Wealth in people
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Welcome, everyone. My name is Gilad Levy. I'm a professor at the economics department here at LSE. And I'm extremely happy to welcome Professor James Robinson here to the LSE and you, the audience, here in the old theater, in the old building.

looking very young, and also our audience online. Professor Robinson is the director of the Pearson Institute. He's a Pearson professor and a university professor in the Harris School of Public Policy in the University of Chicago.

I'm sure you've heard, he's also the latest recipient of the Sverre Riksbank Prize for the Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, together with two other co-authors. I'm sure you've heard about this because LSE was very happy to bask in the glory as Jim was an undergraduate here at the LSE. The groundbreaking research that...

Jim, I can call you Jim? Jim. Jim, together with Simon Johnson and Darren Asimoglu, produced groundbreaking and extremely influential, looked at the super important question of why do some states or places or regions succeed and why do some of them fail economically and politically, and have looked at the

Particularly at different institutions that were initiated under colonial regimes, for example in Africa. Some of them, they have realized, were inclusive, so allowing the pie to grow. Some of them more extractive, so the pie doesn't grow and the resources go to some particular set of people.

And this focus on institution as the key idea for why some nations fail and some not,

has allowed them also to get on to more general questions about political institutions such as why do we have, when do the elite agree to have democratic institutions and when do they stick to autocratic regime. Tonight we're going to go back to Africa to learn about political institutions before colonial regimes

and to think about, to learn about narrative of African development politically and economically that is potentially different from what we are used to looking through the Western type of lens. And we are in for a real treat. The way I see Professor Robinson is that I used to think of him as the complete political economist providing, you know, combining tools both from political

political science and economics. Now I'm thinking he's the complete social scientist, so also using theory and methodologies from not only political science and economics, but also sociology, anthropology, history, so the whole package. And I'm really, really looking forward to the talk. I have lots of things to say to you about the Q&A session that we will have

after the talk, but I really want to get going, so I'll say it when we have the Q&A session. And I'm very delighted to hand over to Jim. Thank you. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you.

I don't remember that the stage was as small as this. Okay, great. Thank you very much. It's very exciting to be back. I was an alumni of the LSE. I sort of feel being in this room, I'm not sure I've been in this room for 40 years, I feel like the criminal returns to the scene of his crimes.

So it's quite a thrill to be here. And so thank you very much. And what I'm going to do, yeah, is try to kind of talk about some of the work, the kind of project that I have

putting together a lot of the ideas that I've been trying to generate about sub-Saharan Africa, you know, over the past 25 years. And it has this rubric of wealth in people. And I'll get into that in a few minutes. Okay. But what I want to do to start with, you know, is, oh, there you go. Okay. So what I want to do to start with is, you know, which I've sort of

Found is that in social science, you know when you start talking about Africa It's always a sort of litany of disasters, you know It's like one disaster after another one terrible thing happens after another the slave trade colonialism democracy collapse There was civil war there was famine there was you know And I used to teach a class when I was at Harvard with Robert Bates very distinguished political scientists and that class was like that and it was terrible it made me so depressed and

And at some point I thought, like, you know, I just, like, I had to kind of look inside and say, you know, I really like being in Africa, you know. I just, I get off the plane, you know, somewhere and I just, I'm happy, you know. And it's not because I like autocracy, you know, or famine or civil war. And so it sort of forced me to articulate, you know, what I thought was just so fascinating about,

and rewarding about working in Africa and studying in Africa. And I think that's also part of the agenda here. I'll have to look up. You've got all these people here. Don't feel neglected if I, you know. All the professors are here, you see. LAUGHTER

So I had to kind of totally reboot my understanding of Africa. I threw away all my slides when I moved to the University of Chicago. I deleted the files on my computer, and I started again from like ground zero. So this is sort of where I am, you know, 10 years later from ground zero. And I think the first thing to do, you know, with that thought in mind, the first thing to do is start by talking about something constructive, constructive.

And start by, instead of talking about something Africans failed to do, start by talking about something Africans failed.

succeeded in doing. So for the economists and economic historians in the room, that means you have to start by not obsessing with the great divergence. So most of you might have heard of this rhetoric of the great divergence due to my colleague actually in the history department, Kenneth Pomerantz at the University of Chicago. Kenneth wrote a very famous book about comparative economic development. He's a specialist of China and he kind of

He chose this rubric, the Great Divergence. So the Great Divergence is this creation of inequality in the modern world that starts with the British Industrial Revolution and sort of spreads to other parts of the world, North America, Western Europe, and Africa does very badly in the Great Divergence. So I'll come back to the Great Divergence, but let's not start by talking about it. So I picked up here some pretentious phrase from one of my colleagues, that we have to decenter it.

I'm going to get to an even more pretentious phrase, which is going to be in French. So you know when an Englishman starts talking French, it's going to get really pretentious.

So wait for it. De-centering. So there's this obsession with explaining, and this is part of my Damascus-like moment, this obsession with explaining things that went wrong in Africa. I want to start by trying to convince you something went right in Africa, like big time. And the Africans succeeded in something. So what was that?

And for me, the obvious thing which I can document and show you facts about, which I'm going to do in a second, is the political organization of African society. So in social science, we're very obsessed with ethnicity. When people look at Africa, they talk about these ethnic groups and ethnicity and all of that.

But that actually conceals, complete discussion completely conceals the political organization of African society. Ethnic groups were not united except in a few case perhaps. In any case, you know, it's sort of anachronistic to talk about ethnicity prior to the colonial period.

But whatever the case, very few ethnic groups were united politically. So how were they organized politically? So one of the projects I've been working on the last few years is trying to get a kind of answer, a sort of global answer within Africa to how many-- I'm going to use the word from polities-- how many politically independent societies were there in Africa? Not ethnic groups, but political

how was Africa organized politically? So I'm going to come up with a number, and it's going to be 42,000. At the time of the scramble for Africa, according to the latest version of the calculation, still ongoing, there were 42,000 independent polities in Africa. It was incredibly decentralized politically. And I'm going to say that was a success because that's what Africans were trying to achieve, and they did achieve it.

Okay? So, and I'll talk about what they were trying to achieve and why there was so much political diversity in Africa. But also I'll talk about some of the consequences of that, and that's where we'll get back to the great divergence. But what I want to do to start with is start with this positive theme. Okay? So, you know, I think if any of you are kind of familiar with Africa, you can think of parts of Africa.

a sub-Saharan Africa that makes you think this is, it doesn't really matter for me whether that number is 30,000 or 50,000 or 40, you know, like it's big, okay? There were a lot of polities, okay? And, you know, we're doing our best to get to this number, get to this, let me tell you how I got to this number 42,000, okay?

So what we did is, without going into too many details, we took the variable from Murdoch's ethnographic atlas. George Murdoch was a Yale ethnographer who put together this ethnographic atlas in the 1960s and 1970s. It's a little bit controversial amongst my anthropological colleagues because...

It's condensing a huge amount of variation and a huge amount of detail. And I should say, before I even got into this, I always forget to say this, but I'm talking about Africa. Immediately, anyone who starts talking about Africa, you know what's going to come next is going to be highly oversimplified. So there's lots of nuance. I'm a professor, so I do nuance.

But I think, and I'm not going to go into that now because I'd have to spend the whole time sort of justifying why I'm talking about Africa. I think there's enough commonalities within Africa, cultural, historical, technologically, that it's useful to talk about Africa. But I also recognize that reasonable people can disagree about that.

So it's very important to think about the details and the variation. I'm sort of super happy to talk about that. And if people want to ask me questions about that, then I'm really happy to kind of engage on that. But if you'll just bear with me, I'm going to talk about Africa. When I was a student at the LSE, I came home... This is a bit of a digression. LAUGHTER

I came home for Christmas, you know, and my mum asked me, so, you know, what did you learn? You know, what did you learn? Studying economics at the LSE. And I came out with some complicated thing about what was Mrs Thatcher, what was going on, you know. And I ended up by saying, oh, it's really complicated, mum. She looked at me and said, you know, I never studied economics, but I can tell you the world is pretty complicated, you know.

I could say it's really complicated. Isn't it your job to say it's actually much simpler than you thought? So I think if anybody complains about me being too simplified, I'm going to come back with my mum. All right. So Africa, I just wanted to mention that. I think that's a very important thing and it's an important discussion. Okay. So let's go back to the numbers.

So what we did is we took these different categories. So Murdoch has these categories where he kind of measures what he calls the levels of jurisdiction hierarchy above the local community. So it's a sort of measure of how centralized politically society was. So for example, I'll come back to missing. Missing means there's 250 ethnic groups for which there's no information on this variable.

So zero means the village is the polity. So there's no levels of jurisdictional hierarchy above the village. That might be eastern Nigeria, for example, like Igbo land. One would be there's a village, but above the village there's another level of jurisdiction.

kind of hierarchy authority. So one of the societies in that bin, for example, would be Mende land in the south of Sierra Leone where you had sort of villages, but above the villages there was a kind of, there was a sort of layer of administration hierarchy above the villages. Okay? Now,

Four is the highest. There's only two societies in sub-Saharan Africa, and they're pretty small that are at that level. Three, 45, that has some of the most famous kind of pre-colonial polities. Rwanda, Dahomey, Benin would be in that category. And then there's two. So what we did is we basically looked at these. This is from Murdoch. And we used...

back projections of population. And what we're interested in is taking seriously the fact that the societies in these different categories were not united politically. I mentioned Mende Land in the south of Sierra Leone, for example, in the time at the pre-colonial period, that was probably divided into about 50 separate chiefs and sys, 50 separate polities that were politically autonomous and independent.

So what we want to try to do is kind of come up with estimates for the number of polities. And as I said, I think, to my knowledge, nobody's ever done this calculation before. There could be two reasons for that. One is it's so heroic and implausible that they were too sensible to do it.

And the other is, he's nodding his head, and the other is, the other is, you know, like, they just didn't think of it. You know, they didn't think it was interesting. Okay? But I think it's very interesting because for me, this is a sort of, this is a story of success and I'm getting into that. Okay? Maybe I'm sort of laboring the details too much, you know, but, but,

But there's a lot of incompleteness here in the sense that many of the societies, so for the Mendelein, for example, we have a fabulous ethnography from the 1950s that has a real number. So we actually know how many independent polities there were in Mendelein. But in other places, we don't know. There might be an ethnography. There might be history. But there's no kind of estimate of the number of polities. And then we have to sort of guess, basically. We have to guess based on--

historical projections of back predictions of population, which is what we have here, you know, we have to kind of, and we have to, like, we have to guess based on information we do have on similar types of societies. So there's a lot of, you know, there's estimate one and estimate six here. I saved you the other four estimates, you know, where there's a lot of robustness checks here and kind of reality checks also, meaning, you know, we make some assumptions based on what we know and then we sort of extrapolate that

And then we go to places where we don't have a number and we sort of, is it plausible? Does this kind of pass some... So I won't... Let me give you the flavor of what we're doing. So then the biggest problem, of course, is the missing, where we just have to make different sorts of assumptions about... We don't even know how centralized the missings were. So I think...

42,000 for me is a pretty plausible number if you think about the political geography, not just eastern Nigeria, but Gabon, southern-- there were many parts of Africa with enormous Zambia, very politically decentralized societies. But I want to say that's a success. It's a success. Why is it a success? Why were there so many polities in Africa?

And I think that's where I want to bring in this idea, which I find so kind of central to thinking about Africa, which I call wealth in people. So for me, this political decentralization is a consequence of a particular kind of worldview. I'm going to use a pretentious word, at least for an economist to issue it, it's a pretentious word. For other people in other space of academia, it's not. But...

Ontology. So, subset of metaphysics. So this is going to be related to lots of ideas in African studies about the importance of the community or the importance of the collectivity. But this notion of wealth in people, what do I mean by wealth in people? So here's a Yoruba proverb from southwest Nigeria. A gift of money is not equal in value to the gift of a person.

So I think, for me, my experience of working in Africa is like social relations are so important. Social ties, social networks, social connections. There's this kind of density. And when I was thinking, trying to think about why I liked Africa so much, the first thing I thought of was there's this sort of density of social life, which is just kind of extraordinary, especially relative to my upbringing as a British in Coventry.

I was sent to Coventry.

Okay. So, you know, the crude way, it's a bit more subtle than this, but, you know, the crude way to think about this is if you've read, you know, Piketty's book on capital, you know, he thinks of wealth as buildings, stocks, bonds, financial assets, whatever, you know. You know, don't think about that. Think about wealth as social relations and connections to people, okay? And the objective in life is

is to accumulate these connections or make more connections or build these connections. Okay? And material assets are often valued, but, you know, for many times as tools to acquire more people. You can acquire people with material wealth. All right? So...

I'm going to try to motivate this with a metaphor that's going to come up a few times in this talk, which is a common board game all over sub-Saharan Africa called, you know, Mankala, it's called in Congo. I'm going to come to this in Congo, but this is actually from the British Museum. It's Wari, which is... What? Isn't it from the British Museum? Yeah. So it's in the British Museum, looted, you know, from Ghana. Huh?

Okay, I don't know why I chose that. Yeah, but I think it's because you're going to see more stuff from the British Museum later. So I got, you know, I was on the web page and it was, you know. Anyway, so let me tell you, I'm not going to go into the rules of Mancala, but let me give you the crucial point. Okay, so here's Mancala. There's two bases, you know, there's two players. You have a base. There's some carry shells. You distribute the carry shells between the other 12 indentations. And then there's a set of rules for basically moving the carry shells together.

And the objective of Wari or Mancala is to capture the Kairi shells of the other person and bring them into your base. And the person who wins is the person who basically manages to capture all the Kairi shells of the other player. So contrast that game with chess. What happens in chess?

In chess, you have the whole kind of hierarchy, you know, kings, queens, bishops, you've got the church, castles, pawns. You know, in mankind, everyone is the same. All the pieces are the same. There's no hierarchy. And the objective in chess is not to bring the other opponents into your team. It's to obliterate them and take their territory. So I think this is going to sound sort of silly, but it'll grow on you.

For me, the difference between those two board games tells you awful lots about the difference between African and at least the Western society that I grew up in. So this is a sort of metaphor, in my mind, for wealth in people. But you see this comes up in all sorts of consequences in religious life in Africa. I'm going to give you a political example later on as kind of manifesting the basic principles, symbolizing the basic principles of society.

All right. So I've talked a little bit about, you know, wealth in people. I want to get to the political consequences of wealth in people. I think it has economic consequences. It has all sorts of consequences. But I'm going to focus on political to start with, you know, because I kind of put up my 42,000, right? So I want to justify why I think that fact is interesting. Okay? And I think...

Wealth in people, this sort of, you know, this kind of ontological commitment is institutionalized in lots of ways. It's institutionalized in kinship groups, in clans, in fictive kinship groups. Okay? So, and I think it's those institutionalizations of this ethic that become very important politically in the sense that

You value them and you want to protect them. So another, George Murdoch, I talked about his ethnographic atlas. We could spend a lot of time arguing about that. We could probably spend just as much time arguing about Placide Temples' book, Bantu Philosophy. So Temples was a cleric who worked amongst the Luba people in the Southern Democratic Republic of Congo. And he wrote in the 1940s this book, which was sort of the first attempt to kind of

present the worldview of Africans, actually Luba people, from a kind of African perspective. So again, it's overgeneralized and whatever, but I think many of the things that, for me at least, many of the things that he talks about sort of resonate, and one of his emphases is on Africans have this ontological duty to preserve the clan. So you have this commitment to the community,

and you see yourself as part of this community and you need to preserve that community, you value that community, you want to preserve that community. So what is it that threatens the clan or the community?

political centralization threatens that community. So I always like to illustrate this with an ethnographic example from Nigeria by Paul Bohannon, who studied the Tiv people for many years, kind of in the middle belt of Nigeria. And the way Bohannon sort of talks about, he was very interested in the political, why the Tiv people were so decentralized politically. Okay.

and what mechanisms led them to be so decentralized politically. And in one famous paper, he studied a cult from the 1930s called Nyambua. So on the face of it, Nyambua was a sort of anti-witchcraft cult.

So people were threatened, they were accused of being witches. How do you know somebody's a witch? Well, somebody was handing out fly whisks, here's one of his photographs, and here's a diviner. So if you think you're being attached by witchcraft, you go to a diviner to get a kind of diagnosis of the problem, and here's somebody with a fly whisk, and the fly whisk was used for kind of smelling out witchcraft.

witchcraft. But what Bohannon noticed about this kind of these witchcraft accusations and diviners was who was being accused of a witch,

It was people who sort of tried to get too big for their boots. People who started telling other people what to do. And he says, you know, men who acquired too much power were whittled down by means of witchcraft accusations. Nian Bu was one of a regular series of movements to which Tiv political action, with its distrust of power...

gives rise to so that the greater political institutions, the one based on the lineage system and the principle of egalitarianism can be preserved. So what Bohannon is saying is, you know, what the Thiep people valued was the lineage, the clan, the local community. They saw political innovations as threatening. And they devised a mechanism, there's lots and lots of different mechanisms in Africa, this is just one very specific example.

They devised a mechanism to keep hierarchy in check, which was accusing people who were disrupting the system of being

Now, of course, centralized states did emerge. When I was talking about those numbers, I was mentioning a few examples, Rwanda, Benin, Dahomey, for example. But, of course, there's advantages to centralized authority. The Tiv stayed extremely decentralized, but other places became more centralized. But I want to say something very specific about that, which was, you know, Yat,

there's advantages to centralization. You can provide public goods or you can provide order or maybe you can do things on a bigger scale, you can allow for trade or whatever. But there was a consciousness that that generated risks. And the solution to that risk was what I'm calling a hybrid institution, meaning it was centralized authority that somehow

merged with kinship systems or lineage systems, managed to kind of preserve the thing that was really valued. So the terminology that was given to this by Aidan Southall, who was an anthropologist who worked in Uganda in the 1940s and 1950s, was a segmentary state. So he said, you know, this kind of fusion of kinship with state institutions, he called that a segmentary state.

So why design a state like that? Well, you're trying to take advantage of political centralization, but you're trying to do it in a way that preserves your basic principles. So that's a kind of constitutional design problem. And part of it is the way you structure the state.

But part of it is also how you govern the state. So one of the ways that these states were often governed, for example, was by bringing in outsiders to rule. So this is one thing that Southall studied, so-called stranger kings. You have one of those. This country is run by Germans, if you didn't know that. We brought the Hanoverians in the 18th century. It's not quite the same, but you know.

It's part of a constitutional design. You want to have hierarchy. It's useful for some things, but you're worried about it. So you need to kind of govern it, set it up in the right way. So one way is to bring in these outsiders. What's good about outsiders? Well, quite a few things, I'll tell you. But what Southall points out is what he calls limited jurisdictions. You bring outsiders in that don't have land rights.

They're outside the community. They're useful for some things, mediating disputes. Maybe they have supernatural powers. They were rainmakers in the case of the Alor. So it's a sort of constitutional design to take advantages of scale but preserve what you care about.

So let me tell you about this gentleman. He's a sort of institutional designer that I spent a long time studying, King Shiam. So he was the founder of the Kuba Kingdom in 1620 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And he's sitting, this is called an Ndop, it's a statue of a Kuba king. He kind of started the, every king is represented by an Ndop.

What's he sitting in front of? A mankala board. So this is what the great historian of Congo Basin, Jan Vansina, calls his emblem. Why was his emblem a mankala board? Because what Chiam did was he merged the clans. In a famous sort of constitutional moment, he merged these clans together. Why is he sitting in front of a mankala board? That's the social contract. He's saying, why?

We're doing this, but we're going to do it in a way that respects the basic principles of society. So that's what the Mancala board is symbolizing. I'm going to tell you some more things about it later on. So this is centralization, merging these clans together, but trying to do so in a way that preserves the social contract. So

The bottom line here is there's 42,000 polities in Africa in 1880. It's very fragmented politically. Why is it so fragmented politically? Because Africans saw centralized political institutions as

a threat. And they created all sorts of mechanisms that stopped power accumulating. And when it did, they designed the state and political institutions in such a way as to stop power getting out of control. Of course, it did get out of control. There's always a risk, but that's the big picture. So here's a question for the international relations scholars in the audience. 42,000 polities.

How on earth did 42,000 polities coexist? You know, Eastern Nigeria, there are probably 500 independent polities. How on earth did those independent polities exist? So I asked that question once to a colleague of mine, a historian at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and he said the following thing. He said, "Let the kite perch and the eagle perch. Whichever says the other must not perch, let its wing break off." Meaning, the kite has its place.

The eagle has its place. The eagle leaves the kite alone, the kite leaves the eagle alone. If anyone messes up with that, let their wing break off. So that's the image. This is the Igbo morning prayer. So every Igbo person is supposed to say this as part of the morning prayer every morning when they wake up. So that's an image of kind of mutual coexistence and sort of toleration.

in some sense. So for me, that's a theory of international relations. I'm an economist. Now, I'm going to give you some examples of why I think this is so interesting. It turns out this kind of international relations has hardly ever been studied in pre-colonial Africa. There's some stuff, but not much.

One thing about stranger kings I didn't tell you. Often, like divine kings, they were surrounded by taboos and restrictions. So King Siam, for example, the king and the Kuba king were not allowed to cross the Kasai River. So when we went, I went to the Kuba capital, Musengei,

And so we were really interested in this question. So my colleague, I was with my colleague Nathan Nunn, and Nathan Nunn asked the Kuba King or the regent of the Kuba King, why didn't you just cross the Kasai River and invade these other people? You could have done it easily. You had an army that really decentralized and stuff.

He looked at them, he said, there are brothers. Why would we do that? There are brothers. So this question of kind of the political, what does this broader equilibrium look like, I think is sort of fascinating. And the way I'm going to suggest, I'm going to show you some at least indirect evidence about this, is that this question

Ebo proverb, it's one proverb from one part of Nigeria, suggests this very powerful norm of coexistence and mutual toleration. Why would such a thing exist in Africa? Well, I think if you look at the history of Africa, it's a history, like many parts of the world, of migration, of mingling, of merging, of cosmopolitanism. And here's my favorite example of cosmopolitanism and mingling and merging.

This is the composition of the Nguato Reserve from the 1946 census in Botswana. So Botswana, you know, pre-colonial Botswana was made up of these independent Swana polities. This is probably the biggest one, Nguato. The Nguato, you know, this was where Siretzi Kama, you'll hear a bit more about Siretzi Kama later, the post-independence. This is going to be about contemporary Africa as well. It's not just about history. This is going to be

Sereti Karma, the first Prime Minister and President of post-independent Botswana, he was the hereditary chief of the Nguatu. So let me just go down here. There's about 100,000 people living in this reserve in 1946. How many of them were Nguatu? 18,000. Less than 20% of the people in the Nguatu reserve were actually Nguatu. Who are these other people? Calaca.

That was the biggest group. Who are the Kalaka? Well, they're north into Matabele land, western Zimbabwe. They're a different...

ethnicity, shall we say. But they were actually the dominant group in the Nguato reserve. Who were the Swapong? There's quite a lot of them. The Swapong weren't a people at all. It's an area of hills in Nguato land where the Nguato basically just kind of put people. And they were all living on these hills, so they classified them as a kind of ethnic group in the census. And they called them the Swapong. That's not really a people at all. It's just a mixture of different migrants.

You can go down the list here, Herero, so these are people from Namibia, Pedi people from southern Africa. There's other Swana people here, Swana people here, people from other Swana, Paltese. But what's kind of staggering about this is just the incredible heterogeneity. What are all these people doing there? Were they there on vacation? No.

People move and mingle and they were integrated into the Nguato polity, through the political institutions. And this is the work of a great London School of Economics scholar, Isaac Shapiro, who is a professor of social anthropology here, one of the great social anthropologists, at least in my opinion.

I worked for a lot of time in Botswana and I was so confused about everything until I started reading his work. So I'm a big groupie of Isaac Shapiro, although I never met him personally. So this is like, you know, why would you have these norms of toleration and whatever? Well, here's part of the story, I think. And what are the consequences of this? Lots of consequences of this. So this is some work that I've been doing with...

Soren Henn, who's one of my collaborators at University of Wisconsin at Madison, which is, you know, somebody pointed out to me once, you know, in Nigeria, that in Hausa, the word for guest and stranger were the same. I thought, gosh, that's interesting. So we did the following exercise. We went to the library, and we pulled out every dictionary we could, and we tried to kind of put together

the picture of, you know, in which languages in Africa are the words for guest and the stranger the same. Okay, so this is, you see this, if you look at like proverbs or whatever, you see, you know, you see huge amounts of stuff on this. The dark blue are like languages that we could actually code.

Here's Setswana down here. The light blue was sort of lingua franca, so mostly Swahili and Lingala. So those are languages where guest and stranger are the same, and it makes it look more blue. But there's lots of holes through the lack of dictionaries. But I think this, why would the word for guest and stranger be the same? That's a sort of cultural adaption to the fact that people are

valuable, there's wealth in people. Why did all those Swarna people, why did they want those Kalaka and Herero and Pedi in Nguato land? Because people are valuable, so they wanted to attract them. It's a little bit more nuanced than that, of course, because who were the Sawa? I jumped over the Sawa. The Sawa were serfs, basically, you could say. So,

There was coercion also. I could talk about the slave trade. I'm not going to talk too much about the slave trade. But I think slavery in some sense, you know, the way I would think about slavery is that's part of wealth in people too. There's a sort of continuum of unfreedom, okay? A lot of what went on here is, you know, attracting strangers, attracting outsiders, bringing them into, you know, the Nguato polity. But there's coercion also, okay? So...

Just to mention that. So this, for me, this is why does that theory of international relations make sense? This is why it makes sense. Now, let me say something about the economy. I'm not going to belabor the economy because I'm going to stick on the 42,000. How do I think about economics in this sort of space?

And I think, you know, the way I think about economics is the economy was really also subservient to these wider goals. Just as the way I'm saying political organization was subservient to this goal of like protecting wealth and people and its institutionalizations, that was true with the economy as well.

Okay, so one of the most brilliant illustrations of this, and I think this is very much the tradition of Karl Polanyi, for example, and Moses Finlay, you know, that's, it's so, you know, that's, and you know, for me, that's the way I've always come to understand

economic institutions in Africa. You know, I'm going to quote Paul Bohannon again, you know, from his marvelous book with his wife, Laura Bohannon, "TIV Economy" from 1968. And, you know, economists might want to put their fingers, you know, in their ears for the next kind of minute, you know. To the TIV, a market is not merely a place to buy and sell.

It is a political institution of major importance because in a society that's dominated by the lineage principle, it's a means of overriding that principle. So I think if you look at the pre-colonial organization of African economies, there were no factor markets. I mean, that's not completely true. There were capital markets on the West African coast, on the East Africa. So again, I'm overgeneralizing here. But the big picture for me is...

There weren't land markets. How did you get access to land? You didn't buy land in a market. You didn't rent land in a market. You got access to land through kinship group, through your community. Same with labor. How did you mobilize labor to work on your farm? You didn't hire it in a market. You mobilized labor through your kinship group. Why organize stuff like that? Well, because that fortifies those basic structures in society. Okay?

So what were the economic consequences of this? I'm coming. All right. So I could give other examples of this, but maybe I've made... There's lots of contemporary examples of this, too, of this, you know, what...

what Bahanen calls separate spheres, there's different spheres. And, you know, the economy was embedded in the society and the polity. All right. So now back to the great divergence. Okay. So I'm trying to kind of paint this picture of, you know,

I'm painting too static a picture. There's lots of dynamics here, which I can't get into, you know, but I'm painting this picture of there were these principles, you know, Africans wanted to design political institutions to preserve this. They organized other things to go along with that, like the economy, okay? And there's a lot of innovation here, as I was trying to emphasize, okay? So...

But clearly that had lots of unintended consequences. If you read, for example, about the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade in the kingdom of the Congo, when the Portuguese arrived wanting to buy slaves, where did the slaves come from?

the dependents, the people of the rulers of the kingdom of Congo and the aristocracy. If people were so valuable, why did you sell your people off to the Portuguese? Well, one reason is the Portuguese had all this cool stuff. The other reason is it comes back to the very fragmented political geography.

What did the king of the Congo do after he sent off all his dependents? He went south and raided in Angola, what's now Angola, to get more people. So I think what you see with the emergence of the slave trade is that this very fragmented political geography creates these extremely kind of perverse non-cooperative interactions between these polities in Africa. I think...

To go back before that, you could say there's very good contemporary work on this, for example, by Chris Udry and Marcus Goldstein in Ghana, showing that there's a kind of, southern Ghana, there's a kind of traditional agrarian order. For example, just as I described, the way you access land is through your matrilineal group or through your kinship group. Chris and Marcus show that that has very negative effects

for productivity. Fine. But it's part of an order which is there for a reason. It has a justification. It has a sort of legitimacy. Maybe it had economic consequences, but perhaps it wasn't organized to maximize productivity. So I think if you think through that lens, it's possible that we know historically in Africa there was less adoption of technologies like the wheel or writing, you know,

Sure, there was some trade, even quite long-distance trade, but all of that political fragmentation probably made it very difficult to have a commercial revolution in the same way Europe had. So I think there are economic costs of that. Okay?

But of course many societies were poor in 1750 and 1800. Japan didn't have a centralized state, the government collected taxes in kind, it was immensely fragmented politically. But Japan was autonomous and it was able to reorganize itself to take advantage of the modern world and new technology and African societies

didn't have that benefit. And one of the reasons was the disruption from the slave trade. Another reason, of course, was the disruption from colonialism. So I think, you know, and Professor Levy was mentioning some of my work on colonialism.

we could talk a lot about colonialism, the different mechanisms of colonialism. But I want to just emphasize one kind of big thing that I'm going to come back to, for me, which is the biggest kind of negative legacy of colonialism, is the construction of something like Nigeria or

Tanzania or Democratic Republic of Congo. The kind of merger of hundreds of different societies with different political institutions, different social contracts, stuck them all together in a country and

failed to create a kind of workable national social contract. So my favorite description of this is by the Nigerian sociologist Peter Eke. Peter talked about the two publics. There were two publics. There was the local public, the traditional society, where there was morality, there were rules, there was a legitimate order.

But that order was never projected onto the national state. My favorite, this is in Chinua Achebe's great book about the collapse of the first republic in Nigeria. He sort of says right on the last page of the book where he's describing the collapse of the state and the military coup that kind of leads ultimately to the Biafra war.

In the affairs of the nation, there was no owner. The laws of the village became powerless. That's exactly about this inability to protect this legal order, project this legal order of the village up until the nation state. So I'll come back to that. So how to think about this? How to think about this great divergence? Africa was organized in this particular way. Maybe it had economic costs,

It was what people were intending to do. I think that's the important message. But it had all sorts of unintended consequences. And here's some of the big stories about the unintended consequences. Ten minutes, great. Now I want to talk about the comparative question. Meaning, why did Africa get onto that path? How to think about that? To do that, I'm going to talk about Turkey, obviously. Why not?

The world's oldest freestanding building. Gobekli Tepe is on a site in southern Turkey near the Syrian border. You can see that Syria in the background, the Haram plain. Gobekli Tepe, you can see, has these enormous five-meter-high obelisks. They're carved with animals. What was this thing? Before farming, there's no evidence of domestication of animals or agriculture whatsoever.

What was it doing? Basically a temple, that's what archaeologists think. It was a religious sanctuary on top of a hill. People dragged these big monuments up there and they built temples. People brought together by religious ideas. What was the first city in the world? Uruk. What started Uruk?

A temple. Uruk started as a temple and humans served the temple. In fact, the Sumerian creation myths were even adapted to bring humans in with this role to serve the gods. And I always like the passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh. So Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, I won't go into the details, Gilgamesh is sort of out of control. People petition the gods, you know, look, we're being exploited, you know, can you do something about it? And the gods send a kind of doppelganger. They send Enkidu. So Enkidu is born into the wild. He's kind of covered in hair. He needs to be civilized. How do you civilize somebody? You bring them to the city, okay?

You bring them to the state. Come, I will lead you to Uruk, the city, to the sacred temple. You too, like a man, will find a place for yourself. You find a place for yourself in the state. That's what Aristotle thought. If you read Aristotle's politics, he gives a completely secular argument, of course, but where do humans flourish?

in the state. When several villages are united in a single community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficient, the state comes into existence for the sake of a good life. And I think what you see, and I have to do some work to prove this, I'm going to just do something cute instead,

is that the state becomes a given at this point. Here's the cute thing. Here's Napoleon crossing the St. Bernard Pass. At the bottom, he's got Carolus Magnus Charlemagne. So after the state, the idea of the state comes, everyone is the Romans, everyone is the state is a given. We take the state as given. What I see is that

You know, these are intellectual projects, okay? The state could be religious, could be secular, lots of other examples. You know, think of the mandate of heaven in China, Confucianism, legalism. Think of the origins of the Islamic State. You know, Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina. What was he doing in Medina? Resolving disputes, conflicts.

starting a religion, building a state, writing a constitution, a medina. That's an ideological approach to the state. I always contrast that with another Igbo expression, which I find incredibly telling, which is, imagine you get a job in the government in Abuja. You get a civil service position. What is that? In Igbo, it's called ulu oyibo, white man's job.

It's called a white man's job today. You get a job in the civil service, it's a white man's job. Now, of course, that has something to do with colonialism, but for me, I think it's also very symbolic of what an alien institution the state is in Nigeria. The central state is a very alien institution. Of course, in the amoral zone, it's an alien transplant in Nigerian society. So for me, there's a very different path of

intellectual, this idea of the state becoming the go-to institution, that somehow never gets traction in Africa. Like, that's the way I'm thinking about it. Now, of course, you're a hard-headed social scientist. You say, well, ideas don't come from nowhere. You know, where did that come from? Well,

I'm thinking about that, and this is where I get really pretentious and bring in French, with all due respect to French-speaking people in the audience. I've been in America too long. Okay. I don't have time to talk about this, but if I had time to talk about it, I'd talk about, okay, let's think about some of these aspects of African society I've been talking about and ask ourselves, how distinct are they really? How distinct are

how distinct is the way the economy was organized, how distinct are these ontological beliefs. I didn't talk about African traditional religion. I should talk about African traditional religion. How distinctive is African traditional religion? You know, all sorts of things we could talk about in this. And I think my kind of current understanding of the evidence is that probably anything you can see in Africa you can find in some other society, you know.

I don't want to say there's some magic silver bullet that explains, but what I do find kind of interesting is the ensemble that I did it. It's like somehow these things mutually reinforce each other in a way that makes it very difficult to start the kind of ideational project that created the Greek city-states or created Uruk or created the Res Publica in the Roman Republic.

So the way I'm trying to think about this is just, you know, it's somehow that these things together mutually reinforce each other in a way that makes that equilibrium very stable and very difficult to perturb

Sure, ideas come up, ideas about the state come up, and they're rejected. You know, if you read, you know, talking about the London School of Economics, you read Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya, which was his, this book, the famous book he wrote when he was a student at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, you know,

He has a fabulous discussion of the kind of constitutional history of the Kikuyu people where he sort of discusses this, yeah, there was a centralized state and we rejected that and we moved to this system based on plans and age, political representation of age sets and things like that. Okay, so it's that combination. Now, if you did in moments of weakness...

wanted to have a univariate theory, I'd just like to point out, you know, without making too much of it, that if you map the whole world and you ask in what languages are guest and stranger the same, it turns out that at least so far we can find nothing except Hawaiian where that's true. Okay, just a little bit of evidence. But I'm not going to push that too much. Okay, so what do you want to conclude from this?

I want to conclude Africa is not underdeveloped. Africa is differently developed. Africans made different choices than Europeans, historically, and they ended up with different types of societies which they wanted to do.

That had lots of unintended consequences, and that's the reason why Africa lost out in the Great Divergence. But here's the, if you buy that, I think it has lots of implications. First of all, Africans made different decisions from we did, so maybe we have something to learn from them.

They made different choices. They experienced different things. Maybe we have, there's lessons for us. And it also means that since many of these negative things that I've been talking about are kind of unintended consequence of what they did, maybe there's all sorts of potential in African society for reorganizing things and doing things differently and being successful in their own way.

And if I had time, I'd talk about that. I think that's the story in Botswana. If you want to know why has Botswana been so successful since 1966, it's because they leveraged their own traditions to build a state, and they solved this problem of the two publics. And here's the hotline, Bonkling, which is in the

a suburb of Haberone, which is, you know, that's where the accountability goes on. They did it in Somaliland. We were talking about Somaliland earlier this afternoon. This is a Burama conference in Somaliland. What did they do? Finally, they got some

breathing space to reorganize their society, they build a state from scratch. They innovated political institutions to build a state in Somaliland for which there was no previous precedent, based on the structure of their society.

Same thing in Rwanda. How does policy get implemented in Rwanda? This is the biggest policy implementation mechanism in Rwanda. It's called Imehigo. It's based on a kind of traditional pre-colonial mechanism of reciprocity and promise-making, and President Kagame kind of leveraged that. These are sort of prizes you get for, mayors get for kind of doing the best performance in Imehigo policies.

President Kagame in the middle there, again, kind of building sort of state capacity in a very surprising way, at least in Washington, D.C., but not so surprising if you're Rwandan. And the last thing I'm going to say before I shut up is I already alluded to, which is if

Africans really made different decisions and they went in different ways. Maybe we have something to learn from them. That's what I call a two-way street. It's not just a matter of me. A couple of years ago, I was at a World Bank conference on... I hate to beat up on the World Bank. It's a dirty business, but somebody's got to do it.

I was at a World Bank Africa knowledge fest. And I thought, great, this is going to be fabulous. It's going to be so much fun. And it was just World Bank functionaries pontificating about how the World Bank was saving Africa. So I threw my PowerPoint away and I said, look, I don't think I ever learned anything from any African. But let me tell you what I learned from studying Africa about the world and about my own society.

And let me just finish with two examples. That sounds ridiculously romantic and ludicrous. But I showed you guest equals stranger. Here's some data from a very recent paper in the American Economic Review by Ben Enke, economist at Harvard and his collaborators.

And Ben is very interested in kind of morality and the effect of kind of morality on human society, on politics and economics. And he did a global survey of universalism. So universalism, think of it like this. I give you like $1,000 and you have to decide how to split the $1,000 between someone kind of close to you, like a relative, and somebody further away, like a stranger, someone from a foreign country.

So the more you favor your kind of in-group, or your kin, or whatever your in-group, the less universalist you are. So in his data, where are the most universalist societies in the world? Which societies are people least likely to favor their in-group? Ethiopia? Egypt?

Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania. In fact, there's eight African countries in the top 10. So that sounds pretty surprising based on a bunch of cliches from Africa. But it's not so surprising once you've bought into my guest equals stranger.

So don't you think in this world, I don't know about you, but living in the United States, I think we have a lot to learn from this aspect of African culture. And one more thing, finally, an example. You may have noticed, but we have a crisis of democracy. You know...

And the democratic system, particularly in the United States, was designed by people who didn't actually like democracy. They didn't trust democracy. Why do we have this crazy thing called the... What is it called? That's it. He must be a political scientist. Why? Because they didn't want to have the president directly elected because they didn't trust democracy. They thought it was going to lead... Aristotle didn't like democracy either. It's a long tradition. But...

Had it struck someone that maybe that's why we have a problem? That actually we designed the system not to be terribly democratic because we didn't really trust democracy. So I'm going to finish with a photograph of-- I have a chieftaincy title in this village, so these are my friends. It's all men, unfortunately. I didn't talk about wealth in people. That means women too. But I realized I was never going to have-- so if you want to ask me questions about women, that would be awesome.

And this was a meeting where they were discussing a specific issue when I took the photograph. So it's only a bunch of men here. But this is the Aladimna of Umichese in eastern Nigeria. It's a village. How do people make decisions in eastern Nigeria? Of course, there's a lot of heterogeneity here.

There's two layers of councils. There's four kinship groups, kindreds, they each have a council, and this is the village council called the Amna Dhimna. Any adult can show up at that, even youths can show up. If you have something to say, you can show up. So it's super participatory. And the way decisions are made is by consensus.

Okay, so that's very hard for somebody to imagine who grew up in England, the idea that you can make decisions by consensus. Like we lost that political culture a long time ago. You know, but in the United States at the moment, we have a government, you know, which won an election by a thin, thin margin and is radically transforming the society. Okay.

So here, everyone gets heard. Everyone gets heard. Everyone gets to say. Everyone participates in the decision. How could you ever possibly have consensus, make a decision by consensus? You have to understand the political culture, which is really outside of the ontology of Western society to understand how that would even work. So I want to end by saying, for me, this kind of journey...

It's not really about, at the end of the day, just, okay, we'd like to understand these problems, we have these questions about the world, we'd like to have an intellectual framework to study them and understand it. It's also about learning from them and learning about our own societies, and I think that's exactly the way you get pushed when you think of different development. This is different development. Okay, so... APPLAUSE

We do have to leave time for questions, although I can see we could have clapped for more. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. So first, in terms of questions, if you are online, you can use the Q&A function at the left of your screen. Please also register your name and affiliation. We are very eager to hear from LSE alumni, of course.

students. And if you're here, just raise your hands, the microphone will come to you and please also say your name and affiliation. And I will abuse my hierarchical power here and start with the first question. I'll give you some more time to think about your own questions also. So I was struck by the fact that thinking about our standard economic models, it would be very difficult to

sort of join them with the particular political structure here because if typically we think about the individual and the state and there is a market in between and it seems that you know nothing would apply to these types of society right I mean maybe I have to

change the unit of analysis as perhaps they do in biology moving from individuals to genes and maybe back to groups. So maybe instead of individuals, what would be the economic unit of analysis? What type of rules do

Do I even think about markets? Does it make sense? You know, I think, yeah, I think... Maybe you didn't have time to discuss this, but politics and economics are intertwined, as you said. It was not clear to me what are the economic rules of the game. What are the economic rules? What are the economic... What could I describe as...

creating the economic interactions. It's not clear that it's markets because there are other rules. Well, there's non-market allocation mechanisms. So if you want to get access, for example, in that village I showed you the picture of, so the land is collectively owned by these four

kinship groups basically so if you're a member of that kinship group you have a right to land you know owned by that kinship you want to farm land you have a right to land you go petition the elder you know in that and you you have access to land you get you'll get you'll get land you know

You want to farm the land. You want to cut the trees down. You need labour. How do you get labour? You get people to come. In that village also they have what's called age sets. So people across the village are initiated into these age sets. So the age sets are very kind of cohesive. So you could mobilise your age set to work on your farm. Or you could mobilise people within your relatives or people within your kinship to work on the farm. So there's kind of non-market...

if you like. I think you can think about it in terms of social preferences. I always think a lot of economics is we started with this incredibly pristine model of competitive markets and materialistic preferences and we've been backing away from it and

backing away from it when we realise like, okay, that doesn't actually fit the way people behave, you know. So I think if you thought about social preferences, like the work that Ernst Fehr has done, like, you know, you could think of people have social preferences here, you know, they kind of put a lot of weight on other people and the community, you know, some things are kind of intrinsically valued. So I mean, I haven't gone there. But I think, you know, I think the tools you could use the tools

of economic analysis to sort of think about that. Chris is the person who sort of thought most about this. He has a very nice paper with Rohini Pandey actually where they try to kind of think about these agrarian institutions. They have all these negative effects for productivity but actually in their model they provide this insurance benefit. I'm not sure, that's not how I would think about it, but

But, you know, so I think there are tools that you could think about it. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Thank you. Yeah, question. Hello. Hi, good day, Professor Robinson. My name is Pratyamna. I'm studying master's in applied development economics from the Department of International Development.

My question to you is according to the endogenous growth theory in economics, collectivization of people leads to a better life because of the density of people that live and the idea generation that comes out of it. Therefore, the technological progress that comes out of it. So do you think there is a lesser technological adoption in certain African communities because of said lack of collectivization and because of the institutions that are absent in the space?

I'm not terribly committed to that way of thinking about innovation, but I wouldn't think about this like... I mean, I'm not describing this as an absence of institutions. You could think about this in the following way. I mean, if you have half an hour while you're brushing your teeth or making your dinner, you could watch my Nobel lecture. LAUGHTER

It's only half an hour. Well, I have a kind of way of thinking about this, which is to say, relating a lot of this discussion to kind of like my work with Daron in Why Nations Fail on inclusive and extractive institutions. So you can sort of say, what you see in this village in Nigeria is kind of like extractive institutions.

But it turns out there's very different motivations behind extractive institutions. They're extractive institutions in the sense that they don't necessarily create, you know,

the same sorts of incentives and opportunities that we describe with these inclusive institutions, but they're not there to maximise somebody's rent or they're not there for some kind of material reason. They're there, there's a rationale for them and there's a real justification for them. There's what I call a normative order in that lecture. And it's on my webpage if you're interested in the Nobel. If you've got more time on your hands,

You can read the whole paper. So I would see it through that lens. And this is just a realization I've come to, basically, through working in Africa and in Latin America, that many of these institutions that look very inefficient from an economist's point of view actually have a fantastic rationale. Like, people explain this... There's a legitimacy. I'm trying to find this sort of...

kind of more general language for talking about that. And people understand the trade-offs. I'm trying to emphasize here the sort of agency and people designing these things. And of course there's also evolution. So I don't want to overdo that. But I don't want to think the problem here is kind of

The purpose of equality, I question from up there, so the lady here.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.

Why don't you try and state your question and I'll repeat it. For gender equality. Yeah, so... So the role of women and what can we learn from gender equality? The invited question, but it was on our minds the whole time. Great, great, yeah, so great question. So I think wealth in people, you know, meaning men and women. And I think, you know, here there's an awful lot of heterogeneity, you know. But I, you know, I think it's not...

Women resisted centralization too. The women resisted centralization. So the greatest example I know of that is also from eastern Nigeria. Although my eastern Nigerian friends always tell me it's very dangerous to generalize on the basis of eastern Nigeria, but I'm going to do it anyway. So eastern Nigeria is very decentralized politically.

But a very large centralized state emerged in Benin in the kind of late medieval period. And so that state spread east. A male version of political centralization spread. What did the women do? The women organized against it. So all over eastern Nigeria, you have what they call a dual-sex political system, where you have parallel institutions for men and parallel institutions for men.

parallel institutions run by women. You have a king, you have a queen. The queen has nothing to do with the king, selected in a completely different way. She has a council, she solves disputes amongst women. So this dual sex political system was exactly the men sort of centralised and the women innovated this institution to counterbalance the power of the men.

So I think all over coastal West Africa you see very similar, different institutionalizations, like queen mothers, for example, in southern Ghana. In Sierra Leone, again, it would be different. So I think women also... Of course, there's a lot of variation. You still have the force of patriarchy asserting itself everywhere in the world, in different parts of Africa. But I think you also see mechanism whereby...

Women also have this autonomy. Every market in West Africa is run by women. Talking about separate spheres, women farm some crops, men farm other crops. So I think that it's in there. Yes, but thank you for asking that. Thank you very much.

- First of all, thank you very much for your brilliant talk, Professor Robinson. I'm Aldo Cisneros. I'm a student in development management here at the LSE. My question is the following. At the end of your talk, you shared that Africa could like deepen their root for development by following their own path and unique characteristics and institutions rooted in their own cultures.

But what will be the alternative, for example, for certain countries in Latin America? I'm thinking especially in the Andean countries, in which indigenous people are the majority of the population, but the control over the institution still relies on Criollo elites. That means Latin Americans that are European descendants, European-minded, and westernizing their educations and goals. How can we create socially rooted and legitimate institutions in that kind of made-up states?

What we're going to do is I'm going to gather two more questions and one from online, and then you can choose and mix and match.

So until the microphone gets to you, I will ask a question from an online participant. Your example from Africa on how societies are organized resembles Switzerland. Decisions there are made with consensus and there is very little interference of the federal state. I mean, the question says, do the Swiss somehow have African genes? But I think we can...

perhaps give some thoughts to... Yeah, go ahead please. My question on the other hand was more EU-centered. I hope that's okay. So I'm Laura and I work for the Center for Global Development. So the EU current development focuses on win-win economic partnership, yet beneath the surface geopolitical and there is the extractive

interests are hidden in the details. Meanwhile, as you mentioned, many sub-Saharan economies have historically been built around collective interest and operate in just different economical spheres, which, as you say, left Africa highly vulnerable to European colonialism. Then my question is, would you say sub-Saharan countries today have the leverage to negotiate through win-win economic partnership? Or are these deals just shaped overwhelmingly by EU economic narratives?

leaving Africa without a real seat at the table. And if you think change is possible, what should be the EU top priority for making this partnership generally equitable? Thanks. Okay, one more question for this round. Thank you so much for coming to the LSE and congratulations on the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm over here. Sorry, sorry.

Just pick up. Okay, thank you for coming to the LSE and congratulations on the Nobel Peace Prize. My name is Mona. I'm an MSc student in development management with the Department of International Development. My question is from your research on inclusive and extractive institutions, have you seen a difference between cultural extraction and resource extraction during colonial rule? And how do you think cultural extraction or cultural theft impacts the development of institutions?

So if I just may repeat, because I wasn't sure people heard, is there a difference between cultural extraction and economic extraction? And what is the effect of cultural extraction? What is the effect on the development of institutions? Okay, so you can pick and mix. Yeah, okay. No, no, I mean, yeah, Latin America, I mean, I, you know, that's, you know, I think it's very hard to sort of think of analogies to Latin America in the sense that, you know,

Latin America was colonized for 300 years, you know, I mean...

many of these places like Botswana was only colonized for 60 years or something. And, you know, and it wasn't colonized as intensively or effectively, you know, as many Latin American countries were. So I think if I were going to think about Latin America, you know, I'd actually think about it in very different ways, to be honest with you. You know, so meaning, you know, like there are, you know, there is, you know, there are very distinct kind of aspects

of Latin American culture and society. You know, I always... One of the most fascinating articles about Latin America is José Martí's Nuestra América. You must know that article. Where he sort of says, Latin America can't develop by borrowing from the gringos, or the Germans or the French. We're not going to do it like that. We have to do our own thing in our own way. But he never clarified...

And that project is still waiting to be delivered on, I think. So if you want to talk about that, I have ideas and I'd be really happy to talk about it. But I think finding a starting point is... I don't have a good...

I don't have a good explanation. Switzerland, absolutely. I mean, that's a fabulous model, you know, of, you know, but the Swiss had hundreds of years to sort of consolidate that cantonal authority to kind of, yeah, they had to fight for their freedom from the Habsburgs or whatever, and then gradually build those central institutions, you know, representing the canton's

They never really had a proper state after the 1848 revolutions. So the Swiss carved themselves out some space where they could do that. I think it's a brilliant analogy, whoever said that. So I think absolutely, yeah, that's... And Switzerland is a bit like...

It's a bit like Africa, actually. Honestly. I mean, you know, like, you know, one of my friends, Francis Njoko, who's a professor of philosophy at the University of Nigeria, he says, like, the Igbo man is like a tethered goat, you know. When you're born, your umbilical cord is buried under a particular tree in the village, and you have to be buried, you know, in the village where your umbilical cord is. But my impression is Swiss people are like that, too, you know. Like...

You can't, you know, that's it. You're tied to your kind of village in this very kind of visceral way, you know. And I think that's fine, you know. I would mention that voting rights for women were very late in Switzerland. That analogy doesn't work on the... At the federal level. Yes, at the federal level. And Switzerland is amazingly participatory democratically.

also at the local level. So, yes, I agree. Great, great, great analogy. I, you know, this business of Africa is exploited in all these international institutions. Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, a lot of these military coups in the Sahel, you know, in West Africa are kind of motivated by this

kind of you know exasperation that meddling by the french or the you know whatever it's trying to kind of establish some sovereignty and it's very hard to to influence you know it's very hard to influence these institutions when you're so weak you know when you're so poor when you're so reliant on foreign aid when you're so dependent on you know but my view of this you know we could you know reasonable people can disagree on this my view about this is you know if countries get that act together

No one's going to stop them. You know, you might try to mess up with them. You know, Botswana is my favorite example. You know, when Botswana transformed its institutions, you know, not just in the 1960s, you could go back, you know, into the late 19th century, you know, but when it built post-colonial state institutions like the hotline in Haberone in Montleng that I showed you, you know, nobody stopped them. You know, when they renegotiated the diamond contract with De Beers to make sure that

way more of the diamond wealth came to Botswana. Nobody stopped them. So I think, for me, if you could solve those kind of political problems in Africa, solve this problem of the two publics, like create really sort of legitimate, functional national states, not a trivial political problem,

then you'd be able to start exerting much more influence over this process of negotiation. And of course African countries are exploited, but I still think that the big problem is these political problems that I'm sort of describing. And then you'd be able to influence that process. And I'm not sure I understand what cultural extraction is, actually.

So, cultural extraction that would include looting and the cultural theft of a colonized nation. So, how does the cultural theft and looting impact the development of institutions? I'm still not sure I understand the question. Do you understand the question? I don't, no. Do you mean the objects at the British Museum? Yes. How does, for example, the fact that these objects ended up at the British Museum...

It's more like looting. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's a very sad history of exploitation and not just there, at least their preserve, most of them were destroyed, burnt. So I think that's all part of the kind of looting and destruction of Africa that took part in the colonial period.

And I think that's a sort of tragedy. It's a cultural tragedy because Africans lost so much of their history. And so many of these things are very powerful and important. Also, it's not just like a work of art. It has immense cultural and social relevance and roles. So I think that's a...

I think that's a horrible tragedy. Does that hold Africa back? I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. So, I don't think so. One last question here with the glasses. Thank you very much for this conference. My name is Joaman Al Serra. I'm a master's student of international political economy here at LSE.

And my question is, I wrote it down because my English isn't really good, but is in light of your remarks on the decentralized political structures in pre-colonial Africa, how do you see this historical reality interacting with Harari's thesis that early statehood tends to entrench autocratic legacy? I don't know. Early statehood had what legacy? So Harari says that...

post-colonial states that had previously centralized and statehood societies were more resistant to the democratic institutions once the Europeans tried to implement those institutions in those countries.

in those stages? I don't know. I'd have to look at the data. I don't know the study that you're talking about. Whether there's a mapping. There's claims, there's work by Stelios Mikhailopoulos and Elias Papianou about the relationship between pre-colonial

kind of centralization and development outcomes today in Africa. They show that places which were more centralized politically are more developed today. But that doesn't surprise me. I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all in the sense that that just says something about

the persistence of these political structures through colonialism and the fact that they're able to provide public goods and they're able to function, which makes sense. I don't think it's terribly surprising, but it kind of makes sense. What's the consequences of that for democracy?

I don't know, I'm not making a claim about that. I think the bigger problem for democracy, maybe there's some sort of heterogeneity there, but the bigger problem for democracy, I just think, is this, how do you build legitimate political institutions in this very complicated place where there's no social contract and there's many different

There's no national social contract, but there's many, many different, very different local social contracts. You have to somehow aggregate that, and that's terribly hard. The Swiss took hundreds of years to sort of figure out how to solve that problem. Africans never got the time to do that. It took them 10 years in Somaliland or whatever. But it took... So that... Is there...

I don't know. I'd have to think about that. I haven't looked at that data, and I don't know the data, but if you tell me, I'll look at it. Thank you, Raj. I'm afraid that's all what we have time for. I would like to thank you again for participating, and most of all to Professor Robinson for an amazing talk. Thank you.

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