TY - JOUR AU - Engerman,Stanley L. AU - Sokoloff,Kenneth L. TI - Colonialism, Inequality, and Long-Run Paths of Development JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11057 PY - 2005 Y2 - January 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11057 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11057.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Stanley L. Engerman Department of Economics University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627-0156 Tel: 585/275-3165 Fax: 585/256-2309 E-Mail: s.engerman@rochester.edu Kenneth L. Sokoloff Department of Economics UCLA 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477 Tel: 310/825-4249 Fax: 310/825-9528 E-Mail: N/A user is deceased AB - Over the last few years, colonialism, especially as pursued by Europeans, has enjoyed a revival in interest among both scholars and the general public. Although a number of new accounts cast colonial empires in a more favorable light than has generally been customary, others contend that colonial powers often leveraged their imbalance in power to impose institutional arrangements on the colonies that were adverse to long-term development. We argue here, however, that one of the most fundamental impacts of European colonization may have been in altering the composition of the populations in the areas colonized. The efforts of the Europeans often involved implanting ongoing communities who were greatly advantaged over natives in terms of human capital and legal status. Because the paths of institutional development were sensitive to the incidence of extreme inequality which resulted, their activity had long lingering effects. More study is needed to identify all of the mechanisms at work, but the evidence from the colonies in the Americas suggests that it was those that began with extreme inequality and population heterogeneity that came to exhibit persistence over time in evolving institutions that restricted access to economic opportunities and generated lower rates of public investment in schools and other infrastructure considered conducive to growth. These patterns may help to explain why a great many societies with legacies as colonies with extreme inequality have suffered from poor development experiences. ER -