The Spatial Ecology of Power: Long‐Distance Trade and State Formation in Northeast Africa

Abstract

This study examines the longue durée pattern of state formation in northeast Africa by situating its determinate dynamics within a wider constellation of social-property relations and inter-regional exchange networks. Given the social dynamics of tributary relations, increases in surplus extraction typically took the form of extensive territorial expansion rather than intensive augmentation of production, and the supply of means of coercion (weapons) and means of persuasion (luxury goods) with which to build retinues and alliances was a crucial determinant of the persistent oscillations between centralized rule and periods of pronounced regional autonomy. The sustained spatiality of power in the region was consequently shaped by the uneven and combined dynamics of production and exchange relations rather than by any simple dominance of one over the other. Within the more inclusive spatiotemporal framework adopted here, it is their historical imbrications rather than their idealized juxtapositions that calls for critical analysis and social explanation.***** The role of long-distance trade in the genesis of modernity and as a solvent of feudal social relations has long been a controversial one. Drawing within its orbit historical sociologists and economic historians alike, the controversies date back to the 1950s "Transition Debate" and ranged widely across several key areas of sociohistorical inquiry: the crisis of serfdom, the origin of towns, the development of merchant capital, the emergence of agrarian capitalism, and the expansion of simple commodity production in hastening the overall crisis of feudalism. They all converged on the question of the "prime mover": the relative weight accorded trade and merchant capital, in contrast to social contradictions "internal" to the feudal order proper, in the transition to capitalism. 1 The controversies of that period were revitalized some two decades later by the economic historian Robert Brenner whose study of the agrarian roots of European capitalism set the terms of the revived debate. In a forceful critique, Brenner took aim at both "Smithian" historians and their claim that expanding commerce and urban industry had led to a trajectory of cumulative growth and "neo-Malthusian" interpreters who pointed to a pattern of 1

Results and prospects: an introduction to the CRIA special issue on UCD

“…In this register, UCD has been applied to both modern and premodern historical conjunctures. (For the latter, see especially Matin [2007], Makki [2011] and Anievas and Nişancıo glu [2015].) A second level is that of the socalled 'concrete abstraction' (Rosenberg 2006, 319).…”

Historical Sociology’s Puzzle of the Missing Transitions

“…In some cases, peasants and artisans directly provide elites with food and other goods (Weber [1922] 1978). The more common pattern, however, is for elite incomes to be received in either the staple agricultural product alone or in cash; in either case, elites must exchange this income for the other goods they need—the weapons and luxury consumption goods that Makki (2011:164) calls “the means of coercion and persuasion.” The concentration of purchasing power in the hands of elites thus supports the emergence of specialized merchants and artisans to supply them and their entourages, and the degree of state centralization tends to increase the depth of commercialization—more populous capital and provincial cities and larger armies, administrations, and courts draw resources from a larger hinterland and can support more specialized markets. 4 Increasingly centralized states with larger armies and more urbanized elites in turn become more politically and financially dependent on merchants (Anderson 1974; Ertman 1997; Tilly 1992).…”

“…Although this process of migrating economic and political hegemony is sometimes linked to the long-term emergence of capitalism in Europe, the pattern is in fact far more general. It can be seen also, for instance, in the special relationship between monarchies and Jewish populations in the Middle Ages (Barkey and Katznelson 2011) or the “symbiotic relationship” of “warrior nobility and trading merchants” in successive polities in northeast Africa (Makki 2011:179).…”

Development by Dispossession: Terra Nullius and the Social‐Ecology of New Enclosures in Ethiopia

“…This spatially differentiated agrarian policy is reproducing in new forms older core‐periphery hierarchies within the Ethiopian social formation. For state builders in the highland core, the western and eastern lowlands had historically constituted a virtual no‐man's land, and the southwest fringes in particular were the source of the gold, ivory, and enslaved captives that sustained imperial state formation (Donham and James ; Makki 2011b). The delimitation of state boundaries in the early part of the twentieth century did little to change this sociospatial hierarchy, and as late as 1955 the Imperial Constitution simply designated the communal and pastoral commons as state domains (Helland :14).…”