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33 Both in British and French Africa, colonies were in principle on their own when it came to their state finances. With the exception of providing a military umbrella under the imperial army, British and French taxpayers were not supposed to pay for empire. The French Ministry of the Colonies budget (Ministère des Colonies) relied on metropolitan taxes and its funds were used for military expenses only. This was not very different from the British system, where metropolitan taxpayers supported the expensive British navy, while African colonies cofinanced standing armies in the region.

34 Conklin, A Mission.

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40 We chose the year 1925 here to illustrate our findings because it was the first year for which all of our observations are present. As can be derived from the regressions, the stylized fact we set out to illustrate does not differ significantly when selecting another year.

41 A simple OLS and pooled OLS regression reveals that those differences are statistically significant while controlling for other geographical variables. Readers interested in these results are invited to contact the authors.

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47 In 1851, a hut tax had been imposed in the Gold Coast, but it was abandoned in 1861 because it was unsuccessful in terms of the revenue it yielded and custom duties soon proved to be a far better alternative.

48 There was a difference between the fiscal strategies in Northern and Southern Nigeria. As pointed out by Bush and Maltby in ‘Taxation in West Africa’, the Southern part, which was ‘far more prosperous and economically active’, had no direct taxes until after the First World War. Even when an income tax was imposed in the 1920s, incomes under £30 per year were exempted from this tax. Taking contemporary wage rates into account, which fluctuated between 12 and 17 pence per day in the 1920s, the annual income of an unskilled urban laborer would not exceed £22 per year, assuming a 6-day workweek. It was not until 1937 that the lower income exception was abolished, and that the native income tax thus became applicable to all inhabitants of Southern Nigeria.

49 Our conclusions for British and French Africa are in line with several other recent studies observing similar patterns within British Africa. For examples, see Frankema, ‘Colonial taxation’; Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa, 24–5; and Mkandawire, ‘On tax efforts’.

50 That is Uganda, Kenya, and Nyasaland. In the fiscal year 1909–10, c. 26 per cent of the total fiscal budget of the Kenyan government was supplied by a metropolitan grant. The British East Africa Protectorate, Blue Book (Nairobi, 1909–10). For a broader discussion of British efforts to build self-sufficient states in Africa, see Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa, 17–30.

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52 It should be noted that the temporal trend we observe of a decreasing reliance on direct taxes should not be extrapolated to the post-Second World War period, as the colonial tax systems underwent a series of reforms during the early postwar and postcolonial eras, and income taxes and graduated poll taxes started to play a greater role in this period. We have not included the post-Second World War era into our analysis, as space constraints do not allow for an encompassing discussion of these reforms. Additionally, there is an analytical reason for this exclusion, as the widespread and systematic existence of colonial development subsidies structurally changed the conditions of fiscal capacity building.

53 Quote taken from Conklin, A Mission, 144.

54 Despite there maybe being something counterintuitive about our argument of identifying local agency from such a general level, our framework highlights a trend that can only be distilled at the macrolevel.

55 Note that some tax rates were applied multiple times, so that this captures only the total number of different tax rates in circulation rather than the number of districts or subgroups that had their own tax rates. The former offers a better reflection of the ‘fine-grained’ nature of the direct tax system.

56 Such rapid tax increases occasionally met great resistance. In Dahomey in 1923, for example, a tax revolt broke out in the city of Porto Novo, after the French had raised the going tax rates by more than 500 per cent for men, 300 per cent for women, and 100 per cent for children to adjust for the postwar inflation. Conklin, A Mission, 161.

57 This underlines again that, where possible, colonial governments were happy to shape their fiscal institutions on the basis of existing tax structure, and both the British and the French did so in North Africa. Young, The African Colonial State, 124–5.

58 To transform the French tax rates from an individual to a household base, we have made the assumption that an average household existed of a father, a mother, and three to four children – of which one would have been older than ten years and not yet started a family of his or her own. Although there was obviously greater variation in terms of family composition, these assumptions correspond well with demographic survey reports and should thus, on an aggregate level, be a fairly good approximation. Considering tax rates were slightly lower for women and children in the French African colonies, we multiply or divide not by a factor of four (a father, mother, and two children), but by three.

59 It is highly likely that in areas that relied more on the implied revenue from forced labor, the colonial perception of Africans needing to be ‘disciplined’ into becoming productive workers was more strongly articulated. This implies that, ultimately, local material conditions also co-shaped philosophies of colonial state building. We believe this would be an important avenue for further research. For important studies on philosophies of state building, see Young, The African Colonial State; and Conklin, A Mission.

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68 Important exceptions to this rule were the British campaign against Sokoto in northern Nigeria between 1900 and 1903 and the Niger delta, which was still being subdued in the early 1900s when most of Uganda and Kenya were already under British control.

69 For Côte d'Ivoire, however, the net drain increasingly became a serious source of discontent. In the late 1950s, the Ivorian government broke with the federal rules of collecting and transferring customs duties and became the first country to introduce VAT to raise the local state budget.