pre colonial literary period strengths weaknesses
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Abstract
We investigate the role of deeply-rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development obtains also within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.
Keywords: Africa, Ethnicities, Development, Institutions
1 Introduction
There has been ample research on the institutional origins of African (under)development both in economics and the broader literature in social sciences, yet the two strands have followed somewhat different paths. On the one hand, influenced by the studies of Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002) and La Porta et al. (1997, 1998), the empirical literature in economics has mainly focused on the impact of colonization in comparative development primarily via its effect on contractual institutions and property rights protection at the national level (see Acemoglu and Johnson (2005)). On the other hand, the African historiography has invariably stressed the role of deeply-rooted, ethnic institutional characteristics (see Herbst (2000) for a summary). Motivated by the richness of anecdotal evidence and case studies documenting the importance of ethnic-specific institutional traits, in this study, we explore systematically the relationship between pre-colonial ethnic institutions, political centralization in particular, and regional development.
We utilize data from the pioneering work of Murdock (1959, 1967), who has mapped the spatial distribution of African ethnicities and compiled various quantitative indicators reflecting political institutions, cultural, and economic traits of several ethnic groups around colonization. To overcome the paucity of economic indicators across African ethnic homelands, we combine the anthropological data with satellite images of light density at night.
Our analysis shows that the complexity and hierarchical structure of pre-colonial ethnic institutions correlate significantly with contemporary regional development, as reflected in light density at night. This correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relationship, because one cannot rule out the possibility that other ethnic characteristics and hard-to-account-for factors drive the association. Nevertheless, this correlation obtains across numerous permutations. First, it is robust to an array of controls related to the disease environment, land endowments, and natural resources at the local level. Accounting properly for geography is important as there is a fierce debate in the literature on whether the correlation between institutional and economic development is driven by hard-to-account-for geographical features. Second, the strong positive association between pre-colonial political centralization and regional development retains its economic and statistical significance, when we solely examine within-country variation. Including country fixed effects are crucial since we can account for all country-specific, time-invariant features. Third, regressing luminosity on a variety of alternative pre-colonial ethnic characteristics, such as occupational specialization, economic organization, the presence of polygyny, slavery, and proxies of early development, we find that political centralization is the only robust correlate of contemporary economic performance. This reassures that the uncovered positive association does not reflect differences in observable cultural and economic attributes across African ethnicities. Fourth, the positive correlation between ethnic political complexity and regional development prevails when we limit our analysis within pairs of neighbouring homelands falling in the same country where ethnicities with different pre-colonial institutions reside.
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