Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development

ABSTRACT We show new evidence that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,600 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World. For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and high civil conflict. Our results offer new evidence about where and when ‘war makes states’.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Economic History of Developing Regions

• Publication date

  2019-05-03

• Fields of study

  Political Science, History

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/20780389.2019.1586528
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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