(the exchange of blood wealth) that satisfied both sides and
was paid over the next three years.
The paying of blood wealth took place in the shadow of
the threat of force and feuding, and even when it was paid,
it did not necessarily stop conflict. Usually conflict died
down and then flared up again.
Political power was thus widely dispersed in Somali
society, almost pluralistically. But without the authority of a
centralized state to enforce order, let alone property rights,
this led not to inclusive institutions. Nobody respected the
authority of another, and nobody, including the British
colonial state when it eventually arrived, was able to
impose order. The lack of political centralization made it
impossible for Somalia to benefit from the Industrial
Revolution. In such a climate it would have been
unimaginable to invest in or adopt the new technologies
emanating from Britain, or indeed to create the types of
organizations necessary to do so.
The complex politics of Somalia had even more subtle
implications for economic progress. We mentioned earlier
some of the great technological puzzles of African history.
Prior to the expansion of colonial rule in the late nineteenth
century, African societies did not use wheeled
transportation or plow agriculture and few had writing.
Ethiopia did, as we have seen. The Somalis also had a
written script, but unlike the Ethiopians, they did not use it.
We have already seen instances of this in African history.
African societies may not have used wheels or plows, but
they certainly knew about them. In the case of the Kingdom
of Kongo, as we have seen, this was fundamentally due to
the fact that the economic institutions created no incentives
for people to adopt these technologies. Could the same
issues arise with the adoption of writing?
We can get some sense of this from the Kingdom of
Taqali, situated to the northwest of Somalia, in the Nuba
Hills of southern Sudan. The Kingdom of Taqali was formed
in the late eighteenth century by a band of warriors led by a
man called Isma’il, and it stayed independent until
amalgamated into the British Empire in 1884. The Taqali
kings and people had access to writing in Arabic, but it was
not used—except by the kings, for external communication
with other polities and diplomatic correspondence. At first