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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Rural Interests and the Making of Modern African States
Author:Boone, CatherineISNI
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.
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