This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasizing the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions-the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis-played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and...

Indigenous peoples have three features in common: their historical heritage, their current culture and their extreme poverty. This paper presents a hypothesis about the development of a cultural factor: indigenous people prefer to work on a small scale. This cultural factor developed during the...