From Conquest to Centralization: Domestic Conflict and the Transition to Direct Rule

Garfias, Francisco; Sellars, Emily A.

doi:10.1086/711175

Cited by 24 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…These interactions, in turn, represent the bulk of the ordinary citizens’ interactions with their government (Pepinsky et al, 2017). This measure is in line with historical work that correlates bureaucratic availability with state capacity (Garfias & Sellars, 2021).…”

Section: Data and Measurementsupporting

confidence: 79%

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The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

Dulay

2022

Comparative Political Studies

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A growing literature posits that colonial Christian missions brought schooling to the colonies, improving human capital in ways that persist to this day. But in some places, they did much more. This paper argues that colonial Catholic missions in the Philippines functioned as state-builders, establishing law and order and building fiscal and infrastructural capacities in territories they controlled. The mission-as-state was the result of a bargain between the Catholic missions and the Spanish colonial government: missionaries converted the population and engaged in state-building, whereas the colonial government reaped the benefits of state expansion while staying in the capital. Exposure to these Catholic missions-as-state then led to long-run improvements in state capacity and development. I find that municipalities that had a Catholic mission have higher levels of state capacity and development today. A variety of mechanisms—religious competition, education, urbanization, and structural transformation—explain these results.

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Section: Data and Measurementsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…The instructions given in the encomienda-the collection of revenues, mobilization of labor, and spreading of the Catholic faith-implied the need to hold and control localities. It is worth noting that other scholars use encomiendas as a proxy for indirect rule during Spanish colonization (Garfias & Sellars, 2021).…”

Section: Colonial Government Controlsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

Dulay

2022

Comparative Political Studies

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“…The importance of the disease environment for the demographic collapse can be hardly overstated. We draw the data on the historical disease environment from Cook and Krusic (2004) and Garfias and Sellars (2018). Our proxies for the strength of the disease environment include indices of drought severity for the years 1600 and 1645 as the two major years linked with the onset of cocolitzi epidemics (Acuña Soto et.…”

Section: Covariatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When climatic conditions improve, rodents dissipate into agricultural fields and homes causing rapid spread of infection among the populace by inhaling rodents' faeces. The spread of the bacteria has been associated with the post-conquest demographic collapse (Garfias and Sellars 2018).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Effects of Radical Institutional Overhauls: Evidence from the Mexican-American War

Dothan

Kovač

Spruk

2022

Preprint

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This paper examines the impact of radical institutional reforms on long-term development of property rights and on institutions regulating contracting. The paper demonstrates that the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) had a significant effect on the institutional development of Mexico. The war partially removed the legal and economic barriers that protected the old oligarchic elites in Mexico and paved the way for the modernization of legal and commercial codes. The analysis exploits the within-country variation in the presence of US troops during the Mexican-American war across Mexican states and cities. Using propensity score and nearest neighbour matching techniques with orthogonal covariates, the paper presents evidence of the long-term institutional implications of the presence of troops. Troops-controlled areas have less complex business registration procedures, better quality of land administration, broader access to property rights, markedly better quality of the judicial process, and lower costs of enforcing contracts than the areas without troops’ presence. We show that the presence of US troops generated a positive and radical historical shock for institutional development that survived to the present day and made the return to the previous status quo nearly impossible. The positive effects of troops’ presence are robust to a variety of specification checks and are particularly large for smaller cities. JEL Classification: C31, D74, N16, N46,

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“…State-building reforms represent an important example. Efforts to consolidate the state's fiscal or bureaucratic control over territory, while perhaps laying the foundation for future peace and prosperity (e.g., Acemoglu, Garcia-Jimeno, and Robinson 2015;Dincecco and Katz 2014), often come at the expense of elite intermediaries (Besley and Persson 2009;Garfias 2018;Garfias and Sellars 2021;Gerring et al 2011). State building, though capacity enhancing over the long term, can backfire by reducing the willingness of elites to back the government during a crisis.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

When State Building Backfires: Elite Coordination and Popular Grievance in Rebellion

Garfias

Sellars

2021

American J Political Sci

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We examine the complementary influence of elite politics, popular grievances, and central government weakness on rebellion. Efforts to strengthen the central state often come at the expense of the elite intermediaries charged with maintaining local political control. By driving a wedge between local elites and the central government, centralizing reforms can reduce intermediaries' willingness to repress mobilization, providing an opening for popular rebellion during both localized and national crises. For a given level of commoner grievance, revolts from below are thus more likely to be attempted and more likely to spread where elites' incentives to enforce order have been diminished. We formalize these ideas and provide supportive evidence using subnational data on rebellion, tax centralization, and drought in colonial Mexico from the late seventeenth century to the War of Independence.

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From Conquest to Centralization: Domestic Conflict and the Transition to Direct Rule

Cited by 24 publications

References 40 publications

The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

Long-Term Effects of Radical Institutional Overhauls: Evidence from the Mexican-American War

When State Building Backfires: Elite Coordination and Popular Grievance in Rebellion

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