Contracting Nations or Status Nations? Evidence of Strategic Bargaining in Nineteenth-Century East Africa

Abstract

onventional wisdom with regard to the political and economic development of Africa gives weight to the colonial origin of the modern state and institutions. However, since the seventeenth century until World War I, African leaders entered into economic and political agreements with foreign firms, early transnational corporations, and signed procurement contracts for the delivery of various goods and services. These contracts present the theorist with an interesting challenge: where (if anywhere) do we place procurement practices in the history of state formation in Africa? I argue that by entering into contractual agreements of various kinds with their European-Asian counterparts, African leaders made it difficult to interpret subsequent changes in global trade and processes of state formation from the vantage point of imperialism and/or colonial interests only. Drawing from various historical documents,1 the paper uses process tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship between historical contractual practices and state formation in the nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals over trade with foreign entrepreneurs