The subsequent development of state-society relations in the nineteenth-century United States played out in the same messy, unpredictable way that is the hallmark of the Red Queen, as we saw in the Athenian case. As the centralized state became more powerful and more involved in people’s lives, society tried to reassert its control. As society became more mobilized, the elites and state institutions reacted and attempted to wrest back control. Though we see this dynamic in many aspects of U.S. politics, the biggest fault line was the tension between the Northern and Southern states over slavery, which forced many distasteful compromises in the Constitution. This tension erupted into one of the deadliest conflicts of the nineteenth century after seven Southern states (out of the thirty-four states at the time) declared their secession, forming the Confederate States of America, after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. The secession was not recognized by the government, and the Civil War erupted on April 12, 1861, between the Union and the Confederacy. In the four years it lasted, the war destroyed much of the transport system, infrastructure, and economy of the South, and cost as many as 750,000 lives. The end of the war led to a powerful swing in the balance of power against the elites, especially Southern elites, as the slaves were freed (with the Thirteenth Amendment), their civil rights were recognized (with the Fourteenth Amendment), and their voting rights were recognized (with the Fifteenth Amendment). But this wasn’t the end of the series of reactions. The Reconstruction Era, lasting until 1877, empowered the freed slaves and incorporated them into the economic and political system (and they participated with gusto, voting in great numbers and getting elected into legislatures). Yet the Redemption period that followed after Northern troops left the South disenfranchised them again, locked them into low-wage agriculture, and made them subject to a gamut of formal and informal repressive practices, including murders and lynchings at the hands of local law enforcement officers and the Ku Klux Klan. The pendulum did not swing back against the elites and in favor of the most disadvantaged segment of Southern society until after the civil rights movement got going in the mid-1950s. (And of course we are nowhere near the end of history as far as the evolution of American liberty is concerned.)
Though the standard narrative paints a picture in which the U.S. Constitution protects our rights, there was nothing pretty about the way those rights came to be protected for most Americans—and we owe these rights as much to society’s mobilization as to the document drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. That’s just in the nature of the Red Queen.
Chiefs? What Chiefs?
So the Red Queen effect isn’t pretty, and as we’ll see later in the book, all that running is rife with danger. But when it works, it creates conditions for the type of liberty that Athenians and Americans have enjoyed. But then, why do many societies remain with the Absent Leviathan? Why not attempt to create centralized authority and shackle it? Why not unleash the Red Queen effect?
Social scientists have typically linked the failure of centralized authority to emerge to the absence of some key conditions that made it worthwhile to have a state, such as high population density, established agriculture, or trade. It has also been argued that some societies didn’t have the requisite know-how to create states. According to this view, building state institutions is primarily an “engineering” problem of bringing in the right expertise and institutional blueprints. Though these aspects all play a role in some contexts, another factor is often more important—the desire to avoid the fearsome face of the Leviathan. If you fear the Leviathan, you will prevent the accumulation of power and resist the social and political hierarchy that is necessary to launch it.
We can see a clear instance of this fear blocking the rise of the Leviathan in Nigeria’s history. Away from Lagos and the coastal lagoons, you enter Yorubaland, the home of the Yoruba people. The A1 heads north first to Ibadan, and then if you swing east on the A122, you pass Ife, the traditional spiritual home of Yoruba chiefs, and then reach Lokoja via the A123 (which can be seen on Map 1 in the previous chapter). Lokoja, located at the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers, was made the first capital of colonial Nigeria by Sir Frederick Lugard in 1914. It is supposedly here that his wife-to-be, Flora Shaw, coined the name for the country-to-be. Heading farther east, the A233 dips below the Benue. By the time you reach Makurdi, back on the river, you are firmly in Tivland.
The Tiv are an ethnic group, organized around kin relations, who were stateless when Nigeria was colonized. They nevertheless formed a coherent group with a well-defined, large, and even expanding territory and a distinct language, culture, and history. We know quite a bit about the Tiv thanks to the anthropologist couple Paul and Laura Bohannan, who studied them from the mid-1940s onward. Their and others’ accounts make it very clear that the same problem as in Athens—preventing powerful individuals from becoming too dominant and bossing around everybody else—was a major concern for Tiv society. But the way the Tiv dealt with this problem was very different. It was by means of norms that made them suspicious of power and willing to take action against those building their power. These norms then prevented the emergence of any political hierarchy. Consequently, though the Tiv did have chiefs, these chiefs had little uncontested authority over others; their main role was mediation and arbitration in resolving conflict and supporting cooperation of the sort we saw with Asante elders in the previous chapter. There was no possibility for a ruler or a big man establishing enough authority to impose his will.
To understand how the Tiv contained political hierarchy, let us return to Lord Lugard. Lugard wanted to perfect what came to be known as “indirect rule,” a method of running colonies with the help of local notables and indigenous political authorities. But how could you run a country in this way when there weren’t any such authorities? When Lugard demanded to be taken to their chiefs, the Tiv responded, “Chiefs? What chiefs?” The system of indirect rule had already developed in Southern Nigeria during the 1890s as British authority spread. Here administrators created “warrant chiefs,” so called because the British gave warrants to powerful indigenous families whom they made chief. After 1914 Lugard wanted something even more ambitious. He argued, “If there are no chiefs … the first condition for progress in a very loosely knit community such as the I[g]bos or the … [Tiv] is to create units of some size under progressive chiefs.”
But just who were these “progressive chiefs”? Lugard and colonial officials got to decide. Lugard wanted progressive chiefs to enforce order, collect taxes, and organize labor to build roads and railways in Tivland. If the Tiv didn’t have real chiefs, he would create them. And so he did after 1914, imposing a new version of the warrant chief system on the Tiv.