Colonial Institutions and Intra-Ethnic Inequality

• In Event: The Political Origins of Inequality and Ethnic Difference

Abstract

I examine the origins of intra-ethnic inequality by exploring the effects of colonially-imposed ethnic political institutions in Northern Ghana. I leverage unusual variation in the early 20th-century colonial invention of chieftaincy, which assigned otherwise similar ethnic groups to different degrees of internal social hierarchy. As a result of the British annexation of part of the German colony of Togoland during WWI, some pre-colonially acephalous ethnic groups saw the colonial imposition of chieftaincy, and the resulting elevation of new elite families, while others were ignored by the colonial state and left without similar social hierarchies.

My analysis combines nearly one million contemporary geo-coded individual-level census records with historical village-level census data and original datasets on chieftaincy succession and the family ties of politicians and early post-independence civil servants. I find greater present-day intra-village, intra-ethnic stratification in wealth in communities that experienced the invention of chieftaincy compared to similar communities that did not, and also show that groups with invented chiefs now have significantly more urban elites per capita, even as group members are poorer on average compared to groups left without formal chiefs. I then trace historical mechanisms through which this inequality may have emerged, including by using a colonial-era database of chiefs to document how specific families empowered by the colonial state through chieftaincy captured dynastic local political power upon independence and gained preferential access to the post-colonial civil service, ultimately becoming over-represented in Northern Ghana's present-day political and economic elite.

While a large literature demonstrates the relationship between colonial policy and macro-level inter-regional and inter-ethnic economic inequality within African countries, I help document the more subtle ways in which colonialism also had lasting effects on micro-level, intra-communal inequality. In doing so, I show that even in remote rural peripheries where the colonial state was most absent, the limited interventions colonial authorities did make still had large effects on the underlying societal institutions around which power and wealth were subsequently distributed. This challenges assumptions in common theories of state weakness in rural Africa and also complicates understandings of the links between pre-colonial institutions and contemporary outcomes.

Author

• Noah Nathan, University of Michigan