Cash Crops, Print Technologies, and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Africa

What are the origins of ethnic landscapes in contemporary states? Drawing on a preregistered research design, we test influence dual socioeconomic revolutions that spread throughout Africa during nineteenth and twentieth centuries—export agriculture print technologies. We argue these changes transformed ethnicity via their effects politicization boundary-making. Print technologies strengthened imagined communities, leading to more salient—yet porous—ethnic identities. Cash crop endowments increased groups’ mobilizational potential but with exclusionary boundaries control agricultural rents. Using historical data cash crops African language publications, find groups exposed forces likely be politically relevant postindependence period, members report salient observe heterogenous boundary-making as measured by interethnic marriage; relative crops, printing fostered greater openness assimilate linguistically related outsiders. Our findings illuminate not only sources also mechanisms shaping boundary formation.