Joan Ricart-Huguet

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Who Governs? Education as Colonial Revenue Maximization

Joan Ricart-Huguet∗

October 12, 2016

JOB MARKET PAPER

Abstract

Regional composition of a government is key for political stability, clientelism and public goods provision in developing countries, many of which are former colonies. But what explains the regional distribution of political power? Given the strategic nature of cabinet formation, extant explanations mostly focus on bargaining—leaders allocate portfolios to minimize unrest—but fail to consider long-term factors. Using a sample of 16 former British and French African colonies, I ﬁnd that some districts were represented in post-colonial governments much more than others, even adjusting for population. By combining historical records and geospatial data, I show that district political returns—proxied by minister shares—derive from colonial investments in public (missionary) education in French (British) colonies but not from pre-colonial political centralization, levels of colonial development or other colonial investments. I argue that these political leaders are a byproduct of the revenue-maximizing strategy of colonial administrators, who recruited civil servants disproportionately based on numeracy and literacy. Regional political inequality after the end of foreign rule thus has a structural human capital component which might mediate the relationship between colonialism and current political and economic development. JEL: F54, I26, N37, N47

∗Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. Email: [email protected]. For useful comments, I thank Carles Boix, Evan Lieberman, Marc Ratkovic and Leonard Wantchekon as well as Jennifer Widner, Tim Parsons, Robert Tignor, Tsering Wangyal Shawa, Chris Parel, Bill Guthe, Torben Behmer, Brandon Miller de la Cuesta, Romain Ferrali, Costantino Pischedda, Rajesh Ranganath and seminar participants at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Princeton University and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. I am grateful to Elise Huillery and Bob Woodberry for sharing the relevant data. Jeremy Darrington and Elizabeth Bennett helped me locate multiple data sources. Seth Merkin Morokoﬀ, Luise Zhong and Bruno Schaﬀa provided excellent research assistance.

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1 Introduction

Regional composition of a government is important to understand clientelism, public goods provision, and conflict prevention in developing countries. On distributive politics, Hodler and Raschky (2014, p. 995) use data on 126 countries to show “that subnational regions have more intense nighttime light when being the birth region of the current political leader.” Franck and Rainer (2012) focus on primary education and infant mortality and present similar findings for 18 African countries. Kramon and Posner(2016, p. 1) present evidence from Kenya showing that, beyond the president, “ministerial appointments come with real power to impact distributive politics.”1 On conflict, Arriola(2009) shows that increasing cabinet size reduces the probability of a coup against political leaders by accommodating diverse groups; while Cederman et al.(2010) show that “ethnoregional” groups recently excluded from government are more likely to instigate coups and civil wars. But what explains the the share of ministers hailing from each of the country’s districts to begin with? More generally, what explains the regional distribution of political power in a country?

Almost all existing literature focuses on the short-term strategic environment of government formation. A large literature in democratic settings emphasizes the importance of post-election bargaining between ideological parties, usually led by a formateur (Baron, 1991), to explain cabinet composition (e.g. Laver and Shepsle, 1996; Strom et al., 1994; Huber and Martinez-Gallardo, 2008). The emphasis on bargaining not only applies to democracies but also to less democratic developing countries and former colonies (Roessler, 2011). In those settings, political scientists have long emphasized regional and ethnic diﬀerences (Horowitz, 1985), which are seen as a more important cleavage than ideology in the bargaining process (Rothchild and Olorunsola, 1983). The formateurs or “chief executives [tend] to allocate key political and economic positions according to ethnic considerations” (Keller, 1983, p. 259), a practice described by Rothchild as “regional balancing” or “ethnic arithmetic.”2

While bargaining is indeed important, it does not tell us whether and how structural differences across a country’s regions (e.g. their populations or levels of development) may affect their representation in government. The literature has ignored longer-term factors that may underlie the regional composition of governments and therefore provide a fundamental explanation of cabinet formation. This structural dimension is difficult to study because the formation of a state and its political leaders constitute a long and endogenous historical process in Europe (Abramson, 2016; Tilly, 1990) and elsewhere (Boix, 2015). To alleviate the problem of historical endogeneity, I take

1See Kramon and Posner(2013) for a long list of studies on distributive politics in Africa. 2For instance, “President Kenyatta’s announcement of three ministerial appointments from Nyanza province in July 1969 was clearly calculated to appease the aggrieved feelings of the Luo people following the assassination of Tom Mboya, one of Kenya’s founding fathers” (Rothchild, 1970, p. 605). Existing literature argues that the colonizer is indirectly responsible for these post-colonial rebalancing practices.

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advantage of East and West Africa’s colonization and decolonization shocks, respectively around 1900 and 1960, because the colonizer rapidly changed the structural conditions of the colony and then exited two generations later.3 The end of European rule was a key moment for state formation because these colonies established their ﬁrst-ever independent cabinets.4 To learn about the origins of political leaders, I use a combination of historical sources that includes over 900 ministerial biographies of the 16 former British and French colonies in East and West Africa from 1960 to 1970.5 I complement these biographies with a large set of data sources that include subnational pre-colonial and geographic characteristics, colonial maps with subnational boundaries, and disaggregated records on colonial investments.

I ﬁnd that some districts were represented in government much more than others, as proxied by the share of ministers born in that district. Figure1 shows, for the cases of Nigeria and Senegal, that some districts punch above their weight and others below even if we take population into account by subtracting population shares from minister shares. For example, Bornu in Nigeria has 9% of the minister-years but only 4.5% of the country’s population. Figures 10 to 13 in the Appendix show that severe disproportionalities exist more generally in British and French colonies.

In this paper, I provide a theory to explain why colonial investments in education—but not development more generally—are important for the district composition of early post-colonial governments and hence regional inequality in representation.6 I argue that these political leaders are a byproduct of the revenue-maximizing strategy of colonial administrators, who recruited civil servants disproportionately based on numeracy and literacy. Colonialism was a conscious exploitative enterprise (Mamdani, 1996; Young, 1994) but the effects of these exploitative practices on post-colonial political representation were largely unintended.7 European officials, under severe budget constraints in East and West Africa, recruited natives for the colonial civil service and even for participation in legislative councils (territorial assemblies in French colonies), largely set up after World War II. These “évolués” (evolved) or “Europeanised”—different terms with similar racist connotations—reduced operating costs because they were paid lower wages than their European

3While most colonies became independent around 1960, the start of colonization obviously varies. While Ghana was a colony by the mid 19th century, Niger was colonized in the early 20th century and Malawi became a protec- torate only in 1907. 4Other regions such as Latin America and parts of Asia also became independent from European rule in the 19th or 20th century and established their first-ever cabinets, as opposed to rule by an emperor, a royal court or “tribal elders.” These would be adequate areas in which to extend this research (see Section3). 5The sample consists of the eight French West African (AOF) colonies as well as the main eight territories under the British Colonial Office (CO): Benin (formerly Dahomey), Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana (Gold Coast), Guinea, Kenya, Malawi (Nyasaland), Mali (French Soudan), Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania (Tanganyika), Uganda and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). 6I establish the existence of political returns to colonial education not at the individual level—leaders are generally better educated than the average citizen—but at the district level. 7As explained in Section2, these political effects were largely unintended because few would have guessed before World War II that European empires would mostly come to an end less than 20 years later (Cooper, 1996; Lawrence, 2013; Darwin, 2012).

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Figure 1: Minister-year shares by district of birth (1960-1971)

Nigeria minister-years share minister-years share - population share 10 10 5 0 5 -5 Percentage -10 -15 0

Oyo Oyo Ijebu Ilorin Zaria Warri Niger Kano Kano Ilorin Ijebu Zaria Warri Niger Ondo Kabba Benin Benue OgojaOwerriBornuLagos Owerri OndoBenue Kabba OgojaBenin BornuLagos Katsina OnitshaBauchi Plateau SokotoCalabar Onitsha Sokoto Bauchi Katsina Calabar Plateau Adamawa Abeokuta Adamawa Abeokuta Cameroons Cameroons Senegal minister-years share minister-years share - population share 30 30 20 20 10 Percentage 10 0 -10 0

Baol Baol Bakel Podor Louga Dakar Thies Podor Bakel Louga Dakar Thies Dagana Matam Matam Dagana Tivaouane Saintlouis Tivaouane Saintlouis SinesaloumCasamance Sinesaloum Casamance Hautegambie Tambacounda Hautegambie Tambacounda

Note: The left ﬁgures show the percentage of ministers born in a particular district of the former colony. The right ﬁgures subtract district population shares to that percentage. Either way, some districts are over-represented and others under-represented. For example, Bornu in Nigeria has 9% of the minister-years but only 4.5% of the country’s population. counterparts and provided local knowledge (Lawrance et al., 2006) that Europeans did not have in order to increase revenue collection.

Men—rarely women—were recruited not because they were “tribal chiefs” but because they possessed formal education, a necessary condition for admission into a civil service which included various jobs such as accountants, teachers, doctors and a variety of administrators (Sharkey, 2013). Because numeracy and literacy are key to perform these functions, men from highly educated districts were selected by European colonial oﬃcials disproportionately, not because of ethnic characteristics (Horowitz, 1985) but because of the absolute—rather than the relative—number of educated individuals in the district. Until the end of the colonial period, Europeans had little concern for regional balancing practices since political power was solely in their hands.

Selection on education had consequences for post-colonial governments: just as literacy and numeracy learned in school were transferable to the civil service, administrative and organizational

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skills learned in the civil service were transferable to politics. Although colonial legislatures were rubber stamp assemblies and African bureaucrats and politicians had very little power until the 1950s, native legislators and civil servants acquired a diﬀerent but relevant political skill set that I term “colonial incumbency advantage” because it included experience in public aﬀairs, skills and name recognition.8 Colonial incumbency advantage even allowed some future presidents (e.g. Senghor in Senegal, Obote in Uganda) to build a support base prior to independence thanks to their membership in the structure of the colonial state.

While the theory applies to both empires, data shows that district political returns to education are larger in French than in British colonies, where post-colonial leaders engaged in more ”regional rebalancing.” Second, returns are type-speciﬁc: they derive only from missionary education in British colonies and only from public education in French colonies, suggesting that the importance of education is limited to the dominant type of education provided in each empire. Furthermore, the theory outlined above should apply more to civil than to military governments since most military leaders were not members of the colonial civil service and did not sit in colonial legislatures. Using this implication as a placebo test, I divide the data between country-years under civilian and military governments and show that district political returns to education are statistically insigniﬁcant under military governments.

Other possible explanations are conceptually weaker and do not bear out empirically. First, investments in infrastructure and public health are often positively correlated with district minister shares but there is no clear theory causally linking these other investments to cabinet formation. Empirically, infrastructure and health investments have no independent effect on district minister shares. Second, the importance of education could be the result of development not captured by colonial investments. I proxy district economic development with levels of taxation and with the size of the settler community to show that these proxies of overall development do not affect district minister shares either. Third, district minister shares are not simply a function of population size, and in fact district population is largely irrelevant in French colonies. This stands partly in contrast to Francois’ et al. (2012, p. 1) finding that bargaining processes result in ministerial positions being “allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups” across 15 sub-Saharan African countries in the post-colonial period.9

Finally, other research suggests that investments could be epiphenomenal to pre-colonial characteristics since the colonial period in East and West Africa was brief. Investments were low and could be explained by the diﬀerent levels of pre-colonial political centralization in the continent, which recent research shows improves current “outcomes such as light density at night, paved roads,

8Only in 1956 did the loi-cadre Deﬀerre empower colonial executives and legislatures of French African colonies. The process was less uniform in British colonies. 9They argue, formalizing Arriola(2009), that avoiding political turmoil is the main reason for this strong correlation between population and minister shares.

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immunization, literacy, and infant mortality rates” (Bandyopadhyay and Green, 2016, p. 471; see also Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013b). This recent evidence is consistent with Diamond’s (2012b) claim that “the most important factor behind [good institutions] is the historical duration of centralized government.”10 Pre-colonial advantages could persist especially if colonial states were weak as much research suggests (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; Herbst, 2000; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013a). However, I ﬁnd that the British and the French empire did not invest more in pre-colonially centralized societies.11 Pre-colonial political institutions and Native Author- ities were useful for revenue collection and for maintaining order, but the locus of power was the colonial state.

In sum, this paper makes three main contributions. First, I collect and combine new data sources to show that current theories of cabinet formation, with their focus on bargaining and proportionality to population shares, are at best incomplete. Second, I fill this gap by developing a more structural theory of cabinet and political elite formation that highlights the political consequences of European administrators’ recruitment strategy aimed at maximizing revenue. Selection on numeracy and literacy stands in contrast to a historically rich but often underspecified literature that focuses on putative differences between ethnic groups. Third, while most recent literature examines the effect of colonialism on economic development (see Nunn(2009) for a review), this paper helps us understand the impact of colonialism on political outcomes (Woodberry, 2012; Wilkinson, 2015). The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. Section2 develops the argument and section3 places it in historical context. Sections4 and5 present the data and the results, respectively. Section6 concludes.

2 Political leaders as a byproduct of colonial revenue maximization

Cabinet composition is essential to understand who governs. Focusing on the executive, rather than the legislature, is warranted for at least two reasons. First, legislatures around the world, even in non-democracies, take district population into account when devising their legislatures and usually have a ﬁxed number of seats for each constituency or district, thereby eliminating regional power inequalities by design.12 Second, cabinets are important because the executive is the most

10The pre-colonial kingdoms of Dahomey in Southern Benin and Buganda in Central Uganda, for example, likely developed more political organizational skills than pre-colonial acephalous societies in Northern Benin or Eastern Uganda. These skills could be helpful in achieving power after independence when Africans ran the former colonies for the ﬁrst time. 11For example, the British invested more in the Buganda kingdom than in the rest of Uganda but less in the Hausa kingdoms than in the rest of Nigeria. 12Figure 14 in the Appendix shows the parliamentary seats allocated to each colonial district in Senegal (Sy, 2009, p. 21). Malapportionment is the instrument governments use to try to deviate from the population criterion.

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important branch of government in the usually less-democratic context of developing countries and former colonies (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; Bratton and van de Walle, 1997).

I deﬁne district representation as the share of cabinet members—usually ministers and hence the use of the two terms interchangeably throughout the paper—that were born in a particular district. Some districts may be represented in the government more than others because, unlike in legislatures, there is no formal rule that allocates cabinet seats to districts or any other group. Regional rebalancing can be thought of as an informal rule analogous to the formal rules that determine the territorial composition of the legislature. Its goal is to avoid the exclusion from the cabinet of some regions and groups that might otherwise threaten with secession, violence or unrest. If we let minik be the total number of ministers born in district i and country k, then

minik the district share of ministers is simply %minik = 100 N . For instance, a district with P min i=1 ik no ministers (0%) is surely under-represented in the executive. Analogous to the Gini coeﬃcient, inequality in representation would be extreme if all ministers hailed from one single district.

Unless regional rebalancing produces shares of ministers that are very close a district’s share of the population, as Francois et al.(2012) argue, some districts may punch above their weight and others below. That matters because the literature on clientelism in developing countries has established that ministers favor their constituents (Franck and Rainer, 2012; Kramon and Posner, 2016). In the remainder of this section, I argue that there are good reasons to expect a district’s over or under-representation to be rooted in the actions of colonial administrators. In order to develop the argument, I start by considering what is arguably the main reason for colonialism throughout history: proﬁt.

2.1 The revenue imperative: selecting on numeracy and literacy

European colonialism was an exploitative enterprise (Chi-Bonnardel, 1973; Darwin, 2012) and economic profit was one of the main motivations for the colonial enterprise in South America, Africa and Asia (Diamond, 2005). The metropole constantly put pressure to minimize the quantity of funds, especially grants-in-aid, available to colonial governments (Constantine, 1984, p. 14, 84; Gardner, 2012, p. 9). So much so that British and French African colonies were expected to be financially self-sufficient in all domains other than the military, which meant very little support for colonial administrators. Hence the generation of enough revenue and a good use of investments generated from that revenue was paramount for the viability of the colonial state— what Young(1994, p. 124) terms “the revenue imperative.” And yet colonial states were often short in administrative personnel and described as being “thin on the ground” and “skeletal” (Young, 1994, p. 124). In this context of scarcity, what were the revenue-maximizing strategies of European administrators?

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Taxing settlers was difficult for various reasons, including their political connections to the metropole and their outsized influence on the colonial state. Settlers in Kenya, for instance, went as far as to create the European Taxpayer’s Protection League to shift the tax burden away from Europeans to the native population (Gardner, 2012, p. 98). Instead, some of the most prominent accounts focus on the importance of international trade tariffs and the role of Native Authorities and local chiefs as agents of local taxation in British and French colonies (Mamdani, 1996; Suret- Canale, 1971).

Cooperation of local chiefs was indeed useful to raise colonial revenue. However, there was another important strategy through which the colonial state tried to maximize revenue: the careful selection of its lower civil service echelons among the qualified local population. Colonial budget constraints induced administrators to minimize costs by recruiting Africans that were paid low wages to fill the ranks of the civil service in each colony.13 Sharkey(2013, p. 165) highlights this strategic element: colonial administrators “from the start had been training and hiring African men as petty government employees, who typed and filed papers, surveyed plots of land, taught in government schools, disbursed medicines, counted revenues and more.” Numeracy and literacy were paramount to perform any of these functions, and hence civil service recruitment was a function of education to a large extent. The importance of education was not restricted to civil service jobs. Numeracy and literacy were also important for membership in colonial legislatures, even if they were largely rubber-stamp political bodies until the 1950s. Lugard(1922, p. 78) considered that “Western education” had seen “remarkable results.” “[T]he Europeanised African [racism pervades the book], defined by its education and Christian morals, occupied the positions of importance. For example, they sit in the Legislative Councils.”

In sum, I argue that men were selected in higher numbers than the district population would warrant not because of some ethnic or martial trait—these were useful pretexts—but because of the absolute—rather than the relative—number of educated individuals in the district. To anchor the argument, consider a colony that consists of only two districts, A and B. District A has 100 inhabitants and B has 1,000, and 20 in each completed primary education. To ﬁll out 10 positions in the civil service or in the legislature, one option would be to recruit more from the larger district B. Instead, selection on numeracy while disregarding population or other district characteristics means a 5 and 5 split, in expectation. As a consequence, A becomes over-represented compared to B and gains a disproportionate weight in the colonial civil service and legislature. These imbalances existed because Europeans had little concern for the strategic “regional rebalancing” in which post-colonial leaders would later engage (Rothchild and Olorunsola, 1983).14

13See Cooper’s (1996) account of wage discrimination in British and French colonies in Africa. 14Wilkinson(2015) shows that the regional and ethnic imbalances in British military recruitment in South Asia were very large and had consequences for post-colonial politics in India and Pakistan.

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2.2 Incumbency advantage: the political returns of colonial education

What were the effects of this biased recruitment into the colonial civil service and the rubber-stamp legislatures on the distribution of post-colonial power? I argue that unequal district presence in the colonial state had important unintended consequences in the post-colonial period: just like literacy and numeracy learned in school were transferable to the civil service, skills acquired in civil service and in colonial legislatures provided those over-represented districts with an incumbency advantage as colonies transitioned to independence. Hence, political leaders in the early post- colonial period are a byproduct of a revenue maximizing strategy based on education. Perhaps because of the prevalence of political conflict and military rule in many former colonies during the Cold War, the literature has not taken education seriously enough as a source of power in that time period. Figure2 presents the basic causal chain. Why were these political consequences a largely unintended legacy of colonial administrators? Few would have guessed before World War II that most European empires would come to an end less than 20 years later. Cooper(1996) shows the end of colonialism and its timing were far from clear in French and British African colonies. Lawrence(2013) convincingly argues they were not obvious in the French empire at large either until the French reneged on their promise of “political equality” and citizenship for their colonial subjects. Darwin(2012) documents the sheer difficulty that British officials and observers faced in predicting the future of the British empire even after World War II.

Figure 2: Causal chain from colonial district investments in education to colonial district minister shares

Colonial politics

Educational Post-colonial investments cabinet shares

Colonial civil service

While I argue that education was the root source of incumbency advantage, its mechanisms were multiple. Colonial legislative councils were typically rubber-stamp legislatures until the late 1950s, but nonetheless they provided a relevant political skill set and even allowed some future leaders to build a base of support prior to independence (e.g. Senghor in Senegal, Obote in Uganda) thanks to their membership in the political structure of the colonial state. The advantage derived from

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membership in the civil service was not directly of a political nature. And yet, belonging to the colonial civil service entailed a position of prestige, and even name recognition. It also garnered the individual experience in bureaucracy and management skills, especially as he would climb the ladder to senior positions, something that became more common after World War II in both empires.15 Members of the colonial legislatures or councils did not have to be popularly elected by their constituents—they were often appointed, especially before World War II—in order to gain experience, political skills and name recognition, important mechanisms of incumbency advantage.

The explanation provided here is far from attributing virtue or a fulﬁllment of the “white man’s burden” to the logic of selection on education. Rather, the argument moves away from a standard “divide and rule” logic by positing that a rational economic explanation, proﬁt maximization, had largely unintended consequences for post-colonial political representation. In the remainder of this section I present several testable implications of the argument.

2.3 Testable implications

Since revenue collection relied on a recruitment procedure based on numeracy and literacy, the main hypothesis is that levels of colonial education by district, rather than colonial infrastructure expenditures or other proxies for economic and institutional development, should predict district minister shares in the post-colonial period. The counterfactual is therefore at the district level: between two otherwise identical districts, the district with higher colonial educational investments should gain a higher share of ministers after colonialism.

The sign of the main prediction is homogeneous across colonies and empires, but the effect size could be smaller in British colonies because officials engaged in more rebalancing strategies at the eve of independence. For example, Nigeria’s North-South cleavage is partly due to the “[British] manipulation of the political situation just before independence in such a way as to facilitate northern leadership at the center” (Rothchild, 1970, p. 602) and hence avoid Northern alienation in the new country, especially since they were the most populous region. This is an important difference of extent between empires, even if some former French colonies like Benin also suffered from regionalism. Rebalancing efforts in British colonies at and after independence were a response to their more extensive use of divide and rule compared to the French (Wucherpfennig et al., 2015). Therefore, district returns to colonial education should be higher, or at least not lower, in French than in British colonies (implication 1).

There are several other implications deriving from my argument. The importance of colonial education should be larger in civilian governments than in military governments because jobs in the administration and legislature of the colonial state were civilian (implication 2). If indeed these

15See No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe for a ﬁctional account set in the Nigerian colonial context.

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are two important mechanisms, many if not most post-colonial ministers should have belonged to the colonial civil service or have been members of colonial legislatures (implication 3). The education recruitment mechanism does not apply to the colonial army—most military leaders had not been members of the colonial civil service nor had they sat in colonial legislatures. If anything, in French and British colonies in Africa and Asia, administrators would actively recruit more from poorer areas and groups (Wilkinson, 2015; Echenberg, 1991; Parsons, 1999) where the opportunity cost of joining the colonial army was foregoing subsistence agriculture, an activity with low returns, rather than an urban wage. Ministers with a military background should therefore be less educated than those with a civilian background (implication 4). Finally, the importance of colonial education should be larger in countries that became independent from European powers in an orderly manner and in agreement with the colonial power (implication 5) than in countries that became independent less orderly or more drastically. The latter should have undergone more elite replacement, with outsiders to the colonial state apparatus taking new leadership roles and thereby reducing or even eliminating the incumbency advantage we should observe in orderly transitions to self-rule.

3 Research design

Latin America and especially sub-Saharan Africa are arguably the best suited regions to study the consequences of colonial investments. First, colonialism meant a radical shock to the political organization of society because in these regions centralized governments (e.g. the Inca Empire, Abyssinia) were the exception in the pre-colonial period. That is not the case in other regions. In the 1500s, many Eurasian peoples “were already living under state governments” (Diamond, 2012a, p. 19). The external imposition of institutions in Latin American and East and West Africa alleviates historical endogeneity with respect to colonial state formation processes because native populations had limited inﬂuence in the creation of the colonial polity. Second, East and West African countries had little time to learn from their neighbors’ post-independence experience because of the sudden transitions to independence they experienced.16 In that sense, we can take advantage of a double colonial shock that started around 1900, right after the Berlin Conference, and ended rather suddenly around 1960.

Third, most European empires—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain—put in place standard data collection procedures that allow within and between-country comparisons. Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America gained independence much earlier, however, which complicates biographical data collection on political elites, and their post-colonial elites were composed of criollos rather

16For the 16 countries in the sample, Guinea becomes independent in 1957; Ghana in 1958; Senegal, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Mauritania in 1960; Sierra Leone and Tanzania in 1961, Uganda in 1962; Kenya in 1963; and Malawi and Zambia in 1964.

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than indigenous population. Fourth, investments were largely decided by outsiders—European colonial administrators—with little consultation with local populations. Finally, investments were very unequal even within colonies and colonial oﬃcials lacked a deﬁned investment strategy, as I explain below.17 While this section shows that colonial investments were not random, de facto decentralized colonial decision-making and the lack of a systematic investment strategy, as I explain below, provides much haphazard variation in colonial investments.

3.1 The uneven distribution of colonial investments

There is much qualitative evidence in the literature that colonial practices and treatment of the indigenous population was unequal within colonies. This is what Horowitz(1985, p. 151) first called the “ethnic distribution of colonial opportunity,” especially in Africa and Asia, whereby some groups such as the Wolof in Senegal or the Baganda in Uganda were “more favored”— i.e. less exploited—than others. To give one striking example: as late as in 1960, “the Kakwa and Lugbara [Northwestern Uganda] had between them a single student [out of 281] enrolled in Makerere University [the oldest university in East Africa]. The Baganda, though only 16 percent of the population, had nearly half” (Horowitz, 1985, p. 239, p. 154). The British in particular are well-known for their policy of divide and rule in Nigeria and elsewhere. As we know from Mamdani(1996), racist stereotyping was pervasive: “The Baganda proper [central Uganda] are eager to become educated [...] with a zest which is almost pathetic” (Herbertson and Howarth, 1914, p. 297). British rule was partly beneficial for Southern Nigerian districts from an educational and economic standpoint, especially in contrast to the North, and Igbos (Eastern provinces) gained prominence in the civil service thanks to their educational opportunities.18 Northerners, initially considered more developed and hence apt for indirect rule by Lord Lugard, became laggards educationally and economically. Their opportunity came in the colonial army, where they occupied rank and file as well as officer posts (Haywood, 1964; Ejiogu, 2007).

The French policy of assimilation was in theory blind to considerations of race or region. France had “lofty ideals for colonial rule, at the heart of which was the so-called mission civilisatrice or civilizing mission” (Sharkey, 2013, p. 156). In reality, French oﬃcials sometimes also saw people from districts with higher educational or economic status in a negative light: “the Wolof soldier [Western Senegal] was spoiled and had become a terrible snob,” no longer ﬁt to be a tirailleur (Echenberg, 1991). There existed regional inequalities in civil service and army recruitment in

17In the context of religious conversion, Nunn(2010, p. 147) describes colonial Africa as a “natural laboratory to examine how an external intervention [missions] can have lasting impacts.” 18The ﬁrst Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe, for example, was a US-educated Igbo. Also not coincidentally, perhaps, Portuguese missionaries had ﬁrst disembarked in what would become the eastern province of Benin in Nigeria in 1515, although their presence was temporary and had very limited impact.

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French African colonies (Echenberg, 1991), in British African colonies (Parsons, 1999; Ejiogu, 2007) and in South Asia (Wilkinson, 2015).

Figure 3: Public health and education by district (1910-1939)

Cote d'Ivoire Public health staff Public health staff per 100,000 people 40 50 40 30 30 20 20 10 10 0 0

Man Kong Man Daloa KongLahou DaloaGuigloLahou Tabou Guiglo Indenie Assinie Tabou Gouros Baoule Gouros Baoule AgnebyIndenie Assinie SeguelaOdienne Agneby Bassam Lagunes OdienneSeguela BassamLagunes Nzicomoe Nzicomoe Tagouanas Bondoukou Sassandra BondoukouTagouanas Sassandra Nigeria Students Students per 100,000 people 15,000 2,000 1,500 10,000 1,000 5,000 500 0 0

Oyo Oyo Niger Ilorin ZariaKano Warri Ijebu Kano Ilorin NigerZaria Warri Ijebu Benue KabbaOgojaBornu OndoLagosBenin Owerri Benue Bornu Ogoja Kabba Owerri OndoBenin Lagos Plateau Katsina Bauchi Sokoto Onitsha Calabar SokotoBauchi Plateau Katsina Onitsha Calabar Adamawa Abeokuta Adamawa Abeokuta Cameroons Cameroons

Note: The graphs show the distribution of investments by district in two former colonies. The left graphs show the raw number of public health staﬀ (doctors and nurses) and students per colonial district while the right graphs adjust that number per 100,000 people. While the order of districts in the right graphs somewhat changes, inequality remains remarkably similar.

My data shows quantitatively that Horowitz’s unequal “distribution of colonial opportunity” also applies to colonial investments. Figure3 presents examples for Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria, but the very unequal pattern applies without exception to each of the 16 colonies and each type of colonial investment—infrastructure, education and health—, as I show in a companion paper (Ricart-Huguet, 2016). Some districts concentrated the lion’s share of those expenditures while others received very little, and these diﬀerences remain when we consider per capita investments.

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3.2 Colonial investment strategies or lack thereof

The ‘command and control’ of [the British] empire was always ramshackle and quite often chaotic. To suppose that an order uttered in London was obeyed round the world by zealous proconsuls is an historical fantasy (although a popular one). Darwin(2012, p. xii)

We may expect investments to be unequal, but the lack of systematic investment strategies is at first more surprising. While district expenditures presumably responded to needs—imprecisely defined—“no explicit investment strategy can be found in [French colonial] local budgets. Motiva- tions reported at the beginning of each local budget explain the general level of annual resources but do not motivate the spatial distribution of public goods provision” (Huillery, 2009, p. 181). British documents present a remarkably similar focus on description and administration rather than on policy. “Colonial tax and spending patterns did not follow a similar logic throughout British Africa” (Frankema, 2011, p. 147) because “[Britain] did not strive to apply a common financial policy to the various dependencies” beyond “general instructions [...] from the Secretary of State for the Colonies” (Stammer, 1967, p. 194).

The lack of district and colony-level investment strategies is less surprising if we realize that colonial states were very far from Weberian states (Herbst, 2000). Knowledge of the territory was limited and communication was rudimentary, which in turn made policy coordination difficult between the core and the periphery of a colony (Darwin, 2012, p. xii; Delavignette, 1968, p. 63). Short distances by today’s standards were long absent adequate roads or railroads, as was the case for most of East and West Africa especially before World War II. “Physical distances and [lack] of communication” meant that the “administrative organization [in French West Africa] was officially centralized but effectively decentralized,” making district heads “the real chiefs of the French empire” (Huillery, 2009, p. 181; Delavignette, 1968). District heads in both empires had much latitude in local policy and were in charge of administration, taxation, justice and other public services (Suret-Canale, 1971, p. 72). They were also in charge of relations with village chiefs, and district heads partly relied on them for policy implementation and revenue collection, often using translators.19 Local chiefs in French West African villages were a useful but certainly subordinate figure whose “influence [was limited] to small areas” (Huillery, 2009, p. 181). Similarly, “local chiefs [in British territories] had a guise of autonomy in their local jurisdictions, but they were actually guided and supervised by the British colonial administrators” (Strang, 1994, p. 149).20

19For a collection of essays on the importance of translators and interpreters in French and British colonial Africa, see Lawrance et al.(2006). 20Lugard’s (1922) promotion on indirect rule is well-known for some British colonies, but its practice was not unique to them. Sharkey(2013) considers the diﬀerence in that regard between the two empires a matter of degree, consistent with the move by Gerring et al.(2011, p. 378) “to understand systems of [direct and indirect] rule along a continuum that reﬂects the degree of central control.”

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What does explain within-colony variation in investments? Table 14 in the Appendix shows that the large investment inequalities between districts are best explained by pre-colonial trade and district population. As I argue in a companion paper (Ricart-Huguet, 2016), pre-colonial trade, instrumented by natural harbors and capes—following Jha(2012)—, is the common origin and only consistently significant predictor of colonial investments in infrastructure, health and education. Just as interesting for the purposes of selection effects, Table 14 shows that geography, natural resources, soil quality and pre-colonial observable characteristics are irrelevant to explain levels of colonial district education. In Section5, I take advantage of the conditionally haphazard within-colony variation in investments to estimate the effect of colonial education on post-colonial district cabinet shares.

4 Data

4.1 Minister data

The Europa Year Book publications are almanacs that contain, among other data, the list of cabinet members for every country-year in the world since 1960. That source is essential to identify the population of interest, but the Europa almanacs do not contain any further biographical information. For that purpose, I turn to the World Biographical Information System (WBIS), which contains over six million biographies including those of many political leaders. Figure 15 in the Appendix includes a page of the Europa Year Book for Ghana in 1960 and a page of the WBIS ﬁle containing biographies of Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah. Combining the two sources is essential to know who was in power after independence in the set of 16 countries under study. WBIS entries often contain the occupation, town and year of birth of the minister alongside other information compiled from multiple biographical sources. I complemented WBIS with historical dictionaries and other sources often obtained from Google Scholar or Google Books.

The end result merges 16 country datasets, one for each of the colony in the sample, with minister-year observations from 1960 to 1970. Most political elite data have the title of minister, but the data also include the president and/or prime minister, state ministers and the president of the legislature.21 The year of birth and the town of birth are available for 84% of the ministers and 91% of minister-years. The remaining 10-15% are individuals whose basic biographical information could not be found on WBIS or tracked in online sources. Some of those individuals missing birth place are secretaries of state, rather than ministers, that were nonetheless listed as cabinet members in the Europa Year Books, or ministers who held their post for only one year. When available, the

21I use ministers and cabinet members indistinguishably because over 90% of the sample is composed of ministers, although occasionally there are state ministers, members of national military council and indeed the president of the legislature is an important ﬁgure and yet not part of the cabinet.

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data also include covariates such as the function they performed in the cabinet, a measure of the function’s prestige, and in some cases the speciﬁc schools they attended and their ethnic group, among other variables.

For the purposes of this paper, cabinet members should be born soon before or between 1900 and the 1940, the period for which we are measuring colonial investments which is also the period when the colonial state is established.22 Figure4 shows that the distribution of birth years for ministers matches the colonial records data. The oldest one was born in 1893 and the youngest in 1942. The ﬁrst decile of ministers was born before 1910, the median in 1922 and the 99th percentile in 1937. Hence, only the oldest decile of ministers would have started schooling before the ﬁrst available years of colonial records.

Figure 4: Birth years of ministers in French and British colonies (1960-1970) .06 Colonial records data .04

British French Density .02 0 1880 1900 1920 1940 Year of birth Note: The histogram shows that the distribution of birth years for ministers matches the colonial records data. Only the oldest decile of ministers would have started schooling before the ﬁrst available years of colonial records.

The other necessary piece of information is birth place, which I georeference for each minister. This information needs to be combined with detailed maps in order to determine the district in which a given individual was born. For that purpose, I used colonial maps with district boundaries. After many administrative and political changes since independence, as much as 80% of colonial district boundaries remain in place as of 2015. To illustrate it, Figure 18 in the Appendix shows a colonial map of Nigeria. The boundaries of Sokoto in the northwest, for instance, fully remain as of 2014, albeit now split into three smaller provinces. Niger, on the other side of the border,

22As Young(1994, p. 101) mentions, “the professionalization of colonial services [in Africa] did not really take hold until after World War I.”

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follows a similar pattern, although in a few countries like Kenya administrative boundaries have changed more over time.

The maps in Figure5 show the result of combining birth locations with colonial district boundaries. We can see clustering along the coast in some countries, while some districts do not have any ministers in the whole decade.23 Figures 10 to 13 in the Appendix show this variation quantitatively by district and across the 16 colonies to establish that some districts in the newly independent countries were represented in government much more than others, as proxied by the share of ministers born in that district (left graphs). Disparities remain after subtracting minister shares from population shares (right graphs), with some districts punching above their weight and others below. For example, Bornu in Nigeria has 9% of the minister-years (23, the second most after Lagos) but only 4.5% of the country’s population. Finally, Table1 and Figure6 show some interesting descriptive statistics. Cabinets in British colonies were 20% larger than in French colonies. That could be a function of British colonies being larger, among other reasons. However, there is little difference between empires regarding the average cabinet member’s length in office, and no difference if we exclude Niger.

Figure 5: Birth locations of cabinet members in East and West Africa

Note: The maps show ministers from French colonies in blue and from British colonies in red. The diameter of the circle indicates the number of ministers born in a particular town and range from 1 to 11 (Freetown, Sierra Leone) and 12 (Saint Louis, Senegal).

23Around 10% of cabinet members were born in countries other than those they served in as ministers, and they are excluded from the analysis. Many of them were French or British colonial administrators that were ministers during the colonial governments and sometimes even after independence born in places such as India, South Africa, Martinique and Guadeloupe, besides the United Kingdom and France. A few others were African but born in a country (e.g. Togo, Western Sahara, Southern Rhodesia) diﬀerent than the one in which they served as ministers since the AOF federation permitted much mobility within colonies.

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Table 1: Individual data on cabinet members (1960-1970)

ministers minister-years average cabinet size French colonies 382 1,403 15.94 British colonies 531 1,686 19.16 Note: The table the number of ministerial biographies used for each empire. Cabinets in British colonies were larger, at least in part because their populations were also larger.

Figure 6: Average length of minister tenure 6

Mean without Niger = 3.45 4 ______Mean = 3.67 ______Mean = 3.29 2 Average number of years in office 0

Mali Kenya Benin Niger Ghana NigeriaZambiaMalawiUganda Guinea Tanzania Senegal Mauritania Sierra Leone Burkina Faso Cote d'Ivoire British colonies French colonies

Note: The means by empire are averages of individual cabinet members, not means of country averages. The difference between 3.67 and 3.29 (4.5 months) is significant (p < 0.1) if Niger is included; it is not otherwise. The figure restricts the analysis to year 1963 onward when British East African countries are also independent. Starting in 1960 increases the difference in length of tenure between empires by an additional 2 months to 6.5 months. This is not due to East Africa becoming independent later, since cabinet stability is higher than in the three British West African colonies.

4.2 Colonial and pre-colonial data

I combine the biographies and historical maps with colonial and pre-colonial data. Research on colonialism has largely eluded the causes and consequences of investments, perhaps because it is diﬃcult to systematically collect subnational data across colonies and empires. To the best of my knowledge, this paper presents the most extensive data on colonial investments at the district level by combining records for French West Africa—collected by Huillery(2009)—and for the main eight African British colonies under the Colonial Oﬃce—original data collection.24

24List of former colonies: Benin (formerly Dahomey), Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana (Gold Coast), Guinea, Kenya, Malawi (Nyasaland), Mali (French Soudan), Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania (Tanganyika), Uganda, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia).

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An important advantage is that record-keeping procedures were very similar within each empire, owing partly to the fact that British and French colonies reported to the Colonial Office or Ministère des Colonies, respectively. This is why the yearly Comptes Définitifs (Final Budgets) and the Blue Books, as the Colonial Office called its yearly reports owing to the color of the cover, were mostly standardized across colonies.25 This comparability does not directly extend to Sudan, for instance, which was under the control of the Foreign Office. The British National Archives and the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer keep most of the original records. Huillery(2009) collected the original French records for selected years in the 1910-1939 period.26 I collected British colonial records in various libraries from 1915, 1920, 1927, 1928 and 1938 as a function of availability and completeness. Figure 17 in the Appendix shows a page of a Blue Book for Uganda and a page of a Compte Définitif for Benin. Records are often organized or can be grouped by district as these pages show, and they sometimes contain detailed information on demographics, education, infrastructure investments and other activities. One important shortcoming is that records in both empires have many gaps so, while technically the data on colonial investments are a panel, it is a highly unbalanced one.27

Colonial records are complemented with a set of sources that provide information on pre-colonial geographic, geologic and socioeconomic covariates that could affect investment decisions and hence confound empirical estimates. Some of that data for French West Africa also come from Huillery, such as distance between the district capital and the coast, altitude, navigable rivers and main pre-colonial trading posts. I extend those variables to include British colonies, and sometimes I provide additional sources for the whole continent such as an old map of navigable rivers by C.S. Hammond(1921). Besides geography, disease environment could also have affected settlement and investment decisions. Altitude is a proxy for disease environment, notably for malaria (World Health Organization, 2016), but a rough one. To better capture disease environment, I use a geocoded map of malaria prevalence around 1900 (Lysenko and Semashko, 1968) and FAO tse-tse fly data (Alsan, 2015). Those data are important in tropical Africa, “often referred to as ‘the white man’s grave’ [and where] malaria, yellow fever and dysentery could wipe out an army with appalling efficiency” (Darwin, 2012, p. 138). I also geocode several historical natural resource maps. However, the importance of natural resources is limited to investments in infrastructure and they do not explain investments in education or health, let alone minister shares. A map by Hubert(1922) that I georeferenced is likely the most comprehensive historical map on the issue for

25They were not the only empires to keep such records. The Portuguese and the Belgian records I examined are similarly detailed. 26Technically the panel extends to 1956, but data are mostly missing post-1939. I have averaged French colonial data from 1910 to 1939 and from 1919 to 1956 and the correlation between these two averages of the same variables across districts is usually over 0.9, which is not surprising since most data come from the interwar period (1919-1939). 27Occasionally information on particular variables is missing throughout the period. For example, records for Malawi and Mauritania do not contain disaggregated student data. This paper, however, only requires a cross- section since the outcomes of interest are post-colonial.

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West Africa. Kuhne(1927) produced an impressive worldwide map. I employ an early publication by the United States Geological Services (USGS, 1921) only as a complement because, although it has world coverage, the data are restricted to large deposits.

Crops like coﬀee and large plantations like cotton were important in some colonies. Because some of these crops are an endogenous choice of the colonizer, I use geological soil characteristics such as nutrient and oxygen availability (FAO/IIASA, 2012). These are current measures and hence far from ideal, but they are useful to the extent that soil quality does not change dramat- ically over time (Wantchekon and Stanig, 2015, p. 27). Otherwise, the paper purposely avoids current databases on natural resources and diseases that are commonly used in some well-known studies (e.g. see Parker (1997) in Acemoglu et al.(2002)) and yet raise serious reverse causality concerns because most natural resources were discovered towards the end of colonialism or after it ended. Finally, the paper includes data on relevant colonial socioeconomic characteristics, such as a historical map on the presence of Islam across the continent (Bartholomew, 1913). For some other pre-colonial characteristics, notably whether the district was located in a pre-colonial kingdom or in an acephalous society, I extend Huillery’s variables to include British colonies. I also draw from the Murdock(1959) dataset on pre-colonial ethnic group characteristics because it provides useful proxies of pre-colonial economic and political development, such as intensity of agriculture, settlement patterns, the size of local communities and level of political centralization. Tables 12 and 13 in the Appendix provide summary statistics of the main variables.

4.3 Unit of analysis

There are multiple reasons to consider districts rather than ethnic groups as the unit of analysis.28 First and most obviously, the colonial state was divided into districts and so are the corresponding historical data. Second, we observe high persistence of colonial district boundaries, especially in French West Africa but also in British colonies. Many of these boundaries have changed surprisingly little—there are some exceptions like Kenya and Ghana—and districts in the 2000s are often partitions of a larger colonial district. Most importantly, colonial districts were still the relevant administrative and political units after independence. Third, the list of districts in a country is ﬁxed for a particular point in time. That is not the case for ethnicity. While researchers often use ethnic groups as units of analysis, there is little agreement on what the “list of ethnic

28At first, ethnicity appears as another viable unit of analysis besides colonial districts. After all, Horowitz(1985, p. 150), quoting Kasfir(1972), argues that traditional ethnic leadership during colonialism “sanctioned the notion that an ethnic group was a valid basis for an administrative unit... and provided an institutional expression for cultural unity.” In British colonies, more so than in French ones, districts sometimes tried to reflect the colonizer’s understanding of ethnic social organization. In that case, districts would just be a proxy for ethnicity. While this is true in some well-known cases such as Uganda and Kenya, superimposing Murdock’s (1959) map of ethnic homelands with colonial district maps shows the two spatial units have little overlap.

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groups” should be (Fearon, 2003).29 Fourth, and similar to strategic marriages between to-be monarchs in Medieval and Modern Europe, Adida et al.(2014) show that cross-ethnic marriages are frequent among African leaders. Assigning ethnically mixed leaders to a particular ethnic group is not straightforward. Creoles are a special category of this problem, and while not as common as in South America, in some West African countries like Sierra Leone they were an important group already in the 19th century. In sum, ethnicity is not factual like birth place: everyone is born into only one district. Migration at a very young age into a district with more primary education, which happened only occasionally but certainly more than the other way around, would downward bias the eﬀect of education because the coding of birth place does not depend on later migration. While each of the four problems above might be surmountable by itself, their combination makes districts the feasible and advisable unit of analysis.

5 Results

I begin by examinining the share of the within-country variation explained by population and education. These simple models take the form

Yik = β0 + β1populationik + β2educationik + ηk + ik, (1) where Y is the logged district share of ministers to correct for non-normality.30 Country ﬁxed eﬀects are included in all models to account for country-level heterogeneity. They explain about 9% of the variation, showing that distributions of power are, to a modest extent, unequally unequal within colonies of the same empire. For instance, political representation is more unequal in Niger than in Mauritania. Models 1 and 3 include logged population and models 2 and 4 include logged education. In British colonies, population (model 1) and missionary education (model 2) each explain an additional 13-14% of the variation. In French colonies, adding population (model 3) again explains an additional 15% of the variation but adding non-missionary teachers (model 4) explains an additional 43% of the variation. I use missionaries for British colonies and non- missionary teachers for French colonies advisedly because colonial education was largely in the hands of missionaries in British colonies but largely in the hands of the state in French colonies.

Those correlations could be driven by a few particular countries where public or private colonial education had an important impact, such as Senegal and Nigeria. Figure7 shows that the positive

29The debate around primordialism and constructivism shows the difficulties of determining ethnicity (Hale, 2004). Brubaker(2002, p. 164) explains that “groupism” is the “tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as [...] fundamental units of social analysis.” Groups rarely have such strict characterization, of course, but such practice leads to reifying ethnic groups, Brubaker argues, in an attempt to turn Anderson’s (1983) imagined communities into more concrete units. 30Minister shares and colonial investments are logged in all models to reduce right skew. The magnitude of the education effect is larger in non-logged models, but a few outliers are highly influential because of non-normality and hence these models are not informative of the importance of colonial investments for an average district.

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Table 2: Shares of district cabinet members as a function of population or education

(1) (2) (3) (4) British British French French Population, logged 0.51∗∗ 0.53∗∗ (0.08) (0.08) Missionaries, logged 0.34∗∗ (0.09) Teachers, logged 1.16∗∗ (0.17) Observations 200 200 112 112 Adjusted R2 0.23 0.22 0.22 0.50 Notes: †p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. All models include colony ﬁxed eﬀects. All models include clustered standard errors by colony. correlation applies across former colonies with the exception of Uganda and Burkina Faso. While these are simply within-country correlations controlling for population due to small sample size in each particular country (n = 19.5 districts, on average), they show that the positive population- adjusted correlation applies to 14 out of the 16 cases.

The rest of the section combines several models and methodological approaches to disentagle the eﬀect of education from other possible explanations, including pre-colonial political centralization and the eﬀect of other colonial investments, and I also test the theoretical implications discussed in Section2. Table3 presents models for each empire:

T Yik = β0 + β1educationik + β2othereducationik + β3otherinvestmentsik + X β4 + ηk + ik (2)

where outcome Y is once again the logged share of ministers born in a district and β1 is the coefficient of interest corresponding to public education in French colonies and private (Protes- tant missionary) education in British colonies. The complement to education is othereducation: number of Catholic and Protestant missions in French colonies and government school students in British colonies. I also include the main two other investments in each empire, infrastructure and health, since they might be confounding the effect of education. Besides the usual country fixed effects (η), I include a large set of controls (X): geographic (distance from the coast, an indicator for navigable rivers, a continuous measure for terrain ruggedness, malaria and tse-tse fly presence indices to proxy for disease environment), geologic (presence of noble and base metals in the district, a soil quality index), and socioeconomic (logged population, logged area, prevalence of Islam and of slavery as well as pre-colonial agricultural development and settlement patterns).

The results are interesting in three respects. First, we observe district political returns to education in both empires but they are type-speciﬁc: they derive only from public education in French colonies and from private (missionary) education in British colonies. On the other hand,

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Figure 7: Correlations between post-colonial minister shares and colonial educational investments

Ghana Benin

Kenya Burkina Faso

Malawi Cote d'Ivoire

Nigeria Guinea

Sierra Leone Mali

Tanzania Mauritania

Uganda Niger

Zambia Senegal -.5 0 .5 1 -1 0 1 2 3 Missionaries, logged Teachers, logged

Note: The figure reports regression coefficients where the logged district share of ministers is predicted by the level of educational investments, which are logged missionaries in British colonies and logged public teachers in French colonies, controlling for logged district population. 14 out of 16 coefficients are positive, but some are small and/or imprecisely estimated on a country-by-country basis. In Kenya, for instance, a 1% increase in the number of missionaries leads to a 0.5% increase in a district’s minister share. the effects of public education in British colonies and missionary education in French colonies are smaller and very imprecisely estimated. Coefficients are easy to interpret because this is a log-log regression (i.e. both the dependent and the independent variables of interest are logged). In particular, a 1% increase in missionaries in missionaries in British colonies leads to a 0.18% increase in minister shares for that district. In French colonies, a 1% increase in teachers results in a 1.03% increase in missionaries, a larger effect. Results in each empire are robust (p < 0.05) to excluding one country at a time and to excluding colonial capitals (Table 15 in the Appendix).

Second, infrastructure and public health investments are not signiﬁcant in either empire. In other words, spending more money on buildings, roads, sewage and electricity (infrastructure) or more doctors and nurses does not increase the share of ministers born in a district even though these are reasonable proxies for district development. A raw correlation between minister shares and infrastructure or health is positive but statistically insigniﬁcant once population and education are taken into account.

Third, there are two other interesting null results. One concerns the presence in the district of a major pre-colonial trading post, which I already showed has a causal positive effect on educational investments (Table 14 in the Appendix). The other null finding concerns pre-colonial political centralization, in spite of recent findings in the literature. Pre-colonial kingdoms may provide

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Table 3: Minister shares by district: the post-colonial political returns to colonial education

(1) (2) (3) (4) British British French French Educational investments Missionaries, logged 0.18∗ 0.14∗ (0.05) (0.04) Teachers, logged 1.03∗ 1.00∗ (0.37) (0.39) Students (government and aided schools), logged 0.04 (0.04) Missions, logged 0.20 (0.45) Other investments and alternative explanations Infrastructure expenditures, logged 0.04† 0.03 0.01 0.01 (0.02) (0.02) (0.08) (0.08) Public health staff, logged 0.02 0.02 0.06 0.05 (0.06) (0.04) (0.18) (0.19) Population, logged 0.37∗∗ 0.35∗ 0.12 0.11 (0.07) (0.10) (0.16) (0.15) Pre-colonial trading post 0.04 0.04 0.48 0.40 (0.25) (0.23) (0.76) (0.74) Political centralization (Murdock) -0.04 -0.08 0.18 0.19 (0.07) (0.07) (0.20) (0.21) Observations 200 185 111 111 Adjusted R2 0.29 0.30 0.54 0.53 Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects.and a large set of controls: geographic (distance from the coast, an indicator for navigable rivers, a continuous measure for terrain ruggedness, malaria and tse-tse fly presence indices to proxy for disease environment), geologic (noble and base metals indicators, a soil quality index), and socioeconomic (logged population and area, prevalence of Islam and of slavery, pre-colonial agricultural development and settlement patterns. French data lack health staff for Conakry, hence n=111 instead of 112. Results in each empire are robust (p < 0.05) to excluding one country at a time and to excluding colonial capitals (Table 15). Importantly, results show that political returns are type-specific: they derive from colonial investments in public (missionary) education in French (British) colonies. better public services today (Gennaioli et al., 2013) and be more developed (Bandyopadhyay and Green, 2016), but the reason does not seem to lie on being overrepresented after independence.

I have implicitly assumed that political returns to education are linear, but we might observe a ceiling eﬀect on returns to education because in no country does a district concentrate over 50% of ministers. If it did, the country would presumably be most unstable (Cederman et al., 2010). Hence, we might observe decreasing marginal returns to colonial education. Table4 uses the same model as in equation2 but adds a centered squared term for educators, which are teachers in French and missionaries in British colonies. The term is marginally positive, not negative, and very imprecisely estimated in both empires even in models 1, 3 and 5, which only include population

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Table 4: Linearity of district political returns to colonial education

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) All All British British French French

Teachers/missionaries, logged 0.33∗∗ 0.22∗∗ 0.23∗ 0.16∗ 0.96∗∗ 0.89† (0.08) (0.07) (0.07) (0.05) (0.21) (0.45) Teachers/missionaries, logged squared 0.09 0.07 0.06 0.03 0.09 0.20 (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) (0.05) (0.09) (0.17) Observations 312 311 200 200 112 111 Adjusted R2 0.36 0.37 0.30 0.29 0.53 0.54 Notes: †p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects.and logged population. Models 2, 4, and 6 include additional geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls. and country fixed effects. In sum, there does not seem to be a ceiling effect insofar as educational returns are concerned.

5.1 Causality

5.1.1 Alternative explanations

There are two plausible alternative explanations for the education effects we observe. First, some of the recent literature on colonial legacies focuses on the importance of settlers for political institutions. Indeed, Europeans settled in central locations that contained, among other facilities, the best secondary schools in the colony. However, my argument rests on basic numeracy and literacy, and many colonial civil servants finished primary but not secondary school. Settlers are a very imperfect proxy for district levels of human capital among the local population because most lived in two or three districts in each colony, and yet primary education was available, to different extents, throughout the colony. The correlation between settlers and education is positive but low (ρ = 0.18). Column 1 of Table5 shows that the size of the settler community in a district does not predict minister shares.

Second, teachers and missionaries might be proxying for other forms of institutional or economic development in the district. This is unlikely the case in British colonies where missionaries provided almost all of the primary education, sought to spread their religious inﬂuence across the territory (Wantchekon, 2016, p. 5) and sometimes evangelized purposely in remote areas. It is more likely the case in French West Africa, where more district capacity in education was positively correlated with more district capacity and development generally. Fortunately, Huillery(2009) includes data on administrative capacity, proxied by the number of administrators in a district, and on taxation levels in French West Africa. These are two key variables that allow us to disentangle the education

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effect from state capacity and economic development. As Lugard(1922, p. 232) put it, “[t]he payment of direct taxes is in Africa, as elsewhere, an unwelcome concomitant of progress.” The size of the colonial state administration varied widely between the main districts in a colony, ranging from having only a district officer in remote districts to dozens of civil servants in the capital. Models 2, 3 and 4 in Table5 show that proxies for state administrative capacity—the number of European, African or overall administrators in the district—do not reduce the education effect and do not even predict district minister shares if we take education into account. Models 5, 6 and 7 show that taxation does not affect the magnitude or significance of the main coefficient of interest either.

Table 5: Other alternative explanations: settlers and district institutional and ﬁscal development

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) Teachers, logged 1.04∗ 1.48∗ 1.53∗ 1.14∗ 1.08∗ 1.15∗ (0.43) (0.45) (0.47) (0.34) (0.33) (0.35) European population (settlers), logged 0.02 (0.07) Administrative Staff, logged 0.23 (0.35) Administrative Staff, Europeans, logged 0.12 (0.09) Administrative Staff, Africans, logged -0.02 (0.06) Head taxes collected, logged -0.07∗ (0.02) Trading licenses taxes, collected, logged 0.06 (0.07) Trade taxes per capita, logged -0.17 (0.56) Observations 300 111 83 83 111 111 111 Adjusted R2 0.36 0.52 0.64 0.64 0.53 0.52 0.52 Notes: †p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects. All models include colonial investments in infrastructure and health as well as geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls. Models 2-7 are restricted to French West Africa because of data availability.

5.1.2 Regional ﬁxed eﬀects

All models suggest that district political returns derive from human capital rather than from plausible competing explanations. However, it is diﬃcult to rule out endogeneity. Reverse causality is ruled out by design but omitted variable bias remains a concern. Although models in Table3 include a large set of controls, regions within a colony might diﬀer in some unobserved characteristics. For instance, although I include various pre-colonial (and hence pre-treatment) ethnic

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group characteristics, there could be some unobserved factor that differentiates districts mostly populated by the main ethnic group in Burkina Faso (Mossi) or in Uganda (Baganda) from the rest of the colony. To account for potential omitted variable bias, I include regional fixed effects. In Guinea, for example, I create indicators for the four regions that share physical and cultural characteristics (Maritime, Middle, Upper and Forested Guinea). In Uganda, the indicators correspond to the British provinces and current regions of Buganda (Central region), Eastern, Northern and Western Uganda. The model is thus akin to equation2 but now η is a set of 58 regional indicators rather than 16 country indicators.

Table 6: Models with regional ﬁxed eﬀects (FE)

(1) (2) (3) (4) British British French French region FE region FE, full model region FE region FE, full model Missionaries, logged 0.28∗∗ 0.14† (0.08) (0.06) Teachers, logged 1.22∗∗ 1.16† (0.24) (0.56) Observations 200 200 112 111 Adjusted R2 0.18 0.26 0.48 0.52 Notes: †p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include regional/provincial ﬁxed eﬀects, 35 in British colonies and 23 in French colonies, which make up the total 58 regions. For instance, the 15 colonial districts of Uganda are divided between Buganda/Central, Eastern, Northern and Western provinces. Models 2 and 4 include additional geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls. Also notice that in both empires, and especially in French colonies, all additional controls (e.g. distance from the coast, disease environment, etc.) are of little relevance and jointly explain just 4% (French) to 8% (British) of the variation.

Table6 presents the results. Models 1 and 3 include only regional fixed effects. Models 2 and 4 additionally include the full set of controls of equation2. This is a demanding empirical strategy because we are including 58 fixed effects and around 20 other covariates in a cross-section of 312 observations. The upside is that we can increase our confidence in the causal interpretation of the educational effect because we are examining variation in educational investments within each region of a colony while also including the set of geographic, environmental, geologic and socioeconomic controls. The most surprising finding is the stability of the point estimates between models 2 and 4 of Table3 (0.14 for British colonies and 1.00 for French) and models 2 and 4 of Table6 (0.14 again for British colonies and 1.16 for French). The estimates are a bit less precise but they remain significant and stable in magnitude, which again increases the confidence not only in the causal interpretation of the educational effect but also in its magnitude. Also, all additional controls (e.g. distance from the coast, disease environment, etc.) are of little relevance in either empire and jointly explain just 4% (French) to 8% (British) of the variation. Most confounding is captured by using either a large set of controls or regional fixed effects.

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5.1.3 Method of direct estimation

For further robustness and causal identification, I implement a new machine learning method that directly estimates observation-level counterfactuals (Ratkovic and Tingley, 2016). Intuitively, the causal effect of the treatment on the outcome requires comparing the outcome for an observed value for the treatment to a value for the same observation, but with a treatment level just slightly above or below the observed value. Given these two values, we could calculate the effect of a change in the treatment on the outcome. The problem, of course, is that we do not observe the counterfactual outcome (Holland, 1986), and therefore it must be estimated.

Unlike matching methods, which are restricted to binary treatments and require an estimated propensity score as an intermediate step, this method estimates each counterfactual outcome directly using a high-dimensional regression model, specifically an extension of a Bayesian Lasso to non-parametric causal inference. In particular, Ratkovic and Tingley(2016) use cubic splines cap- turing main effects and interactions between the treatment and covariates to estimate the difference between the observation with a treatment of value t, namely the level of educational investments, and a treatment increased by an arbitrarily small amount (δ) at value (t + δ). With the fitted and predicted values, we can estimate the partial derivative of the outcome with respect to the treatment for each observation in the data.

Under the assumption of no unobserved confounders, the method returns consistent causal estimates while making minimal assumptions on the potential outcome functions (minister shares) and the data generating process. The model includes all covariates used in equation2, their interactions, and the interactions again of these variables with the treatment, all estimated using smooth spline functions. Consistent with the linear models above, we observe that the overall effect of education is positive. The average treatment effect is 0.22 and the 95% confidence interval ranges between 0.09 and 0.36.31 Because we are directly estimating the counterfactual for each observation, we can also observe the causal effect of a δ increase in education for each district. As Figure8 shows, the effect is positive for most districts in all countries except for Burkina Faso. In conclusion, this paper addresses selection concerns and establishes causality by combining multiple approaches: I show that no pre-colonial observables other than pre-colonial trade (and colonial district population) explain education observables. Next, there is a consensus on the historical literature that budget allocations were often decentralized and not systematic. Finally, I address alternative explanations and use regional fixed effects as well as a method of direct estimation of counterfactuals to identify the effect of colonial education.

31I obtain the conﬁdence interval by bootstrapping the estimation for each observation 100 times.

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Figure 8: Causal eﬀects by country using the method of direct estimation

Note: The method of direct estimation (Ratkovic and Tingley, 2016) provides counterfactual estimates for each observation, plotted here by country. Consistent with the other models, we observe that the overall effect is positive. Improving on the other models, the effect is positive for the average and for most observations in all countries except for Burkina Faso. This is an interesting outlier already suggested by Figure7. Unlike the other 15 former colonies, the Upper Volta (currently Burkina Faso) was carved out of Niger and Ivory Coast as late as in 1919 and lost its colony status in 1932. It became a colony again in 1947 until independence in 1960. While this may or may not be related to its outlier status, it is the most obvious difference between Burkina Faso and the other 15 former colonies.

5.2 Testable implications

Section2 provided several theoretical implications. The most important one is a sort of placebo test concerning the division between civil and military governments. In particular, I argued that political returns to colonial education should be higher under civilian governments (implication 2). The models in Table7 follow equation2, but now each country-year in the sample either has a civil or a military government as described in the Europa Yearbooks. In other words, Y becomes the share of ministers from each district k under civilian rule (models 1 and 2) or military rule (models 3 and 4) by grouping all the military and civilian years separately. Results remain for civilian governments. Military governments, however, only predict minister shares in model 3, which is a simple population-adjusted model with country fixed effects.32 The coefficient goes to 0 and is insignificant as soon as we control for health and infrastructure investments—or various other combinations of controls. 32A bivariate correlation is also positive (ρ = 0.2), which is not surprising since military elites did not necessarily hail from the most uneducated or underdeveloped districts.

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Table 7: Civil vs. military governments

(1) (2) (3) (4) Civil Civil Military Military

Teachers/missionaries, logged 0.38∗∗ 0.26∗∗ 0.12† 0.03 (0.09) (0.08) (0.06) (0.03) Population, logged 0.40∗∗ 0.39∗∗ 0.05 0.06 (0.05) (0.05) (0.07) (0.07) Public health staff, logged 0.04 0.10† (0.06) (0.05) Infrastructure expenditures, logged 0.04† -0.01 (0.02) (0.01) Pre-colonial political centralization -0.00 -0.04 (0.09) (0.05) Observations 312 311 312 311 Adjusted R2 0.34 0.35 0.46 0.48 Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects.. Models 2 and 4 include additional geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls.

However, these heterogeneous eﬀects raise another issue. The importance of colonial education in civilian governments could be driven by governments where the head had been a member of the colonial civil service or administration, which included low-level bureaucrats but also judges, doctors (Cote d’Ivoire’s Hophouet Boigny), colonial school inspectors (Mali’s Modibo Keita), teachers and academics (Ghana’s Nkrumah and Senegal’s Senghor). I split the country-years based on whether the head of government had been a member of the colonial administration. Table8 shows that results are not hinging on the formateur having a civil service background. In other words, the importance of colonial education does not extend to military governments but it extends to governments where the formateur had not been a member of the colonial administration.

Another implication I discussed is that colonial education should be more important in countries that became independent in an orderly manner and in agreement with the colonial power (implication 5) than in countries that became independent less orderly or more drastically. As it turns out, 12 out of 16 countries in the sample become independent in an orderly manner, and even in the other four there was no large scale violence. Independence agreements were usually negotiated between colonial and local oﬃcials, preparing the ground for an orderly succession of power.

Guinea, Zambia, Malawi and Kenya constitute the exception for two reasons. Guinea voted not to remain in the French Union and that led to a breakdown of the relationships with France. “Three months after independence almost all French civil servants were gone. Gone too was French economic aid” (Berg, 1960, p. 556), which had increased in Guinea as elsewhere in French West

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Table 8: Eﬀects of educational investments by colonial civil service (CCS) past of the government head

(1) (2) (3) (4) CCS head CCS head non-CCS head non-CCS head

Teachers/missionaries, logged 0.25∗∗ 0.20∗∗ 0.27∗∗ 0.20∗ (0.06) (0.06) (0.08) (0.09) Observations 312 311 312 311 Adjusted R2 0.42 0.43 0.33 0.34 Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony ﬁxed eﬀects.. Models 2 and 4 include additional geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls. The models split the data in two groups by country-year based on whether or not the head of government had been a member of the colonial civil service (CCS head of government or formateur). Models 3 and 4 show that the relevance of educational investments for civil governments is not simply driven by the formateur strategically appointing members with a similar career background.

Table 9: Orderly vs. disorderly transitions from colonial rule to independence

(1) (2) (3) (4) Orderly, all Orderly, civil Disorderly, all Disorderly, civil

Teachers/missionaries, logged 0.17∗ 0.20∗ 0.30∗ 0.30∗ (0.07) (0.08) (0.03) (0.03) Observations 233 233 78 78 Adjusted R2 0.38 0.36 0.30 0.30 Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects.. All models include additional geographic, environmental, geological and socioeconomic controls. Models 2 and 4 restrict the sample to country-years under civil government. The differences in magnitude between model point estimates are insignificant.

Africa after 1945. Conﬂict between locals and the settler minority is the fundamental reason for the moderately violent 1950s in the three British colonies. The 1950s Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya is perhaps the most well-known. Transition to independence in Kenya was peaceful only on the surface (Darwin, 2012) and violence did not escalate further in part thanks to the Lancaster House Conferences (1960-1963), which provided a forum for intense negotiations on Kenyan self-rule. In Zambia and Malawi there was no comparable revolt but much smaller scale violence directed against the dominance of the white settler minority (Darwin, 2012; Tedla, 2011).

Table9 shows that political returns to colonial education are not higher in orderly transitions whether we compare all governments in those countries (models 1 and 3) or just civilian governments (models 2 and 4). One possibility is that the argument extends to somewhat disorderly and rushed transitions (Guinea, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya). Ironically perhaps, these four countries did not have any military governments in the 1960s and have almost always been ruled by civilians, hence the identical results for models 3 and 4. The other possibility is that East and West Africa

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are not the best settings to test that implication of the theory since anticolonial movements and transitions there were much less violent or even peaceful compared to Algeria in the 1950s, India in the 1940s or many Latin American countries in the early 1800s.

5.3 Colonial politics and administration as mechanisms

There are multiple mechanisms through which unequal colonial education could lead to unequal political representation. While this paper does not econometrically adjudicate among them, I provide some evidence that colonial political bodies and the colonial civil service are two important paths connecting early education with post-colonial politics.

Figure9 and Table 10 are constructed using the biographical data and show that civil service careers and participation in colonial politics were very common among ministers in most if not all 16 colonies (implication 3).33 In fact, around 80% of ministers were either appointed or elected members in colonial legislatures—or occasionally even in colonial cabinets—, colonial civil servants, or both. By contrast, fewer than 20% were soldiers in the colonial army in any given country. Data on the background of all African members of the civil service and legislatures in these colonies would be ideal to establish the percentage that became post-colonial cabinet members. While we lack that data, these percentages are still notable because the colonial civil services and legislatures where very small—a few dozen people even in the 1950s in most colonies, and many of them European.

These percentages are expected in one sense but unexpected in another. They are expected because the literature on the colonial state highlights the importance of the colonial civil service as a cradle of colonial elites (Young, 1994; Mamdani, 1996), and my reading of hundreds of short biographies confirms this to be the case systematically among cabinet members. Diamballa Maiga, for instance, was the son of a Songhai district chief and Niger’s minister for Interior throughout the 1960s. Born in 1910, he was an “unwilling pupil and was actually forced to school by the police.” However, “he flourished” in school [and eventually became] “a clerk in the Finance Department from 1929 to 1940” (WBIS, 2014). Ousmane Camara from Senegal came from an unprivileged and unstructured family, in fact he even switched identities after he was taken by an uncle. While his socioeconomic background was different to that of Maiga, he explains in his autobiography that “a bookish bulimia [boulimie livresque] with my friend Birane Wane [...] led us to devour all of what the municipal library of Kaolack contained” (Camara, 2010, p. 28). Dedication ensured his passage to the Lycee Faidherbe in Saint Louis (Senegal) and eventually to becoming one of the first four judges of Senegal and later minister of Civil Services and Labor. These two examples

33The two ﬁgures are actually lower bounds, hence the inequality, since data are not available for all ministers and the denominator includes missing data.

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Figure 9: Percentage of cabinet members in the colonial civil service, colonial political bodies, and colonial army by country

Colonial civil service 60

Mean = 43% ______

40 Mean = 35% ______20 Percentage of cabinet members 0

Mali Kenya Benin Niger Uganda GhanaMalawi ZambiaNigeria Guinea Tanzania Senegal Mauritania Sierra Leone Burkina Faso Cote d'Ivoire British colonies French colonies

Colonial politics 100 80 ______Mean = 68% Mean______= 61% 60 40 20 Percentage of cabinet members 0

Mali Kenya Benin Niger Ghana Nigeria ZambiaUgandaMalawi Guinea Tanzania Senegal Mauritania Sierra Leone Burkina Faso Cote d'Ivoire British colonies French colonies

Colonial army 20 15

Mean = 10% Mean = 10% ______10 5 Percentage of cabinet members 0

Mali Kenya Niger Benin Uganda Ghana Nigeria ZambiaMalawi Guinea Tanzania Senegal Mauritania Sierra Leone Cote d'Ivoire Burkina Faso British colonies French colonies

Note: A simple t-test shows the mean diﬀerences between empires are not signiﬁcant. Data are lower-bound estimates because 29% of ministerial biographies do not contain information on colonial civil service/politics/army history.

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are interesting anecdotally but typical in essence of the over 900 biographies in the dataset that strongly suggest the relevance of the civil service as a mechanism.

The very high percentages on colonial politics in particular are unexpected because, after all, French territorial assemblies and British legislative councils were mostly deliberative forums dominated de facto and de iure by Europeans—i.e. often Europeans were a majority—at least until the 1950s. In that sense, colonial legislatures were mostly epiphenomenal insofar as important colonial decisions were concerned. Perhaps that is why there is much less emphasis in the literature on colonial legislatures. And yet, Figure9 and Table 10 reveal that even a higher share of ministers had been elected or appointed members of colonial legislatures. While African colonial politicians had very little power, their political position entailed social prestige, skills acquisition and name recognition—in short, incumbency advantage. Admittedly, Table 10 does not reﬂect that one’s civil service career usually started before one’s political career. And civil service experience was not a pre-requisite to join a cabinet since 37.64% of the ministers had a political but not a civil service career. However, most ministers that engaged in both (33.93%) were civil servants ﬁrst, as we learn from biographies. Finally, the odds of being minister with neither type of experience were indeed low—over 75% had developed at least one of these two careers. In the largely orderly transitions of East and West Africa, both appear to be fundamental sources of incumbency advantage.

Table 10: Ministerial presence in the colonial administration and colonial politics (pre-1960) colonial civil colonial service only legislature only both neither All colonies 12.12% 37.64% 33.93% 16.32% British colonies 13.16% 43.80% 30.13% 12.91% French colonies 10.27% 26.79% 40.63% 22.32% Note: Colonial administration is coded 1 whenever the minister held a job in the colonial administration. Colonial politics is coded 1 whenever the minister was a member of colonial legislatures and councils. Data are available for 178 of 382 AOF ministers (47%) and 348 of 531 CO ministers (65%). Data on these two variables are more likely to be missing for less relevant ministers, and hence these may be overestimates to the extent more important ministers were more involved in colonial politics and administration.

Table 11: Average years of education by empire and type of minister

colonial army background civilian background p-value All colonies 13.42 15.60 0.01 British colonies 13.63 16.15 0.02 French colonies 13.16 14.54 0.37 Note: “Colonial army background” means that the minister had been a member of the colonial army, regardless of his post-colonial career. The diﬀerence is in the expected direction in both empires but only statistically signiﬁcant in British colonies.

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Finally, if education was more important in civilian governments, ministers with a military background should be less educated than those with a civilian background (implication 4). Ghanaian Colonel Yeboah exemplifies a pattern explained by social historians of colonial armies (Parsons, 1999; Echenberg, 1991): “in those days a career in the army was for someone who did not have an education. It was not considered a very attractive career. It was only for school drop-outs” (Baynham, 1994, p. 22). And yet he became a minister in 1966 after the deposition of independence leader Kwame Nkrumah. Of course, his path to power was not based on either of the two mechanisms discussed above but on a military coup. Table 11 shows that ministers with a colonial army background had two fewer years of education than those with a civilian background. The difference exists but its magnitude is actually smaller than one might expect and statistically insignificant when we consider French colonies alone. This is probably because the minority groomed to be army officers, unlike the typical tirailleur or askari (soldiers), were relatively more educated and often trained in military academies in France and Britain.

6 Conclusion

Recent literature shows that inequalities in political representation matter for public goods provision and conflict, especially in developing countries. In this paper I show that the origins of unequal district representation are rooted in the revenue-maximizing strategies of colonial administrators. District political returns are not the result of economic development, pre-colonial centralization or overall investment levels but are due to educational investments in particular, as shown by various empirical strategies including within-country regional fixed effects and a Lasso method of direct estimation. Further, district political returns are type-specific: they derive only from missionary education in British colonies and only from public education in French colonies. While bargaining is important for cabinet formation, it is bounded by historical district differences in human capital. Critical junctures like the end of colonial rule are far from a tabula rasa, and cabinets have a structural component beyond population shares. Strategic rebalancing was especially prominent in British colonies, since their rule was more unequal. That is one likely reason why the effect of colonial education is larger in French colonies.

With regard to public policy, the findings suggest that power could be better distributed across a country’s regions by equalizing or rebalancing non-tertiary educational investments. In other words, a more equal distribution in education provision could lead to a fairer division of power even if regional economic inequalities remain in the short-term. This is a difficult but more feasible public policy goal than eliminating wealth and development disparities across regions. Finally, do colonial investments affect current welfare, political participation and conflict within former colonies? In another paper, I examine the long-term impact of British and French investments on current

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outcomes and how early post-colonial distributions of power mediate that relationship. Examining these downstream consequences as well as the mediating role of governments is important to understand current development disparities in former colonies.

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Appendix

A Tables and ﬁgures

Table 12: District summary statistics in British colonies

Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Minister-years share 200 4 5.17 0 23.46 Missionaries (Woodberry) 200 7.44 11.84 0 75 Missions 200 2.7 3.34 0 26 Teachers 15 68.47 63.53 0 285 Students 185 1137.09 2382.92 0 13764 Public health staﬀ 200 11.63 25.47 0 232 Infrastructure expenditures 200 44085.89 153460.6 0 1551032 Railroad indicator 200 .5 .5 0 1 Pre-colonial trading post 200 .07 .25 0 1 Pre-colonial political centralization 200 2.36 .82 .04 4 District ELF (based on Murdock) 200 .43 .25 0 .94 Population 200 189727.6 343033.9 4309 3443207 Area, in km2 200 18880.26 24707.34 138.26 248403

Table 13: District summary statistics in French colonies

Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max Minister-years share 112 7.14 8.55 0 47.45 Missionaries (Woodberry) 112 .41 1.48 0 10 Missions 112 .31 .74 0 3 Teachers 112 6.18 8.54 .43 71.43 Students 103 358.47 492.06 8 3724.94 Public health staﬀ 111 9.39 11.69 0 70.8 Infrastructure expenditures 112 51240.38 130562 0 1150341 Railroad indicator 112 .3 .46 0 1 Pre-colonial trading post 112 .08 .27 0 1 Pre-colonial political centralization 112 2.56 .66 1 4 District ELF (based on Murdock) 112 .46 .21 0 .87 Population 112 116481.1 95748.38 2361 533000 Area, in km2 112 41319.36 79381.05 41.29 523825

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Table 14: Determinants of colonial educational investments by district (1919-1939)

(1) (2) (3) All colonies British French

Pre-colonial trading post indicator 0.95∗∗ 0.63 1.41∗∗ (0.32) (0.41) (0.30) Distance from the first trading post in the colony, in 100km -0.08∗ -0.09∗ -0.04 (0.03) (0.04) (0.03) African population, logged 0.39∗∗ 0.42∗ 0.37∗∗ (0.10) (0.15) (0.05) Geography Area in km2, logged 0.00 -0.00 0.03 (0.10) (0.15) (0.05) Distance from the coast, in 100km 0.02 0.02 -0.02 (0.03) (0.04) (0.02) Navigable river indicator (1910) 0.07 -0.09 0.19 (0.13) (0.24) (0.13) Terrain ruggedness 0.13 0.06 0.82 (0.31) (0.37) (0.49) Malaria prevalence index (1900) -0.12 0.04 -0.20∗ (0.08) (0.08) (0.08) Tsetse fly prevalence index (1970) 0.11 0.27 -0.04 (0.10) (0.15) (0.14) Natural resources and soil quality Gold, silver or diamonds indicator (1920) -0.20 -0.34 -0.04 (0.14) (0.23) (0.12) Base metals indicator (1920) 0.10 0.36 -0.18† (0.17) (0.28) (0.08) Soil quality index (2000) 0.02 0.05 0.05 (0.08) (0.16) (0.04) Pre-colonial characteristics Ethnic Fractionalization Index -0.14 -0.17 0.07 (0.29) (0.32) (0.38) Prevalence of Islam (1910) -0.14 -0.16 -0.06 (0.11) (0.11) (0.14) Agriculture (none to irrigation) 0.20∗ 0.23 0.08 (0.08) (0.13) (0.10) Settlements (nomadic to complex) 0.04 0.02 -0.02 (0.04) (0.06) (0.08) Pre-colonial political centralization -0.02 -0.05 -0.09 (0.10) (0.12) (0.16) Slavery (absence to prevalent) -0.07 -0.19 0.09 (0.11) (0.16) (0.11) Constant -2.76∗ -3.36 -2.49∗ (1.26) (2.01) (0.71) Observations 312 200 112 Adjusted R2 0.38 0.35 0.61 Notes: † p < 0.10,* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Clustered standard errors by colony in parentheses. All models include colony fixed effects. The model is a simple OLS, akin to equation2 in page 22, where educational investments are logged for normality. This table shows that pre-colonial trade and district population are the only consistently significant determinants of public (missionary) education in French (British) colonial districts. 43 Page 63 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

Table 15: Excluding capitals: The post-colonial district political returns to colonial investments

(1) (2) (3) (4) British British French French Educational investments Missionaries, logged 0.14∗ 0.11∗ (0.04) (0.03) Teachers, logged 0.99† 0.95† (0.47) (0.47) Students (government and aided schools), logged 0.06 (0.03) Missions, logged 0.21 (0.49) Other investments and alternative explanations Infrastructure expenditures, logged 0.03 0.02 -0.00 -0.00 (0.02) (0.02) (0.08) (0.08) Public health staﬀ, logged -0.01 -0.03 0.09 0.10 (0.08) (0.06) (0.20) (0.20) Population, logged 0.42∗∗ 0.39∗ 0.12 0.10 (0.07) (0.11) (0.20) (0.20) Pre-colonial trading post -0.21 -0.21 0.53 0.46 (0.22) (0.21) (1.04) (1.03) Political centralization (Murdock) -0.05 -0.08 0.18 0.18 (0.06) (0.06) (0.22) (0.23) Observations 192 178 104 104 Adjusted R2 0.26 0.26 0.44 0.44 Note: This table is identical to Table3 but with the 16 colonial capitals at independence excluded as a robustness check.

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Figure 10: Minister year shares by district in British colonies I (1960-1971)

Ghana

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 15 10 5 10 0 -5 5 Percentage -10 0

Ho Wa Ho Wa Ada Birim Keta Ada Birim Keta GonjaKrachi Sefwi Lawra Accra Krachi SefwiGonja Lawra Accra SunyaniAshantiObuasi WasawBekwai Wenchi AhantaKumasi Wasaw SunyaniAshantiObuasi WenchiBekwai Ahanta Kumasi VoltariverWinnebaAkwapimSaltpond Voltariver WinnebaAkwapimSaltpond Mamprusi Capecoast DagombaNavrongoMampong MamprusiCapecoastNavrongo Dagomba Mampong Westernakim Westernakim

Kenya

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 15 10 5 10 0 -5 5 Percentage -10 0

Digo Kitui Kilifi Digo Kitui Kilifi MeruNandi Uasin Lamu Embu Teita Lamu Nandi Uasin Teita EmbuMeru NakuruElgeyo Ravine Nairobi Elgeyo Nakuru Ravine Nairobi Turkana LaikipiaKisumu Westsuk Kericho ForthallBaringo Kiambu KisumuLaikipia TurkanaWestsukKericho Baringo ForthallKiambu Mombasa Naivasha TanariverMasaiken MombasaNaivasha Tanariver Masaiken Machakos SouthnyeriTransnzoia Northnyeri NorthnyeriTransnzoia MachakosSouthnyeri NorthkavirondoNorthernfrontier Southkavirondo Northernfrontier NorthkavirondoSouthkavirondo Centralkavirondo Centralkavirondo

Malawi

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 25 20 20 10 15 0 10 Percentage 5 -10 0

Kota Kota Cholo Dowa Cholo Dowa LikomaNcheu MlanjeZomba Dedza LikomaNcheu Zomba Mlanje Dedza Karonga Blantyre Lilongwe Mzimba Blantyre Karonga Lilongwe Mzimba Lowerriver Chinteche Lowerriver Chinteche Fortjohnston Fortjohnston

Nigeria

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 10 10 5 0 -5 5 Percentage -10 -15 0

Oyo Oyo Ijebu Ilorin Zaria Warri Niger Kano 45 Kano Ilorin Ijebu Zaria Warri Niger Ondo Kabba Benin Benue OgojaOwerriBornuLagos Owerri OndoBenue Kabba OgojaBenin BornuLagos Katsina OnitshaBauchi Plateau SokotoCalabar Onitsha Sokoto Bauchi KatsinaCalabar Plateau Adamawa Abeokuta Adamawa Abeokuta Cameroons Cameroons Page 65 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

Figure 11: Minister year shares by district in British colonies II (1960-1971)

Sierra Leone

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 25 20 20 10 15 0 10 Percentage 5 -10 0

Bo Bo Kono Kono Bonthe SherbroBombaliKarene Tonkolili Bombali Karene Bonthe TonkoliliSherbro Kenema PujehunKailahunPortloko Freetown Kenema PujehunKailahun Portloko Freetown Koinadugu Moyamba Koinadugu Moyamba

Tanzania

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 15 10 5 10 0 5 Percentage -5 0

Lindi Pare Lindi Pare Kilwa Rufiji IringaUfipa Moshi RufijiKilwa IringaUfipa Moshi Arusha Kilosa MasasiMaswaMbeyaMbulu Ulanga Tanga Tabora Maswa MbuluUlangaMbeya KilosaArushaMasasi Tanga Tabora KahamaKondoaKwimbaManyoni NewalaNjombe HandeniKigomaTunduruRungweBukobaSingidaDodomaMwanzaSongeaMusoma KwimbaKahamaKigomaNjombeKondoa Bukoba Newala RungweManyoniHandeniSingidaTunduruMwanzaDodomaSongeaMusoma Masaitza MorogoroMpwapwa Mikindani Morogoro MpwapwaMasaitza Mikindani BagamoyoBiharamulo ShinyangaUsambara Shinyanga UsambaraBiharamulo Bagamoyo Daressalaam Daressalaam

Uganda

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 25 10 20 5 15 0 10 Percentage -5 5 -10 0

Teso Toro Teso Toro Kigezi CentralLangoAcholiAnkoleMengo Kigezi Central LangoAnkoleAcholiMengo Masaka BudamaBunyoroBusoga Busoga Masaka Budama Bunyoro Westnile Karamoja Mubende Westnile MubendeKaramoja

Zambia

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 25 20 15 20 10 15 5 10 Percentage 0 5 -5 0

Isoka Mpika Ndola Ndola MpikaIsoka Mkushi Kalabo Lusaka Mongu 46 Kalabo Mkushi Lusaka Mongu Balovale Luwingu PetaukeSerenje SolweziKalomoKasamaLundazi Chinsali PetaukeBalovale Luwingu Serenje SolweziKalomo KasamaLundaziChinsali AbercornBrokenhillKasempaMankoya MumbwaSenangaSesheke Namwala AbercornSenangaBrokenhillSeshekeMankoya MumbwaKasempaNamwala Mporokoso LivingstoneMazabuka Mporokoso MazabukaLivingstone Fortrosebery Kawambwa Fortjameson FortroseberyKawambwa Fortjameson Page 66 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

Figure 12: Minister year shares by district in French colonies I (1960-1971)

Benin

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 10 30 5 20 0 -5 Percentage 10 -10 0

Mono Mono Allada Ouidah Borgou Allada Ouidah Borgou Djougou AtacoraSavalouCotonou Abomey Abomey Atacora DjougouSavalouCotonou Portonovo Portonovo Moyenniger Moyenniger

Burkina Faso

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 20 10 15 5 10 0 Percentage 5 -5 0

Say Say Dori Fada Kaya Dori Kaya Fada Gaoua Gaoua Dedougou Dedougou Tenkodogo Ouahigouya Koudougou Tenkodogo Ouahigouya Koudougou Ouagadougou Bobodioulasso Ouagadougou Bobodioulasso

Cote d'Ivoire

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 30 30 20 20 10 0 Percentage 10 -10 0

Man Man Daloa Kong Kong Daloa GuigloIndenie Tabou AssinieGourosLahouBaoule Guiglo Indenie TabouGourosLahouAssinieBaoule Bassam Odienne Agneby Seguela Lagunes Odienne BassamSeguela Agneby Lagunes Nzicomoe Nzicomoe Bondoukou SassandraTagouanas BondoukouSassandra Tagouanas

Guinea

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 25 20 20 10 15 0 10 Percentage 5 -10 0

Pita Pita Labe Labe Boke KindiaBeyla Boffa Siguiri 47 Boke BeylaKindia BoffaSiguiri Mamou Kankan Dabola Mamou KankanDabola Koumbia ConakryMacenta KoumbiaMacentaConakry NzerekoreKouroussaForecariah Nzerekore KouroussaForecariah GueckedouKissidougou KissidougouGueckedou Page 67 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

Figure 13: Minister year shares by district in French colonies II (1960-1971)

Mali

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 40 30 20 30 10 20 0 Percentage 10 -10 0

Gao Nara San Kita San Kita Nioro NemaMopti NioroNara Gao Macina Kayes Segou Nema Kayes MoptiSegou GourmaKoutiala Niafunke Sikasso Bamako Koutiala Macina Gourma Sikasso Bamako BafoulabeBougouni Goundam Bougouni Niafunke Bandiagara Bafoulabe Goundam Satadougou Tombouctou Bandiagara Satadougou Tombouctou

Mauritania

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 30 10 5 20 0 Percentage 10 -5 0

Adrar Adrar Tagant Assaba Gorgol Brakna Trarza Assaba Tagant Brakna Gorgol Trarza Guidimaka Guidimaka Baiedulevrier Baiedulevrier

Niger

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 50 30 20 40 10 30 0 20 Percentage -10 10 -20 0

Bilma Konny Goure Dosso Zinder Konny Zinder Dosso Bilma Goure Agadez Nguigmi Tahoua Niamey Tahoua Nguigmi Agadez Niamey Tessaoua Tessaoua

Senegal

minister-years share minister-years share - population share 30 30 20 20 10 0 Percentage 10 -10 0

Baol Baol Bakel Podor LougaDakar Thies Podor BakelLouga Dakar Thies Dagana Matam 48 Matam Dagana Tivaouane Saintlouis Tivaouane Saintlouis SinesaloumCasamance Sinesaloum Casamance Hautegambie Tambacounda Hautegambie Tambacounda Page 68 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

B Historical materials

This section provides images of the historical materials referenced in the main text. I start by listing the independence years of the 16 countries in the sample. In bold, countries with coups d’etat—all taking place between 1965 and 1970—that led to a regime change:

1957 Guinea 1958 Ghana 1960 Senegal, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Mauritania 1961 Sierra Leone, Tanzania 1962 Uganda 1963 Kenya 1964 Malawi, Zambia

Figure 14: Senegalese Assembly

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Figure 15: Government of Ghana, 1960 Figure 16: Biography of Nkrumah

------

GHANA-(THE CONSTITUTION, THE GOVERNMENT) Nkrt1111al1, Fra11cis Nwia Ko.fie (Kwan1e) THE CONSTITUTION Prcside11t of Gl1a11a. The draft Constitution for the Republic of Ghana was Presidential Elections Dor11 in Septen1ber 1909 at Nkroful in presented to the National Assembly in March 1960, The first President will be named in the Constitution, and accepted by plebiscite in April, and will come into force on will be elected by the people at the same time as they vote tl1c W ester11 Province of Gl1a11a (tl1e11 I July 1960. in the plebiscite. k11ow11 as tl1c Gold Coast), 11ear tl1e Ivory The main provision of the new Constitution are: The President's term of office will be identical with that of the National Assembly, unless he dies or resigns, when 1. That Ghana should be a sovereign unitary Republic Coast border, a 111en1ber of tl1c Nzi111a with power to surrender any part of her sovereignty to a a new President will be elected by the National Assembly Union of African States. for the remainder of its term of office. tribe a11d tl1c so11 of a goldsn1itl1, l1e was The President will be eligible for re-election. 2. That the Head of State and holder of executive power The election of subsequent Presidents is the subject of a educated at Catl1olic 111issio11 scl1ools a11d should be an elected President responsible to the people. Presidential Elections Bill, to be introduced after the 3. That Parliament should be the Sovereign legislature establishment of the Republic. Should any candidate tl1e11 beca1nc a pupil tcacl1cr. 111 1926 he and should consist of the President and the National obtain the support of half the Members of the National Assembly, and that the President should have a power to Assembly he is automatically declared President.:' Should \Vc11t to the Govcrn111cntTrainit1g College veto legislation and to dissolve Parliament. there be no candidate with a clear majority, the election is 4. That a President should be elected whenever there is entrusted to the National Assembly, voting by secret ii1 Accra (later i11corporated into Acl1i a general election by a method which insures that he will ballot. Failing agreement after five ballots the National normally be the leader of the party which is successful in Assembly is automatically dissolved and another General n1ota College), \vl1crc he took a tcacl1i11g the General Election. Election is held. diplon1a, a11d tl1e11 taugl1t at a variety of 5. That there should be a Cabinet appointed by the Tiie Cabinet President from among Members of Parliament to assist the schools u11til i11 193 an u11cle l1clpcd to President in the exercise of his executive functions. The Cabinet shall consist of at least eight Ministers. s 6. That the system of Courts and the security of tenure The National Assembly pay llis passage to the U11ited States. In ·of Judges should continue on present lines. The normal life of the National Assembly shall be five 7. That the control of the armed forces and the civil years, after which there shall be a General Electio!lr 1939 lie graduated fro111 Li11coh1 U1tl service should be vested in the President. Election is by universal adult suffrage. vcrsity witl1 a 111ajor in Econo111ics at1d Sociology, stayi11g on to study Theology. THE GOVERNMENT Having obtained post-graduate degrees in Educatio11 a11d Pl1tlosopl1y fro111 tl1e President: Dr. KwAME NKRUMAH (from J uly 1st, 1960). DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATIVES U11iversity of Pe11nsylva11ia, he was CABINET (A) Ambassador; (H.C.) High Commissioner. Head of State: Dr. KWAME NKRUMAH (from July Jst, 1960). appoi11ted Lecturer in I>olitical Scie11ce at Ethiopia: M. A. RIBERIO, Addis Ababa (A). Minister ot Finance: K. A. GBEDEMAH. Minister or Economic Attain: KOJO BoTSIO. France: J. E. JANTUAH, Paris (A). Li11coh1 U1tlversity a11d, \vhile there, was Minister of Health and Social Welfare: c. T. NYLANDER. aerman Federal Republic: T. o. AsARE, Bonn (A). elected Preside11t of tl1e Africa11 Students Minister of Local aovemment: A. E. A. OFoRI-ATTA. Bulnea: Hon. J. H. ALLASSANI, (Ghana Minister for Minister or Fonlgn A train: AKO ADJEI. Guinea Affairs). Minister or the Interior: A. E. INKSUMAH. India: NANA KwABENA KENA II, New Delhi, (H.C.). Orgattlzation of America and Canada. · Minister or Transport and Communications: KRoBo Israel: BEDIAKO POKU, Tel Aviv (A). 0 EDUSEI. Japan: W. BAIDOE-ANsAH, Tokyo (A). Coming across the works of Marcus Minister of Education and Information, Director, Bureau of African AHain: KOFI BAAKo. Liberia: CoBINA KEssrn, Monrovia (A). Garvey, he beca1ne fired with the idea of Minister of Health: IMoRu EGALA. Nl1erla: V. M. C. TAY, Lagos (H.C.). Minister of Works and Housing: E. K. BENSAH. Sudan: C. S. DEY, Khartoum (A). Pan-Africattlsm. InJune 1945 he went to Minister of Food and Agriculture: F. Y . AsARE. Tunisia: JOHNATHAN E. BossMAN, Tunis (A). London to read Law and write a thesis. · Minister or Trade: P. K. K. QuArnoo. U.S.S.R.: JOHN BANKS ELLIOT, Moscow (A). Minister of State (Guinea A train): J. H. ALu.ssANI. Becoming Vice-President of the West · United Arab Republic: J.B. ERzuAH, Cairo (A). Minister of State: N. A. WELBEcx. • African Students Union, he worked i Minister ot State for Defence: C. T . NYLANDER . United Kln1dom: E . c. AsAFU-ADJAYE, London (H.C.). United States: w. Q. M. HALM, Washington (A). closely witl1 George Pad1nore and in · REGIONAL COMMISSIONERS Yu1oslavla: SIMON WELLINGTON KUMAH, Belgrade (A). L. R. ABAVANA (Northem Region). October was one of the joint Secretaries '. R. 0 . AMUKO-ATTA (Ashanti). United Nations (New York): A. c. QuAYsoN-SACKEY, F. D . K. GoKA (Volta Region). New York. of the 5tli Pan-African Conference at , c. DE GRAFT DICKSON (Special Duties). United Nations (Geneva): H. R. AMoNoo, Geneva. J.E. HAGAN (Western Region). H. T. KoRBOE (Eastern Region). Embassies are to be set up in Brazil, Poland and Cuba. S. W . YEBOAH (Brong-Ahafo Region). 527 190

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Figure 17: Pages of a Blue Book page for Uganda, 1945 (left) and of a Compte Déﬁnif for Benin, 1928 (right)

COMPTE DÉFINITIF 1928 xxxm

3 W S CRÉDITS S J O S u DEPENSES «J ' par Pu H S NATURE DES DEPENSES

Cercle de Cotonou.

II 17 Entretien des routes et ponts 10.700 » 10.565 70 Entretien des routes. 8 Entretien des marchés et caravansérails ; 3.000 » 2.717 82 Réparation ie la toiture du mar- 9 Entretien des : immeubles, gîtes d'étapes et ché de cotonou et uadigconnage. puits 1.250 » 350 50 Réparation do l'école de fiodomey, , . crépissage des murs et badigeonnage. Totaux. 14.950 » 13 634 02

17 2 2 Autres — dépenses imprévues. Aménagement d'un champ d'aviation entre Kadjèhoun et Godomey 3 084 » 2 084 » Aménagement d'un champ d'aviation entre Kadjèhoun et (iodomey. Totaux 3.084 » 2.084 »

20 2 1 Construction de ponts et de routes dans les cercles 25.200 » 24.773 50 Grosses réparations a la route de , Cotonou. Totaux 25.200 » 24.773 50

Cercle de Djougou

III 7 Entretien des routes et ponts 37.000 » 19.608 » Travaux courants d'entretien des routes Djougou-Sèméré-Djougou- Onklou sur tout leur parcourt). 8 Entretien des mai chés et caravansérails. 1.000 » 020 » Entretien courant des bâtiments du marché et

2 3 Construction de bâtiments pour logement de fonctionnaires 4.000 » 610 » Construction d'un pavillon de 3 pièces avec vôrandah, toiture chaume. Totaux 4 000 » 010 »

20 2 l Construction de et pnnts routes nouvelles.' 32.000 » 16.148 » Construction de la route de Djou- , gou a N'Dali. Totaux 32.000 » 16.148 »

6 3 Travaux divers aux rpostes médicaux... 5 000 » 4.180 » construction d'un dispensaire a , Djougou. Totaux 5.000 » 4.180 »

Cercle du Borgou.

11 1 7/ PntrptiPii HP« rontP< entretien aes roiue» etPt pontsnnntt; -il.UUUk\ 000 » 49i».o/u876 » Entretien et amélioration desroules ,iu cercle. Remise en état de la route Nikki. Kallé, route Guessou, Senendé. Construction d'un pont sur rivière Kala, réfection des ponts du cercle. 8 Entretien des marchés et caravansérails 1.000». 1-009» decgKcu^^en8e^ffr "^ tion des toits des caravansérails des 9 Entretien des immeubles, gîtes d'étapes et subdivisions. puits .. . . * 4 ' 750 » 4.697 » lîntretiendes immeubles du cercle et creusement des puits du poste. Construction d'un gîte d'étapes â Bori. 10 1U entretienFntfpripn aesHPS Cimctieiespimptipr'PS ~ou250 » 235~o<; » Crépissage et blanchiement des tombes, réfection du mur d'entou- , , „ , . . . . t m • 11 Réparation et transformation des Tribunauxi. raSe~ â Bem béréké. .f.. ,„ . , ,. . m .. , . indigènes 3oOocn »„. dou-JKO » Transformation du Tribunal de Parakou. Réfection toiture, aména- salle d'audiences. Crépissage 1V, „ fementes murs.

51 Page 71 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

Figure 18: Colonial map of Nigeria (1948)

Figure 19: Colonial map of French West Africa (1954)

52 Page 72 of 185 | Created 10-13-2016 10:50:36 | Joan Ricart-Huguet

The Origins of Colonial Investments

Joan Ricart-Huguet∗ October 11, 2016

Abstract

Recent literature has documented the economic and political consequences of colonialism, but we know less about the origins of colonial investments. I present evidence that they were very unequally distributed within 16 French and British African colonies, even when adjusted for population. How did colonial powers allocate their investments? Eco- nomic history emphasizes the role of natural resources while recent literature in political economy argues that settlers explain the origin of colonial institutions. I argue that observable geographic features—locational fundamentals—led some locations to become centers of pre-colonial trade, which in turn increased colonial settlement and investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Disparities did not diminish during the colonial period because those locations became centers of colonial economic activity and beneﬁted from complementarities between investments, consistent with a logic of increasing returns. JEL: F63, H50, N37, N57

∗Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. Email: [email protected]. I thank Carles Boix, Evan Lieberman, Marc Ratkovic and Leonard Wantchekon, Jennifer Widner, Tsering Wangyal Shawa, Bill Guthe, Torben Behmer, Brandon Miller de la Cuesta, Costantino Pischedda and seminar participants at the Contemporary African Political Economy Research Seminar (CAPERS), at the Politics and History Network and at Princeton University for useful comments. I am grateful to Elise Huillery and Bob Woodberry for sharing the relevant data. Jeremy Darrington and Elizabeth Bennett helped me locate multiple data sources. Seth Merkin Morokoﬀ, Luise Zhong and Bruno Schaﬀa provided excellent research assistance.