In Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, henceforth AJR, (2001), we advanced the hypothesis that the mortality rates faced by Europeans in different parts of the world after 1500 affected their willingness to establish settlements and choice of colonization strategy. Places that were relatively healthy (for Europeans) were—when they fell under European control—more likely to receive better economic and political institutions. In contrast, places where European settlers were less likely to go were more likely to have “extractive” institutions imposed. We also posited that this early pattern of institutions has persisted over time and influences the extent and nature of institutions in the modern world. On this basis, we proposed using estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today. Data on settlers themselves are unfortunately patchy—particularly because not many went to places they believed, with good reason, to be most unhealthy. We therefore followed the lead of Curtin (1989 and 1998) who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings. 1 Curtin’s data were based on pathbreaking data collection and statistical work initiated by the British military in the mid-nineteenth century. These data became part of the foundation of both contemporary thinking about public health (for soldiers and for civilians) and the life insurance industry (as actuaries and executives considered the

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The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

The Logic of Violence in Civil War: List of Tables and Figures

http://feem-web.it/ess/ess07/files/bulte6_ln.pdf

Political foundations of the resource curse

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9106/w9106.pdf

Tropics, germs, and crops: how endowments influence economic development

Contrary to expectations implicit in the image of the “melting pot” that ethnic distinctions could be eliminated in US society, the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in the United States and around the world has prompted social scientists to rethink models of ethnicity rooted in assumptions about the inevitability of assimilation.1 Instead, the resiliency of cultural, linguistic, and religious differences among populations has led to a search for a more accurate, less evolutionary means of understanding not only the resurgence of ancient differences among peoples, but also the actual emergence of historically new ethnic groups.2 The result has been the development of a model of ethnicity that stresses the fluid, situational, volitional, and dynamic character of ethnic identification, organization, and action – a model that emphasizes the socially “constructed” aspects of ethnicity, that is, the ways in which ethnic boundaries, identities, and cultures, are negotiated, defined, and produced through social interaction inside and outside ethnic communities.3

Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture

(1995). The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 39-40.

The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective

The Politics of Cultural Pluralism.

The difficulties inherent in any political analysis are compounded in the cases of the third world nations by the complexity of their socio-cultural makeup. Western political scientists are often ill-equipped to deal with a fundamental fact of the third world politics - cultural pluralism. The author explores patterns of conflict and integration in a variety of culturally plural societies, and he offers a number of theoretical postulates concerning the nature of such conflict and integration. His approach to the problem is comprehensive both in its scope and in its theoretical aspirations. He applicates his inductively derived general propositions to a number of sattings: Zare, Nigeria, India, Uganda, Tanzania, Indonesia, the Philipins, the Arab world and Latin America.

The politics of cultural pluralism

The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State

Examination of the political trajectory of African states since the terminal colonial period suggests that, by the 1990s, the 'post-colonial' label still widely employed was losing its pertinence. The term acquired widespread currency not long after independence in acknowledgment of the importation into new states of the practices, routines and mentalities of the colonial state. These served as a platform for a more ambitious form of political monopoly, whose legitimating discourse was developmentalism. The colonial state legacy decanted into a patrimonial autocracy which decayed into crisis by the 1980s, bringing external and internal pressures for economic and political state reconfiguration. But the serious erosion of the stateness of many African polities by the 1990s limited the scope for effective reform and opened the door for a complex web of novel civil conflicts; there was also a renewed saliency of informal politics, as local societies adapted to diminished state presence and service provision. Perhaps the post-colonial moment has passed. AT THE MOMENT OF THE GRAND ENTRY OF AFRICAN STATES into the world consort of nations in 1960 (17 out of 53 achieved sovereignty that year), the primary discursive referent for the new polities was 'post-independent'. From an African nationalist perspective, widely shared in the academic community, the achievement of independence was a defining historical moment, the culmination of an epic struggle. Incorporating visions of liberation, transformation and uplift, the independent African state was a newborn polity. As 'new states', African polities appeared to shed the colonial chrysalis. By subtle metamorphosis, over time the routine descriptor for African states became 'post-colonial'. This semantic shift was not innocent of meaning. Formal sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle gradually became less salient as defining attributes than the colonial origins of the African state; more crucially the wholesale importation of the routines, practices, Crawford Young is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of WisconsinMadison. An early version of this paper served as a keynote address for a conference on 'Beyond the Post-Colonial State in Central Africa?' organized by the Centre of African Studies of the University of Copenhagen in December 2001.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3518419.pdf

Crawford Young

Papers

The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective

The Politics of Cultural Pluralism.

The politics of cultural pluralism

The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State

The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics