Ties That Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa J. C. Sharman

J. C. Sharman is a prolific scholar who publishes a book every eighteen months. His latest is Ties That Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa, an application of lessons learned from his book Empires of the Weak. Both emphasize the inability of Western European empires to dominate the people they encountered in the early modern era. For an economic historian, this is reminiscent of exactly the argument made by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, the 2024 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, who argue that settler mortality rates around the world can predict where the empires were weakest. Unfortunately, their works will not be found in the bibliography at the end of Ties That Bound, nor will any of the modern economic history of Africa, including works by this reviewer. That may be a curse and a blessing: another example of historians and economic historians not talking to each other but creating the possibility of independent confirmations, like two tests of the same hypothesis. In this case, the possibility is a live one. Both disciplines hypothesize that the fundamental determinant of precolonial African development is land abundance, or low population density, an environmental feature that incentivized both the gravitational pull of slavery (a tie that bounds) and the centrifugal push of political decentralization (weak power to bind). Economic historians approach the problem by controlling for the political power to bind and then looking to see if land abundance increases slavery. Sharman integrate the two, arguing that slavery is the path to political power. One static, the other dynamic. The dynamic model is the better one but harder to test.