Industrialization and ethnic change in the modern world

Abstract

Despite the large recent attention given to ethnicity within the social sciences, the sources of modern ethnic change have remained opaque. Drawing upon social theory from Marx and Gellner, I argue here that industrialization incentivizes ethnic homogenization by lowering the relative value of land. Using carbon emissions per capita as a proxy for industrialization, I show that crosscountry changes in ethno-linguistic fractionalization between 1961 and 1985 are negatively correlated with industrialization, and that this result is robust to the use of a variety of control variables, sub-samples and alternative measures of industrialization such as cement production, urbanization and agriculture as a percentage of GDP. In particular I find no evidence for the direct role of the state in promoting ethnic homogenization, which adds to other recent evidence on how economic incentives may trump political ones as regards identity change, at least in the short-to medium term.

The impact of demographic structure, human capital, migration and environmental degradation on economic growth in Asia

“…We also found a significant and positive association between environmental degradation (as measured by CO 2 emissions) and economic growth, see Tables 1–3. This positive result implies that industrialization, associated with CO 2 emissions, can lead to higher economic growth, which implies that policymakers should sacrifice economic growth to reduce environmental degradation growth (Green, 2019; Ahmad and Du, 2017; Azam et al. , 2016).…”

Explaining inter‐ethnic marriage in Sub‐Saharan Africa

“…In the first case, the negative relationship between country population and inter‐ethnic marriage is an important one in a continent with high population growth rates as a consequence of high fertility and low mortality rates, particularly in the Sahel and Central/East African regions. Second, the U‐shaped relationship with ethnic group size (and positive relationship with ELF) is also notable in a context where there is a history of ethnic assimilation from smaller groups to larger groups, whether via industrialization as individuals assimilate from smaller to larger ethnic groups (Gellner, 1983; Green, 2019), the provision of public goods due to the desire to identify with politically dominant ethnic groups (Wimmer, 2018) or other factors. In other words, processes of ethnic assimilation that lead ethnic groups to grow in size and ELF measures to diminish could have a negative effect on inter‐ethnic marriage across the continent.…”

The Politics of Ethnic Identity in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Finally, (Cassan, 2015) provides evidence that legislation in colonial India incentivized the individual-level manipulation of caste identity for the purposes of acquiring land. The same logic applies in crossnational analyses as well: (Wimmer, 2015) suggests that states provide incentives for individuals to identify with the nation when they provide public goods, while (Green, 2018) shows that individuals give up more parochial tribal identities and adhere to larger ethnic identities during periods of industrialization. Within this literature, (Cassan, 2015;Laitin, 1998;Nix & Qian, 2015) are particularly relevant inasmuch as the identity shifts they document occur along horizontal rather than vertical lines, inasmuch as individuals shift identity from one comparable, exclusive social group to another, rather than from a smaller identity to a larger one, with the former nested inside the larger such that both identities can be held simultaneously (and are thus not exclusive).…”