Sovereignty Without Power by Professor Leigh Gardner seeks to answer the question “Why has Liberia's 177 years of independence not brought economic development?” In a thorough, well-researched, and groundbreaking book, Gardner provides the answer in a new economic history of Liberia.One of the greatest strengths of this work is the data set that has been created by Gardner so that other scholars can continue to do work to understand Liberia's economic past. Gardner writes, “Reconstructing the story of Liberia's economic history . . . requires piecing together a tale from the scraps of information that have survived over the centuries” (3). One of the reasons these “scraps of information” have had to be pieced together is because economic data on Liberia has been lost, was destroyed during the war or was never created (4–5). Gardner does not let this deter her. She creates her own, using available primary economic and noneconomic sources on Liberia, such as available information on government revenues and national demographic information from Liberia's Center for National Documents and Records Agency archives, comparative data from Mexico, Ghana, and Japan because of their similar rates of economic development and growth at certain points in their histories, and secondary sources and literature on Liberia (2, 12, 28). Taken together, this data set tells a radically different story of Liberian economic history, one in which the leaders of Liberia tried to use their political independence as leverage in a global economic arena that was rigged against them.The main argument of Gardner's book is that although Liberia's particular history is unique, as one of the only sovereign African states during the colonial era, its dilemma of how to best exercise sovereignty in a changing global economy was shared by a number of states who like Liberia, were sovereign but lacked the economic power to truly control its political destiny. Given this shared dilemma, countries like Liberia had to develop an “art of survival” to maintain their sovereignty as they navigated challenges posed by “internal illegitimacy” and external hostility (88–89). The strategy that Liberia's leaders adopted in response to these challenges was to concede aspects of their economic independence in the hopes that they would preserve their political autonomy. On this point Gardner writes: “Liberia's history of public debt in comparison to that of its neighbors was that strategic concessions of sovereignty, intended to prevent full takeover, were actually worse for borrowing than the full takeover would have been. In the end, however, the Liberian government deemed that too high a price” (161).Gardner's main argument is compelling to a certain extent, in that she places Liberia's problems and challenges in a more global context, which has been missing in Liberian scholarship for years. For too many scholars, such as J. Gus Liebenow, Stephen Ellis, and Amos Sawyer, Liberia's problems are unique to Liberia; Liberia's leaders are seen as backwards, repressive, and responsible for all of Liberia's problems; Liberia is rarely contextualized in time or space.1At first glance, Gardner's work seems to be a welcome change, a move beyond the ethnocentric theses constructed by those aforementioned scholars that continue to plague the historiography of Liberia. At times this work is a major break from that consensus because she analyzes the leaders of Liberia based upon what they set out to do and the world they faced, which posed limits on their vision and often curtailed their ability to act. She even offers much needed insight into the repatriate–Indigenous relations and how the Liberian state acquired some of its territory when she writes, “The classification of public land retained considerable ambiguity through much of Liberian history and did not represent the whole seizure of land from the indigenous people” (230). A significant part of what Gardner shows is that Liberia's history is not simply one of tensions between the repatriates and the Indigenous people, it is instead a history of struggle between the leaders of Liberia and representatives of some of the most powerful entities in their world including traders and officials from Britain and France who tried to syphon land from Liberia and businessmen and politicians from the United States who attempted to control large facets of the Liberian economy (163–70). This portion of the argument and the evidence provided represents the strongest and most significant contributions of this work.A closer reading of her argument, however, reveals one significant limitation is that the author is at times contradictory in her analysis of Liberia because she relies on sources that have helped to construct the ethnocentric narrative of Liberia. For example, most of the book is about how Liberia's leaders utilized the “art of survival,” but this is a concept based entirely upon a quote from J. Gus Liebenow, who thought that the Liberian government “lacked internal legitimacy” (88). For such a major theme in her work, she does not fully interrogate its validity and at times even undermines this idea, as shown above. Elsewhere, such as in the chapter “Before the Dragons Came,” Gardner's references suggest that the repatriates are “dragons” who disrupted the way of life in traditional Liberia (33, 56–57). Moreover, she repeatedly cites Stephen Ellis's Mask of Anarchy, which is one of the most epistemologically violent works because of his anarchic characterizations of Liberia (33). At the same time Gardner relies on Liberian historian C. Patrick Burrowes to show that repatriates and Indigenous people were more aligned than it was once thought (34). Gardner's book would have been strengthened had she waded more deeply into the historiographical debates in Liberian studies because she cited authors fairly opposed in their views on Liberia. Her work at times suggests that she is in lockstep with the new interpretation of Liberia, while some of her sources pull her back into the past problematic literature on Liberia.Another limitation is that although Gardner does an excellent job describing the challenges to Liberia's sovereignty, she offers little discussion on what we are to call or make of this overarching system. She rightly notes that Liberia lacked power, but little attention is paid to the international structure that limited Liberia's power; neither the Atlantic slave trade nor the Western political and economic infrastructure get proper explicit due. They are individually referenced, but not accounted for as a part of a broader system. Moreover, she argues against some of the literature that best accounts for these structures, including How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, writing that it is not nuanced enough (110). With the absence of serious engagement with this literature, we are left to think that Liberia's leaders had every opportunity to take advantage of their place in an international economy, but for some mysterious reason did not. Yet Gardner's work shows there is no mystery here, even as she refuses to explicitly say it. Liberia's leaders were the “losers” in a global game—they were consistently cash-strapped and heavily dependent on capital controlled outside of the country (112–14).Despite these issues with the text, this work remains a good economic study of Liberia. It expands our knowledge on the challenges that Liberia's leaders faced and the choices they exercised to confront those challenges. It makes clear that Liberia's leaders tried to do their absolute best to use their sovereignty to navigate a global economic system that was ultimately against them.
Elijah R. Zehyoue (Wed,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: