The Colonial Origins of Local Inequality

Abstract

Since the "Arab Uprisings" of 2010, the political salience of local variation in social development has dramatically increased. While we know a lot about the political parties and activists that played such an important role in events following the self-immolation and death of Mohamed Bouazzizi, we know much less about the origins of the local disparities that experts cite as one of the main drivers of discontent across the region. These discrepancies are puzzling. While we know descriptively that Tunisia, like many parts of the developing world, has long faced stark contrasts in the local provision of basic public goods and services, Tunisia is a small, ethnically homogeneous country, with a strong tradition of precolonial governance and is generally cited as a successful example of nation building post-independence. The Tunisian case suggest the importance of two related questions: why is social development high in some localities but not others? Why do these glaring inequalities in local access to public goods and services persist in some localities but not others? I argue that patterns of European settlement during the colonial period introduced inequalities in access to basic public goods. These inequalities trace their origins to the process of state building, the creation of the institutions responsible for the provision of public goods like education, health care, as well as infrastructure like roads and irrigation. As a result the state building process looked very different in colonies than countries that were never colonized. In colonies the expansion of the colonial state was closely tied to patterns of European settlement. Because Europeans were the overwhelming beneficiaries of colonial administration former colonies inherited glaring discrepancies in the institutions and infrastructure essential for social development at independence. But colonial legacies of social welfare were moderated by the expansion of formal registration: the process of formally registering and enumerating land and people. Where registration was limited, colonial era inequalities were much more likely to persist post-independence.