Aerial View of Countryside Punjab Province
Image Credit: Ghulam Hussain
Congratulations to AREC's assistant professor Cory Smith who just received a Faculty-Student Research Award (FSRA) for 2023-2024 and an Independent Scholarship, Research, and Creativity Award (ISRCA) for summer 2023.
Faculty-Student Research Award (FRSA)
This project will explore the role of colonial law enforcement in shaping India's political history. Law enforcement was critical to upholding colonial rule, but its effects are difficult to study quantitatively. If enforcement was increased directly in response to political activity, the correlations will be misleading. To overcome this, we will investigate an administrative rule that used to determine the number of low-level enforcers: the village chowkidars (watchmen). In many parts of colonial India, population thresholds were used to determine the number of chowkidars, meaning that arbitrary cutoffs in village size could shape the number of enforcers. This project will collect the requisite data on population and estimate the causal effects of increased enforcement from this rule using the statistical method of regression discontinuity. We aim to estimate the estimated effect of increased enforcement on political activity and longer-run economic development.
Independent Scholarship, Research, and Creativity Award (ISRCA)
This project will explore the legacy of policies establishing local governance structures in colonial Punjab, now primarily Pakistan. The governance structures of many formerly colonized nations were inherited from the colonial era, including both national and local setups. This aspect of the colonial legacy is difficult to study statistically, however, as it is often impossible to quantify elements of governance. Even when possible, governance structures might simply reflect local conditions rather than changing them, making correlations misleading. In this project, I will tackle both problems in the setting of Punjab's "canal colonies." Beginning in the 1880s, the colonial British established thousands of new villages along newly-expanded canals. In a quirk of administration, villages below a certain size were typically governed by a single lambardar (headman) while responsibility was shared across multiple lambardars in villages larger than the threshold. Villages close to this size threshold thus experienced an arbitrary change in whether local governance was more centralized or fragmented. The project will study the effects of this governance structure on the long-run economic and political development of each village into the period of independent Pakistan.
