Slavery, Mistrust, and the Origins of Poor Government Information

• In Event: Ethnicity, State Capacity, and Democracy in Historical Latin America

Abstract

What are the consequences of labor coercion—i.e., slavery and slave-like institutions—on state capacity development? Most political science research focuses on whether labor-coercive arrangements affect the incentives of political rulers to invest in state capabilities such as extracting tax revenues, enforcing laws, and delivering public goods (e.g., Bezemer et al. 2014; Fujiwara et al., 2022; Kurtz, 2013; Sherman, 2023; Suryanarayan & White, 2021). However, we know less about whether labor coercion encourages citizens to comply with state-defined laws and policies. This paper addresses this question by studying how labor coercion shapes states’ “legibility”—the capacity to gather and process information on citizens, which often requires citizens to accurately report personal information to government officials on censuses. Concretely, this paper studies the effect of African slavery on the informational capabilities of the state using archival data from Imperial Brazil (1822-1889), the world’s largest slave state. Slavery was notoriously known for relying on trickery, kidnappings, captivity, and other forms of deceit (e.g., Nunn 2008; Nunn & Wantchekon, 2011) that, in Brazil, commonly involved provincial and municipal authorities. By fueling a culture of mistrust in the state, slavery should decrease the incentives of local populations to comply with censuses and supply reliable, personal information. Preliminary results show that municipalities with higher slave prevalence experience poorer census quality in the poor age heaping. That effect tends to persist over time. Additional results also show that municipalities with greater exposure to the Atlantic slave trade have higher rates of violence against census takers.

Author

• Jorge G Mangonnet, Vanderbilt University