We report on recent findings of a fruitful research agenda that explores the importance of ethnic-specific traits in shaping African development. First, using recent surveys from Sub-Saharan African countries, we document that individuals identify with their ethnic group as often as with the...

This article attempts to make a comparative comparison between British policy in India and the economic system that Iran has based on Zagros and Kurdistan. The paper discusses the systematic and deliberate examples of economic destruction, state monopoly, racism and ethnic discrimination through...

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization...

Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 1999) has attracted much attention with his historicising model of the trajectory of African politics. The most fertile innovation in Mamdani's work is to speak of the typical African state as 'bifurcated'. He generalises South Africa's apartheid system to the whole of...

We study the persistent and adverse effects of colonial ethno-racial segregation on modern urban sorting patterns. After the conquest of Mesoamerica, Spaniards segregated natives into settlements called Pueblos de Indios. By the end of colonial times, there were two types of settlements: Pueblos...