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Geography and institutions are the two main contenders to explain the fundamental causes of cross-country differences in prosperity. The geography hypothesis — which has a large following both in the popular imagination and in academia — maintains that the geography, climate, and ecology of a society’s location shape both its technology and the incentives of its inhabitants. This essay argues that differences in institutions are more important than geography for understanding the divergent economic and social conditions of nations. While the geography hypothesis emphasizes forces of nature as a primary factor in the poverty of nations, the institutions hypothesis is about man-made influences. A case is developed for the importance of institutions which draws on the history of European colonization.

This essay explores the hypothesis that extreme differences in inequality across European colonies in the Americas gave rise to systematic differences in the ways institutions evolved, and in turn, on the paths of development. European colonization altered the composition of the populations in the colonized societies. Because colonization generally meant implanting communities that were greatly advantaged over natives in terms of human capital and legal status, and because the trajectories of institutional development were sensitive to the incidence of extreme inequality that often followed, European colonial activity had long, lingering effects. Colonies in the Americas with extreme inequality, compared with those with relative equality, were systematically more likely to evolve institutions that restricted access to economic opportunities and to generate lower rates of public investment in schools and other infrastructure considered conducive to growth. These patterns of institutional development, which tend to persist over time in economic performance, may help explain why many societies that began with extreme inequality continue to suffer from the same condition.

This chapter examines the political evolution of Malaysia in relation to minority communities, and compares the Malaysian experience to Western liberal theories of multiculturalism. The first three sections of the chapter focus on the important eras in the political history of the Malaysian model: colonization and migration, political independence, and the 1969 ethnic riots and resulting policy initiatives. The final section explores the constitutional and structural opportunities and constraints facing minority groups, and their relation to Western liberal theories. It is argued that Malaysia practices minority rights within the framework of Western liberalism, which is both a boon and a bane for minority communities.

This book began with two urban mysteries. One, the explosive growth of settler cities like Chicago and Melbourne. The other was the growth of London and New York into mega-cities before the modern agro-industrial revolution made this generally possible. In 1890, London and New York were the only two cities in the world with more than 2.5 million people. The Anglos were also the first people to experience industrialization. Thirdly, the Anglos from 1815 were the first people to undertake explosive colonization, followed by recolonization. Explosive colonization rapidly gave the Anglos vast ‘Wests’. Recolonization allowed the Anglo oldlands to integrate with these Wests, so boosting the bulk and power of the United States and Greater Britain. This process made the United States a superpower and gave Britain an extra half-century of that status. The following chapters explore the intersections between these three phenomena.

This book has argued that an Anglo-prone settler revolution took place in the long 19th century, and that it explains the gargantuan growth of Anglophone societies in the period. It posited a roller-coaster rhythm and a ‘hyper-colonial’ shape for this revolution. Fresh frontiers went through successive booms, busts, and export rescues, which in a wider sense comprised rounds of explosive colonization followed by recolonization. Explosive colonizations were triggered by particular settler transitions and mass transfers, and then powered more by a boom mentality than rational choice, industrialization, growth-friendly institutions, or the premeditated long-range export of staples. Recolonization re-forged the shattered settler socio-economies after the bust, now converting them into long-range staples exporters, the virtual hinterlands of the distant megacities, London and New York. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and this chapter applies these hypotheses to the histories of particular regions at particular times.

Argues that the holistic notion of the ‘whole earth’ as a protectable entity is too insensitive to, and remote from, real human life‐worlds. It works as a poetic vision but not as a framework for sound environmental policy. The examples of Russian colonization of Yakutia in eastern Siberia and of Spanish colonization in Central and Latin America illustrate the conceptual dangers that attend such an ‘objectifying’ attitude. The chapter cites stages in Western philosophy depicting the ‘otherness’ of the natural world as a domain to be conquered, and suggests that a more sympathetic understanding of humanity's place in it is required. This in turn requires greater mutual respect between human beings.

This chapter investigates the campaign for female education in Anglican missions in Madagascar through the women's wing of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and particularly through the work of Emily Lawrence and Gertrude King. In the late nineteenth century, missionaries and the indigenous Merina state engaged in a collaborative effort that tied evangelism to education; however, the day‐to‐day work of evangelism involved a constant struggle over the terms and meanings of Christianity, particularly in the context of illness and healing, and the rituals surrounding rites of passage. Moreover, the French colonization of the island in 1895 undermined Protestant hegemony. This chapter traces the how the ideology and practice of residential education responded to this changing political and social context, shifting from a rescue effort for protecting young girls to a professional scheme for training Malagasy women.

This chapter examines the next generation of Anglican women's mission work in Madagascar through the growth of the Mothers' Union, particularly under the leadership of Gertrude King. The MU supplemented women's evangelism in two ways. First, it offered a means of building a corporate Christian community that mitigated the secularist effects of French colonial policy. Second, it conceived a sacred, ritual function for motherhood in ‘high‐church’ terms that engaged both Malagasy and British religious expression and crafted a new basis for female authority in the mission church. However, the moral regulation of membership, particularly centred on divorce, exposed the limits of the MU as an inclusive, multiracial body.

Some competition was associated with all European voyages of discovery, whether considered in an intellectual or a nautical sense, but the character of the competition became confessional as the contest between states over resources to be exploited gave way to disputation between denominations over how souls might best be saved. This happened when, in the late sixteenth century, Protestant publicists began to disparage the colonial endeavours that the Spanish and Portuguese authorities had been engaged upon for more than a century, and when they resolved to start the colonial process all over again, with a view to making the Atlantic World a Protestant rather than a Catholic space. This was to be achieved both by releasing what remained of the Native American population in Central and South America from Spanish tyranny, and by establishing Protestant colonies to evangelise the native populations in extensive areas of America to which the Iberians had no more than titular claims. A comparison between French and English colonial undertakings in the West Indies, and between the literatures associated with these endeavours over the course of the seventeenth century, establishes that these Protestant ambitions proved as elusive in practice as they had been myopic in theory. The conclusion seeks to explain why colonial efforts in which Catholic religious orders were involved proved more capable of linking scientific investigations with missionary concerns than was possible in colonies that were self consciously Protestant.

This chapter argues that people in the early medieval times knew almost nothing Africa and Africans. Through geographical errors and confusion between India and Ethiopian Africa, biblical traditions about the presence of Jews in the land of the Son of Kush, the legend of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and the location of Ophir in Africa came to be set pieces in the repertoire of Jewish and Christian ethnography of Africa.

The chapter provides a detailed description and critical discussion of Habermas' attempts to make the theory of communicative action and discourse ethics fruitful beyond the narrower moral and ethical realm and, conversely, to find confirmation for it in empirical theories. Habermas refers to the research areas of psychology and social evolution and to political and sociological issues around which the “Critical Theory of Society” is to take concrete form. Concerning psychology, he develops or adopts theories of ego-development, moral development and “communication pathologies”. As it concerns social evolution he proposes theories of hominisation and socio-cultural evolution. In dealing with the political and sociological issues he is most productive, offering a theory of social order, his famous colonialisation thesis, his discourse theory of law and the constitutional state, and his theory of modernity.

This chapter offers a comprehensive discussion of Protohistoric Bronze Age Cyprus (ca. 1650–1100 BC) and its material record, which is characterized by several striking changes: town centres with monumental architecture; new, socially‐stratified burial practices; first appearance of writing (Cypro‐Minoan); intensification of copper production and development of extensive trade contacts; fortifications and other martial paraphernalia. This transformed material record indicates that Cypriot society was no longer egalitarian, isolated, or village‐oriented but rather had become socially stratified, internationally‐oriented and town‐centred. The successful production and trade of Cyprus's copper resources together with the generation of agricultural surpluses indicate that political authority on the island had become centralized. The key indicators of a stratified, complex society are considered through detailed examination of settlement trends (site hierarchy), socio‐political organization (architecture, mortuary practices, seals, sealings), production and exchange (copper, metals, jewellery, luxury goods, storage facilities, seal impressions), gendered representations (terracotta and metal figurines), mortuary practices (pottery, metal objects, luxury imports), monumentality and memory (architecture, sites), migration, hybridization, and the Aegean ‘colonization’ of Cyprus (pottery, metals and metallurgy, ivories, figurines, seals, architectural features, burials). All these materials typically reveal a mixture of Cypriot, Levantine, and Aegean elements, and are more likely to reflect an amalgam of ideas and influences from all of them rather than proof for an origin (or colonization) from one any single one.

The early Iron Age (ca. 1125-1000 BC) represents a major cultural break in the archaeological record of Cyprus. Although often regarded as a time when Aegean migrants or colonists established firm control over native Cypriotes in new towns that later became the centres of Cyprus's Iron Age kingdoms, this chapter argues through detailed discussions of a wide range of archaeological data that the population of the island was as hybridized as it material culture, showing a clear amalgamation of native Cypriot, Aegean, and Levantine (Phonenician) elements. Again employing the concept of hybridization, it examines various types of pottery, metals (including a spit with an inscribed Greek name), mortuary goods and tomb constructions, figurines, and luxury items to argue that the colonial encounter played out on early Iron Age Cyprus was anything but a blanket emulation of Aegean high culture. Instead, not only material but also social and ethnic meetings and mixings in the various towns and regions of Cyprus are seen.

What ensured the continual relationship of castles to colonization was not so much the resistance it sometimes had to contend with, but rather the stamp of new lordship that fortresses set upon the whole transformation. In the British Isles, next to Wales, the largest-scale working out of such changes, apart from the Norman Conquest itself, occurred in Ireland from the late 12th century. This chapter provides some comparative illustrations, chiefly drawn from French records. Because castles with dependent townships are so common, entire fortress-town complexes being called the castle, or the walled-town itself having the title castrum or castellum, the plantation of new towns is an essential part of the picture and is accordingly dealt with in the present chapter. The term bastide, although naturalized to some extent in English, characterizes town-colonization in south-western France so effectively that it has been retained as a French borrowing from the late Latin bastida or building.

This chapter describes the underlying ethos in Ibâḍism of equality before God, and illustrates this with particular reference to the protection of the rights of the peasants and other producing classes. It shows the ability of Ibâḍi law to adapt to the needs of an agricultural economy in two entirely different environments — that of Oman based on an ancient pre-Islamic falaj irrigation system, and that of colonization de novo in the Mzab. As barriers between the indigenous village population and the Arab tribesmen broke down, the majûs converted and a remarkable assimilation of the villagers and tribesmen occurred that is not characteristic of neighbouring regions. Nevertheless, the concern for protecting the little man from illegal seizure in an agricultural economy now based on privately owned mulk small holdings, led to a sterilization of vast areas of former production, when land that fell into the hands of jabâbira (tyrants) reverted to Ibâḍi rule, while a tax system that failed to recognize inputs other than labour as a factor of production did not encourage reinvesting in expensive irrigation reconstruction.

This chapter examines the relation between urbanization and colonial settlement in the western Mediterranean and evaluates whether the Mediterranean should be considered an urban region. It investigates the interconnection between urbanization and colonialism and analyses archaeological evidence for early colonial settlement, focusing on Greek colonization in South Italy and Sicily and the Phoenician presence on the Tyrrhenian islands and the Spanish south-east coast. The findings indicate that the urban fabric of many colonial foundations does not necessarily have to be understood in urban terms.