State Building and War in the French Colonial Empire

• In Event: Revolutions and Statebuilding: Transforming Political and Social Institutions

Abstract

What explains the uneven reach and presence of the state over its territory? Bellicist theory argues that the Darwinian pressures of war compelled states to build institutions and extend state control to defend against conquest by their neighbors. However, scholars have long noted the limitations of the warmaking-statemaking thesis outside the context of Western Europe. We advance an important theoretical intervention in this debate by arguing that only in sovereign states did war lead to the expansion of the state. In sovereign states, mobilization is predicated on rewards for service. In non-sovereign territories, the state has greater incentive to shirk, because subject populations are less able and likely to hold the state accountable. We test our argument using a subnational comparison of early 20th-century France, including Algeria, at the time an overseas department. We conduct a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages archival data on the mass mobilization of French citizens and Algerian subjects during World War I to explain variation in a range of local level measures of state presence. This project contributes to the scholarship on war and statebuilding by demonstrating the unequal role of wartime pressures in non-sovereign polities.

Authors

• Melissa M. Lee, Princeton University

• Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Brown University