Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development

Abstract

We show that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,500 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World.For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and high civil conflict. Our results offer new evidence about where and when "war makes states." * We thank

Diversity and Conflict

“…In this section we investigate whether population diversity predicts historical conflict events in a cross-section of countries. We use information on the locations of violent conflict events over the period 1400-1799, as compiled by Brecke (1999) and geocoded in Dincecco, Fenske and Onorato (2015). We map these events to countries according to modern borders.…”

Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India

“…There is no significant correlation between warfare and state centralization in the context of pre-colonial Africa (Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson, 2013). Moreover, the correlation between pre-colonial conflict levels and long-run development outcomes in Africa is negative (Besley and Reynal-Querol, 2014;Dincecco, Fenske and Onorato, 2019). Thus, our study helps clarify the conditions under which war "makes" states and promotes economic development are most likely to hold.…”

Diversity and Conflict

“…This section investigates whether population diversity predicts historical conflict events in a cross‐section of countries. Specifically, the analysis exploits information on the locations of violent conflicts during the 1400–1799 time period, as compiled by Brecke () and geocoded by Dincecco, Fenske, and Onorato (), employing the geocoding of conflict locations to map these historical conflicts to territories defined by contemporary national borders. The examined time period excludes the colonial wars of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of which were associated with the Scramble for Africa.…”