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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Rural Interests and the Making of Modern African States |
Author: | Boone, Catherine |
Year: | 1995 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 23 |
Pages: | 1-36 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Senegal Ivory Coast - Côte d'Ivoire Ghana |
Subjects: | rural development State Politics and Government Development and Technology Economics and Trade Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601724 |
Abstract: | This article analyses cross-regional differences in key aspects of the institutional design of postcolonial States in Africa. It tries to account for variation in the degree to which State power and administrative prerogative was centralized and concentrated in national-level institutions. Differences along these dimensions were manifest in three areas of administrative design and practice: 1) in rural development institutions that structured access to agricultural credit and purchased inputs; 2) in State agencies that organized export-crop marketing; and 3) in the regional and local-level administrative agencies of government. The study focuses on a set of West African cases that provide strong contrasts: Senegal's groundnut basin, the coffee and cocoa-producing forest belt of Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana's cocoa-producing south. In all cases, the time period under review is the 'decolonization period', defined for Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire as the early 1950s through the mid-1970s, and for Ghana as 1950-1966 (the Nkrumah years). The study suggests that African State authority and hegemony have been constituted in part through 'fusions' of State power with the societally based forms of power that lie beyond the direct reach of the State and that are embedded in peasant modes of production. Notes, ref. |