Are commodity-dependent countries doomed by the resource curse? Do commodity booms undermine state capacity? Can state building take place in the context of weak institutions? What is the role of coalitional politics in mediating the effect of resource wealth?

These are the main questions that Ryan Saylor addresses in State Building in Boom Times. They are highly relevant for contemporary policymaking since state capacity is increasingly recognized by both academics and international organizations as a critical factor for development. However, the way in which state capacity is generated remains poorly understood.

Seeking to address this issue, the book’s main logic departs from two widely held views in the state-building literature. The first is the bellicist tradition, which regards government’s revenue imperatives—especially those resulting from war—as the main driver behind state building. The second relates to the resource curse, which maintains that commodity booms provide easy money that undermines institutional development through revenue windfalls. Across the developing world, the absence of interstate warfare combined with resource dependence would result in the expectation of lackluster state building. Yet, we observe considerable variation in the development of state capacity.

The book explains this variation by switching the emphasis from a top-down approach to state building, in which rulers strengthen state institutions in response to revenue needs, to a bottom-up approach based on societal pressures on government elites. It explores how good economic times result in state-building pressures by economic actors, who push governments to provide new public goods and stronger institutions, as well as the conditions under which governments are likely to satisfy these demands.

The argument hinges on two demand-side motivations. First, economic actors will push for the provision of public goods that allow them to maximize profits. Government’s provision of public services is one way in which state capacity is expanded, since public goods often require long-term investment and involve the development of technical expertise to build infrastructure or the development and maintenance of regulatory capacity. Second, social actors will push for institution building to secure distributional political advantages and preserve their power. However, institution building is costly and fraught with uncertainty, and therefore actors will engage in this practice only when they are threatened by competing sectors of society.

The book finds evidence for these arguments by studying the first major international commodity boom in six countries in Africa and Latin America, including Argentina (1852–86), Chile (1848–83), Colombia (1880–1905), Ghana (1945–66), Mauritius (1825–95), and Nigeria (1945–66). On the basis of comparative historical analysis, Saylor finds that these booms’ consequences for state building are contingent on the nature of coalitional politics in each country. Where commodity-exporting coalitions were in power, as in Argentina (wool), Chile (wheat and copper), and Mauritius (sugar), governments responded to the demands for public good provision by expanding the state. Conversely, where exporting coalitions were excluded from power, as in Colombia (coffee), Ghana (cocoa), and Nigeria (cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil), governments ignored these demands, and these countries did not experience an expansion of state capacity. And where exporters were both in and outside the ruling coalition, ruling elites perceived an existential threat that led to institution building to contain challengers and preserve power, as in Argentina and Chile.

At its core, this thoughtful and well-written book shows that even when weak institutions prevail, the nature of coalitional politics determines whether resource windfalls result in state building or state weakening. By transcending tax revenue as a measure of state capacity and focusing mainly on the development of infrastructure and access to credit, this research expands our understanding of the patterns and potential pathways of state building. Further, by showing that economic and political actors’ self-interest can be an important driver of state capacity even in contexts where existing theories would least expect it, the book makes an elegant and strong contribution to the emerging body of research challenging the determinism that has characterized the study of resource wealth and commodity booms.

A major strength of this work is the impressive breadth of historical evidence it brings to bear in support of the argument. Saylor adeptly conducts process tracing to identify relevant causal mechanisms in the six cases, which share many characteristics with broad swaths of the developing world, including an agrarian, colonial past featuring weak institutions. At the same time, the selection of such seemingly dissimilar cases from two continents allows the argument to travel comfortably to different cultural, geographic, and temporal contexts.

One quibble is that the bar for what constitutes a meaningful threat to elites is often unclear. In particular, the book points to diametrical and existential threats convincing elites that institution building is necessary in order to avoid catastrophe. However, what constitutes an existential threat could be made clearer, since it is not necessarily the potential for civil war that might generate institution building—as in Colombia—but, rather, the existence of a group with diametrically opposed interests to those of the ruling coalition—as in Argentina and Chile. At times, rising exporters can represent a serious political challenge but not a diametrical threat to the ruling exporting coalition, and at other times these threats are characterized as an “elemental danger” to which elites are forced to respond. Having said that, this complication is common to arguments that point to crises as prompting state-building episodes, however, and the book is far more precise than the norm.

As with any good piece of scholarship that dives so deeply into a handful of cases, State Building in Boom Times inevitably raises some questions about its applicability to other contexts. Although the book makes a convincing case for both the relevance of the findings for policymaking and the potential differences between the commodities studied and other goods, such as hydrocarbons, it misses an opportunity to link its conclusions to the contemporary period and inform developing countries’ prospects for state building in the face of recent commodity booms. While this would have made the claims even more generalizable, the author cannot be faulted for not extending the analysis to these countries, however, since the emphasis on the six historical cases is already a tremendous effort. I found the evidence convincing, and future work will likely extend the findings to other contexts.

In short, this book is an outstanding piece of scholarship. Readers looking for an alternative to the dominant bellicist and resource curse approaches to the study of state building will find its emphasis on bottom-up factors refreshing. It will no doubt become a mandatory reference for scholars of state building and the political economy of development, as well as an influential voice in the debate about the existence of a curse of natural resource wealth.