Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns in India. We construct a new geocoded database of historical interstate conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, from which we compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a positive and significant relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development across India today. This result is robust to numerous checks, including controls for geographic endowments, initial state capacity, colonial-era institutions, ethnic and religious fractionalization, and colonial and post-colonial conflict, and an instrumental variables analysis that exploits variation in pre-colonial conflict exposure driven by cost distance to the Khyber Pass. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more exposed to pre-colonial conflict experienced greater local pre-colonial and colonial-era state-making, and less political violence and higher infrastructure investments in the long term.

Keywords: Warfare, Economic Development, State Capacity, Public Goods, India, History

JEL Classification: N45, O11, P48, H11