Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State by Frederick Cooper (review)

New York University History Professor Frederick Cooper’s book Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State is engaging and impressive. It eloquently builds on W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The World and Africa, published in 1946. It is appropriate, then, that the origins of Cooper’s book are at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, where Cooper was invited to deliver the McMillan-Steward Lectures, which provide much of the material in the book.

Apart from an introduction, which sets the scene and highlights the book’s analytical approach and key arguments, this book has three chapters. The first places Africa in the capitalist system; the next examines empire building by Africans and, in Africa, by Europeans. The remaining chapter carefully unpacks the evidence about how the nation-state became the dominant political institution in Africa, although confederation and federation were more prominent options in the decolonization process.

The major contribution of the book is historical and historiographical. Historically, it demonstrates the organic connection within and across Africa, and between Africa and the world, in the process of the formation of capitalism and its development. Indeed, it unearths historical evidence that shows how Africa has molded, and in turn has been molded by, the world system and capitalism as a particular mode of production. Additionally, it provides a careful and systematic investigation of the roots of social conflict and deprivation in much of Africa, conscientiously distinguishing between aboriginal poverty and modern social conditions called poverty.

Unlike books that are satisfied with analysis of the nation-state in Africa as a harbinger of conflict, disease, corruption, and repression, and hence offer description as causal analysis, this book digs deep into the processes that saw the nation-state, the least preferred option for social organization, become the anointed option for Africa. Demonstrating how the coupling of notions of nation and state is itself a source of exclusion, repression, and tension, Cooper shows how federation and confederation, not only among Africans, but between African countries and others, were all possible routes for organizing African society in different parts of Africa, notably in French West Africa. He carefully develops and analyzes arguments for these forms of political organization.

Historiographically, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State demonstrates how to study Africa as a major part of the story of capitalism, and hence why it is incomplete to study capitalism without paying serious attention to how Africa contributed to, has experienced, and shaped capitalism. To see the contribution of this book, one must look at other works, including articles that appear in mainstream magazines as well as scholarly periodicals, and some progressive scholarship. In 2014, for example, The Economist wondered: “Why don’t more people love capitalism?” Expecting that capitalism lies everywhere but Africa, it was shocked at the results of a survey when it claimed that “in America, capitalism’s spiritual home, a survey in 2013 found that just 54% had a positive view of the term. . . . Support for capitalism, on average, was higher in poor countries like . . . Ghana than in the advanced world” (2014:64).

Among scholars in mainstream economics, especially, Africa is studied without a context and certainly with a view that capitalism has developed entirely outside of Africa’s economies. In turn, there have been hasty attempts to reshape institutions in Africa after the image of the so-called spiritual home of capitalism. That is evidently the story set out in books such as The Bottom Billion (Collier 2008) and The Mystery of Capital (De Soto 2000). Progressive scholars have done much better, but a few have tended to consider Africa to be raw, untouched by capitalism, and hence advocate the freezing of African institutions in traditional or aboriginal mode; however, Cooper’s analysis challenges this orientation, too. It will appear, then, that it is substantive and dialectical analysis that can better advance our knowledge of Africa in the world or the world in Africa.

As with...