The Economic Origins of Twentieth Century Decolonisation in West Africa

This paper argues that the pattern of decolonisation in West Africa was a function of the nature of human capital transfers from the colonisers to the indigenous elites of the former colonies. Underpinning the nature of these human capital transfers is the colonial educational ideology. Where this ideology emphasized the notion of "assimilation", the system generally tended to produce elites that depended highly on the coloniser for their livelihood, hence necessitating a continuation of the imperial relationship even after independence was granted. On the contrary, where the ideology emphasized the "strengthening of the solid elements" of the country-side, the system tended to produce a bunch of elites that were quite independent of the coloniser and consequently had little to lose from a disruption of the imperial relationship at independence. The model raises several predictions based on a single assumption on the nature of the nationalist elite. The paper's contribution, is in providing a framework for understanding the different paths of decolonisation in Africa in general, but more specifically in the British and French West African empires, an approach which unites both the Eurocentric and Afrocentric perspectives.Decolonisation, Human Capital Transfers, Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, West Africa

A Theory of Colonial Governance

This paper considers conditions of optimality in a co-optive strategy of colonial rule. It proposes a simple model of elite formation emanating from a coloniser's quest to maximise extracted rents from its colonies. The results suggest multiple optimal solutions, depending on the specification of the production function, the governance technology chosen by the coloniser and the technological parameters of the model. For instance, in agrarian colonial societies, the results suggest that under a technology of governance by numbers, a large elite population is a direct reflection of a high productivity-enhancing technology by the coloniser. In contrast, under a governance technology by quality, the better the productivity-enhancing technology, the lower the quality of human capital that is transferred to the elite. Additionally, under a composite governance technology, and given non-linearity conditions defined by the productivity distance threshold, the better the productivity-enhancing technology, the smaller the optimal elite size that is chosen by the coloniser. An alternative set of results is obtained assuming an industrial economic set-up (or interdependent production). These results suggest that the long debate about the apparent superiority of one European colonisation experience over the other is much more intricate than is often perceived in the literature. The insight from the model is also useful in understanding why the stock of human capital available in countries emerging from colonisation varied considerably across colonial experiences and from one country to another.Optimality Conditions, Governance technology, human capital, elite, productivity