This book examines the role and influence of Greek philosophy in the final days of the Roman republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of Epicureanism at the time.

Though Cicero offers his most explicit, detailed critiques of Epicureanism in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum, his anti-Epicureanism consistently works itself into a wide swath of his theoretical writings over the last 13 years of his life. Therein Cicero consistently uses a rhetorical strategy whereby he avoids naming the Epicureans outright. Instead he employs a series of shorthand descriptions to attack the Epicureans for what he understands to be their basic tenets. In employing this tactic Cicero both slights the Epicureans by leaving them unnamed and reduces their philosophy to a set of behaviors that he thinks best encapsulate their beliefs. They fail by believing the soul to be mortal, by prioritizing an animal-like desire for pleasure over ratio and oratio, and by using quasi-commercial calculations to make ethical decisions. In each of these ways they fail most of all in Cicero’s eyes by representing a threat to the social fabric of the republic.

Catullus’ collection contains several clear echoes of the work of two contemporary Epicurean poets, Lucretius and Philodemus. Indeed, several of the neoteric poet’s central themes (the attractions of otium and disengagement from public life; patronage by members of the high elite and its pitfalls; dissatisfaction with the mos maiorum) bring him potentially into close alignment with Epicurean ideals. In this chapter, however, I argue that, on closer consideration, Catullus’ intertextual engagement with his two contemporaries points rather to a self-consciously antagonistic stance towards Epicurean ethics. Catullus’ attack on ‘Socration’ in Poem 47, combined with parodic echoes of Philodemus’ epigrams in Poems 13 and 43, bears comparison with Cicero’s deployment of anti-Epicurean clichés in the In Pisonem; similarly, Philodemean and Lucretian echoes underline a striking divergence both from Epicurean ideals of friendship and from the rejection of romantic love explicit in Lucretius and arguably implicit in Philodemus’ Xanthippe cycle.

This chapter presents the results of an original survey of more than 350 local elites sampled from across Senegal’s precolonial geography to develop insights into how local actors experience and evaluate their local governments. Throughout their answers to open-ended questions, respondents invoke the past when describing local sociopolitical cleavages. Cumulatively, their responses illustrate how cross-village social institutions motivate local political action under decentralization in historically centralized areas. Where cross-village social institutions are absent, local politics are more frequently described as contentious and conflictual. I use this survey data to elaborate the foundations of my theory and to deduce the theory’s two mechanisms: the role of group identities and social network ties. Both mechanisms are present and mutually reinforcing in areas that were home to precolonial kingdoms, while they are fragmented across space in historically acephalous zones. The findings show that otherwise similar local governments are home to distinct political climates as a function of their long-run political histories.

By the mid-1970s, much of the wind had gone out of the sails of Tanzania’s socialist project. Economic crisis, political authoritarianism, and the collapse of the Portuguese empire meant that Dar es Salaam ceased to be a major centre of anticolonial revolution in Africa. This concluding chapter briefly traces this demise and then sets out the book’s major findings and their implications. It finishes with a short reflection on the legacy of Dar es Salaam’s revolutionary past for Tanzania today.

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

Chapter 1 articulates the theory of institutional congruence. I argue that persistent forms of social cooperation at the grassroots are revitalized following institutional reform because some communities have inherited robust social institutions that stipulate appropriate social behavior. I elaborate on the theory’s dual mechanisms of shared social identification and dense cross-village network ties to illustrate how institutional congruence helps local elites navigate the two-level political game introduced by decentralization: local elected officials face pressure within their villages on a first level that are not always compatible with their incentives at the second level of the local state itself, where they must negotiate with other elites from other villages. When shared social institutions stretch across the many villages of a local government, elites find it easier to negotiate at the second level of the local state because these social institutions reorient them toward group-based goals. As a consequence, local representation and redistribution is expected to be broader across space under conditions of high congruence, but contentious and targeted when it is low.

Although usually associated with events in Europe and North America, the events of the ‘global 1968’ were global in scope. This chapter shows how Tanzanian youths shared common ground with their contemporaries around the world in protesting against Cold War interventions in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they drew inspiration from the landscape of radical ideas and texts of revolutionary Dar es Salaam. But in contrast to the dynamics of counter-hegemonic protest elsewhere, the Tanzanian government’s foreign policy meant that it could channel these radical critiques of superpower imperialism into its own nation-building project. The language of anti-imperialism could also be deployed against more immediate threats, as the case of Malawi’s claims to Tanzanian territory demonstrate. While recognising the significance of transnational Afro-Asian and Third Worldist solidarities in these movements, the chapter integrates these dynamics into a national story. The state circumscribed the autonomy of youth activism, especially when it risked upsetting Julius Nyerere’s carefully calculated foreign policy.

This chapter employs an original, geocoded dataset of social service investments to estimate the effect of precolonial centralization on a village's likelihood of receiving a new local public good between 2002 and 2012. I find robust evidence that falling within the territory of a precolonial state increases a village’s chance of receiving local infrastructural investments from the local state. This result is robust to a number of alternative explanations and model specifications, affirming the argument that there is something different about how local governments respond to demands for and deliver these public goods in formerly centralized areas even when accounting for similar objective need. The chapter thus documents that we are witnessing the emergence of subnational variation in the spatial logics of local public goods delivery.

From Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, Dar es Salaam was an epicentre of revolution in Africa. The representatives of anticolonial liberation movements set up offices in the city, attracting the interest of the Cold War powers, who sought to expand their influence in the Third World. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian government sought to translate independence into meaningful decolonisation through an ambitious project to build a socialist state. This chapter explains how the lens of the city reveals the connections between the dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and socialist state-making in Tanzania. It locates this approach among new approaches to the history of the Cold War, decolonisation, and global cities. Scattered across continents, the postcolonial archive offers the potential for exploring the revolutionary dynamics which intersected in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter explores the debates about the future of the Tanzanian state after independence, which culminated in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. It sets out the contours of elite-level conversations about development in the 1960s, as Tanzania groped for a path forwards that would translate independence into meaningful socio-economic progress. After showing how Julius Nyerere’s decision to embark on a radical programme of socialist reform was motivated by local unrest and the fate of postcolonial regimes elsewhere in Africa, it then revisits the little-understood politics of the Arusha Declaration and its fallout. Offering an alternative dimension to readings of Arusha as a stimulant for national unity, the chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s socialist revolution created fissures among the political elite. In particular, it pushed Oscar Kambona, a prominent politician, into exile in Britain. The Arusha Declaration represented a critical turning point in Tanzania’s postcolonial history that narrowed space for dissent, while also sowing the seeds for future challenges to the TANU party-state.

Dar es Salaam was a mecca for Third World liberation movements, whose presence in the city was fundamental to its emergence as a ‘Cold War city’. This chapter shows how their activities became embedded in the capital’s political life through the case of the assassination of the president of the Mozambican anticolonial movement FRELIMO. Eduardo Mondlane was a skilful politician who used the city’s international connections to publicise his movement’s cause and canvass for foreign support. However, as FRELIMO sought to draw on Cold War patronage to wage war against the Portuguese, it was gripped by an internal crisis that split the movement’s leadership along ethno-racial and ideological lines. Powerful gatekeepers within the Tanzanian political establishment aligned with Mondlane’s enemies to challenge him in public and undermine his security in private. These schisms facilitated the assassination of Mondlane in 1969 and clouded the waters of subsequent inquiries into the crime’s perpetrators.