The Merze Tate – Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award, formally the APSA Best Book Award, is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects provides a sweeping and incisive account of divergent post-colonial development trajectories in the Global South. Owolabi first identifies a pattern that previous scholarship has often over-looked: post-independence performance across multiple dimensions of politics and development is much stronger in colonies where European settlers relied heavily on chattel slavery than in those where settlers exploited existing Indigenous populations rather than imported enslaved Africans. He then advances a compelling explanation for these divergent outcomes, arguing for the important role of emancipation and early liberal reforms in enhancing the political agency of those formerly enslaved. These processes enabled political trajectories that led to higher levels of human development and more robust postcolonial democratization in contexts previously characterized by forced settlement than those that experienced colonial occupation.
The selection committee was impressed by Owolabi’s skillful use of multiple methodological tools including large-scale statistical analysis and comparative historical analysis based on extensive original archival research across multiple continents. In this way, Owolabi provides a thorough and rigorous evidentiary basis to understand how and why the trajectories of forced-settlement colonies diverged from those subjected to extractive colonial occupations. Also, by investigating across rarely compared contexts and leveraging bodies of scholarship that are often not in direct dialogue, Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects offers an innovative argument concerning the way that emancipation often (but not always) facilitated not only the formal establishment of individual legal and citizenship rights but also the eventual expansion of administrative capacity, state-funded education, and political representation. This process produced comparatively more favorable development patterns in both British as well as French forced settlement colonies than in instances of colonial occupation in West Africa where colonial officials established extractive administrative systems and restricted legal and citizenship rights. Owolabi also uses well-designed comparisons and analyses of outlier cases such as Haiti to grapple with alternative accounts in the existing literature, to center the pivotal role that inclusive citizenship regimes play in advancing long-term development trajectories, and to delineate the scope conditions of his argument.
Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects impresses with its ambitious scope, thoughtful research design, and novel theoretical argument. The theoretical and conceptual distinction between forced settlement and imperial domination seems poised to shift how future research thinks about colonialism and its legacies. Moreover, Owolabi’s extraordinary ability to reach across contexts, time periods, literatures and even disciplines ranging from political science and sociology to history and economics sets the book apart. This breadth enables the book to speak to a wide audience about important debates concerning race, power, post-colonialism, and democratization. As a result, Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects offers insights that are directly applicable to political struggles for social and political equality today.
The committee applauds these contributions and commends the book to scholars across all fields of political science as well as other disciplines, making it highly meritorious of the Merze Tate-Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award.
Dr. Olukunle P. Owolabi is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of Africana studies at Villanova University. His research examines the developmental and political legacies of colonialism, slavery, and abolition in the Black Atlantic world. He holds degrees in International Relations (B.A. Honors, University of Toronto, 2001), Latin American Studies (MPhil, Oxford University, 2003), and Political Science (PhD., University of Notre Dame, 2012). His research has been supported by various grants and fellowships in Canada, Britain, and the United States. His peer-reviewed research articles have been published in Comparative Politics, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies’ Working Paper series. His research monograph, Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects: The Divergent Legacies of Forced Settlement and Colonial Occupation in the Global South (Oxford University Press, 2023) is the recipient of several book awards, including the Peter Katzenstein Award for the Outstanding First Book in International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political Economy, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Prize from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. In addition to his academic interests, Owolabi is also a classically trained pianist and organist (with associates’ diplomas from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto), and a published composer of choral music. He also has an extensive collection of African popular music, which is frequently used as a pedagogical tool in his courses on African politics and post-colonial development.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Jana Morgan (Chair) of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dr. Nathan P. Kalmoe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Andrew Karch of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Dr. Catherine Lu of McGill University, and Dr. Milan Svolik of Yale University.