the diya-paying group of the murderer. This led to all-out warfare, and within the next forty-eight hours thirteen Yuunis and twenty-six Tol Ja’lo had been killed. Warfare continued for another year before elders from both clans, brought together by the English colonial administration, managed to broker a deal (the exchange of blood wealth) that satisfied both sides and was paid over the next three years.
The paying of blood wealth took place in the shadow of the threat of force and feuding, and even when it was paid, it did not necessarily stop conflict. Usually conflict died down and then flared up again.
Political power was thus widely dispersed in Somali society, almost pluralistically. But without the authority of a centralized state to enforce order, let alone property rights, this led not to inclusive institutions. Nobody respected the authority of another, and nobody, including the British colonial state when it eventually arrived, was able to impose order. The lack of political centralization made it impossible for Somalia to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. In such a climate it would have been unimaginable to invest in or adopt the new technologies emanating from Britain, or indeed to create the types of organizations necessary to do so.
The complex politics of Somalia had even more subtle implications for economic progress. We mentioned earlier some of the great technological puzzles of African history. Prior to the expansion of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, African societies did not use wheeled transportation or plow agriculture and few had writing. Ethiopia did, as we have seen. The Somalis also had a written script, but unlike the Ethiopians, they did not use it. We have already seen instances of this in African history. African societies may not have used wheels or plows, but they certainly knew about them. In the case of the Kingdom of Kongo, as we have seen, this was fundamentally due to the fact that the economic institutions created no incentives for people to adopt these technologies. Could the same issues arise with the adoption of writing?
We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of Taqali, situated to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a man called Isma’il, and it stayed independent until amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The Taqali kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was not used—except by the kings, for external communication with other polities and diplomatic correspondence. At first this situation seems very puzzling. The traditional account of the origin of writing in Mesopotamia is that it was developed by states in order to record information, control people, and levy taxes. Wasn’t the Taqali state interested in this?
These questions were investigated by the historian Janet Ewald in the late 1970s as she tried to reconstruct the history of the Taqali state. Part of the story is that the citizens resisted the use of writing because they feared that it would be used to control resources, such as valuable land, by allowing the state to claim ownership. They also feared that it would lead to more systematic taxation. The dynasty that Isma’il started did not gel into a powerful state. Even if it had wanted to, the state was not strong enough to impose its will over the objections of the citizens. But there were other, more subtle factors at work. Various elites also opposed political centralization, for example, preferring oral to written interaction with citizens, because this allowed them maximum discretion. Written laws or orders could not be taken back or denied and were harder to change; they set benchmarks that governing elites might want to reverse. So neither the ruled nor the rulers of Taqali saw the introduction of writing to be to their advantage. The ruled feared how the rulers would use it, and the rulers themselves saw the absence of writing as aiding their quite precarious grip on power. It was the politics of Taqali that kept writing from being introduced. Though the Somalis had even less of a well-defined elite compared with the Taqali kingdom, it is quite plausible that the same forces inhibited their use of writing and their adoption of other basic technologies.
The Somali case shows the consequences of the lack of political centralization for economic growth. The historical literature does not record instances of attempts to create such centralization in Somalia. However,