How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation

Jutta Bolt,Leigh Gardner

doi:10.1017/s0022050720000455

Abstract

The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism. We use new data on local governments, or “Native Authorities,” to present the first quantitative comparison of African institutions under indirect rule in four colonies in 1948: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland, and Kenya. Tax data show that Native Authorities’ capacity varied within and between colonies, due to both underlying economic inequalities and African elites’ relations with the colonial government. Our findings suggest that Africans had a bigger hand in shaping British colonial institutions than often acknowledged.

Highlights

The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism
This paper presents new data on the structure and capacity of Native Authorities for four British colonies, Nigeria, the Gold Coast ( Ghana), Nyasaland ( Malawi), and Kenya, and uses these data to argue that the interaction of colonial officials and African elites during the colonial period created substantial variation in colonial institutions both within and between colonies
This suggests that we need a new approach to the study of British colonial institutions in Africa, one that treats them neither as purely European inventions nor as the continuation of pre-colonial systems, but rather, as we argue here, as the outcome of interactions between Africans and Europeans

Summary

A SHORT HISTORY OF INDIRECT RULE IN BRITISH AFRICA

Sub-Saharan Africa was one of the last regions to be colonized by European powers. By that stage, they were not prepared to invest large sums in establishing an administrative apparatus in the colonies, which meant that colonial governments had to support recurrent expenditure with limited local revenue collections (Gardner 2012) and, had to leave many of the main tasks of governing in the hands of Africans (Iliffe 2007, p. 193). In northern Nigeria, where states were already highly centralized and most of the Fulani aristocracy were willing to cooperate with the British in exchange for political support, Lord Lugard merely placed the British colonial government at the top of an existing hierarchical system In such cases, the emirs often enjoyed increased internal authority even while ceding external power The establishment of Native Treasuries and increase in Native Authority revenue led to an increase in fiscal decentralization in British Africa, even in colonies that had been highly centralized in previous decades This is shown, with decentralization measured as local government’s share of total government spending. In Kenya, for example, the 1937 Native Authority Ordinance gave Local Native Councils control over a range of local

The relevant laws were as follows

Maps were sourced from several archives

Nyasaland

RESULTS

Findings

CONCLUSION