Colonial Legacies of Development, Agriculture and Democracy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What are the legacies of colonial rule on democracy and development? This panel brings together several papers which analyze colonial legacies in the middle-east, Latin America and South Asia. The papers use sub-national data of different types to analyze how colonial land tenure and indirect rule has long term effects on conflict and state capacity, as well as how colonial legacies of democracy, colonial irrigation, and attempts to prevent corruption had long term effects on levels of democracy and development.

Hartnett analyzes how variation in British indirect rule and property rights institutions within Iraq affected state capacity and public goods. It uses a unique subnational dataset of Iraqi liwas from 1929 to 1965 and archival records from the British Colonial Office, this paper shows how colonial administration implemented exclusive land tenure and tribal policies that led to reduced state capacity in districts dominated by landed elites.

Guardado uses sub-national data in Mexico and finds that localities subjected to direct control by the Spanish Crown and farther missions exhibit worse outcomes. This paper shows how the administrative organization of the Spanish Empire had a direct bearing on its long-term development prospects.

Lee engages with previous literature which argues that British colonial rule promoted post-independence democracy. Contradicting existing theories, he shows that this relationship follows a strong temporal pattern. Although former British colonies were considerably more democratic than other countries immediately following independence, subsequent convergence in democracy levels has eliminated these differences in the post-Cold War period.

Sen et al. engages with the well-known paper by Banerjee & Iyer (2005) which theorizes that colonial land tenure institutions in India have long term effects on post-colonial agricultural development. They focus on the role of colonial investment in irrigation and using district level data from colonial records of irrigation, they show that endowments as reflected in stocks of irrigation from past colonial investments provide a more plausible causal mechanism for India’s post independence agricultural development than land tenure institutions.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Divergent Development: Colonial Property Rights and Uneven Development in Iraq - Allison Spencer Hartnett, Yale University

• Overlapping Jurisdictions and Long-Term Development in Colonial Mexico - Jenny Guardado, Georgetown University

• Did British Colonialism Promote Democracy? - Alexander Lee, University of Rochester

Chair

• Kunal Sen UNU-WIDER

Discussants

• Shivaji Mukherjee University of Toronto

• Anoop K. Sarbahi University of Minnesota