Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences

By Lakshmi Shankar Iyer. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on postcolonial outcomes.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc640232e5dadee0b165dbd4041c89ead6f05ae1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development (2012, background): “Our micro approach enables us to overcome problems inherent to the cross-country framework, adding to a vibrant body of research that examines the within-country impact of various historical institutional arrangements (e.g. Banerjee and Iyer (2005); Iyer (2010); Dell (2010)).”
Institutions, Human Capital and Development: Online Appendix (2014, positive): “Some prominent examples include Banerjee & Iyer (2005) and Iyer (2010) for India, Acemoglu et al. (2008a, 2012a, 2013 Importantly, all of these papers find strong evidence of the effect of institutions on long-run economic development at the within-country level.”
Chiefs: Economic Development and Elite Control of Civil Society in Sierra Leone (2014, background): “Our paper is also related to a small literature on economic consequences of indirect rule, including Lange ð2009Þ and Iyer ð2010Þ.”
Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics (2015, positive): “Similar to the convergence found in Iyer (2010), the longer East Germans live under the new market system, the more their preferences resemble those of West Germans.”
Cities in Bad Shape: Urban Geometry in India (2020, background): “The British direct rule dummy identifies cities in districts that were formerly part of British India, based on Iyer (2010).”
Ecology, trade and states in pre-colonial Africa (2014, background): “These include forms of colonial rule, land tenure, and forced labor (Banerjee and Iyer, 2005; Dell, 2010; Iyer, 2010).”
Well-Being Dynamics and Poverty Traps (2016, background): “…on phenomena such as ethnic fractionalization, weak property rights, public goods provision, and other institutions thought essential to promoting investment and development (Acemoglu et al. 2001, Banerjee & Iyer 2005, Dell 2010, Easterly & Levine 1997, Iyer 2010, Nunn 2007, 2009; Tan 2010).”