An expansion of history: Pre-colonial order, public goods provision, and the realities of historical change across the 20th century in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper investigates the relative importance of pre-colonial institutional capacity on long term development outcomes in an African context. It firstly questions the approach, often used in economic history, that relies on statistical regression analyses spanning a considerable time periods (the so-called ‘compression of history’), and secondly the use of data from the Murdock ethnographic atlas to accurately capture the realities of pre-colonial Africa. We construct a new measure of pre-colonial institutional capacity based on North et al. (2009) and apply a decade by decade analysis of public goods provision to a case study of Nigeria from 1900-2010. We use data on education, health and public works at a provincial level from a variety of colonial, missionary and Nigerian state sources. Our results provide evidence that colonial-era investments were strongly influenced by pre-colonial conditions and showed strong path dependency until the independence era. However, contrary to other studies, instead of finding evidence of early colonial investments or pre-colonial centralisation impacting on current outcomes, we found that the post-colonial era saw a break in the pattern developed earlier in the century and demonstrate that this was due to factors unique to Nigeria. This suggests that future research on long term change in Africa should take local and temporal complexity into account when investigating the impacts of past variables on present day outcomes.