Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is embroiled in a controversy. Pottermore, her official website for all things Harry Potter, made a big announcement over the weekend, telling the world that there are wizarding schools in the United States, Japan and Africa:
Although Africa has a number of smaller wizarding schools (for advice on locating these, see introductory paragraph), there is only one that has stood the test of time (at least a thousand years) and achieved an enviable international reputation: Uagadou. The largest of all wizarding schools, it welcomes students from all over the enormous continent. The only address ever given is ‘Mountains of the Moon’; visitors speak of a stunning edifice carved out of the mountainside and shrouded in mist, so that it sometimes appears simply to float in mid-air.
But J.K. Rowling’s first thought — that a wizarding school might be better described as “African” than “Ugandan” — has historical grounding. You could make an excellent case that an African wizarding school that has lasted a thousand years should be African, rather than associated with any particular state.
Africa didn’t have a state system before the colonial era
African history did not begin with colonialism. However, we can look to historians like Jeffrey Herbst, who argue that while Europe and Japan developed a dense, competitive state system early on, geography (and slavery) conspired against a dense system of competing states in most of Africa. That is, until it was imposed by colonialism.
In other parts of the earth, coherent states formed through a long process of conflict and competition in densely populated regions. Charles Tilly and other scholars have argued that the modern European state was forged by the rulers trying to extract their population’s resources while fighting off the warlords who wanted to take their territory away.
This led European states (and states like Japan) to become more efficient at administration (to squeeze as much as possible from their populations) and at fighting (to defend themselves against other states that were strong, and to devour states that were weak). Strong states prospered, while weak states perished.
Like J.K. Rowling, political scientists do not think of most states in history as benevolent. Behind every bumbling Ministry of Magic, there lurks a cruel and voracious Azkaban. States that were too weak or too nice were driven to extinction by ruthless adversaries.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:02/04/2016