LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Sarah Carr

June 1st, 2016

Precolonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development in Uganda

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Sarah Carr

June 1st, 2016

Precolonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development in Uganda

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

In his latest article Dr Elliott Green looks at the role of “Precolonial Political Centralization and Contemporary Development in Uganda”. Below is a summary of the article, the full text can be found in the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change

The role of precolonial history on contemporary development has become an important field of study within development economics. In particular many scholars have suggest that precolonial political centralization has had an impact on contemporary levels of development within Africa. In this paper my co-author Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay (from Queen Mary University of London) and I examine the role of precolonial political centralization on contemporary development outcomes with detailed subnational data from Uganda. We use a variety of data sets and obtain two striking results. First, we find that precolonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes such as GDP, asset ownership, and poverty at the subcounty, district, and individual level; additional results using an instrumental variable approach confirm this finding. This finding thus confirms earlier findings from other authors that show a link between precolonial political centralization and various measures of development.  Second, we find that public goods such as immunization coverage and primary school enrollment, as well as perceptions of local government quality, are not correlated with precolonial centralization, which actually goes against previous findings on this topic. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between precolonial centralization and private rather than public goods, thereby suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the precolonial period to the present.  We speculate on the mechanism of this persistence, but suggest that it may involve conflict, the slave trade and the inability of postcolonial states to eliminate pre-existing regional inequalities, among other factors.


Dr Elliott Green is an Associate Professor of Development Studies in the LSE Department of International Development. His co-author on the paper, Dr Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Queen Mary University, London

About the author

Sarah Carr

Posted In: Featured | Publications

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RSS Justice and Security Research Programme

RSS LSE’s engagement with South Asia

  • Falling Out-of-Pocket Expenditure in India’s Healthcare: What’s Behind the Trend?
    Healthcare in India is a critical sector, now being the most populous country in the world. Government initiatives and investment play a central role in providing both affordability and access. Vrinda Gupta examines the latest figures of the National Health Accounts, and analyses the possible causes that lie behind them.     The latest National Health […]
  • Environmental Degradation and the Future of Myanmar
    Damage to Myanmar’s environment has been constant and incremental under decades of military rule. Averse to international aid and assistance — which has not been particularly high in any case — the junta has been ploughing the country’s natural resources for revenue. Declining law and order and political control has led to further illegal activities […]