Precolonial elites and colonial redistribution of political power

Allison Spencer Hartnett and Mohamed Saleh

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Studies of colonialism often associate indirect colonial rule with continuity of the precolonial institutions. Yet, we know less about how colonialism affected the distribution of power between precolonial domestic elites within nominally continuous institutions. We argue that colonial authorities will redistribute power toward elites that are the most congruent with the colonizer’s objectives. We test our theory on the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Using an original dataset on members of the Egyptian parliament and a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that the colonial authorities shifted parliamentary representation toward the (congruent) landed elite and away from the (oppositional) rural middle class. This shift was greater in cotton-producing provinces which were more exposed to colonial economic interest. Our results demonstrate that the colonial redistribution of power within precolonial institutions can reengineer the social-structural fabric of colonized societies.

JEL-codes: N45 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2025-01-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-his
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Published in American Political Science Review, 24, January, 2025. ISSN: 1537-5943

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Related works:
Working Paper: Precolonial Elites and Colonial Redistribution of Political Power (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:125972

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