Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa
The Centrality of the Margins

By examining three centuries of history, this book shows how vital border regions have been in shaping states and social contracts.

Paul Nugent (Author)

9781107020689, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 June 2019

636 pages, 6 b/w illus. 15 maps
23.5 x 15.7 x 3.2 cm, 1.14 kg

'A tremendously creative study, masterfully bringing to the West African fore that which has hitherto been seen as marginal: the edges of the colonial and postcolonial state. With his fine frontier brush, Nugent paints us a different conceptual picture of how we ought to reimagine the centres and perimeters of African polities.' William F. S. Miles, Northeastern University, Boston

Border regions are often considered to be the neglected margins. In this book, Paul Nugent argues that through a comparison of the Senegambia and the trans-Volta (Ghana/Togo), we can see that the geographical margins have shaped notional centres at least as much as the reverse. Through a study of three centuries of history, this book demonstrates that states were forged through an extended process of converting a topography of settled states and slaving frontiers into colonial borders. It argues that post-colonial states and larger social contracts have been configured very differently as a consequence. It underscores the impact on regional dynamics and the phenomenon of peripheral urbanism. Nugent also addresses the manner in which a variegated sense of community has been forged amongst Mandinka, Jola, Ewe and Agotime populations who have both shaped and been shaped by the border. This is an exercise in reciprocal comparison and shuttles between scales, from the local and the particular to the national and the regional.

1. Centering the margins: states, borderlands and communities
Part I. From Frontiers to Boundaries: 2. Configurations of power in comparative perspective: commerce, people and belief to c.1880
3. Port cities, frontiers and boundaries: spatial lineages of the colonial state
Part II. States and Taxes, Land and Mobility: 4. Constructing the compound, keeping the gate: a fiscal anatomy of colonial state-making, c.1900–40
5. Being seen like a state: frontier logics, colonial administration and traditional authority in the borderlands
6. Border regulation and state-making at the margins: taxation, migration and contraband during the interwar years
7. Land, belief and belonging in the borderlands
Part III. Decolonization and Boundary Closure, 1939–69: 8. Bringing the space back in: decolonization, development and territoriality c.1939–60
9. The vanishing horizon of Senegambian unity: statist visions and border dynamics
10. Forging the nation, contesting the border: identity politics and border dynamics in the Trans-Volta
Part IV. States, Social Contracts and Respacing From Below, 1970–2010
11. Barnacle states and boundary lines: states, trade and urbanism in the Senegambia
12. The remaking of Ghana and Togo at their common border: Alhaji Kalabule meets Nana Benz
13. Boundaries, communities and 're-membering': festivals and the negotiation of difference
Conclusion. Boundaries and state-making: comparisons through time and space.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Geopolitics [JPSL], Regional government [JPR], Central government [JPQ], Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]