This paper argues that empires in the age of nations are beset by cultural contradictions that undermine attempts to create a cohesive social bloc able to achieve hegemonic rule. The proposition is tested through an examination of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth...

Recent scholarship claims that extractive colonial institutions explain the lackluster performance of Latin American economies today. We examine forced labor in colonial Peru. We find that while coercive labor institutions led to a drop in the indigenous population until the seventeenth century,...