Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins (African Studies)
Cambridge University Press, 6/6/2019
EAN 9781107622500, ISBN10: 1107622506
Paperback, 636 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 3 cm
Language: English
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.