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The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under-development suffers from several shortcomings. In this article, the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting. Using a new data set for the U.S. states spanning 73 years and case studies of Texas and Louisiana, the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has. They provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth, poorer developmental performance, and less competitive politics. Using this empirical setting, they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development. They draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross-national and cross-state work.

When the revolt began, rail and communications lines were cut by peasants, and Cairo was isolated from the countryside for weeks. The revolt was only put down when tens of thousands of British troops were sent into the country and, aided by aircraft, restored by force the control of the central government on an essentially unarmed population.Compared to the other great peasant insurrectionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Egyptian Revolt of 1919 has been little studied, and consequently our knowledge of it is not very great. Until very recently, the classic work and basic source has been Thawrat sanat 1919 by c Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi c i. 5 Without denigrating Rafi c i's work, it is clear that there is room for further study. 6 What explanations of the Egyptian revolt do we have now? One often mentioned is the anger of the peasants and the urban working masses and their alienation from British colonial officials and British values. It was European Christian domination, rather than the outcomes of the policies of that domination, that evoked peasant rage:It was none the less an extraordinary piece of folly on our part to make in a Mahomedan country repeated collections, which, under pressure from the local authorities, became really compulsory levies, for the Red Cross, as the mere name lent itself to easy misrepresentation and was in fact suspected of covering some mysterious purpose of sectarian propaganda. 7More recently, Reinhard Schulze has argued that the revolt represents a generalized rejection of Western capitalism:

Recent scholars of the Middle East have implicitly and suggestively noted similarities between contemporary Muslim activists and sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. A more explicit and rigorous argument comparing Protestantism and contemporary Sunni movements in Egypt can yield insights into both movements.

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