economic history

New evidence from colonial history is challenging the consensus that extractive institutions always harm long-run development, showing that outcomes depend on whether extraction left behind durable public infrastructure and state capacity.

Ethnic diversity is often blamed for poor development outcomes. New evidence from colonial Peru shows that a history of economic exchange can sustain inter-ethnic cooperation and local trade in the long run.

Theories from research in anthropology, history and African studies, combined with new data on independent political communities in pre-colonial Africa, provide an alternate view of the continent’s history. Africans succeeded in keeping the scale of ...

Successful governments throughout history have taken many diverse forms, showing that effective statehood does not follow a single linear evolutionary path but instead depends on how societies organise themselves to provide public goods and mobilise their people.

Over a thousand years, China’s political hierarchy reshaped regional prosperity – provincial capitals flourished through bureaucracy and market access, but these benefits faded once they lost administrative status.

The land prices of the former outcaste neighbourhoods in Japan remain substantially lower, suggesting persistent stigma despite the legal abolition of discrimination more than a century ago.

Industrial clusters can fuel economic booms today, but can also trap cities into tomorrow's decline. Evidence from two centuries of British cities reveals the lasting costs of specialisation.

Stalin’s forced deportation of educated ‘enemies of the people’ inadvertently concentrated human capital in Gulag towns, fostering inter-generational prosperity and long-term development despite the destructive intent of the repression.

India’s 75-year journey of development has intertwined nation-building, democracy, and economic transformation in ways that challenge conventional theories of growth – highlighting both the achievements and enduring tensions between inclusion, governance, and inequality that continue to shape the country's future.