This chapter situates this book’s conceptual and theoretical approach with respect to earlier work on ethnicity and region in African countries and beyond. Earlier work has looked away from regional economic inequality as a political force in Africa, defaulting to theories centered on ethnicity, understood as a force orthogonal to programmatic policy interests and devoid of economic ideology. This work inverts these arguments, showing that regional economic inequalities and differentiation give rise to political cleavage and divergent policy interests. In Africa, the sources of subnational (regional) economic difference and inequality lie in unevenness of natural endowment, regionally specific patterns of state intervention in the economy that date to the colonial period, spatial–sectoral differentiation, and administrative structure. This chapter follows Lipset and Rokkan (1967) in theorizing the sources and nature of regional cleavages that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. It identifies institutions that contribute to the “regionalization” of national economies and politics in African countries. Section 2.5 of this chapter lays out the main elements of an approach to the analysis of regionalism that is fit for African contexts.

Like many nations, the United States is undergoing a revolution in economic and political geography. The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy is feeding both political polarization and economic polarization. Scholars of American political development have long stressed that the United States’ diverse economic geography and strongly territorialized institutions encourage sectional policy conflict. Prominent scholars of contemporary politics have similarly argued that territorially based representation encourages policy responsiveness to local communities. We argue to the contrary that several key mediating factors – the increasing antiurban and status quo bias of American political institutions, the nationalization of US party coalitions, and the path-dependent character of inherited policy regimes – have greatly weakened the representation of place-based economic interests (PBEIs) in contemporary American politics. Indeed, because of these “filters,” each of the nation’s two major party coalitions manifests what we call a “PBEI paradox,” a set of policy commitments starkly at odds with the underlying economic needs of the areas that vote for it.

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.”

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

Armies prepare to fight the last war, or so the adage goes. Napoleon, for instance, won great battles attacking with tight formations of troops, and mid-nineteenth-century military leaders emulated his tactics, even as advances in bullet and rifle technology rendered them increasingly ineffective. This became brutally apparent in the American Civil War as defenders capable of shooting more quickly and accurately at longer distances decimated charging formations. The problem of predicting the nature of future wars by looking to past conflicts can be more generally summed by another adage, this one traceable to Søren Kierkegaard in 1843: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.1