State Building in the Niger Basin in the Common Era and Beyond, 1000–Mid 1800s: The Case of Yorubaland

Abstract

Notwithstanding its destructive aspects, historical sociologists have severally used their work to establish that warfare has its constructive side especially in the realm of state building. Through their work, the literature in the sub-specialty is continuously updated with narratives and accounts of war making and state building in Europe and parts of Asia during the early modern era. Such narratives and accounts are troves of information that enrich our knowledge about the trajectories and processes through which the states that we know today in Europe, China and Japan came about. But the neglect of Africa, where states were also built through warfare by indigenous political actors, remains conspicuous in the sub-specialty literature. This article, which begins the process of redressing that neglect, extends Charles Tilly’s theoretical proposition on the symbiotic interaction between war making and state making in early modern Europe to account for the emergence of states in Yorubaland during the Common Era and up until the 1800s using the wealth that accrued from slave-taking and other sources. It draws from the Eckstein-Gurr theoretical framework – or E-G scheme – to show that although those Yoruba states were monarchies, they were also constitutional monarchies that thrived on democratic sociocultural authority patterns of the Yoruba.

State History and Contemporary Conflict: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

“…As expected, conflict in t − 1 strongly predicts conflict in t. 45 Experiencing an extreme negative shock increases the likelihood of civil conflict by 3.3 percent. 46 In columns 3, I include the interaction between a negative shock and my measure of state history. The estimated coefficient for δ suggests that conditional on experiencing a negative shock, the likelihood of experiencing conflict is 30 percent lower in a grid with the mean value of state history (i.e: 0.16), relative to a region with no history of statehood.…”

Dispelling the myth of pre-colonial gender equality in Yoruba culture

“…In the introduction I noted that, prior to the British invasion of Nigeria, the Yoruba had developed an array of kingdoms composed of towns constructed from patrilineal compounds. The development of gender relations must be analyzed within the context of the continuous rise and fall of the many kingdoms created from about 1000 to the mid-1800s (Ejiogu 2011). Ejiogu points out that scholars Canadian Journal of African Studies/ La Revue canadienne des études africaines 327…”

War, interaction capacity, and the structures of state systems

“…Oyo faced increasing international competition towards the beginning of the 18th Century and beginning of the 19th Century from Dahomey and the Sokoto Caliphate (Asiwaju, 1989, 707). Oyo was insulated from European influence and its institutional responses were indigenous (Ejiogu, 2011). Some centralization occurred toward the end of the 18th Century and beginning of the 19th Century in the province of Egbado, which was colonized by Oyo in the 1770s or 1780s and was on the slave trading route linking the interior to Porto Novo.…”

“…These towns paid tribute to the center, both acknowledging it as the final juridical authority and subordinating control of foreign affairs (see Akinjogbin (1966), Morton-Williams (1967, 37) and Smith (1988)). Yoruba states generally exhibited this structure: the center claimed authority to conduct external affairs, preside over capital crimes, and appoint head chiefs, while subordinate polities retained internal autonomy otherwise (Ejiogu 2011, 597). Beyond the kingdom were states such as Dahomey that had formal independence but paid tribute to the Alafin .…”