This chapter shifts its focus away from Nigeria at large and narrows the discussion down to a more specific area: the coastal regions of Southern Nigeria, with the city of Lagos as the chapter’s focal point. It examines the city’s origin, beginning as a small, relatively insignificant coastal town peripheral to the old and well-established Benin Empire. From humble origins, this chapter will explore the region’s rise to prominence, prompted primarily by the expansion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For Lagos specifically, its ascension began at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lagos became a regional center of the slave trade due to the ostracization of the Kingdom of Dahomey, a major exporter of slaves, by European powers. After the center of the slave trade shifted to Lagos, the city and region at large experienced a flurry of economic activity, the details and consequences of which will be explored in detail. The latter half of this chapter will explain the gradual transformation in the trade systems away from the slave trade toward a system of “legitimate” trade, which would facilitate the erosion of indigenous state power and eventual colonial acquisition of Lagos and the Niger Delta area at large.

This chapter explores how multiple corporate structures in multinational enterprises operating in developing countries, and in Africa in particular, make determinations of responsibility among the members of such corporate families difficult. Specifically, this chapter challenges the assumption that the end of colonial rule and the founding of African states threw off the economic subordination that characterized colonial-era corporate activity in Africa. The end of colonial rule was accompanied by a desire on the part of multinational corporations to re-legitimize their activities in service of the newly independent governments through Africanization, which involved hiring African directors and officers as well as establishing domestic subsidiaries with African directors and officers. These strategies, together with the indigenization policies of post-colonial governments, in part account for the emergence and proliferation of multiple corporate structures in post-colonial African countries. Those complex structures, in turn, facilitate opportunistic behavior by transnational elites and complicate attribution of responsibility in the context of taxes and other financial liabilities.

This edited volume explores the nature of authoritarian policing, its transformation and resilience, and its rule of law implications. The discussion of the evolution of policing takes place in the context of the overall development of the police, their professionalization, institutional autonomy and neutrality, legality, and their credibility within the communities they manage and serve. What makes policing “democratic” is a contested concept and the definition varies depending on the level of abstraction and the particular focus of the inquiry. While regime type, which is itself a contested concept, the close nexus between the coercive power of the police and the state, it is never dispositive. Thus, the dichotomous categorization of authoritarian policing (AP) and democratic policing (DP), while useful as a starting point for comparative analysis, misses a large amount of nuance and often overlooks the plurality of either system, neglecting the fact that a police system can be authoritarian or democratic in multiple ways and in different aspects of policing. This volume rejects this simple binary view. It aims to untie and unpack the nexus between the police and the political system and to explore the plurality of both AP and DP.

Part I, “Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule,” comprises one chapter. It stipulates the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings for the organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy to challenge the view that British colonial bureaucracy did not have a set of distinct institutional forms and theories of administration. It proposes that “looking over the shoulder of the bureaucrat” from the perspective of colonial officials provides a set of organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy that were not in and of themselves, but rather served as sources of power. It generates a synthetic model of this type of bureaucracy to provide scaffolding for the analysis of how explicitly racialized practices and a perpetual state of emergency affect bureaucratic organization and practice.

This chapter develops and tests hypotheses about possible influences that lie outside national borders. There are many good reasons to expect that domestic factors are not the sole determinants. We lay out a theoretical framework that systematically catalogues most of the possible international hypotheses: exogenous shocks and endogenous networks such as those linking neighbors, allies, and colonizers and colonies. We then test selected hypotheses about exogenous shocks and contagion – the spread of democracy outcomes from country to country through various international networks. Surprisingly, contagion at first appears to be real but so small that it could be ignored when studying domestic influences. However, for some kinds of contagion our analysis implies that the long-run effects grow quite large and must be taken into account if we want to understand how democracies develop and decline. This paradox leads us to conclude that international influences are a hidden dimension of democratization.

Chapter 1 focuses on the state as a distinct form of political organization, and analyzes the formation and capacity of states in Latin America. It initially considers the states created by indigenous peoples in pre-Columbian times and the states subsequently imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial rulers. It next shows how modern states were formed in Latin America after independence from Spain and Portugal. It argues that Latin America pursued a trade-led model of state formation and that the resulting states were weak, patrimonial states – that is, states that were treated by rulers, partially at least, as their private property and did not enforce the rule of law. Moreover, it holds that state weakness has been a persistent problem in Latin America, as a discussion of Mexico and Uruguay shows, and that contemporary states are unable to impose their rule in a uniform manner throughout the territory they claim to control. It maintains that Latin America has modern states, but also that these states are weak.

Over the centuries, states formed and dissolved. Most of them were local but occasionally the region spawned, or became incorporated into, larger ones. In the seventeenth century, the delta became one of the Mughals’ conquered dependencies, a source of large amounts of tax and loot. Thus, well before the British rose to power in Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, the inhabitants had been accustomed to a mulcting administration dominated by foreign officials. The imprint of the Mughal period on Bangladeshi culture is still noticeable.