TY - JOUR AU - Acemoglu, Daron AU - Chaves, Isaías N AU - Osafo-Kwaako, Philip AU - Robinson, James A TI - Indirect Rule and State Weakness in Africa: Sierra Leone in Comparative Perspective JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20092 PY - 2014 Y2 - May 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20092 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20092 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20092.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Daron Acemoglu Department of Economics, E52-446 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 Tel: 617/253-1927 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: daron@mit.edu Isaias N. Chaves 2211 Campus Drive Kellogg Global Hub Evanston, IL 60208 E-Mail: isaias.chaves@kellogg.northwestern.edu Philip Osafo-Kwaako Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government 79 John F. Kennedy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 E-Mail: philip.osafo@gmail.com James A. Robinson University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science 1307 East 60th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 Tel: 617/496-2839 Fax: 617/495-0438 E-Mail: jamesrobinson@uchicago.edu M1 - published as Daron Acemoglu, Isaías N. Chaves, Philip Osafo-Kwaako, James A. Robinson. "Indirect Rule and State Weakness in Africa: Sierra Leone in Comparative Perspective," in Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil, editors, "African Successes, Volume IV: Sustainable Growth" University of Chicago Press (2016) M3 - presented at "African Development Successes Conference", July 18-20, 2010 AB - A fundamental problem for economic development is that most poor countries have 'weak state' which are incapable or unwilling to provide basic public goods such as law enforcement, order, education and infrastructure. In Africa this is often attributed to the persistence of 'indirect rule' from the colonial period. In this paper we discuss the ways in which a state constructed on the basis of indirect rule is weak and the mechanisms via which this has persisted since independence in Sierra Leone. We also present a hypothesis as to why the extent to which indirect rule has persisted varies greatly within Africa, linking it to the presence or the absence of large centralized pre-colonial polities within modern countries. Countries which had such a polity, such as Ghana and Uganda, tended to abolish indirect rule since it excessively empowered traditional rulers at the expense of post-colonial elites. Our argument provides a new mechanism which can explain the positive correlation between pre-colonial political centralization and modern public goods and development outcomes. ER -