Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India

Abstract

Does pre-colonial history – and in particular the role of interstate warfare – help explain long-run development patterns across India? To address this question, we construct a new geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. We document a robust positive relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development today. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more exposed to pre-colonial conflict experienced greater early state-making, followed by lower political violence and higher investments in physical and human capital in the long term.

The Spatial Drivers of Discrimination: Evidence From Anti-Muslim Fake News in India

“…To address this concern, we perform two sets of exercises. First, we show that our results hold if we use several alternative definitions of exposure to Muslim attacks, such as exploiting the intensity of exposure in terms of the number of Muslim attacks, using a distance-based measure of exposure as in Dincecco et al (2022), restricting Muslim attacks to those occurring only after the advent of the Delhi Sultanate, and including also Muslim attacks that occurred up to 1840. Second, we show that our results are robust to controlling in the main specification for several other potential confounders (interacted by a Post-March30 dummy), including further geographical controls, variables capturing historical state capacity and the local exposure to colonizers, and measures of linguistic and ethnic fractionalization.…”

“…In the precolonial period, the Indian subcontinent 7 was divided into many independent and politically fragmented states that, throughout the centuries, have often been in conflict with each other. These conflicts, motivated by aims of territorial expansion mixed with religious motives, have been shaping the long-term development patterns of the country (Dincecco et al, 2022).…”

“…This class of conflicts, which we refer to as Muslim attacks, characterized the history of the Indian subcontinent for several centuries. Our measure of exposure to Muslim attacks relies on the database assembled by Dincecco et al (2022)-based on Jaques ( 2007)-which contains information on the universe of conflicts recorded on the Indian subcontinent between the years 1000 and 2000. For each conflict, we have the date, the geographical coordinates, and a short description of the event.…”

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

“…The first set of controls accounts for the presence of pre-colonial settlements or of competing religions, particularly Islam. Extant work has empirically linked the long-run impact of pre-colonial organization on contemporary state capacity (Dincecco et al, 2020; Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013) and on the institutions that colonizers establish given the existing pre-colonial settlements (Ricart-Huguet, 2021). To account for pre-colonial settlements, I create a binary variable equal to 1 if a municipality had a pre-colonial settlement and 0 if it did not.…”

The Complex Imprint of Foreign Rule: Tracking Differential Legacies along the Administrative Hierarchy

“…In contrast to some non-European cases (Arias and Girod 2014;Hariri 2012), the Romanians of Transylvania were neither able to prevent the imposition of foreign institutions nor did their traditional administrative organization persist beyond 1848. Furthermore, on the general relevance and long-term impact of precolonial developments, see also Wilfahrt (2018) and Dincecco et al (2022). 22 See also Janos (1982, 95-96).…”