This is not a case of one state simply expanding itself into new territory and subjugating new captives to a hierarchy of its own creation. It is in fact the formation of a new state that often flows out of a strategy of resistance of the stateless society. We can call it the reluctant client state. When a stateless society comes into contact with a state that is interested in establishing an exploitative relationship, it is not uncommon for members of the stateless society to enter into a limited relationship, hoping to acquire some material gains (rare trade goods or better weapons, for example) while keeping the foreign state at arm’s length. Rather than inviting foreign state agents to participate in the horizontal social life, they accept the appointment of an intermediary who would seek to arrange favorable deals while limiting contact. But as the foreign state’s presence increases, and their ability to leverage demands or different forms of blackmail grows, the intermediary increasingly has to work on behalf of the state’s interests, and they exercise a growing amount of power in their own society. They become the cathode that galvanizes a new state, employing helpers to organize the intensifying exploitation demanded by the foreign state, and eventually organizing a coercive apparatus under their own control so they do not have to rely on the often-obtuse military force of the foreign state.
In the US colonization of the Great Plains, trade posts played a vital role. Often accepted by autonomous nations as a way to minimize the influence of the encroaching state while availing themselves of the benefits of trade, the trade posts became the nuclei around which a “reservation” (concentration camp) would be constituted. Trader envoys (often of mixed descent) and native police forces played a key role in this process, which invariably led to the appointment—by the bureaucracies in Washington—of a tribal government.
With a little bit of pressure, the logic of the state infiltrates the stateless society, whether that society is a social movement or an entire country. What appeared to be the easier path of state avoidance becomes the path of state formation.
A similar process characterizes at least a part of the state formation that was triggered by the European slave trade in West Africa. For the period of the Triangular Trade, European states had neither the military resources nor the political will to engage in a wholesale occupation of the African continent. Most of the states that formed in sub-Saharan Africa before the Berlin Conference of 1884 were not the direct creation of European colonizers. Rather, European traders, with or without the direct involvement of their states, carried out punitive raids against West African communities and then entire nations that would not help them capture people to be exported as slaves. They also engaged in military action to keep coastal communities from centralizing or becoming too strong, ensuring that they could impose favorable trade terms. African intermediaries tried to get the best bargain for guns and other tools, while trying to minimize the impact on their local society. The cost of the deal was passed off onto neighboring societies, from whom slaves were taken with the aid of European weaponry.
The competition between different nations to avoid the worst of a raw economic deal imposed by foreign states led to an explosion of state formation in West and Central Africa. Intermediaries often became the poles around which new states formed. Because such intermediaries came from privileged strata in preexisting non-coercive hierarchies, they were able to adapt such hierarchies to the new coercive, statist logic. Old power relations were eroded, but old forms were preserved in appearance.
Many stateless societies in Africa had weak hierarchies uniting entire nations at the time European merchants started arriving. Those whom the Portuguese, and later Dutch, French, and English, classified as kings were often religious or military figures who played a ritual or defensive role for the whole nation, but who had no power over simple village chiefs and councils, and no authority in the daily life of people outside the “royal” court. Such leaders might have prerogatives in trade and negotiation with neighboring societies, and so they became intermediaries and organizers in the growing trade of ivory, gold, and slaves.
In the case of the Ashanti state, power derived from trade with the Europeans allowed the royal court to establish a bureaucracy and rule the villages in a hierarchical chain of command, with appointed officials whose authority came to supersede that of the chiefs. Ashanti acquisition of firearms through trade with the Dutch, and the royal organization of a disciplined, professional army, allowed the Ashanti to conquer neighboring societies and expand their territory dramatically. Offensive warfare, in turn, allowed them to kidnap more people and sell them into slavery.
In the Dahomey kingdom, access to firearms also allowed a royal army controlled by a supreme leader to achieve a major territorial expansion. The king’s prerogative of control over trade allowed him to sharply increase his power over the rest of society. Traditional forms of warfare were transformed as war captives were now sold into slavery, exchanged for guns. It was the king and his retainers who monopolized the new firearms and allowed them to subordinate the councils and other power-sharing mechanisms that were typical in West African societies prior to the effects of the Atlantic slave trade. The Dahomey also excelled in another important tactic of state-building: the suppression of local customs and social structures in conquered territories.20
The Oyo empire was one of the most important West African states of the period. Before the slave trade had begun to wreak its worst effects, the Oyo were already a hierarchical society with a supreme leader aided by sub-chiefs, though whether they could be defined as a state is debatable; for example, the sub-chiefs could exercise a considerable amount of power over the paramount ruler. Around 1535, the Nupe invaded, sacking the capital and forcing the royal family to flee into exile. The Nupe were a stateless people organized in a confederation of decentralized villages, but recently united by a single military leader, Tsoede, who had been living with the royal family of a neighboring society, and who returned bearing symbols of leadership. The Nupe enjoyed a military advantage owing to their decentralized structure and their use of cavalry. The Oyo royals spent eighty years in exile, presumably dreaming and scheming of returning to power. When they finally recovered their prior territory and constructed a new capital, they organized a more centralized government and adopted the military use of cavalry. This act of state formation came just in time for the Oyo state to benefit from the slave trade, which it did immensely, enjoying near continuous success as an expansive, militarist state. This was also a survival strategy. West African societies that did not turn to aggressive slave-raiding were depopulated to the point of extinction by the voracious European slavers and their proxies.
Intensive, bloody trade and constant warfare in West Africa were the ingredients that fueled state formation on the continent, the plantation economy in the Americas, and industrialization in Europe. Capitalism had gone global.
But not all hierarchical West African societies seized on the slave trade as a motor for state-formation. The Benin kingdom or megacommunity, which some anthropologists argue did not constitute a state (see Chapter VII), tried to discourage slaving. They limited trade with the Europeans to pepper, ivory, and textiles. “Eventually European pressure and the goals of the Benin nobility combined to generate a significant slave trade in the eighteenth century, but Benin never made the slave trade its primary source of revenue or state policy.”21
The influence of the slave trade was not uniform across Africa. In the Congo basin, far from the European slave forts, local populations were not as pressured by nascent capitalism’s growing appetite for labor as were the societies farther west, and the slave trade was not so intense as to present a threat of liquidation. In fact the locals did not enter into direct contact with European or Arab-Swahili slave traders and explorers until the nineteenth century. States in the basin did not face an urgent need to grow in military power vis-à-vis their neighbors, nor was there a pronounced influx in weaponry. State elites in the Congo basin could comfortably finance themselves by selling war captives to European or Arab-Swahili traders, therefore decreasing their need to exploit their subject population.22 In fact, the more involved a Congo basin state was in the slave trade, the less developed its internal hierarchies and systems of exploitation.
Understanding local complicity with the international slave trade also requires us to distinguish between different paradigms of slavery. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white proponents of the slave trade justified their systematic profiting off of genocide