This chapter identifies the colonial origins of the institutional structures and patterns of uneven economic development that create the template for political regionalism in African countries. Functional economic regions and administrative regions tended to align in African colonies, defining patterns of regional difference and inequality that are often strongly visible today. This process established frameworks within which politically salient ethnic identities developed, and defined political constituencies in territorial terms. With the 1940s emergence of colony-wide politics, existing administrative and political structures channeled regional interests and ideologies of regional consciousness into the national arena. A boundary persistence analysis underscores the large extent to which colonial territorial grids have been reproduced over time. I explain this persistence in terms of how African political leaders, social elites, farmers, and members of rural communities found advantage in territorial institutions forged under colonialism. These regional cleavages and the territorial institutions that help to reproduce them have structured patterns of national-level political competition in many African countries for many decades.

While the conventional understanding within many Latin American historiographical traditions is that science went hand in hand with political liberation from the metropole, this chapter seeks to elucidate the ways in which the public sphere in both Spanish America and Brazil cultivated very different narratives and historiographies. In Spanish America, the republican public sphere aggressively set out to erase all connections between Spain, monarchy, and empire. Science became antithetical with the Spanish empire. The erase was deliberate and painstaking, a careful process of both forgetting and ignoring. By the time national historiographies emerged, the idea of revolution, republic patriotism, and science as casually connected became inextricably linked. In Brazil, there was a different process of forgetting. Science, empire, and monarchy never became disconnected and antithetical in the same fashion, dependent as science was on monarchical institutions that had arrived with the Portuguese royal family in 1808 Brazil. Yet the meaning of science did take a strange turn as science became, in print, the handmaiden of industry in a society that continued to witness a significant expansion of plantation slavery and the slave trade well into the nineteenth century.

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

The contemporary systems of customary authority and land rights in Zambia and Senegal are a composite of precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial institutions. Chapter 4 provides an overview of these three key layers of superimposed political institutions. It places particular emphasis on the differences between the British and French colonial era institutions, showing how the two European powers used distinct narratives to justify their rule and then created land policies to reinforce them. The British and French colonial approaches led to the system of official chiefs in Zambia and unofficial customary authorities in Senegal, respectively. This variation in state recognition of chiefs as land authorities is a critical and representative difference among customary authority systems in Africa that guides the book’s case selection and conclusions. Chapter 4 concludes with an overview of the most important land and customary authority policies enacted between 1960 and 2012 in the independent countries.

This chapter introduces the book. It begins with an examination of the many different types of violence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, from insurgencies and terrorist attacks to violence within society; extant approaches to explaining violence and conflict cannot explain such variety within national borders. It introduces the patchwork states framework: the notion that the spatial politics of competition and conflict can be traced back to state-building under colonial rule, and postcolonial revisions to that rule. It then lays out the ways in which colonial administrators established different forms of governance arrangements across the Indian subcontinent as a response to greed, fear, and frugality. Postcolonial governments attempted to revise these arrangements, but with limited success, yielding differences in state capacity and state–society relations within India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The chapter then introduces the ways in which differences in governance leads to legible patterns of political violence at the local level – including the incidence of sovereignty-contesting and sovereignty-neutral violence –– as well as the broader politics of conflict and competition, impacting electoral and development outcomes. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the implications of the argument and outlining subsequent chapters.

This first concluding chapter discusses the ways that social science literature has analyzed the legacies of colonial rule, and argues that colonial state-building may represent a more fruitful approach to analyzing complex regimes and their long-term consequences. It presents a discussion of the logic of historical legacies in relation to the comparative-historical framework of critical junctures and path dependency. It then discusses the drawbacks to dominant approaches that focus on causal inference in assessing colonial legacies.

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

Radha Binod Pal (1886–1967) was an Indian judge appointed to the international Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE). Sent in as a representative for the British Commonwealth prior to India’s independence, Pal wrote an extensive dissent rejecting the IMTFE as an intrument of victor’s justice. This chapter is divided into five parts and examines the significance of Radha Binod Pal and his dissent to the history and continuity of colonial hegemony in international criminal law and its institutions. The first part articulates the relevance of revisiting Pal’s dissent at this time. The second looks at Pal’s early years and his encounter with international law before and after the dissent. The third locates Pal in the historical-social context of colonial India. In part four, we look at the dissenting judgment, particularly his use of law as a technique despite the absence of any formal Western training in international law. This part also tries to respond to some of the critiques of the dissent. We conclude with a sketch of Pal as an ancestral voice in the critique of international criminal justice and as a proto-ideologue of Third World Approaches to International Law.