Pre-colonial African societies have long been seen through the lens of what they didn't become.
New research argues they should be understood on their own terms—as a result of deliberate institutional choices.
A new working paper, “Africa as a Success Story: Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa,” by University of Chicago Prof. James A. Robinson and coauthor Asst. Prof. Soeren J. Henn of the University of Wisconsin, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of African political institutions before European colonization.
“Drawing on economics, history, and anthropology, we argue that African societies intentionally organized themselves to prevent political centralization—and that, by their own objectives, they largely succeeded in this political goal,” said Robinson, a Nobel laureate.
The paper uses ethnographic records and historical population data to make a striking new claim: that in 1880, on the eve of the European “scramble for Africa,” the continent was home to an estimated 45,000 independent political units, or polities. Fewer than 2% of these could reasonably be classified as states, and less than 1% were organized along ethnic lines. Even when larger states did exist, the paper finds, they encompassed at most a total of 44% of Africa’s population.
This level of political decentralization set Africa apart from Eurasia, where large, bureaucratic states became common. Rather than explaining this as a passive outcome of low population density or limited resources, Henn and Robinson argue that African societies deliberately maintained their decentralized systems through social norms, institutional design and political choice.
Much of the existing literature in economics explains state formation through material incentives, including issues of war, taxation, trade or the control of resources. While these help explain Eurasian trajectories, the authors argue they do not neatly apply to the context of Africa.
The authors emphasize the local community—often organized through kinship structures, but also diverse forms such as village councils, age sets and titling societies—as the fundamental unit of African social life. Centralized state authority was widely viewed as a threat to these local institutions. Even where states emerged, they were often what the literature calls “segmentary,” blending centralized authority with enduring kinship-based governance.
Seen on its own terms, the authors argue, Africa’s pre-colonial political organization represents a form of success. Societies achieved what they set out to do—preserving local autonomy and preventing the concentration of political power.
Yet this success carried unintended and historically consequential costs. Extreme decentralization made coordinated responses to external shocks difficult. It facilitated competition among polities during the Atlantic slave trade, increased vulnerability to European conquest through divide-and-rule strategies and complicated post-colonial state-building after independence.
The authors also argue that markets, accumulation and large-scale competition were often secondary to the political goal of maintaining community autonomy. While the economic costs of this choice were relatively small in a pre-industrial world, they became far more consequential in the face of European mercantile capitalism and colonial rule—setting in motion political and economic realities that continue to shape Africa today.
By reframing Africa not as “failed” but rather as a case of deliberate institutional choice, the paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship emphasizing the multiple paths to political and social organization.
“Africa’s past is not defined by what it lacked, but by what it intentionally built and defended,” Robinson said.
Robinson is the 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and the coauthor, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. The paper was released as a working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute at UChicago.
