essay about colonialism in africa

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5 (page 91) p. 91 Colonialism in Africa

• Published: March 2007
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The period of colonial rule in Africa came late and did not last very long. Africa was conquered by European imperial powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1960s, it was mostly over. ‘Colonialism in Africa’ considers how this period shaped African history. For some Africans, colonial rule was threatening; for others, an opportunity. Reconstructing the complicated patterns of this time is a massive challenge for historians of Africa. Interest in Africa' colonial past has waxed and waned, and resurged recently. Colonialism was not just about the actions of the Europeans, it was also about the actions of the Africans and what they thought.

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Colonialism in Africa: a Historical Overview

This essay about the legacy of colonialism in Africa provides a historical overview of how European colonization has profoundly shaped the continent’s political, economic, and social landscapes. It discusses how arbitrary borders imposed during colonial rule have led to enduring political instability and internal conflicts. Additionally, it examines the economic impact of colonialism, highlighting how extractive practices have hindered economic development and perpetuated poverty. Furthermore, the essay explores the social repercussions of colonialism, including the marginalization of indigenous cultures and languages. It concludes by emphasizing the ongoing challenges faced by African nations in addressing the legacy of colonialism and building inclusive and sustainable societies for the future.

How it works

The colonization of Africa, a process that unfolded over centuries, has left an indelible mark on the continent, shaping its political, social, and economic landscapes in profound ways. The scramble for Africa, reaching its zenith during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw European powers carving up the continent with little regard for indigenous cultures or historical divisions. This essay explores the multifaceted impacts of colonialism on Africa, examining its legacy through the lenses of political borders, economic structures, and social transformations.

Colonial powers imposed artificial borders that disregarded ethnic and cultural lines, leading to enduring political instability in post-colonial states. These arbitrary divisions often grouped disparate communities together or split cohesive ones apart, laying the groundwork for future conflicts. The legacy of these borders is still evident today, as many African nations grapple with internal divisions and regional disputes that trace back to colonial-era map-making.

Economically, colonialism restructured Africa’s economies to serve European interests, primarily focusing on the extraction of resources. This extractivist approach hindered the development of diversified economies, making post-colonial nations heavily dependent on a limited range of exports. Moreover, the infrastructure established during the colonial period was primarily designed to facilitate the removal of resources, rather than to support intracontinental trade or development. This economic legacy has contributed to persistent poverty and underdevelopment in many African countries.

Socially, colonialism had a profound impact on African societies, disrupting traditional structures and identities. European colonial powers often imposed their own cultures and languages, marginalizing indigenous practices and languages. This cultural imperialism not only eroded traditional African identities but also instilled a sense of inferiority that has been difficult to overcome. However, it also led to the formation of new identities and resistance movements that played crucial roles in the eventual decolonization process.

The struggle for independence across Africa, while a testament to the resilience and determination of its people, was often marked by violence and upheaval. The transition from colonial rule to sovereignty was fraught with challenges, as newly independent nations sought to navigate the complex legacy of colonialism. The post-colonial period has been characterized by efforts to redefine national identities, build cohesive states, and develop economies that can sustainably support their populations.

In conclusion, the colonization of Africa has had far-reaching effects that continue to influence the continent today. The political, economic, and social legacies of colonialism are intertwined, contributing to the complex challenges that African nations face in the 21st century. While the scars of colonialism are deeply etched into Africa’s history, the continent’s future will be defined by its own people. Efforts to address the lingering effects of colonialism, build inclusive societies, and forge sustainable development paths are crucial for Africa’s progress. The legacy of colonialism in Africa is a reminder of the enduring impact of historical injustices, but it also highlights the resilience and agency of African nations and their people.

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• Colonialism in Africa

Colonialism is the act by which a country or state exerts control and domination over another country or state. During a period lasting from 1881 to 1914 in what was known as the Scramble for Africa , several European nations took control over areas of the African continent.

European colonizers were able to attain control over much of Africa through diplomatic pressure, aggressive enticement, and military invasions. In fact, European countries competed with one another to see who could attain the most power and growth. At the height of colonization, only three sections of the continent had been untouched by European settlers:

• The Dervish State

Why Did European Countries Want to Colonize Africa?

In the years 1884 and 1885, the Berlin Conference formalized European colonization of Africa. Prior to this time, world superpowers such as Portugal, France, and Britain had already set up colonies in Africa. To a smaller extent, Germany and Italy had, too. By 1900, when the force of the quick colonization was over, the majority of the land in Africa was divided up amongst seven different European colonizing nations: Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal. There were several different reasons why European colonizers set their sights on the African continent Some of the most prominent ones are outlined below:

Search for Riches

The 19th century was home to the industrial revolution , a time when many European nations were flourishing in the technology sector of the time. However, in order to accomplish these advancements, they needed a source of constant raw material supply. European powers noticed that many of these raw materials happened to be abundant in Africa.

Desire For Exploration

Prior to the wave of European colonization, the geography of Africa was generally misunderstood. Much like the adventurers who had traveled to Asia and North America, many European explorers set out to determine the physical makeup of the African continent.

Competition Between Colonizers

At the time of the Scramble for Africa, major world powers like Great Britain, France, and Spain were competing for power on the European stage. The amount of land that each country owned was considered to be a great indicator of power, with every state wanting to do better than their neighbor.

A large motivator behind African colonization was the desire to spread Christianity throughout the world. Much like what occurred in North and South America, European colonizers brought the Christian faith to Africa through missionaries.

Imperialism

A key ideology behind imperialism, which in turn informs colonialism, is the idea of racial superiority or cultural superiority. Again, much like the ideals behind the colonialism of the Americas, many European colonizers thought that they were doing a favor to those living on the African continent by introducing to them the European way of life, even if it came at the cost of destroying established societies.

Life In Africa Under Colonialism and Beyond

Life for the African people during colonization was difficult. Many of the ideologies behind imperialism were discriminatory in nature, using racist beliefs to justify harsh authoritarian leadership styles.

Throughout the colonial period, the societies that had been established in Africa fought hard to fend off their European colonizers. However, due to the fact that European powers were disproportionately aided by the products of the industrial revolution, many former empires and kingdoms that had been present in Africa were at a disadvantage and lost to the colonizers. Throughout this time, Africa was forever changed.

It has been argued that the poverty that is still experienced today in many African countries is a lasting effect of colonialism. The fact that many countries in Africa still experience high levels of poverty today, often despite the country’s natural riches, is used as proof by many that the colonialization of Africa did more harm than good.

British Colonies in Africa 

• Anglo-Egyptian
• Bechuanaland
• British East Africa
• British Somaliland
• British Togoland
• British Cameroons
• British Egypt
• Gambia Colony and Protectorate
• Colonial Nigeria
• Northern Rhodesia
• Sierra Leone Colony and Protectorate
• South Africa
• South-West Africa
• Southern Rhodesia
• Tanganyika Territory
• Uganda Protectorate
• Sultanate of Zanzibar 

Belgian Colonies in Africa

• https://lsigraph.com/Belgian Congo
• Lado Enclave
• Ruanda-Urundi

French Colonies in Africa

• French Dahomey
• French Algeria
• French Cameroons
• French Chad
• French Congo
• French Guinea
• French Upper Volta
• French Somaliland
• French Sudan
• French Togoland
• French Madagascar
• Ivory Coast
• Colonial Mauritania
• French Protectorate in Morocco
• Oubangui-Chari 
• Senegambia and Niger
• French protectorate of Tunisia

German Colonies in Africa

• German East Africa
• German South-West Africa

Portuguese Colonies in Africa 

• Algarve Ultramar
• Mozambique 
• Portuguese Gold Coast
• Portuguese Guinea
• Sao Tome and Principe

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How Africa’s colonial history affects its development

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Ewout Frankema

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Africa is affecting economies, industries and global issues

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The supply of African slaves to American plantations reached an all-time high in the late 18th century (Klein 1999). After anti-slave trade legislation finally shut down the Atlantic slave exports, commodity exports filled the gap. This so-called ‘commercial transition’ was completed in West Africa before it hit East Africa (Austen 1987, Law 2002). It was a game-changer, since it put a halt to the continuous drain of scarce labour and paved the way for the expansion of land-intensive forms of tropical agriculture, engaging smallholders, communal farms, and estates.

The establishment of colonial rule over the African interior (c. 1880-1900) reinforced Africa’s commodity export growth. Colonial control facilitated the construction of railways, induced large inflows of European investment, and forced profound changes in the operation of labour and land markets (Frankema and van Waijenburg 2012). That is, colonial regimes abolished slavery, but they replaced it with other forced labour schemes. The scramble pushed African exports to new heights, but without the preceding era of commercialisation the African scramble probably would never have taken place.

The Industrial Revolution

Africa’s commercial transition was inextricably connected to the rising demand for industrial inputs from the industrialising core in the North Atlantic. Revolutions in transportation (railways, steamships), a move towards liberal trade policies in Europe, and increasing rates of GDP growth enhanced demand for (new) manufactures, raw materials and tropical cash crops. African producers responded to this demand by increasing exports of vegetable oils (palm oil, groundnuts), gum, ivory, gold, hides and skins. Palm oil, a key export, was highly valued as a lubricant for machinery and an ingredient in food and soap. During and after the scramble, the range of commodity exports broadened to include raw materials like rubber, cotton, and copper, as well as cash crops such as cocoa, coffee, tea and tobacco. The lion’s share of these commodities went directly to manufacturing firms and consumers in Europe. Meanwhile, technological innovations also reduced the costs of colonial occupation. These included the Maxim gun, the steamship, the railway and quinine, the latter lowering the health risks to Europeans in the disease-ridden interior of the ‘dark continent’.

The African trade boom

To obtain a deeper understanding of the connection between Africa’s commercial transition and subsequent colonial intervention, we constructed annual time-series of export volumes, export values, commodity export prices, import prices, and the net barter terms (the ratio of average export to average import prices). The data cover the period from the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1790s to the eve of World War II, 1  and make it possible to analyse the commercial transition with much greater precision than was possible previously and to compare the development of African trade with other commodity exporting regions (Williamson 2011).

There was a prolonged rise in the net barter terms of trade for sub-Saharan Africa from the 1790s to the 1880s, a commodity price boom that was especially pronounced in the four decades between 1845 and 1885. Figure 1 shows that this secular price boom peaked exactly at the date of the Berlin conference (1884-5), when diplomats negotiated how to carve up Africa among the European imperialists. The terms of trade tripled in just four decades. While the terms of trade for commodity exporters were rising everywhere in what was once called the Third World, nowhere was the boom greater than for Africa. Furthermore, the scramble started right at the moment when African exports reached their highest exchange value.

Figure 1 . Terms of trade for sub-Saharan Africa, 1784-1939 (1900=100)

Notes : Excluding South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar and Reunion. Smoothed trend derived using Hodrick-Prescott filter, with a smoothing factor set to 100.

The share of West African exports in French imperial trade was much larger than it was in British imperial trade. Around the mid-19th century, about two thirds of French imperial trade was with Africa, the largest part of it with North Africa (e.g. Algeria), but a substantial share was also with West Africa. British imperial trade was dominated by India, and this distinction is consistent with the chronology of the scramble. The French set a chain reaction in motion by moving into the West African interior to survey the possibilities of a railway connection between the major trading hubs of the middle Niger delta (Gao, Timbuktu) and their trading enclaves along the Senegalese coast. The British responded by securing the lower Niger delta. After less than two decades, virtually the entire continent was divided among a handful of European powers.

Africa’s commodity boom in global perspective

The long-term secular trend of sub-Saharan Africa’s terms of trade coincided with the patterns observed in other parts of the commodity-exporting periphery. However, the price boom of 1845-1885 was exceptionally sharp compared with Latin America, Southeast Asia, India and China. From start to peak, the purchasing power of African exports rose by 3% per annum. Although Africa’s share of world exports remained modest, the trend fuelled an optimistic assessment of the future profitability of colonisation, French assessments in particular. Merchants, industrial capitalists, explorers (like David Livingstone) and even Christian missionaries added to the babble about new markets, new investment prospects, new converts, and the moral obligation to abolish African slavery and replace it with a commercial model.

Did colonisation lock Africa into a perverse path of specialisation?

Ironically, the secular terms of trade boom turned into an equally prolonged bust right at the time that the scramble gained steam. This price bust continued, with only some temporary reversals, up to the eve of World War II. In fact, in 1940 Africa’s terms of trade were back at their 1800 levels. Table 1 below shows that export volumes continued to expand after 1885 at a faster pace than before, thus offsetting the price declines. In other words, African farmers, European planters and mining firms specialised more and more in commodities as they became worth less and less.

Table 1 . Decomposition of export growth in British and French West Africa, 1850-1929

Does this mean that European colonisation locked Africa into a path of perverse specialisation? There are two plausible answers to this question: “yes” and “no”. The “yes” view is that expanding imports of European manufactures, coercive cultivation and mining schemes, and free-trade policies effectively pre-empted a diversification of African economies into manufacturing and eroded indigenous handicrafts. Only white-dominated settler economies that were able to operate with some degree of autonomy, such as South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, managed to develop a substantial industrial sector, albeit relying on a combination of protective barriers and African labour coercion. The alternative answer is “no”. Colonial trade simply followed a path that had already been blazed in the early 19th century. Manufacturing was inconsistent with African endowments and thus its comparative advantage. With abundant land and mineral resources, and scarce labour and human capital, commodity specialisation was the most efficient way to exploit world trade, and to move up the technology and skill ladder (Austin et al. 2016). The debate between these two competing views has not yet been resolved.

Is history repeating?

Today, China uses diplomacy in Africa instead of brute force, and it does not seem to aspire to formal political control in the region. Yet, African economies are again responding to the rising demand for commodities by a rapidly industrialising power. Chinese investments in land, infrastructure and mines are flowing in. Mineral exports, and especially oil, are again taking a growing share of African exports. History shows that such export booms are unsustainable, but what are the chances that Africa will avoid a renewed cycle of commodity dependency? As we ponder the answer, a major difference with history should be noted. With a projected population of over 3 billion, Africa will be one of the most populous regions of the world in 2050. If African policymakers find ways to invest commodity windfalls in the health and education of the next generations and to increase trade with neighbour countries, export growth may do more to stimulate African economic development than it did a century ago.

Austen, R A (1987), African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency , London: James Curry/Heinemann.

Austin G, E Frankema and M Jerven (2016), “Patterns of Manufacturing Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Colonization to the Present,” forthcoming in K O’Rourke and J G Williamson (eds), The Spread of Modern Manufacturing to the Periphery, 1870 to the Present , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frankema E, J G Williamson and P Woltjer (2015), “An economic rationale for the African scramble: the commercial transition and the commodity price boom of 1845-1885.” NBER Working Paper 21213.

Frankema, E H P and M Van Waijenburg (2012), “Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965”,  Journal of Economic History 72(4),  pp. 895-926.

Klein, H S (1999), The Atlantic slave trade , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Law, R (2002), From slave trade to legitimate commerce: the commercial transition in nineteenth-century West Africa , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Williamson, J G (2011), Trade and poverty when the Third World fell behind , Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

1 These data will be made available as part of Wageningen African Commodity Trade Database, 1500-present, to be released in the autumn of 2015 at the website of the African Economic History Network, www.aehnetwork.org

This article is published in collaboration with VoxEU . Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Ewout Frankema is professor and chair of Rural and Environmental History at Wageningen University and elected member of the Young Academy of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Jeffery Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Pieter Woltjer is a postdoc researcher at Wageningen University (department of Rural and Environmental History) where he is currently working on the study of long-term African welfare development.

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Colonialism in Africa: An Introductory Review

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• The original version of this chapter was revised: Incorrect author name ‘Nelson, OA.G.’ instead of ‘Obah-Akpowoghaha, G. N.’ has been corrected for this chapter. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0245-3_19

Colonialism has left different forms of impact across the globe. The history of post-independence Africa was the outcome of the history of colonialism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, majority of African territories were under European colonial rule. The division and subsequent colonization of the African territories were efforts of European nations to intensify European imperialism. European countries engaged in antagonistic expansion policy because of essentials that were created by Industrial Revolution. Put differently, European colonization of the African continent was primarily impelled by economic forces; Africa to serve as a source of raw materials for their industries in Europe and as well market place for their finished products. This book, especially the first part of it, simply presents how colonialism laid the foundation for African underdevelopment.

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Chukwu, L.O., Obah-Akpowoghaha, G.N. (2023). Colonialism in Africa: An Introductory Review. In: Ani, K.J. (eds) Political Economy of Colonial Relations and Crisis of Contemporary African Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0245-3_1

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Impacts of Colonialism on Africa Essay

Colonialism confronts simple definition, for its usage has tended to reflect changing moral judgments. In the late 1800s, the term was applied only to colonies of white settlers and was used in either of two ways, both morally neutral, a trait characteristic of such colonies, and the political status of a dependency as distinct from the metropolis or another sovereign state.

Actually, the term colonialism rarely was used in the sense of a colonial system. Its later usage resulted from its adoption as part of the verbal ammunition of the age of decolonization. In this, it suffered the fate of “imperialism,” which after 1900 was adopted by critics of European expansion to serve ideological purposes and used imprecisely to suggest both the annexation of territories and their subsequent state of subordination, in each case to serve the economic interests of the capitalist powers of Europe and North America. By the mid of 1900s, colonialism also began to be used in this derogatory sense. (Doctrines on colonialism 1)

The two terms were gradually refined and distinguished. Whereas “imperialism” came to indicate the dynamics of European empire-building and, for Marxists, the special character of the capitalist societies that acquired empires, “colonialism” described the resultant complex of political and economic controls imposed on dependencies. Colonialism, therefore, must now be taken to denote the colonial system in its post-expansionist phase, with the implication that it constituted a system of controls that was constructed by the imperial powers to subordinate and exploit their dependencies. (Singh 1)

Let’s take a view of the history of Colonization the special feature common to most modern colonial systems was that dependencies were geographically separated from their metropolis, although they remained under some degree of imperial control. The only power of which this was not true was Russia, whose “colonies” stretched without a break from its territory in Europe to the borders of India and to the Bering Strait. Although contiguous, these outlying provinces were true colonial dependencies; for they had been distinct ethnic and economic units with which Russia’s initial relations were those of conqueror or colonizer. (Johnston 2-5)

The Russian Empire provides a conceptual bridge between the modern colonial empires and other territorial empires at earlier periods, most of which was continental and contiguous to the metropolis. Most of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central and South America at one time fell under the authority of an imperial dynasty or state. The greatest ancient imperial powers were Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, Rome, Byzantium, the Carolingians, the Arabs, China, the Incas, and the Aztecs—were essentially continental.

Maritime empires were few and unspectacular before modern European overseas colonization. In classical times the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans established overseas colonies. Later, Hindus and Muslims from India and Arabia settled territories of the Indian Ocean and Indonesia, and the Chinese colonized much of Southeast Asia. However, these settlements generally lacked central control or even continuing contact with the parent state.

For the most part, neither the great continental empires nor earlier maritime settlements had much in common with modern colonial systems—the former because they were territorially contiguous, the latter because they lacked central control. However, then, as later, both the motives that led to the creation of the systems, and the patterns of government, trade, or culture that emerged, were infinitely varied.

Continental empires were the product of multiple factors, notably dynastic ambition, frontier insecurity, religious fanaticism, or the need for land or slave labor. The same variety of motives is seen in earlier maritime colonization in which trade, surplus population, dynastic ambition, and religion figured. Colonial systems were equally varied. Some empires attempted to impose cultural uniformity; others did not. Some were highly centralized administratively; others consisted of essentially autonomous provinces. (Brunelle n.p.)

Modern European expansion can be dated from the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta (in Morocco) in 1415 to the Italian occupation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936. Within this period there were two overlapping cycles, the first ending with the independence of the majority of the original colonies in the Americas in the 1820s, and the second beginning with the British conquest of Bengal in and after 1757. During the first cycle, most of the European colonies were in the Western Hemisphere. During the second cycle, the colonial empires encompassed much of Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Behind these geographical contrasts lay fundamental differences in the character of colonialism. (Fieldhouse n.p.)

The paradoxical feature of the first cycle was that the states of Western Europe established vast empires in America almost by accident. Columbus intended to find an oceanic route to the East, not to found colonies. He failed, but Spain found compensation in the gold and silver resources of parts of Central and South America. Colonization there was the result of the first overseas gold rush by Europeans. In the wake of the first conquistadores came missionaries, administrators, settlers, and craftsmen. By 1650, Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands all had colonies in America.

The motives of the colonizers varied, and their enterprises at first were experimental. Many hoped to find gold or silver. The search for a northwest passage to China continued. French and English fishermen needed bases near the Newfoundland Banks. Emigrants were attracted by free land or hoped to escape political or religious persecution at home. American colonization was an unforeseen and largely uncontrolled reaction to the challenge of discovery.

In other parts of the world the character of European expansion was quite different and to some extent was the result of deliberate planning. The general pattern was set by Portugal, which from the 1400s aimed to exploit the discovery of a route to the East round the Cape of Good Hope for commercial rather than colonizing purposes. Portugal did establish territorial possessions in certain parts of Africa and Asia, but on the whole, it chose to limit its commitments to coastal bases, relying on naval power and treaties with indigenous rulers to provide suitable conditions for a profitable trade. The French, English, and Dutch followed this example.

Nevertheless, European colonial empires expanded anew in the latter 1800s. This “new imperialism” is conventionally explained in terms of changing European economic needs and interests. Sources of raw materials, fields for investment, and ever-larger markets were needed, and fear of exclusion from regions controlled by other states forced each country to establish colonies in order to protect its interests. An alternate explanation holds that, with intensified international rivalries, each state claimed colonies to increase its strategic power, to defend its trade routes, or to use pawns in diplomacy. Finally, it has been suggested that colonization reflected a new aggressive nationalism in Europe, produced partly by international rivalries and partly by racist theories.

All these explanations focus on Europe, but while there were elements of truth in each, the evidence suggests that the dynamics of European expansion once again lay outside Europe: that imperialism was a reaction to crises and opportunities in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa rather than the product of needs and calculated policies within Europe. Crises might result from the frontier problems or expansionist tendencies of existing colonies, from the disintegration of indigenous political or social systems, or from rivalries between Europeans on the spot. Such situations might induce a European government to annex. (The New Imperialism n. p.)

Between 1880 and 1910 the tempo of annexation was quickened partly because crises occurred simultaneously in many areas and partly because Germany, Belgium, the United States, Italy, and Japan joined the existing group of maritime nations and Russia as colonial powers. The outcome was the virtually complete partition of Africa and the Pacific region and an increase of colonial territory in Asia. By 1914, Europe dominated every continent except the Americas, which in turn were dominated, indirectly, by the United States.

The period from 1914 to 1939 was the apogee of the modern colonial empires. After World War I, German, Japanese, and Ottoman territories were assigned mainly to European powers. These territories technically were League of Nations mandates, but they were administered like other dependencies. With the Italian occupation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936, the colonial empires reached their territorial peak. Most western European countries were colonial powers, as were the United States and Japan. Russia, by this time a Socialist state, disclaimed colonies but retained those parts of central and eastern Asia that the Czarist regime had acquired, technically as autonomous republics.

World War II marked the beginning of the end. Europe lost control of most possessions in the Pacific and Southeast Asia to Japan, and other colonies were isolated from their metropolises. Although most ties were restored after 1945, the dissolution of empires had begun.

The reasons are not entirely clear. Hostility to alien rule sprouted or increased. Changing attitudes in Europe weakened faith in the moral basis and the practical advantages of colonialism. Russia and then China supported revolutionary movements. The first dependencies to gain independence—India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Indonesia—inspired nationalists elsewhere.

By the late 1960s, only a few colonies remained notably Portuguese and Spanish territories in Africa, and some British, U. S., and French dependencies, which could not easily be set adrift or which still provided useful military facilities. Colonialism in the formal sense was dead.

There remained, however, a complex of economic and political influences exercised by the advanced over the less advanced world. Labeled “neocolonialism” by its critics, this predominance became the focus of the anti-European and anti-American complaints. Whether it differed in substance from the predominance exercised by the USSR over the eastern European states and how the imbalance of power could be redressed was open questions. (Bissell and Radu 1-7)

After the above-detailed discussion on the background of Colonialism now we proceed towards its impacts on Africa

From 1914 to 1939 saw the peak and the beginning of the decline of the colonial system in Africa. The administrations established by the major colonial powers before 1914 had three primary goals, first to protect law and order, and to erect an administrative makeup designed for effective government at a minimum cost, and to promote forms of economic development that would provide raw materials demanded by markets in the home country.

The political and administrative institutions that the Europeans created in their African colonies were modeled on those they knew best, their own. Frequently there was little regard for the fact that these institutions had been developed for European countries, whose histories, social backgrounds, and administrative needs bore little if any relationship to those of Africa. For the most part during the colonial period, little consistent thought was given by European administrators to the long-range development of the colonies toward independence. Moreover, some administrations forced Africans to work under deplorable conditions or to plant export crops instead of staple food crops. It was only through the gradual spread of education and the consequent emergence of political awareness among a small segment of the African population that demand arose for a share in political power. From this small group of nationalist leaders came the popular movements that finally swept the colonial administrations out of existence. (Cowan 1 of 1)

In the case of Britain, the theory of “indirect rule” was the basis of administration. British officers governed through the traditional chiefs, seeking to preserve as far as possible the power and prestige of those leaders while adapting the customary methods of the rule to meet the needs of modern society. It was hoped in this way to ease the impact of the transition from traditional to modern government. By 1939, however, it was becoming clear that indirect rule was unsatisfactory; the chiefs could not always be adapted to new ways, and the system left no place for the young, educated Africans to share in local administration. Gradually, in the years after World War II, elected local councils were substituted for the “native authorities”. These new councils became the testing ground for nationalist political parties.

France, in its African colonies, pursued a policy of assimilation and direct rule. The objective was to acquaint its African subjects as fully as possible with French institutions, language, and culture, the ultimate goal being the complete assimilation of the colonies to the home country. For this reason, little effort was made until after World War II to create representative political institutions in the colonies, and the traditional chiefs were largely subordinated to the French administrations. In the long run, French assimilation was no more successful than British indirect rule. For the comparatively small number of Africans who were able to enjoy the full benefits of the French educational system, assimilation was complete. Most Africans, however, were only superficially exposed to the French way of life and proved unwilling to give up their traditional cultures, particularly in the Muslim areas, where religion became a block to full acceptance of France. Beginning in 1946, therefore, efforts were made to create territorial assemblies, or local parliaments, in each colony. (Cowan 1 of 1)

Portuguese policy, to a greater degree than that of France, was based on full assimilation. Administratively the colonies were regarded as overseas provinces of Portugal. But Portuguese rule was characterized by abuse of authority, a low level of African education, and (except in Angola after World War II) severe limitations on economic development. In part, this restrictive policy could be accounted for by the poverty of Portugal itself, yet it was also a reaction to the spread of nationalism elsewhere in Africa. Portuguese resistance to the trend toward independence resulted in the outbreak of revolution in its territories in the early 1960s. Only after a military coup deposed Portugal’s conservative government in 1974 did that country become reconciled to the end of its colonial empire.

In the Belgian Congo, the home country pursued a policy of strong paternalism. Africans were prepared by widespread primary education for technical positions, but virtually no attempts were made to create African political representation, nor were political parties organized. In consequence, when Belgium decided in 1960 to grant immediate independence, the colony was unprepared for self-rule and chaos ensued.

Two colonial powers, Germany and Italy, disappeared from Africa between 1918 and 1943. Following World War I the German colonies were separately placed under the administration of Belgium, Britain, France, and South Africa—at first under the overall supervision of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, and after 1945 under the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations in preparation for their independence. Italy lost all its colonies during World War II. Ethiopia regained full sovereignty in 1941 after less than five years of Italian rule, and after the war, the Italian colony of Eritrea was joined to Ethiopia. The other two Italian possessions became independent. (Cowan 1 of 1)

Although the colonial system was showing signs of decline by 1939, what shattered the old order was World War II. The war exposed the weakness of the major colonial powers and had profound effects on all dependent territories in Africa. The European belligerents, hard-pressed by their war effort, made exceptionally heavy demands on their African subjects. Because of the shortage of officials, the colonial administrations were forced to grant Africans a degree of responsibility that would hitherto have been impossible. African leaders showed that they were capable of holding the reins of government. In turn, they encouraged and organized the popular demand for autonomy that forced the colonial powers to give way, first in local government and later at the level of central administration. As new institutions for popular representation were created, the stage was set for the transformation to self-government and finally, by the mid-1950s, to full independence.

Although World War II accelerated the growth of African nationalism, the seeds of independence had been sown in most parts of the continent before the war. In Egypt, for example, what prompted British occupation in 1882 was a nationalist movement expressing popular discontent with international control of the country?

In tropical Africa, the earliest nationalist parties were founded shortly after World War I by professional men in two British colonies: the Gold Coast (afterward Ghana) and Nigeria. Seeking a greater share in the decisions made by the colonial administrations, these parties were not concerned with mass participation in government but with obtaining a share in decision-making for their own small, well-educated elites. (Cowan 1 of 1)

One of the first mass nationalist parties, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, was founded in 1944, and beginning in 1946 similar mass parties sprang up in the French territories of West Africa. In the Gold Coast, it was not until 1950 that the Convention People’s Party, headed by Kwame Nkrumah, became the focus for mass nationalist demonstrations in favor of independence. Thereafter the spread of nationalist sentiment was rapid throughout Africa.

During the early postwar years the colonial administrations fought against the organization and growth of political parties. The trade union movement, however, represented an alternative source for experience in organization and mass discipline, which younger nationalists put to good use. Particularly in French Africa, where the union movement was dominated by the French General Confederation of Labor, the newly formed unions provided training in the political party organization.

The rapid influx of young men from the rural areas to the mushrooming cities contributed substantial numbers of recruits for the growing political parties, which promised the new urban dwellers all the advantages of modernization that presumably would come with independence. Most of the recent arrivals in the cities retained close connections with their villages and became the chief avenue through which political nationalism was spread. (Cowan 1 of 1)

The nationalist parties were organized with a tightly disciplined, hierarchical type of leadership that stretched in an unbroken line from the single leader at the top to the hundreds of village party groups scattered throughout the country. This network of communication made it possible to mobilize mass public opinion in favor of independence and, when the time came, to arouse the people to active resistance to the colonial administrations. Faced with such popular action, the colonial powers could do little but attempt to slow down, through constitutional negotiations, the transfer of power from European hands. The small groups of educated leaders at the top of the nationalist parties, themselves often the product of schools run by European missionaries, were to become the new rulers of the African states.

Works Cited

Bissell, Richard. E/ & Radu, Michael. S. “ Africa in the post-decolonization era”. 2008. Web.

Brunelle, Gayle. K. ” Early Modern International Trade and Merchant Empires” . 2008. Web.

Cowan, L. Gray. “Africa.” Encyclopedia Americana . 2008. Grolier Online. Web.

“ Doctrines on Colonialism ”. 2008. Web.

Fieldhouse, D. K. “ A Review Journal: The European Colonial Empires 1815-1919 by H.L. Wesseling”. JOURNAL OF IMPERIAL AND COMMONWEALTH HISTORY.

Johnston, Hamilton. Harry.” A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races ”. Cambridge University Press.

Singh, Awardees. 2008. Web.

“ The New Imperialism”. 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, October 8). Impacts of Colonialism on Africa. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impacts-of-colonialism-on-africa/

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1. IvyPanda . "Impacts of Colonialism on Africa." October 8, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impacts-of-colonialism-on-africa/.

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Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa

In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding it. In the African case, however, this heterogeneity is muted, making an assessment of the average effect more interesting. We emphasize that to draw conclusions it is necessary not just to know what actually happened to development during the colonial period, but also to take a view on what might have happened without colonialism and also to take into account the legacy of colonialism. We argue that in the light of plausible counter-factuals, colonialism probably had a uniformly negative effect on development in Africa. To develop this claim we distinguish between three sorts of colonies: (1) those which coincided with a pre-colonial centralized state, (2) those of white settlement, (3) the rest. Each have distinct performance within the colonial period, different counter-factuals and varied legacies.

We are grateful to Jan Vansina for his suggestions and advice. We have also benefitted greatly from many discussions with Daron Acemoglu, Robert Bates, Philip Osafo-Kwaako, Jon Weigel and Neil Parsons on the topic of this research. Finally, we thank Johannes Fedderke, Ewout Frankema and Pim de Zwart for generously providing us with their data. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Leander Heldring and James Robinson. 2018. " Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa, " in Carol Lancaster and Nicolas Van de Walle (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of Development, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Part III, 295-327.

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Equestrian Oba and his attendants (1550-1680): detail of a brass plaque, one of many adorning the Court of Benin (in modern-day Nigeria), and plundered by the British Army c 1892. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

It never existed

The idea of a ‘precolonial’ africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history.

by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò   + BIO

We should expunge, forever, the epithet ‘precolonial’ or any of its cognates from all aspects of the study of Africa and its phenomena. We should banish title phrases, names and characterisations of reality and ideas containing the word.

To those who might be put off by the severity of the proposal, or its ideological-police ring, I hear you and ask only that, with just a little patience, you hear me out. It will not take much to jolt us out of the present unthinking in assuming that ‘precolonial’ or ‘traditional’, and ‘indigenous’, has any worthwhile role to play in our attempt to track, describe, explain and make sense of African life and history.

When ‘precolonial’ is used for describing African ideas, processes, institutions and practices, through time, it misrepresents them. When deployed to explain African experience and institutions, and characterise the logic of their evolution through history, it is worthless and theoretically vacuous. The concept of ‘precolonial’ anything hides, it never discloses; it obscures, it never illuminates; it does not aid understanding in any manner, shape or form.

L et us begin with the fact that the ubiquitous phrase is almost exclusive in its application to Africa: ‘precolonial Africa’. How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents? If not, what explains the peculiar representation – treating the continent as if it were a single unit of analysis – when it comes to Africa? I am afraid it comes from a not-so-kind genealogy that always takes Africa to be a simple place, homogenises its peoples and their history, and treats their politics and thought as if they were uncomplicated, each substitutable for the other across time and space. Once you are thinking of ‘Africa’ as a simple whole, it becomes easier to grossly misrepresent an entire continent in the temporal frame of ‘precolonial’.

In reality, ‘precolonial’ Africa never existed. It is a figment of the imagination of scholars, analysts, political types, for whom Africa is a homogeneous place that they need not think too hard about, much less explain to audiences. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a racist philosopher, who argued in the 1820s that Africa was a land ‘outside of Time’ and not a part of the movement of ‘History’. Our intellectual forebears in the 19th century fought against this false characterisation. They were the first to remind people of the fact that Africa had always been a part of the movement of history and the global circuit of ideas. They knew what was behind Hegel’s effort to divide Africa into ‘Africa proper’, or ‘Black Africa’, and ‘European Africa’ – it was his need to reconcile his idea that Africa stood outside of history with the undeniable reality of the attainments of ancient Egypt. His ‘solution’ was to identify the achievements of Egyptian Africans as coming from exogenous sources and to remove it from ‘Africa proper’.

All who talk glibly about ‘precolonial’ Africa, insofar as the designation bespeaks a temporal horizon, award an undeserved victory to the racist philosopher . Of course, the ‘pre’ in ‘precolonial’ supposedly designates ‘a time before’ colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The ‘precolonial’ designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.

Was ancient Egypt part of some precolonial formation? That strains credulity

For one thing, the role of African thinkers in the evolution of Christianity becomes elided by a periodisation that does not see a continuity between African events and events elsewhere, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. It also makes it difficult to track demographic continuities when it comes to cultural hybridities, including citizenship, in different parts of the Mediterranean continuum. And, as long as Roman colonialism lasted in North Africa, the region was not hermetically sealed from the rest of the continent, both across the Sahara, and east to the northern reaches of present-day Kenya.

As used, the term ‘precolonial’ Africa and the distortions it represents cannot illuminate our understanding of Africa and its history.

More importantly, it is wrong to think of colonialism as a non-African phenomenon that was only brought in from elsewhere and imposed on the continent. Africa has given rise to a rich tapestry of diverse colonialisms originating in different parts of the continent. How are we to understand them? For example, if ‘precolonial Morocco’ refers to the time before France colonised Morocco, it must deny that the 800-year Moorish colonisation of the Iberian Peninsula, much of present-day France and much of North Africa was a colonialism. For, if it were, then ‘colonial Morocco’ must predate ‘precolonial Morocco’. I do not know how any of this helps us understand the history of Morocco. Similarly, a ‘precolonial’ Egypt that refers to Egypt before modern European imperialism would also deny Mohammed Ali’s colonial adventures at the head of Egypt in southern Europe and Asia Minor. Was ancient Egypt part of some precolonial formation? That strains credulity. To conceive of the history of Africa and Africans in terms only, or primarily, of their relation to modern European empires disappears the history of Africans as colonisers of realms beyond the continent’s land borders, especially in Europe and Asia.

It is bad enough that the term distorts the history of African states’ involvement in overseas provinces. It is worse that it misdescribes the evolution of different African polities over time. The deployment of ‘precolonial Africa’ is undergirded by a few implausible assumptions. We assume either that there were no previous forms of colonialism in the continent, or that they do not matter. We talk as if colonialism was brought to Africa by Europe, after the 1884-85 Berlin West Africa Conference. But it takes only a pause to discover that this is false.

African history is replete with accounts of empires and kingdoms. By their nature, empires incorporate elements of colonisation in them. If this be granted, Africa must have had its fair share of colonisers and colonialists in its history. When, according to the mythohistory (the founding myth of the empire) of Mali, Sundiata gathered different nations, cultures, political leaders and others to form the empire in the mid-13th century, he did not first seek the consent of his subjects. It was in the aftermath of their being subdued by his superior force that he did what Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century insisted all rulers should do if their rule is to escape repeated challenges and last for an appreciable length of time: turn might into right. Ethiopia, another veritable empire, is a multinational, multilingual, multicultural state whose members were not willing parties to their original incorporation into the polity. Whether you think of the Oromo or the Somali, many of their successor states within Ethiopia are, as I write this, still conducting anticolonial struggles against the Ethiopian state.

Ọ̀yọ́ was an empire whose reaches, at its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries, extended from its capital in present-day Nigeria’s southwest as far west as present-day Togo, with complex systems of governance for the capital and for outlying areas. As an imperial formation, Ọ̀yọ́ was also a significant colonising power in West Africa. The Nigerian archaeologist Akinwumi Ogundiran maintains that Ẹdẹ-Ilé , another city in southwest Nigeria, was founded by Ọ̀yọ́ denizens as a frontier colony to secure the border of the empire against competing potentates who, significantly, were their non-Yorùbá neighbours. Additionally, there are other areas within Nigeria and in other parts of Africa where various forms of colonisation took place.

So it seems as if Africa is no different from other parts of the world where varieties of colonisation and imperialism flourished before the arrival of the modern version. The modern colonialism that came to Africa in the 19th century has since so dominated our imaginations that it has distorted how we see many aspects of history, including that of colonialism and empire themselves.

L et’s continue with how the idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ cannot but misdescribe the history of the continent. For instance, the Fanti banded together in the third quarter of the 19th century to give themselves a constitutional monarchy in a confederacy founded on a written charter. They did so not to counter British colonialism but to protect themselves from their old nemesis, Asante imperialism. Scholars continue to ignore the Fanti’s world-historical constitution, but that does not diminish its importance. The Fanti constitution attempted to improve governance with modern innovations; it placed science in the service of development and progress of their societies, including to advance urbanism and economics; and it created schools for girls. Their constitution shows Fanti societies were far from their description in much scholarship as simple, inward-directed, almost outside the movement of ideas and peoples in the world as it was then.

By the 19th century, coastal Ghana had been the location for several quite cosmopolitan communities. If you think there is some pristine ‘precolonial Africa’ before modern European imperialism, you are very unlikely to see this complex Ghanaian society for what it was: peopled by indigenous groups, Asians, North and South Americans, and Europeans speaking and interacting in numerous languages from which some Pidgin had emerged for purposes of commerce. These are elements that are unlikely to register with people for whom ‘precolonial Fanti society and identity’, to be genuine, must be static and uncontaminated in the aforementioned ways. This is yet another way the epithet limits thinking.

Similarly, 18th-century Fulani empire-builders adopted the language of the Hausa peoples whom they conquered; but, into the 21st century, the Fulani continue to hold sway in parts of northern Nigeria, and many who live there continue to view themselves as victims of Fulani colonisation. It was cooperation between Fulani and British arms and subterfuges in the early parts of the 20th century that helped to preserve their empire.

The ‘precolonial Africa’ epithet implies that we don’t take the history of Africa seriously

When we look past the ahistorical conceit of ‘precolonial Africa’ what we find is that, within the continent, clearly colonial hierarchies characterised relations between and among different African polities and peoples. So, the object that the term ‘precolonial Africa’ is used to describe – ie, ‘Africa before European colonisation’ – is full of colonisation that remains illegible to its proponents. This misdescription perpetuates the racist claim that Africa is the land that Time forgot. Regardless of how often we invoke the caveat ‘I am not trying to say that African phenomena are homogeneous or that things are the same everywhere, but we have enough likenesses among them to enable us to speak of them as being more convergent than divergent,’ the truth is that ‘precolonial Africa’ is nothing if not homogenising.

It renders invisible significant bodies of ideas that the world would do well to mind, if only we would deign to acquaint ourselves with them and rid ourselves of our colonial cathexes. For example, the long history of multination states such as Ọ̀yọ́ must be differentiated from small kingdoms like Ondo or even Ilé-Ifè . Ilé-Ifè enjoys the reputation as the spiritual homeland of Yorùbá peoples, and these polities contain many variations in modes of governance that have evolved over time. Should we speak of ‘precolonial Yorùbáland’? It’s self-evidently unhelpful. Given what we know of the change of the Ọ̀yọ́ state, over history, from its origins in prehistory through its shifting capital cities and ebbs and flows in its expanse, the reach of its authority, the changes in its types of governance, its diplomatic history, the civilisation it embodied and more, describing all of this as ‘precolonial’ will capture a mere sliver – the time it shared with modern, European colonialism – of its history beginning, effectively, in 1893.

It is even more complicated. Ìbàdàn, a new city-state that came into being in its present state in the early 19th century, was – because its leading lights at the beginning were predominantly of Ọ̀yọ́ ethnicity within the Yorùbá nation – tenuously under the sway of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire, itself in decline. To talk of ‘precolonial Ìbàdàn’, dating its history thereby by British colonial interference beginning in 1893, is to miss out the many ways in which it was a new kind of polity under a new mode of governance. Yes, Ìbàdàn’s chiefs were beholden to Ọ̀yọ́ and they appeared as if they were continuous with the monarchical system that dominated Ọ̀yọ́. Yet it was neither a monarchy nor did it mimic the grounds of political legitimacy that undergirded the Ọ̀yọ́ dynastic ruling class. Ignoring these novel emergences is part of what I mean by the poor quality of knowledge produced under the inspiration of the three-period analytical framework of history. There are no dynasties or ruling families in Ìbàdàn. This is just one example of the kind of complexity and change in political forms obscured by locutions such as ‘precolonial Yorùbáland’ or ‘precolonial Ìbàdàn’.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the deployment of the ‘precolonial Africa’ epithet is its implication that we don’t take the history of Africa seriously. It tells the world that African history has only three periods – precolonial Africa, Africa under European colonial rule, and postcolonial Africa – that is, assuming we wish to entertain the idea of ‘postcolonial history’ given the debate in historiography and the philosophy of history regarding the legitimacy of the idea of ‘contemporary history’. As I have argued elsewhere, we African scholars must be the only ones whose people’s history has just three periods: one long precolonial period, which could be anywhere from the beginning of time to when colonialism, however construed, started; a short colonial period, which would leave Ethiopia, Egypt and Liberia out of its orbit; and the present postcolonial period. In the case of Liberia, for instance, it would mean only two periods, colonial and postcolonial, because its history is nowhere continuous with the histories of the autochthonous peoples who were displaced to establish it.

That this schema cannot be productive of serious history-writing, especially when it comes to our long past, seems to escape us. Because we do not invest in disciplines that will allow us serious access to knowledge of the past, expansively conceived – archaeology, geology, botany, palaeoanthropology, language and linguistics, religion and so on – we end up unwittingly presenting myths and legends as the stuff of our past, as if, as is the case elsewhere, we cannot derive deeper understanding from our material artefacts. We are unwittingly cooperating in our exclusion from history enacted by our enslavers and colonisers.

S o the idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is theoretically vacuous, limiting and, ultimately, obscures more than it illuminates. People are apt to forget a simple idea when they deal with African phenomena: theories do not follow geographical or cultural lines, and theories are never event- or culture-specific; they are better when they explain more phenomena with the fewest concepts, and, also, as long as they are applied to, in the present case, human-inflected actions, practices, processes and events. If they are good for such in Ọ̀yọ́, they must be good for similar ones in Siam. What theoretical framework is it that offers no clear boundaries for its referents, applies indiscriminately to empires as to non-state societies, to primitive social formations and sophisticated civilisations alike, without qualification? Only if we fail to pay attention to these substantial differences or think that, as is often the case, ‘it is Africa, after all’, can we evince no qualms about continuing to rely on this framework of understanding.

The rise and reign of the ‘precolonial Africa’ paradigm requires ignoring African intellectuals. We pay little attention to the works of African intellectuals before our time, especially those who fought the colonisers, who pioneered the tradition of writing history, offering analysis and criticism and explanatory models, and generally, telling African stories and history beyond oral traditions. Our stellar African intellectual forebears engaged in making sense of their respective societies’ place in the world. How did they do it? How, for instance, did they account for the evolution of their institutions, practices and processes through time, when they essayed to describe or explain such to themselves or to outsiders desirous of such knowledge, or even as preparatory to moving their societies along to better places? How did they accommodate Africa’s place in the global exchange of ideas and the movement of goods and peoples across the world’s boundaries from time immemorial?

Here is a good illustration. Ladipo Solanke (1886-1958) was a frontline anticolonialist intellectual and legal practitioner. He was a leader of the West African Students’ Union and was an ardent advocate of a self-governing West African federation, following the fashion of Australia and Canada, as a unit within the British Empire. As part of his efforts to educate the world, especially the anti-Black racists of his time who denied the humanity of Africans and insisted that Africa had not contributed anything to the march of civilisation, Solanke wrote the pamphlet United West Africa (or Africa) at the Bar of the Family of Nations (1927). Solanke presumed that West Africa was or could be a nation. This was an attitude shared by many West African intellectuals who insisted that, despite the traditions of particularism that marked the land, nations are not natural but historical creations. They thought that they, like Europeans or Americans, could forge a nation out of the plurality of ethnic groups to be found in their region. They had no quarter for the later substitution, brought to us by colonial anthropology, of the idea of ‘tribe’ and the associated idea of ‘tribalism’ as the natural unit of African peoples and societies.

Solanke’s periodisation for African history is especially relevant. It covers the four chapters of his pamphlet, viz:

Chapter 1 – West Africa in Ancient Times

Chapter 2 – West Africa in Medieval Times

Chapter 3 – West Africa in Modern Times

Chapter 4 – West Africa’s three ‘Rs’, namely Restoration, Regeneration and Rise; alias West Africa in Future

In contrast with the distortions wrought by the ‘precolonial Africa’ epithet, including its silencing of the history of Africa, Solanke was well aware that Africa had a long history. He knew that Egypt as well as Carthage were part of the history of Africa, and that they were colonial powers. Solanke was able to think more clearly about African history than many of our contemporary intellectuals. In the beginning of Chapter 1, on ‘government’, taking a comparative approach to his subject matter, he reminded his readers that ‘there is yet very little to say about West Africa’ during ancient times ‘by way of written evidence’. He quickly added that the region was no different from ‘all other nations past and present’ that ‘also have very little to say about themselves at this same period’. He went on to claim that ancient Egyptian civilisation had global influence in the then world and ‘ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, the Abyssinians, and the Carthaginians’ all had ‘close contact with West Africa through trade several centuries before Christ’. But this did not mean that attainments by West Africans in ‘governments, education, trade, industry and religion’ could be attributed to foreigners, or that there is any discontinuity between what obtains in the region in the modern era and their antecedents from antiquity.

Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Sirte predate European colonialism by centuries

In the preceding section, Solanke places Africa in the general course of world history. He conveys his interest in the specific place of West Africa and in particular states and societies therein, both in terms of their individual histories and their connections with other parts of the world. Notably, Solanke does not use colonialism as the axis of periodisation. For that reason, there is no need to turn the centuries or aeons into some nebulous ‘precolonial period’, homogenising distinctive historical periods and societies as whatever they were relative to colonialism. The term represents an embarrassingly shallow privileging of modern European colonialism in the sweep of African history.

We would benefit from remembering the Nigerian historian J F Ade Ajayi’s corrective that colonialism is an episode in African history, not its principal, much less sole, shaper. Take any of Africa’s native civilisations. We have evidence for Yorùbá civilisation going back 1,000 years at least. Benin history also goes back at least 1,000 years. Then, in 1897, the Bini lost a war to the British and came, as war booty, under British control, and not even as a colony or a protectorate. All of a sudden, Benin’s whole history – with its dynastic calendar, its imperial records and reaches, including control of Europeans within its borders for centuries till that fateful incident – was subsumed under ‘precolonial Benin’. Thenceforth, Benin was to be understood primarily, if not solely, in terms of its relation to one European conqueror. All that came before 1897 is now ‘precolonial Benin’.

Ironically, this dominant organising principle of African history hinders our understanding even of European colonialism in Africa. It encourages us to ignore the many important continuities in African phenomena. It asks us to neglect why and how some African groups welcomed European intervention and embraced modern forms of rule, in part, as their escape from local colonial overlords or from certain ways of ordering life and thought in their original cultures. We paper over many long-standing hierarchies among groups and the dynamics of intergroup relations that had previously structured ideas of citizenship, political legitimacy, succession systems, even geopolitical boundaries, and we wonder why the limited toolkit bequeathed by scholarship that takes colonialism as its singular pole for periodisation does not avail in our contemporary situation. We saw previously that, in coming together to give themselves a new constitution, the Fanti were trying to ally with the British and against the Dutch as well as their local threat, the much bigger and stronger Asante kingdom. Many women utilised the new private laws birthed by colonialism to breach local regulations respecting marriage, child custody, and inheritance rules.

Organising the history of Africa in relation to European colonialism also conceals local versions of colonial state relations and the different models of citizenship in Africa’s long history of states, nations and constitutions. Many of these models need a more sophisticated calendar and dating system to lead us to their relevance and complexities. Ethiopia, for example, has always been an agglomeration of once-independent states under Amharic hegemony. But to speak of ‘precolonial Ethiopia’ would be to commit to something that never happened. Unlike Ethiopia’s colonisation of Eritrea and Somalia, which lasted far longer, Italy’s so-called colonisation of Ethiopia barely lasted five years! How then do we conceive of Ethiopian history such that we grasp its evolution as a multination state, some of whose internal strains and stresses owe to the dynamics of local colonisation when it comes to ‘Western Somalia’ (previously Ogaden), Eritrea (now independent), or Oromia? After all, two of these and other components are constituent units of present-day Ethiopia.

Or to take another example, how do we make sense of the fact that the repeated threat to the corporate integrity of the Libyan state cannot be understood or named in terms of Italian colonialism? It can be traced, instead, to happenings as far back as biblical times and the continuing concatenations of peoples and regions in the country. Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Sirte predate European colonialism by centuries. Competition among them represents continuities that our current fixation on European shenanigans cannot begin to unravel.

Egypt from the 16th to the 18th centuries was a satrapy of the Ottoman Empire before the genius of Mohammed Ali in the 19th century turned it into a local coloniser, if not imperial power, dominating regions to the north, in the Mediterranean and southern Europe, and to the south, especially Sudan. All of the Iberian Peninsula and huge portions of southern Europe including huge swaths of France and Italy were, at some points in the past, colonies of African potentates. Do we speak of precolonial Spain? Would anyone organise all of Spanish history in terms of its colonisation by the Moors, or of Malta and portions of Italy earlier by Carthage and later by Syria and Arabia by Egypt under Ali? Spain does not deign to deny its Moor-inflected past – it has monetised it in the tourism industry – even as there are ongoing debates about its place in its history. Meanwhile, Moorish rule lasted longer there than British rule lasted in any part of Africa.

P erhaps the most pernicious effect of deploying the various iterations of ‘precolonial’ is the way it marginalises ideas, especially philosophy , in Africa. Because ‘precolonial’ takes colonialism as the dividing line for organising ideas within its temporality and forces us to conceive of spaces relative to how they stand in the arrival and dispersal of colonialism in the continent, we, unwittingly for the most part, end up talking as if ideas, practices, processes and institutions can be understood within frameworks delineated by the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial schema. So, when we are looking at philosophy or modes of governance – to take two arbitrary examples – given our justifiable hostility to things colonial, we construe ‘precolonial’ as necessarily having nothing to do with the colonial, the latter understood as having ‘European’, ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ provenance while, simultaneously, interpreting it as ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ and the like.

The misdescription we identified above induces misinterpretation as well as a misrecognition of the genealogy and exchange of ideas, the evolution of institutions, and the identity of thinkers in the area. The problem is profound. Because of the primacy accorded to identity in the business of finding ideas and institutions that could be separated from anything European, Western or modern, African scholars for a long time contorted themselves into finding ‘African philosophy’ that was authentically ‘African’, were even willing to give up on the very term ‘philosophy’ and called their ideational production ‘African Traditional Thought’. The driving question was a matter of whether or not such ideas had been ‘contaminated’ by colonialism and its appurtenant practices, ideas, processes and institutions. When a scholar announces an interest in studying ‘Traditional African Political Thought’, in light of our analysis so far, the first question to ask is whether ‘traditional’ in this formulation has any room for evolution such that we can periodise ‘traditional thought’. Of course, I am assuming what should be obvious: is the thought involved the same throughout history, or were there changes induced by both exogenous and endogenous causes to it, and how are those changes to be understood? The other problem takes us to the next section of this discussion: the problem of facilely deploying an entire continent as a unit of analysis.

Let us recall the temporal framework adopted by Solanke above. Anyone reading his account is immediately enabled to situate his ideas about what transpired in medieval West Africa in relation to what was happening at other places in Africa, nay, the world, within the same temporal boundaries. This enables us to see how similar ideas found in different parts of our world do not have to be explained in terms of influences or common origins. That way, we would have no difficulty identifying African contributions to the global circuit of ideas in ancient times, in medieval times and right to the present. And such contributions would not be limited to so-called ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ African fare. The tendency to treat Africa as a unit of analysis motivated by a wrong-headed approach, which took challenging Europe’s ignorant elucidations of African phenomena as the primary object, has issued in genealogies and narratives of intellectual history that bear no resemblance to how things really happened in history, or how African thinkers actually conducted themselves in the global circuit of ideas. This is why Africa hardly ever features in the annals of philosophy, and chronologies in philosophy anthologies do not carry African entries in frameworks demarcated by the Gregorian calendar.

We offer more to the world and ourselves than exotica and garnishes for their discourses

Historically, from Egypt to the rest of the Mediterranean continuum and beyond, to areas of southern Europe and what used to be called Asia Minor, Africa, Africans and their ideas and intellectual work were neither a mute nor a subordinate presence in philosophy and the history of ideas. From ancient times till the 19th century when modern European colonialism began to hold sway, Africans have without interruption been philosophers. The history of philosophy must be made to take account of African participation in medieval philosophy – Christian, Islamic or secular, it does not matter – as well as theology, mathematics, astronomy, etc. African-derived Roman senators or poet laureates are no less African for having become Roman notables, just as Alexander the Great does not become any less Mediterranean for having had his legacy domesticated in medieval Mali. The origins of the monastic tradition in the Catholic Church did not owe only their physical location to the deserts of present-day Algeria. Maimonides was no less an African presence for his Jewishness. And we certainly do not wish to obscure the role that African minds – for example, Saint Augustine and Saint Anthony – have played in the development of Catholic philosophy and theology.

It is fair to ask: what about ideas and practices that could not be immediately traced to the literate cultures that I have so far referenced? I do not see any problem here, either. Again, the key is in distancing ourselves from references like ‘precolonial’ or ‘traditional’ in identifying African phenomena. We should take seriously the fact that every political arrangement with a modicum of complexity and sophistication is a response to one of the central questions of political philosophy – who ought to rule when not all can rule? With this foundational question in mind, it becomes easier to look at African modes of governance for the answers they offer. The fact that their founding principles were not written does not make them any less complex or without a discernible history. The challenge for scholars is to begin to address African life and history and ideas in relation to those principles. When we have identified those principles, we should, as is done for other philosophical traditions, explore them for coherence, cogency and normativity. For example, the problem of the obligation to obey political authorities is no less present in the Ọ̀yọ́ monarchical state while it was supreme than in the United Kingdom of the 17th century to which Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan was one response. What was the basis of the legitimacy of the rulers back then? Once we settle on this way of studying our philosophical heritage, the road is open to tracking how our institutions, practices and processes have evolved over time, by what or whom they have been influenced, and so on.

Ọ̀yọ́ is one of the longest-lasting states in West Africa. It enjoyed at least 1,000 years of recorded history, from 1000 CE till now. Ọ̀yọ́ governance was monarchical with a hierarchy of lower chiefs and other functionaries. It did not start out as an empire, a polity that conquers and rules others, we know that for a fact. We then need to know on what principles the legitimacy of the king’s rule was based. Yes, heredity was central, but we also know that, while it lasted as an imperial power, the Crown Prince was mandated to die with his father whenever the latter passed on as king.

Here is an unusual constitutional arrangement redolent with possibilities for different kinds of philosophical analysis. When was this rule regarding the Crown Prince introduced? We know it ended around 1859. We might obtain some insights into the place of heterodoxies among Ọ̀yọ́ thinkers and other intellectual types by exploring why and whether there were external influences, for instance, from immediate neighbours and Islam when it was introduced into the capital of the realm, in the very constitution of the system originally, and in its variation, over time. We can do the same for so-called stateless communities. After all, many such communities evolved modes of governance that enabled them to allocate public goods, keep social conflicts in check, ensure the safety of life and limbs and possessions, if not property, and so on. Lumping them all in some precolonial mist is not analysis; it is anti-intellectual abdication. Dispensing with this organising device will make for a vast expansion of the fields of enquiry, and for new research in African history under frameworks from archaeology to palaeoanthropology, art history to musicology, history to religion. We offer more to the world and ourselves than exotica and garnishes for their discourses.

To date, the works of individual thinkers, their respective places in the annals of thought across the globe and their contributions to the perennial questions of philosophy in their own domains have not been part of Africa’s intellectual history and philosophy. Because we are working within the Gregorian calendar that most of the world now follows, we are able to zero in, as a matter of historical specificity, on particular thinkers in particular periods, working on their own or being parts of discursive communities not limited to their own vicinities. Thus, we end up with more robust and more adequate renderings of the historicity of African ideas and thinkers in Africa and their place in the world. Eighteenth-century philosophy can open up beyond Königsberg to Timbuktu . Nineteenth-century philosophy can take seriously the exertions of James Africanus Beale Horton, Rif’ā’ah al-Ṭahṭāwī and Fukuzawa Yukichi – in Sierra Leone, Egypt and Japan, respectively – in their engagement with modernity and what it meant for their respective societies. Horton wanted Africans to embrace modernity, and both al-Ṭahṭāwī and Yukichi are regarded as the principal proponents of modernity in their respective locations in the 19th century.

All this would be invisible to the trinity of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial division of African history for organising states and ideas, practices and institutions, processes and thinkers and intellectual movements through time. Tossing the retrograde ‘precolonial’ epithet in the dustbin can bring only gains in expanding our knowledge, enriching our conceptual repertoires, and telling stories that are closer to the truth than the alternative.

It is time to say bye-bye to the idea of a ‘precolonial’ anything in our intellectual discourses respecting Africa.

What would Thucydides say?

In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian

Mark Fisher

The environment

Emergency action

Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?

Rupert Read

Return of the descendants

I migrated to my ancestral homeland in a search for identity. It proved to be a humbling experience in (un)belonging

Jessica Buchleitner

Economic history

Credit card nation

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?

Sean H Vanatta

Human rights and justice

My elusive pain

The lives of North Africans in France are shaped by a harrowing struggle to belong, marked by postcolonial trauma

Farah Abdessamad

Conscientious unbelievers

How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment

Felicity Loughlin

Return of colonial-era statue to Congo fuels environmental revival

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Reporting by Benoit Nyemba; Additional reporting and writing by Ange Kasongo; Writing by Cooper Inveen; Editing by David Holmes and Aurora Ellis

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A revolution in helping Africa’s poor: Cash with no strings attached

CHAMBA, Malawi — The cyclone tore through Magret Frank’s village two years ago, ripping apart the thatched mud huts. She dragged her four children from their beds just before the roof beams collapsed, and their chickens and clothes were swept away into the howling night.

“I cried inside. But I am the mother — I have to be strong,” said Frank, who has had three homes that were destroyed by cyclones. “So I told them, as long as we have life, there is a new dawn.”

But now, like her neighbors, she is sleeping through storms in a new brick house with an iron roof. The constellation of new homes is the product of a pioneering program that is Africa’s largest cash giveaway as measured by amount per person. It is part of a project that aims to revolutionize the way that aid is given to the poor: in a lump sum of cash with no strings attached.

The program is run by GiveDirectly, an organization founded by graduates of MIT and Harvard who work with prominent economists to identify the most efficient ways to reduce poverty. Donors include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and the founders of the graphic design tool Canva.

Lump sums are the most efficient way to give cash, according to a study of GiveDirectly programs released in December that compared the impact of three methods: in small transfers over 12 years; in small transfers over two years; or in a lump sum. Two years in, recipients of the lump sum have spent more money on health care, and more of their children have scored better on school exams, according to the study by MIT economics professor Abhijit Banerjee and others, including two GiveDirectly directors. The lump-sum recipients were also more likely to start a business and to make more money from their business.

The implications are far-reaching for families such as Frank’s.

After the 2022 cyclone destroyed her home, her family slept in a six-foot-square thatched kitchen largely open to the elements. She wove grass mats to sell for 50 cents each, trying to save enough to rebuild. She said she couldn’t even dream of a brick home. It took her weeks of saving to replace her plastic bucket, the lost item she most mourned.

Then a stranger arrived with a wild proposition: Each household, including Frank’s, would be given $800 — more than she would usually earn in two years. Like most of her neighbors, she used the money to build a new house.

Now cyclones can’t wreck Frank’s food stores, kill her chickens, or ruin her clothes and utensils. Village chief Edna Nikisi said the 2022 cyclone flattened 26 houses. This season, cyclones were strong, but they blew down only four homes, all old-style mud huts.

Global shift to cash

Frank benefited from a global push to distribute more aid in cash. Two decades ago, microfinance was the darling of the aid world. But it attracted predatory lenders and locked recipients into cycles of debt, and recent research has cast doubt over its long-term impact.

Traditionally, aid agencies distributed items such as food , livestock and laptops , but a frequent mismatch between donations and need meant items were often sold, stolen, broken or wasted, various studies found. So donors are increasingly moving to cash. Studies have repeatedly shown that cash is the most efficient form of aid when markets are functioning. New technology such as mobile money makes it easy to send cash directly to the world’s poorest. Governments in Togo, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico have all introduced small cash payments for poor families.

Although cash and voucher programs are increasingly popular , growing from $6.6 billion in 2020 to $10 billion in 2022, they still account globally for only about 5 percent of development aid and just under 20 percent of humanitarian aid, according to a 2023 report by the CALP Network, a consortium of 90 aid groups. Such programs typically give out tiny monthly sums. They also sometimes carry conditions — such as school enrollment or vaccinations — and often suffer from “ineffective targeting, unsustainable funding, and irregular payment cycles,” economists Adam Salifu and Kennedy Makafui Kufoalor said in a 2024 study.

Paul Niehaus, co-founder of GiveDirectly, says cash transfers can’t replace traditional aid to build roads, police forces or hospitals, but they do give recipients more choices. Poor people usually know their needs better than a bureaucrat or aid worker, he said, and lump sums offer opportunities that stipends don’t. Tiny sums, he said, can stave off starvation but not transform a life.

The debate on how to lift people out of poverty is most urgent in Africa. Overall, global wealth has quadrupled in the past 30 years, but a third of the people in Africa still live in extreme poverty — about 100 million more than in 1990, according to the World Bank . That is due partly to rising populations and partly to factors such as war, poor governance and climate change. The ranks of the poor have increased even as money has poured in: Aid to African countries totaled $53.5 billion in 2022 — slightly more than half the $100 billion that the Brookings Institution last year estimated would be needed for direct cash transfers to eradicate extreme poverty globally.

Malawi, where fog-cloaked hills encircle verdant fields, is often called a development puzzle. It is fertile and has never fought a war. Since 2005, wealthy countries have spent $16.5 billion on development assistance to Malawi. But poverty has not decreased , the World Bank says, noting that for every three Malawians who moved out of poverty be­tween 2010 and 2019, four were pushed back in by climate shocks.

Many families remain too poor to take advantage of newly built schools and clinics. Save the Children supports the school that serves Frank’s village, where shrieks of laughter drift among the neem trees. But when cyclones ruined books and uniforms, her children had to drop out because the items were too expensive for Frank to replace. Neither could she afford the bumpy motorbike ride down a long sandy track to a U.N.-supported clinic if her children contracted malaria or pneumonia sleeping outside.

Now, she can use both the school and the clinic.

Physician Alinafe Kachigwali said deaths at Kasiya Health Center in Khongoni have fallen significantly since the GiveDirectly disbursement began. Now, women can pay for transportation to the clinic or even to a referral hospital if needed, she said. Double the number of women are coming in for five-month prenatal checkups, hospital records show, meaning complications are being detected sooner.

Lessons learned

GiveDirectly calculates that, including operating costs, it would need nearly $4 billion to give $550 to every adult in Malawi living in extreme poverty. So far, the program has given out $50 million to 160,000 adults in the country.

At first, GiveDirectly tried to target the poorest villagers by disbursing money only to those living in thatched-roof homes. But now even those with brick houses get cash. That helps reduce potential conflicts or cheating.

And those with stable living situations are more likely to use the cash to create jobs. A lanky, nearsighted tailor bought glasses and a sewing machine that tripled his income. A shop owner converted a cement room into a raucous nursery for 56 children and now employs three teachers. A farmer bought a solar fridge to sell cold drinks and a solar phone charger that he now rents out.

Sometimes, there are problems, including incidents of fraud and theft by staffers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. In each case, GiveDirectly said, it hired external investigators and changed its systems. Outsiders also try to game the system by moving into qualifying villages, but GiveDirectly says a census conducted beforehand weeds them out.

Malawi’s finance minister, Simplex Chithyola, said the government was coordinating closely with GiveDirectly. “If you dictate and impose a particular service provision, it denies [poor families] the right to a choice,” he said. “The wish is to do as GiveDirectly is doing, but quite a number of people are in need.”

Freedom for the Wolves

Neoliberal orthodoxy holds that economic freedom is the basis of every other kind. That orthodoxy, a Nobel economist says, is not only false; it is devouring itself.

A ny discussion of freedom must begin with a discussion of whose freedom we’re talking about. The freedom of some to harm others, or the freedom of others not to be harmed? Too often, we have not balanced the equation well: gun owners versus victims of gun violence; chemical companies versus the millions who suffer from toxic pollution; monopolistic drug companies versus patients who die or whose health worsens because they can’t afford to buy medicine.

Understanding the meaning of freedom is central to creating an economic and political system that delivers not only on efficiency, equity, and sustainability but also on moral values. Freedom—understood as having inherent ties to notions of equity, justice, and well-being—is itself a central value. And it is this broad notion of freedom that has been given short shrift by powerful strands in modern economic thinking—notably the one that goes by the shorthand term neoliberalism , the belief that the freedom that matters most, and from which other freedoms indeed flow, is the freedom of unregulated, unfettered markets.

F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most notable 20th-century defenders of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of “unfettered markets”—markets without rules and regulations—is an oxymoron because without rules and regulations enforced by government, there could and would be little trade. Cheating would be rampant, trust low. A world without restraints would be a jungle in which only power mattered, determining who got what and who did what. It wouldn’t be a market at all.

Nonetheless, Hayek and Friedman argued that capitalism as they interpreted it, with free and unfettered markets, was the best system in terms of efficiency, and that without free markets and free enterprise, we could not and would not have individual freedom. They believed that markets on their own would somehow remain competitive. Remarkably, they had already forgotten—or ignored—the experiences of monopolization and concentration of economic power that had led to the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). As government intervention grew in response to the Great Depression, Hayek worried that we were on “the road to serfdom,” as he put it in his 1944 book of that title; that is, on the road to a society in which individuals would become subservient to the state.

Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history

My own conclusions have been radically different. It was because of democratic demands that democratic governments, such as that of the U.S., responded to the Great Depression through collective action. The failure of governments to respond adequately to soaring unemployment in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Today, it is neoliberalism that has brought massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for dangerous populists. Neoliberalism’s grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate deindustrialization, and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Contrary to what Friedman suggested in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom , this form of capitalism does not enhance freedom in our society. Instead, it has led to the freedom of a few at the expense of the many. As Isaiah Berlin would have it: Freedom for the wolves; death for the sheep.

I t is remarkable that , in spite of all the failures and inequities of the current system, so many people still champion the idea of an unfettered free-market economy. This despite the daily frustrations of dealing with health-care companies, insurance companies, credit-card companies, telephone companies, landlords, airlines, and every other manifestation of modern society. When there’s a problem, ordinary citizens are told by prominent voices to “leave it to the market.” They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems that one might have thought would require society-wide action and coordination, some larger sense of the public good, and some measure of compulsion. It’s purely wishful thinking. And it’s only one side of the fairy tale. The other side is that the market is efficient and wise, and that government is inefficient and rapacious.

Mindsets, once created, are hard to change. Many Americans still think of the United States as a land of opportunity. They still believe in something called the American dream, even though for decades the statistics have painted a darker picture. The rate of absolute income mobility—that is, the percentage of children who earn more than their parents—has been declining steadily since the Second World War. Of course, America should aspire to be a land of opportunity, but clinging to beliefs that are not supported by today’s realities—and that hold that markets by themselves are a solution to today’s problems—is not helpful. Economic conditions bear this out, as more Americans are coming to understand. Unfettered markets have created, or helped create, many of the central problems we face, including manifold inequalities, the climate crisis, and the opioid crisis. And markets by themselves cannot solve any of our large, collective problems. They cannot manage the massive structural changes that we are going through—including global warming, artificial intelligence, and the realignment of geopolitics.

All of these issues present inconvenient truths to the free-market mindset. If externalities such as these are important, then collective action is important. But how to come to collective agreement about the regulations that govern society? Small communities can sometimes achieve a broad consensus, though typically far from unanimity. Larger societies have a harder go of it. Many of the crucial values and presumptions at play are what economists, philosophers, and mathematicians refer to as “primitives”—underlying assumptions that, although they can be debated, cannot be resolved. In America today we are divided over such assumptions, and the divisions have widened.

The consequences of neoliberalism point to part of the reason: specifically, growing income and wealth disparities and the polarization caused by the media. In theory, economic freedom was supposed to be the bedrock basis for political freedom and democratic health. The opposite has proved to be true. The rich and the elites have a disproportionate voice in shaping both government policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes healing divisions all the more difficult.

Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism

As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds. They don’t interact. A large body of evidence shows that economic segregation is widening and has consequences, for instance, with regard to how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps ensure that the system stays as it is.

The media, including social media, provide another source of division. More and more in the hands of a very few, the media have immense power to shape societal narratives and have played an obvious role in polarization. The business model of much of the media entails stoking divides. Fox News, for instance, discovered that it was better to have a devoted right-wing audience that watched only Fox than to have a broader audience attracted to more balanced reporting. Social-media companies have discovered that it’s profitable to get engagement through enragement. Social-media sites can develop their algorithms to effectively refine whom to target even if that means providing different information to different users.

N eoliberal theorists and their beneficiaries may be happy to live with all this. They are doing very well by it. They forget that, for all the rhetoric, free markets can’t function without strong democracies beneath them—the kind of democracies that neoliberalism puts under threat. In a very direct way, neoliberal capitalism is devouring itself.

Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient at dealing with collective issues, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable on its own. To take one fundamental element: A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith himself emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self-interest rather than good codes of conduct:

The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions … Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

For instance, contracts have to be honored. The cost of enforcing every single contract through the courts would be unbearable. And with no trust in the future, why would anybody save or invest? The incentives of neoliberal capitalism focus on self-interest and material well-being, and have done much to weaken trust. Without adequate regulation, too many people, in the pursuit of their own self-interest, will conduct themselves in an untrustworthy way, sliding to the edge of what is legal, overstepping the bounds of what is moral. Neoliberalism helps create selfish and untrustworthy people. A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.

We also need regulations and laws to make sure that there are no concentrations of economic power. Business seeks to collude and would do so even more in the absence of antitrust laws. But even playing within current guardrails, there’s a strong tendency for the agglomeration of power. The neoliberal ideal of free, competitive markets would, without government intervention, be evanescent.

We’ve also seen that those with power too often do whatever they can to maintain it. They write the rules to sustain and enhance power, not to curb or diminish it. Competition laws are eviscerated. Enforcement of banking and environmental laws is weakened. In this world of neoliberal capitalism, wealth and power are ever ascendant.

Neoliberalism undermines the sustainability of democracy—the opposite of what Hayek and Friedman intended or claimed. We have created a vicious circle of economic and political inequality, one that locks in more freedom for the rich and leaves less for the poor, at least in the United States, where money plays such a large role in politics.

Read: When Milton Friedman ran the show

There are many ways in which economic power gets translated into political power and undermines the fundamental democratic value of one person casting one vote. The reality is that some people’s voices are much louder than others. In some countries, accruing power is as crude as literally buying votes, with the wealthy having more money to buy more votes. In advanced countries, the wealthy use their influence in the media and elsewhere to create self-serving narratives that in turn become the conventional wisdom. For instance, certain rules and regulations and government interventions—tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deregulation of key industries—that are purely in the interest of the rich and powerful are also, it is said, in the national interest. Too often that viewpoint is swallowed wholesale. If persuasion doesn’t work, there is always fear: If the banks are not bailed out, the economic system will collapse, and everyone will be worse off. If the corporate tax rate is not cut, firms will leave and go to other jurisdictions that are more business-friendly.

Is a free society one in which a few dictate the terms of engagement? In which a few control the major media and use that control to decide what the populace sees and hears? We now inhabit a polarized world in which different groups live in different universes, disagreeing not only on values but on facts.

A strong democracy can’t be sustained by neoliberal economics for a further reason. Neoliberalism has given rise to enormous “rents”—the monopoly profits that are a major source of today’s inequalities. Much is at stake, especially for many in the top one percent, centered on the enormous accretion of wealth that the system has allowed. Democracy requires compromise if it is to remain functional, but compromise is difficult when there is so much at stake in terms of both economic and political power.

A free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy does not constitute a stable equilibrium—not without strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money’s role in politics. The guardrails come in many forms, such as competition policy, to prevent the creation, maintenance, and abuse of market power. We need checks and balances, not just within government, as every schoolchild in the U.S. learns, but more broadly within society. Strong democracy, with widespread participation, is also part of what is required, which means working to strike down laws intended to decrease democratic participation or to gerrymander districts where politicians will never lose their seats.

Whether America’s political and economic system today has enough safeguards to sustain economic and political freedoms is open to serious question.

U nder the very name of freedom, neoliberals and their allies on the radical right have advocated policies that restrict the opportunities and freedoms, both political and economic, of the many in favor of the few. All these failures have hurt large numbers of people around the world, many of whom have responded by turning to populism, drawn to authoritarian figures like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by where the U.S. has landed. It is a country now so divided that even a peaceful transition of power is difficult, where life expectancy is the lowest among advanced nations, and where we can’t agree about truth or how it might best be ascertained or verified. Conspiracy theories abound. The values of the Enlightenment have to be relitigated daily.

There are good reasons to worry whether America’s form of ersatz capitalism and flawed democracy is sustainable. The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great. It’s a political system that claims to cherish freedom above all else but in many ways is structured to deny or restrict freedoms for many of its citizens.

I do believe that there is broad consensus on key elements of what constitutes a good and decent society, and on what kind of economic system supports that society. A good society, for instance, must live in harmony with nature. Our current capitalism has made a mess of this. A good society allows individuals to flourish and live up to their potential. In terms of education alone, our current capitalism is failing large portions of the population. A good economic system would encourage people to be honest and empathetic, and foster the ability to cooperate with others. The current capitalist system encourages the antithesis.

But the key first step is changing our mindset. Friedman and Hayek argued that economic and political freedoms are intimately connected, with the former necessary for the latter. But the economic system that has evolved—largely under the influence of these thinkers and others like them—undermines meaningful democracy and political freedom. In the end, it will undermine the very neoliberalism that has served them so well.

For a long time, the right has tried to establish a monopoly over the invocation of freedom , almost as a trademark. It’s time to reclaim the word.

This article has been adapted from Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society .

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Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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Athens Turns Orange Under a Saharan Dust Cloud

Taking pictures from the Tourkovounia hills on Tuesday. Credit... Angelos Tzortzinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By Niki Kitsantonis

Reporting from Athens

• April 24, 2024

The skies above Athens turned orange on Tuesday as clouds of dust from the Sahara blew north, casting an eerie glow over the Greek capital’s landmarks.

The phenomenon isn’t new — sandstorms from North Africa have shrouded Britain, Greece and Spain in the past — but the event led to remarkable scenes around the Acropolis and in other parts of Athens.

That’s because the dust cloud was more concentrated than those that have hit Greece in previous episodes, according to Kostas Lagouvardos, research director at the National Observatory of Athens.

“It’s the worst such case in years,” he said.

While the dust had dissipated on Wednesday, the Greek Health Ministry urged people to avoid exercising outdoors and to keep their doors and windows shut.

Here are photos from Athens on Tuesday.

Gazing at the unusual conditions.

The view from Lycabettus Hill, high above the city.

Near the Acropolis.

Strolling past stalls under the orange haze.

The strange hue bathing the city from the Tourkovounia hills.

Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times. More about Niki Kitsantonis

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