History, historians and development policy

Front matter

HISTORY, HISTORIANS DEVELOPMENT

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Part I: Overview of key issues

1 How and why history matters for development policy Michael Woolcock, Simon Szreter and Vijayendra Rao

2 Indigenous and colonial origins of comparative economic development: the case of colonial India and Africa C. A. Bayly

Commentary: History, time and temporality in development discourse Uma Kothari page vii ix xi

Part II: Historical contributions to contemporary development policy issues Social protection

3 Social security as a developmental institution? The relative efficacy of poor relief provisions under the English Old Poor Law Richard Smith

4 Historical lessons about contemporary social welfare: Chinese puzzles and global challenges R. Bin Wong

Commentary: Why might history matter for development policy? Ravi Kanbur

Public health

Health in India since independence Sunil S. Amrith

Health care policy for American Indians since the early 20th century Stephen J. Kunitz

Commentary: Can historians assist development policy-making, or just highlight its faults?

David Hall-Mathews

Public education

The end of literacy: the growth and measurement of British public education since the early nineteenth century David Vincent

The tools of transition: education and development in modern Southeast Asian histo: Tim Harper

Commentary: Remembering the forgetting in schooling Lant Pritchett

Natural resource management and natural resource dependency in Europe, 1600-1900

Special rights in property: why modern African economies are dependent on mineral resources Keith Breckenridge

Commentary: Natural resources and development — which histories matter?

Mick Moore

LIF

N — w

List of tables and figures

Tables 3.1 The English share of European urban growth, 1600-1800 page 76 3.2 Howlet’s evidence on the urban-rural differential in the

Poor Law’s financial incidence 84 Figures

9.1 Energy carrier share in total consumption, England and Wales,

1560-2000 230 9.2 Relative price of coal and firewood, London, 1560-1730 231 9.3 Labour and energy prices, southern England, 1560—1860 234

9.4 Per capita energy consumption, England and Wales, 1560—2000 235

List of contributors

Sunil S. Amrith is Lecturer in History in the Department of History, Classics and Archeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

C. A. Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, and Fellow of St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge.

Keith Breckenridge is Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the Howard College Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

David Hall-Mathews is Senior Lecturer in International Development in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds.

Tim Harper is Reader in History, and Fellow of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.

Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics, Cornell University.

Uma Kothari is Professor of Development Studies at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester.

Stephen J. Kunitz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Community & Preventive Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine.

Mick Moore is Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex.

Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

List of contributors

Vijayendra Rao is Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, World Bank.

Richard Smith is Professor of Historical Geography and Demography, and Fellow of Downing College, University of Cambridge.

Simon Szreter is Professor of History and Public Policy, and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge and Founding Editor of www.historyand policy.org.

David Vincent is Professor of Social History at the Open University.

Paul Warde is Reader in Early Modern History in the Department of History, University of East Anglia.

R. Bin Wong is Professor of History and Director of the Asia Institute, University of California, Los Angeles.

Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Development Specialist in the Development Research Group, World Bank. During the period when much of the work for this book was undertaken, he was Professor of Social Science and Development Policy, and Research Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute, at the University of Manchester.

Preface and acknowledgements

This volume grew out of the seemingly straightforward presumption that if history matters for development policy, as most people agree it does, then perhaps historians — and not only economic historians — might have something important to contribute. Too often, it seemed to us, the substantive and methodological contributions of professional historians to development policy debates was marginal, whether because of the dominance of economists or the inability (or unwillingness) of historians to contribute. As a result, our view was that significant opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue were being lost, and that development policy itself was ultimately the poorer for this. As a step in a more positive direction, we decided to commission a series of papers by leading historians on four core development policy issues — social protection, public health, public education, and natural resource management — and to solicit feedback on them from people working directly at the nexus of scholarship and policy. The result is the volume before you: an introduction, nine substantive chapters and five commentary pieces that we hope exemplifies the fruitful and distinctive outcomes that can emerge when history — understood as both the past and the discipline — is taken seriously in contemporary development policy debates. This volume emerged out of the engagement of three of us (Rao, Szreter and Woolcock) in the World Development Report (WDR) 2006, which was on the theme of equity and development. These Reports are the annual flagship document of the World Bank, and as such have a relatively large global impact on development policy and debate. As part of the various follow-up initiatives launched in the wake of WDR 2006, we decided to capitalise on the fact that the Report had opened up an important space for thinking historically about the emergence and consolidation of different types of ‘institutions’ in particular places. But how exactly would that space would be filled, by whom, and on what basis? The answers to these questions seemed to us to be sufficiently consequential as to warrant expending considerable effort to ensure that the skills and sensibilities of professional historians were included. To this end, we sought out the xii

Preface and acknowledgements wisdom and input of Chris Bayly, who became an eager companion on this venture. Bayly and Szreter, as the two bona fide historians on our team, identified the historians we might approach to contribute to this volume, and collectively we sought to fashion topics and papers that would simultaneously showcase exemplary historical research and speak constructively to contemporary development policy debates.

The initial and final rounds of funding for this project came from the World Bank (its Research Support Budget and trust funds provided by the government of Sweden). The middle phases of the project, including an author’s workshop, were generously funded by the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. The assistance of Laura Partridge is especially acknowledged. We are extremely grateful to both organizations for making this project possible, and for themselves demonstrating that academic and applied organizations can work together to generate outcomes that neither could alone.

The overriding objective throughout has been to demonstrate that responding to inherently complex issues — such as institutional development, organizational design, service delivery and ‘governance’ — requires engagement with a diverse assortment of ideas and evidence. In this regard, the contributions of economists and historians (and other social scientists) are largely complements, not substitutes. It is in this spirit that we invite readers, no matter what their disciplinary training or professional background, to engage with the various chapters, each of which demonstrates in a practical, thoroughly evidence-based manner, and in relation to a specific development policy preoccupation, how much can be gained by development policy practitioners taking seriously historians’ knowledge of context, process, contestation and indigenous agency in the places where they operate. The chapters show how those involved in designing or implementing significant policy interventions, in the name of ‘development’, need to understand that they are attempting, usually with relatively minute instruments and blunt tools, to influence, alter and modify the course of a vigorous, living, flowing river — the metaphor we have adopted for a country’s or a nation’s ongoing history. Those involved in development policy are attempting to insert themselves and their projects, at a particular point of entry, into one of these many currents of history, as it continually negotiates its way from the present into the future, drawing on the resources of its past. They are making a bid to become part of that current and to have some influence over it. To do so most effectively, it would be well to spend considerable time consulting those who are best placed to understand the features of the riverbed and the river’s course, the rhythms of the water’s ebb and flow, the most propitious points of entry from the river bank and the varied forms of life it contains and sustains.

C. A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter, Michael Woolcock September 2010

Part I of key issues

Michael Woolcock, Simon Szreter and Vijayendra Rao

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft. Winston Churchill

Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation. Ernest Renan

[M]odern social science, policy-making and planning have pursued a model of scientism and technical manipulation which systematically, and deliberately, neglects human, and above all, historical, experience. The fashionable model of analysis and prediction is to feed all available current data into some notional or real supercomputer and let it come out with the answers ... [S]uch a-historical or even antihistorical calculation is often unaware of being blind, and inferior to even the unsystematic vision of those who can use their eyes.

Eric Hobsbawm

1 Introduction

There is now a broad consensus across the social sciences and among development policy-makers that ‘institutions’ matter, indeed that they ‘are a key determinant of the wealth and poverty of nations’ (Hoff 2003: 205). Logically, considering where much of the empirical support for this consensus comes from, the next step in this inferential chain has been to conclude that ‘history’ matters (Nunn 2009). Any attempt to understand contemporary institutional performance is bound to identify when, where and why given institutions came to take their particular form, and how these have changed (or not) over time (North 1990, 2005).These debates now play out at the highest policy levels. For example, two recent flagship World Development Reports from the World Bank — on markets (World Bank 2001) and equity (World Bank 2005) — have explicitly sought to incorporate a historical sensibility into their discussions of the origins, structure and persistence of institutions, the better to help understand how they help or hinder broader development trajectories and outcomes. This is to be welcomed and encouraged.

In arguing that institutions and history matter, however, the development policy community has largely failed to take the third (seemingly logical) step, which is to recognize that historians — and the discipline they represent — might matter. Selected economic historians working within the confines of economics departments (e.g., Stan Engerman, Kenneth Sokoloff, Peter Lindert, Ronald Findlay, Kevin O’Rourke, Jeffrey Williamson) have certainly been influential in these discussions,” as have some innovative economists who have turned their theories, methods and quest for data to the past, most notably Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson (for present purposes we shall call them historical economists). Certain authors of influential ‘big picture’ development narratives (e.g. Diamond 1997, de Soto 2000) have also invoked a reading of the past to make their case.’ However, a great many professional historians of particular countries, regions, periods or thematic issues have been conspicuous by their absence from these deliberations, especially in policy circles.*

While historians hardly speak with a single voice or from a unified perspective, we believe it is unfortunate that most historians and their discipline are absent from development policy debates, despite everyone putatively agreeing that “history matters’: at best it leads to lost opportunities to enrich the quality of scholarship and policy responses; at worst it results in all manner of instances in which partisans erroneously or selectively invoke ‘history’ in support of their cause (see MacMillan 2009). Needless to say, it is almost impossible to imagine the reverse situation, namely a prominent policy issue on which there was a consensus that economics matters but that economists were somehow not consulted.’ This volume seeks to provide some constructive examples of the kinds of studies by historians which can provide the basis for establishing a more constructive space in which historians, social scientists (especially economists) and policy-makers can more fruitfully engage one another around core development issues (cf. Szreter 2005). We do not claim to be the first to attempt such an exercise; rather, building on Neustadt and May (1986) and the especially insightful collection published in Cooper and Packard (1997) — works largely preceding the contemporary policy ‘consensus’ regarding the importance of institutions and history — we seek to extend and fortify the bridge connecting historians and development policy-makers.°

The chapter proceeds as follows. Section two clarifies key terms and concepts, and explores the basis on which historical scholarship — or ‘thinking in time’ (Neustadt and May 1986’) — can potentially help to enrich the quality of contemporary development policy. It also provides a brief overview of the arguments and evidence that underpin the prevailing consensus among development economists and policy-makers that ‘institutions’ and ‘history’ matter.

Section three focuses on the different theoretical and methodological underpinnings of contemporary historical scholarship as it pertains to comparative economic development, arguing that in order for non-historians to engage more substantively and faithfully with the discipline of history, they must make a sustained effort both to understand historiography and appreciate anew the limits of their own discipline’s methodological assumptions. Being a historian is not just a matter of ‘knowing more’ about a particular time, place or issue than others, but acquiring an entire sensibility about how to compile, assess and interpret evidence, substantiate causal claims, and understand complex (often interdependent) processes. Section four outlines some of the distinctive types of general principles and specific implications that can be drawn from historical scholarship, and considers their relevance for contemporary development policy. Section five provides a summary of the substantive chapters presented in this volume, while section six concludes with suggestions for how the evolving dialogue between historians and development policy can be enhanced and sustained.

2 Thinking in time revisited: can the past guide the present?

This introduction considers how and why, in general terms, history matters for contemporary development policy. For present purposes, we deploy the term ‘history’ to refer to both ‘the past’ and to the academic discipline of history. As such, we are concerned with drawing upon the deep reservoir of historical scholarship about the past (events and their interpretation) to help provide a more comprehensive body of theory and evidence for wrestling with contemporary development policy concerns."

We acknowledge from the outset that many reasonable people contend that it is naive, foolish or even positively dangerous to expect history (either ‘the past’ or ‘the discipline’) to speak to contemporary policy problems, especially those pertaining to highly controversial concerns such as ‘development’. The basis for such a stance includes beliefs that (a) ‘history’ does not and cannot provide such ‘lessons’ (i.e., it contains no teleological or Hegelian imperative), (b) that each time and place is unique (i.e., there are inherently qualitative differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and/or ‘here’ and ‘there’’), (c) that only those acting with great hubris imagine that ‘the future’ can be effectively guided by the deployment of human reason, or (d) that any such actions inevitably unleash — no matter how seemingly noble the initial intention or diligent the implementation — potentially harmful and irreversible unintended consequences. In this regard, historians are also conscious that (e) many of the twentieth (and previous) century’s most infamous tyrants (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot) justified their actions on the basis that they were acting in accordance with, or to actively fulfil, a destiny or mandate borne of historical necessity.’® Similarly, (f) historians may distance themselves from policy discussions because of a concern that their hard-won research findings — sobering, nuanced and finely crafted as they are likely to be — are either ‘unactionable’ through prevailing policy instruments or may be used for purposes (whether by dictators or by well-meaning bureaucracies wielding only the crudest of decontextualized policy tools'') that they find distasteful and/or for which they wish to bear no responsibility. Finally, (g) large international development agencies, formed as they were during the height of modernization theory’s influence, contain an inherent imperative to embrace, implicitly if not explicitly, presumptions that there is a ‘single’ or ‘best’ path to modernity (embodied in the ubiquitous language of ‘best practices’), a notion most contemporary historians reject." These are all legitimate concerns, which we address below.

A more strident (but to our mind, unpersuasive) critique of our project would dismiss the very possibility that historical scholarship can be, even if it so desired, a basis for informing contemporary policy choices. For many students of post-modernism and cultural studies (see Jenkins 1991), for example, both the content and the epistemological underpinnings of orthodox ‘history’ are suspect at best, since (for these scholars) such history is merely a series of hegemonic, ex post rationalizations propagated by powerful elites, the accounts of the past reimagined by ‘winners’ in the present to ensure their status remains unchallenged (and, in its most complete form, unchallengeable) by the ‘losers’ (Trouillot 1995). According to this view, ‘development’ is among the most egregious of subjects for historical inquiry (see Rist 2009), since its very logic perfectly embodies, enables and justifies attempts by powerful countries, companies and social groups to provide narratives about the virtuous factors (thrift, diligence, intelligence, innovation, courage) that underpinned their economic success while simultaneously obscuring the less savoury aspects of that process (slavery, colonialism, exploitation, suppression, theft).'* Moreover, they argue, as part of this obfuscation, the mantra of ‘development’ enables the rich to lecture the poor about their putative political, cultural and moral failings, doing so as a pretext to encouraging (if not forcing) them to buy goods and resources (by going deeply into debt) and/or to adopt policy measures, institutional reforms and behavioural traits that they are told will surely correct these failings (but in fact will most likely serve only to further advance and consolidate the interests of the wealthy). These are not idle matters: several high-profile graduate programs in development studies (most notably in Europe’*) are informed, implicitly if not explicitly, by these notions; not surprisingly, engagement by the leaders (and graduates) of such programs with policy-makers, practitioners and staff of international development agencies — to the extent it occurs at all — is often characterized by deep suspicion.

In distancing ourselves from this view, we are nonetheless mindful that some post-modernist historians, such as those from Subaltern Studies, have taught us a great deal about issues that are at the heart of contemporary development concerns. Extending the longer tradition of ‘history from below’ exemplified by the work of E.P. Thomson, Subaltern scholars have demonstrated, among other things, that colonial subjects developed intellectual traditions and movements that often ran counter to the dominant colonial discourse (Sarkar 1983), and that this laid the foundations of movements for social change." They have shown, in kinship with Scott (1985), that persistent inequalities cannot be understood without acknowledging that they are often accompanied by modes of resistance that demonstrate the agency of the oppressed (Guha 1983). As we argue below, understanding the dynamics behind ideas such as these lie at the heart of what we believe historians can contribute to development policy.

It is clear, then, that the relationship between history and development policy is often a contentious one, a cautionary opening note that needs to be registered against the prevailing view in policy circles that, as we shall see, offers a remarkably ‘clean’ story in which the desire to incorporate history into development policy is largely preoccupied with the search for the key structural ‘variables’ or ‘factor endowments’ — property rights, disease vectors, press freedom, population density, types of natural resources, labour scarcity — that were associated with the origins and consolidation of institutions that promoted (or precluded) productivity growth, and expanded (or restricted) economic opportunities and political liberties in the pasts of today’s developed economies and societies.

We believe the rich historical scholarship on comparative economic development has much to offer contemporary development policy, indeed that the quality and usefulness of such policy deliberations is much the poorer for its failure to be informed by a sustained engagement with historians. We recognize the concerns raised above regarding the potential dangers this engagement entails, are conscious that how we make sense of the past is itself an evolving exercise, f and concede that some historians may recoil at their inclusion in this project. Nevertheless, we argue that judicious efforts to ‘think in time’ — i.e., to take seriously the scholarly research that specializes in disentangling complex interdependent processes as they have played themselves out in particular contexts across decades and even centuries — are a desirable and potentially fruitful basis on which to try to enhance the quality of the responses to some of the contemporary world’s most urgent policy problems. Much of this work is entirely complementary to the work of economic historians and ‘historical economists’, but much of it is also significantly different, not least with respect to the types of evidence and arguments it brings to bear. More immediately, historical sensibilities can also help to ‘deconstruct’ popular (and often very powerful) myths pertaining to a development organization’s origins, mandate and approach, showing how, at key junctures, particular options among several came to prevail.”

The strongest argument for the importance of bringing history into dialogue with policy and policy-making, however, is that history is already there, all the time: the only question is what kind of history is going to be used. Without the explicit input of critical and reflexive professional historians, the ‘history’ which policy-makers use is likely to be naive, simplistic and implicit, often derived from unconscious assumptions or vague memories; as such it is likely to be highly selective, used to suit predetermined purposes, and to be largely unverified.'* The (ab) use of history in this form not only represents a problem of commission but also of omission, in that it both invokes a defective and distorted rendering of history but also denies the policy process the vast reservoir of imaginative resources available from professional historians’ research. We continually deploy historical memory in all forms of activity, often as unarticulated, framing premises. It is the role of the discipline of history to attempt to keep that memory sharp and rich, vital and challenging, not complacent and forgetful of the more awkward aspects of the past.

‘Institutions matter’: a brief intellectual and policy history

If historians and their discipline can help provide useful and distinctive insights into contemporary development policy, it is instructive to examine the arguments and evidence put forward by those who have done the most to establish the contemporary ‘consensus’ regarding the importance of institutions and history for development policy — i.e., the ‘new’ institutional economists (see Harriss et al. 1995). If historians are to demonstrate their value to this discussion, we need to be clear about the current state and terms of that discussion.

In many respects, the study of institutions and their contribution to development is as old as economics itself (see Bardhan 1993). Adam Smith, in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, repeatedly stressed the importance of what we would now call political, legal and social institutions for making possible spectacular gains in productivity and exchange, and institutions of various kinds featured prominently in the accounts of ‘development’ offered by Marx and Weber in the nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, however, the mathematical turn in economics saw institutions recede from centre stage in that discipline. In the late twentieth century it was primarily the pioneering work of Douglass North (1982, 1990)” — and the subsequent availability of vastly greater computing power and more comprehensive datasets on institutional quality and economic performance — that enabled first the idea of ‘institutions’ and then the measurement of them to re-enter economic theory and the practice of development (see Lin and Nugent 1995). The initial empirical studies by, among others, Putnam (1993), Shleifer and Vishny (1993), Knack and Keefer (1995) and Mauro (1995) inspired literally hundreds of follow-up efforts to expand and refine economists’ understanding of how institutions shape (and in turn are shaped by) economic growth, poverty reduction and all manner of other development outcomes (e.g., conflict). Institutions, and their operational counterpart of ‘governance’, are now (back) at the centre of the development enterprise. This is as it should be.

In its simplest terms, these studies have yielded empirical support for the importance of institutions of various kinds, but most especially ‘property rights’, characteristically defined as the exclusive capacity of those (individuals or collectives) possessing intellectual, physical and natural assets to use, transfer and realize the economic value of those assets, usually through access to clear and legally enforceable titles. The presence in a given country of independent judiciaries, mechanisms for constraining corruption and abuse of executive authority (‘the rule of law’), ensuring the non-repudiation (or at least predictability) of contracts, and procedures for ensuring the non-violent transfer of political power are all now standard referents for what is meant by ‘institutions’ (Clague 1997). In development policy circles, these items are usually grouped together as part of a broader discourse on the importance of ‘good governance’. In conjunction with, indeed fuelled by, the comprehensive expansion and refinement of efforts formally to measure institutions,”

these renderings (or variations thereof) are now thoroughly embedded into everyday development research and policy debates; it is in this sense that we now have a ‘consensus’ on their importance. Our concern, however, in this volume is with better understanding the processes and mechanisms by which any of these ‘institutions’ in the abstract (e.g, ‘property rights’) came to take specific concrete forms in particular times and places, how political and social processes of institutional change were encouraged and/or thwarted in attempting to design and implement them, and what such understandings might tell us about contemporary policy efforts to ‘improve’ institutions in settings often far removed (geographically, culturally, politically) from aggregate quantitative data sets, or the contexts in which those understandings were generated.

For all the attention garnered by the impressive quantitative studies documenting the importance of institutions for understanding contemporary economic performance,” by the early 2000s the prevailing policy discourse was recognizing that institutions themselves clearly had not arrived overnight; they must have ‘evolved’ over time, whether they were now consolidating unhappy outcomes (e.g. high inequality, slow growth, civil war) or encouraging more virtuous ones (poverty reduction, service delivery, participatory democracy). The key empirical and policy questions then became: Under what conditions do ‘good’ and ‘bad’ institutions emerge?” If countries find themselves with ‘bad’ institutions, what can be done, and by whom, to move things in a more constructive direction?

Into this conceptual and policy space stepped an array of impressive studies by economic historians and historical economists that were both intuitively appealing and empirically novel. Engerman and Sokoloff (2002, 2008; see also Sokoloff and Engerman 2000), addressing these phenomena in a comparative analysis of the divergent fortunes of North and South America, argued that the key lay in the types of natural resource endowments, since in both regions land was abundant and labour was scarce. Where the climate was conducive to the cultivation of crops that required large amounts of labour in order to be profitable, such as sugar, colonists resorted to the subjection of local populations

(in Latin America) and/or the importation of slaves (the southern states of North America, Central America and the Caribbean islands and the northern region of South America), in the process institutionalizing laws and social relations consolidating high inequality and elite dominance; where profits could be optimally gained by other means — that is, where the climate supported different kinds of crops or industries requiring different kinds of skilled labour (in the northern states of North America) — then colonists sought instead to attract immigrants and put in place more equitable legal, political and socio-economic arrangements. In these general terms, divergent ‘paths of development’ were thereby set in motion, which, over several centuries, culminated in two qualitatively different development experiences in the Americas.”*

These debates accelerated considerably in terms of both scale and policy impact with the arrival of a series of seminal papers by Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002, 2005), who provided both a seemingly neat empirical solution to the enduring problem of establishing a causal link (courtesy of a new dataset on settler mortality) between institutional quality and development performance, and an explanation for what they termed the ‘great reversal’ — the fact that countries that were viewed as having the greatest potential for prosperity in 1500 were now amongst the poorest today, and vice versa.” The explanation given for this was that the colonizing powers encountered vastly different environmental settings, which shaped the length and terms of their engagement with local populations and natural resources; this in turn gave rise to very different incentives to erect particular forms of institutions. Colonial settlers established a legacy of ‘good’ (inclusive, prosperity-enhancing) institutions in places where they committed to settling in large numbers for long periods, in the process enacting and upholding private property rights; they did this in places where they were engaged in tasks where land was abundant and that required relatively little labour, and (most importantly) where disease burdens were low (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, northern and western United States). ‘Bad’ (exclusionary, prosperity-stifling) institutions, on the other hand, were established in less hospitable environments, where the goal became one of enabling a small population of foreign transients to extract natural resource wealth as quickly and cheaply as possible; in such places, institutions — especially those pertaining to land ownership, civil liberties and conflict management — emerged that greatly concentrated political power in the hands of a powerful, dynastic elite, a process that, over time, led initial inequalities to accumulate and perpetuate, and broad growth processes to be thwarted (Latin America, Africa, the southern US states). In subsequent work, this general story has been refined and updated to account for (among other things) the persistence of sub-optimal institutions in the face of considerable gains to implementing ‘better’ ones; for example, institutional changes that could potentially generate economic expansion for large sectors of the population get blocked in those countries where political elites fear such change will lead to their replacement.”