Historical Legacies at the Grassroots: Local Public Goods in Agra District, 1905-2011 Alexander Lee* September 20, 2020 Abstract Accounts of the historical origins of spatial inequality often use aggregated spatial units, and do not measure outcomes between the time of treatment and the present day. This paper analyses a new panel dataset of local public goods provision in a single North Indian district with observations at the village decade level going back to 1905, and detailed information on colonial land tenure institutions, landholding patterns and demographics. A historical factor often thought to influence rural politics in India, the presence of large or absentee colonial landowners, explains little variation in local public goods conditional on population and spatial location, while villages inhabited by upper caste groups had an advantage only during the mid-20th century. This non-effect is in part a result of changing effects over time. In particular, while villages have always been more likely to gain public goods while a member of the village’s largest caste group was in power at the state level, changes in the composition of Northern India’s political class have meant that this favoritism has benefited different groups in different periods. The results illustrate the changing and contingent nature of effects of institutional differences Keywords: Historical Legacies, State Capacity, Public Goods PRELIMINARY WORK: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION *Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester, Harkness Hall, Rochester, NY 14627. Email: alexan-
[email protected]. 1 Introduction In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of literature on the long term effects on historical institutions on economic development and public goods provision (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2002; Dell, 2010; Lee and Schultz, 2012; Iyer, 2010; Sellars and Alix-Garcia, 2018; Dasgupta, 2018; Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011; Besley and Reynal-Querol, 2014).