The concept of “claims-making” has played a powerful and generally un-recognized role in Frederick Cooper’s work.^{Footnote 1} Indeed, it has proven a durable concept over several decades of intense intellectual development and production. By “claims-making” I mean, and I think Cooper means, efforts by the relatively (not the absolutely) disempowered to use shared discourse and protest (often in the form of collective action) to make claims on the more powerful – whether the latter are operating clove plantations in Zanzibar or the railroad line connecting Dakar to the Niger. The pages that follow examine the utility and advantages – as well as the characteristic rigor – of the claims-making concept and what it implies before turning to the potential costs of its adoption within Africanist historiography and to its limits as an analytical tool.

The concept of claims-making appears, albeit faintly, as early as From Slaves to Squatters, in which ex-slaves and Mijikenda on the Kenyan coast struggled with landlords and former slave holders for access to land.^{Footnote 2} Their claims and those of other “squatters” were thin, but their historical consciousness was thick. They did not and could not own the land; inversely, the land had little value without their labor to make it productive. The emergent political consciousness of squatters was propelled by this paradox, but also rooted in the “autonomy of [their] traditions and beliefs.” ^{Footnote 3} In future analyses, addressing later struggles, such “autonomy” would fade from view. The concepts of claims and claims-making might be most associated with Decolonization and African Society – more attentive to discourse than earlier work – and with the latter chapters of Colonialism in Question – where they are most powerfully developed.^{Footnote 4} In the 1940s, dockers in both Dakar and Mombasa claimed better conditions of labor, but in Dakar they also demanded family allowances and equal pay for equal work. Those demands gained greater traction because colonial administrators perceived claims based on equivalence as the most powerful and the most threatening, while union leaders recognized them as both efficacious and subject to measurement or quantification.^{Footnote 5} Like the nature of the claims themselves, the concept of claims-making shifted in Cooper’s work as his interests evolved from labor to politics, from disputes over land and control of one’s labor to contests over political membership or belonging of various kinds, extending to imperial and later national citizenship.^{Footnote 6} Cooper’s later, more properly political histories – in which claims-making both represents and ultimately generates new forms of membership – demonstrate that political and social-economic rights came to be bundled together, whether through imperial citizenship or in discourses on development, and even if new nation-states would soon sever rights from membership.^{Footnote 7}

It is difficult to discern how deliberate Cooper’s use of the concept of “claims-making” over four decades really is. It may not be entirely self-conscious; neither is it exclusive to his work. To the contrary, as he implies, it bears the imprint of E.P. Thompson’s venerable notion of the “moral economy.”^{Footnote 8} Yet in contrast with moral economy, often mediated through ritual or filtered through intangible values like honor and shame, the claims Cooper studies tend to be precise and in many cases quantifiable. Moreover, they do not depend on historical precedent, as the claims of moral economy inevitably do. What is clear is that, over the course of his work, claims-making has functioned as more than merely a term. Behind it implicitly lies an historian’s theory of social change. If that is so – if claims-making is more than a term – it bears asking precisely what that theory is. Cooper tends to work with the assumption that his historical subjects act thoughtfully and rationally; in doing so, he transforms the analytical burden of the moral economy literature into a premise. Cooper then tries to understand the strategies of his subjects, as they themselves express them, whether verbally or via actions that are visible or legible (generally meaning legible in the archive, as are the stakes of the disputes). As most of us do, Cooper works between discourse (in the narrow sense) – generally the written record, public or private, in French or in English – and events – as marked by evidence of social action, particularly collective social action, ranging from strikes to voting (in the past, Cooper saw such actions, creating meaning, also as discourse).^{Footnote 9} Those forms of action come to constitute repertoires of contestation and engagement intended to force structural change.

Cooper is a disciplined, careful historian who refrains from making arguments that are not sustainable within the method that he has chosen. He does not get ahead of the evidence. Because of his rigor – he is in fact quite modest about what one can and cannot know or understand about the past – the repertoires tend to be narrow and chronologically shallow. The time frames are short. This is true both because dramatic structural change – true events – may happen rapidly, as Citizenship between Empire and Nation illustrates, but also because those are the time frames in which social action is most legible and its rationales most readily discerned.

What does Cooper’s method enable? It obviously supports a very powerful explanatory model, one which allows, for example, the West Indian strikes of the 1930s to resonate across the British empire, informing how successive governments would react to the demands of African workers, and no less importantly how they would perceive those workers and their place in the city. The claims-making of West Indian workers in the 1930s therefore had a ricochet effect, reverberating through Whitehall to generate unanticipated outcomes. One of the advantages of this over-all model of historical change is that within it there is a great deal of room for contingency and the confluence of apparently independent trends or events, events which in this case transpired within an imperial framework.

By the mid-twentieth century, the most effective repertoires of social action and contest relied on irregular and independent strikes, the unceasing need for a supply of casual waged labor, and the uneven emergence of a stabilized workforce. Such repertoires were geographically broad – stretching from Jamaica to Mombasa – but historically shallow. They were effective not only because they emerged at the chokepoints of the imperial economy – its ports – but because they were shared by actors with divergent backgrounds and agendas: by African workers and colonial administrators, by union leaders and negotiators, in polyglot and heterogeneous African cities, and even, although to a lesser extent, in smaller towns up and down the railroad line and into the countryside.^{Footnote 10} By way of contrast, other social struggles in which the stakes ran even higher had much less political effect: the last collective slave rebellions in Soudan Français (Mali) coincide with the historic Dakar-Niger strike of 1947–1948.^{Footnote 11} Only one of these social movements troubled an imperial apparatus more vulnerable to cheminots (railroad workers) than to pastoralists. The colonial state was much more sensitive to trains sitting idle and ships going unloaded than to cows going un-milked. It is a sad testimony to the current state of the Sahel that the inverse of this proposition is now closer to being true: contemporary states may now mostly discount the demands of unions and workers, but they cannot ignore the revolts of pastoralists, armed and angry. Such an example merely illustrates the point that effective repertoires of social action worked not because they were deep, but because they were broad, shared, and commonly recognized, even within the radically asymmetrical colonial situation.^{Footnote 12}

The virtues of the claims-making model are clear. Whether implicitly or explicitly, it has been widely accepted and often adopted by other historians of Africa, although often without the apparent theory of social change behind it. Attention to claims-making has helped historians to avoid what might be called the 18^th Brumaire trap – which has long invested Africanist historiography – of repeatedly demonstrating that people make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing… and then pursuing the argument no further, thereby taking as a conclusion what ought to be a premise.^{Footnote 13} The claims-making model recognizes, as Cooper has said, that even the most hierarchical relationship remains a relationship; it is not unidirectional.^{Footnote 14} Yet if Cooper’s claims-making language does in a sense provide an answer to the question of agency, it evades the conundrum of structure – in William Sewell’s sense of the term, of constant recreation via social contestation. Sewell offers a working definition of structure that recognizes both its “profoundly cultural” nature – here historians might point to durable concepts and practices – and the degree to which its reproduction depends on uneven access to and contests over material resources.^{Footnote 15} The claims-making model is attentive to the latter and indifferent to the former. In Cooper’s more recent work, it remains firmly grounded in political economy on an imperial scale. This is indeed the key to its durability and its comparative potential.

Attention to claims-making is attention to what is broad (or shared) rather than what is deep (or what occurs in another historical or linguistic register). It follows logically that, as an analytical tool, claims-making privileges comparison over contextualization. It does not ask, what distinguishes a docker in Dakar from a docker in Mombasa or Marseille? It may come at the cost of querying deeper repertoires of social action and multi-generational social tensions or forces (e.g., as the social repertoires of post-slavery informed the disputed governmentality around veterans’ politics in French West Africa). This is not inherent to the concept, but characteristic of its practice. Longer term social repertoires are not always visible in the register of evidence in European languages, in documents or in public speech. Such sources often preclude alternate historicities, historically grounded understandings that people may have had regarding their own place in the world, the place of others in unequal societies, or indeed arguments with deeper roots that they may have found persuasive.^{Footnote 16}

Cooper locates a rich history of effective claims-making, of invoking political and socio-economic rights, in the post-war period in particular. This analysis – powerfully binding the claims of workers, especially waged laborers, to those of citizens – has opened up invaluable paths of inquiry. It has focused attention on a period when a taut and contested connection between material and political rights rendered claims so powerful as to produce new forms of citizenship and ultimately of African sovereignty. That history is also of a moment, now past, of economic expansion.

The effectiveness of claims-making as a political tactic may rely, at least implicitly, on the capacity of those on whom claims are made to meet them. As an analytical tool, too, it may presuppose their ability to acquiesce. Yet from the mid-1970s, in the context of economic contraction and structural adjustment, many African states had neither the will nor the capacity to meet an ever-expanding universe of claims. Failing to meet them came with its own risks – from civil opposition to open revolt, from adroit and often courageous political maneuvering to a shift in tactics, the reinforcement of claims by the gun. More recently, claims and rights, particularly as they relate to those who do not and may never work for a wage, are being re-configured under conditions of extreme uncertainty or precarity. Thus discussions of a universal basic income, for example, are premised not on capital’s need for labor, but on the inverse proposition: that capital creates no (or little) demand for work and workers.^{Footnote 17} Given such structural transformations, and insofar as many African histories are ultimately histories of the present, one might ask whether as an analytical tool the concept of claims-making will meet a natural limit, capturing less and less of the reality of a world in need of being remade.