Enforcing Colonial Rule: Blood Tax and Head Tax in French West Africa

How coercive were African colonial states?  Scholars – economists, historians, or political scientists – don’t always agree. Some see colonial states as omnipotent Leviathans, while others describe them as administration “on the cheap”.

In British colonies, African armies were composed of volunteers. In contrast, French colonies used military conscription as one form of forced labor. The term blood tax (impôt du sang) arose during World War I, when more than 25,000 West African soldiers lost their lives fighting for France. Another key extractive institution was the head tax (capitation), a fixed-rate poll tax imposed on the teenage and adult population, including children in the early years.

In this paper, Denis Cogneau and Zhexun Mo analyze new district-level data from 1919 to 1949 to study these two pillars of French colonial rule in Sub-Saharan Africa – military conscription and head tax collection –, how they were implemented or resisted over time and across different regions.

Key findings

• Colonial coercion was quite effective:
  • Military recruitment targets were consistently met, even amid individual avoidance and poor health conditions, by drawing on a pool of eligible fit young men.
  • Tax compliance was similarly high, with approximately 80% of the liable population meeting their obligations.
• This coercion was not incompatible with limited agency and even resistance from the colonized people:
  • Resistance to conscription mainly manifested in the form of individual defiance through absenteeism at the drafting boards.
  • Spikes in head tax rates increased the likelihood of tax-related conflicts.
  • During the Great Depression, tax compliance dropped significantly.
• Colonial administrations exercised caution in setting the head tax rates in response to potential tax conflicts, yet they were unresponsive to idiosyncratic local economic shocks:
  • The head tax rate was adjusted according to perceived district affluence, and tax moderation was applied in times of crisis.
  • However, local shocks, such as droughts or cash crop price collapses, were largely ignored.
• These results underscore the capacity of colonial states to enforce their authority despite limited policy responsiveness, offering new insights into the political economy of colonial governance.

AUTHORS

• Denis Cogneau, Paris School of Economics, EHESS, IRD, World Inequality Lab
• Zhexun Mo, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, Graduate Center-CUNY, World Inequality Lab

MEDIA CONTACT

• Alice Fauvel, Communications Manager, press[at]wid.world