State Building in the Niger Basin in the Common Era and Beyond, 1000–Mid 1800s: The Case of Yorubaland

Abstract

Notwithstanding its destructive aspects, historical sociologists have severally used their work to establish that warfare has its constructive side especially in the realm of state building. Through their work, the literature in the sub-specialty is continuously updated with narratives and accounts of war making and state building in Europe and parts of Asia during the early modern era. Such narratives and accounts are troves of information that enrich our knowledge about the trajectories and processes through which the states that we know today in Europe, China and Japan came about. But the neglect of Africa, where states were also built through warfare by indigenous political actors, remains conspicuous in the sub-specialty literature. This article, which begins the process of redressing that neglect, extends Charles Tilly’s theoretical proposition on the symbiotic interaction between war making and state making in early modern Europe to account for the emergence of states in Yorubaland during the Common Era and up until the 1800s using the wealth that accrued from slave-taking and other sources. It draws from the Eckstein-Gurr theoretical framework – or E-G scheme – to show that although those Yoruba states were monarchies, they were also constitutional monarchies that thrived on democratic sociocultural authority patterns of the Yoruba.