(the exchange of blood wealth) that satisfied both sides and
was paid over the next three years.
The paying of blood wealth took place in the shadow of
the threat of force and feuding, and even when it was paid,
it did not necessarily stop conflict. Usually conflict died
down and then flared up again.
Political power was thus widely dispersed in Somali
society, almost pluralistically. But without the authority of a
centralized state to enforce order, let alone property rights,
this led not to inclusive institutions. Nobody respected the
authority of another, and nobody,
including the British
colonial state when it eventually arrived, was able to
impose order. The lack of political centralization made it
impossible for Somalia to benefit from the Industrial
Revolution. In such a climate it would have been
unimaginable to invest in or adopt the new technologies
emanating
from Britain, or indeed to create the types of
organizations necessary to do so.
The complex politics of Somalia had even more subtle
implications for economic progress. We mentioned earlier
some of the great technological puzzles of African history.
Prior to the expansion of colonial rule in the late nineteenth
century, African societies did not use wheeled
transportation or plow agriculture and few had writing.
Ethiopia did, as we have seen. The Somalis also had a
written script, but unlike the Ethiopians, they did not use it.
We have already seen instances of this in African history.
African societies may not have used wheels or plows, but
they certainly knew about them. In the case of the Kingdom
of Kongo, as we have seen, this was fundamentally due to
the fact that the economic institutions created no incentives
for people to adopt these technologies. Could the same
issues arise with the adoption of writing?
We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of
Taqali, situated
to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba
Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed
in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a
man called Isma’il, and it stayed independent until
amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The Taqali
kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was
not used—except by the kings, for external communication
with other polities and diplomatic correspondence. At first
this situation seems very puzzling. The traditional account
of the origin of writing in Mesopotamia is that it was
developed by states in order to record information, control
people, and levy taxes. Wasn’t the Taqali state interested in
this?
These questions were investigated by the historian Janet
Ewald in the late 1970s as she tried to reconstruct the
history of the Taqali state. Part
of the story is that the
citizens resisted the use of writing because they feared that
it would be used to control resources, such as valuable
land, by allowing the state to claim ownership. They also
feared that it would lead to more systematic taxation. The
dynasty that Isma’il started did not gel into a powerful state.
Even if it had wanted to, the state was not strong enough to
impose its will over the objections of the citizens. But there
were other, more subtle factors at work. Various elites also
opposed political centralization, for example, preferring oral
to written interaction with citizens, because this allowed
them maximum discretion. Written laws or orders could not
be taken back or denied and were harder to change; they
set benchmarks that governing elites might want to reverse.
So neither the ruled nor the rulers of Taqali saw the
introduction of writing to be to their advantage.
The ruled
feared how the rulers would use it, and the rulers
themselves saw the absence of writing as aiding their quite
precarious grip on power. It was the politics of Taqali that
kept writing from being introduced. Though the Somalis
had even less of a well-defined elite compared with the
Taqali kingdom, it is quite plausible that the same forces
inhibited their use of writing and their adoption of other
basic technologies.
The Somali case shows the consequences of the lack of
political centralization for economic growth.
The historical
literature does not record instances of attempts to create
such centralization in Somalia. However, it is clear why this
would have been very difficult. To politically centralize would
have meant that some clans would have been subject to the
control of others. But they rejected any such dominance,
and the surrender of their power that this would have
entailed; the balance of military power in the society would
also have made it difficult to create such centralized
institutions. In fact, it is likely that any group or clan
attempting to centralize power would not only have faced
stiff resistance but would have
lost its existing power and
privileges. As a consequence of this lack of political
centralization and the implied absence of even the most
basic security of property rights, Somali society never
generated incentives to invest in productivity-enhancing
technologies. As the process of industrialization was under
way in other parts of the world in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Somalis
were feuding and fending for
their lives, and their economic backwardness became
more ingrained.
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