How Low Precolonial Density Made African States Large and Artificial

Why This Question Matters

Elliott Green investigates a longstanding puzzle about African political geography: why African states are both unusually large and widely perceived as having artificial, colonial-era borders. These features have been linked to negative development outcomes, but their origins have received little systematic explanation.

Key Concepts: State Size and Shape

State size refers to the territorial area of modern states; shape captures the geometry and compactness of those borders and the extent to which they reflect contiguous, historically coherent polities versus arbitrarily drawn lines. "Artificial borders" here denotes colonial boundaries that ignored prior settlement, trade, and political patterns.

Comparative Empirical Strategy

Green uses cross-national empirical analysis to link measurable aspects of precolonial environments—especially population density and indicators of precolonial trade—to the modern territorial configuration of African states. The analysis compares African cases with non-African former colonies to test whether the same relationships hold elsewhere.

What the Evidence Shows

• Low precolonial population density strongly predicts larger modern African states: areas with sparse populations tended to be consolidated into unusually large colonial polities.
• Precolonial trade is negatively related to state size: regions with more extensive trade networks prior to colonization tended to become smaller modern states.
• Together, measures of population density and precolonial trade account for the majority of variation in African state size.
• The same relationships do not appear in non-African former colonies: there is no apparent link between population density and modern state size or shape outside Africa, underscoring that African state formation followed a distinctive logic.

Implications for State Formation and Development

These findings recast ideas about African borders as consequential outcomes of underlying demographic and economic geography rather than accidental artifacts alone. By tying large, seemingly "artificial" states to low-density, low-trade precolonial contexts, the study offers a historically grounded explanation for a key feature of modern African political order and points to demographic and economic geography as central determinants of how colonial powers drew and consolidated territory.