Lost Maps: Colonial Governance and Local Development in Ireland

• In Event: State and Fiscal Capacity: Integrating Historical and Contemporary Approaches

Abstract

We study how reductions in the state’s informational capacities, across space and between societal groups, exert lasting effects on taxation and local development. The cartographic Down Survey, among the first large-scale territorial maps in European history, mapped almost the entirety of Ireland during its colonization in the 1650s. For nearly two centuries, formal property rights were legally underpinned by its individual-level records of landownership, while its spatial delineation of townlands served as the basis of local taxation. We leverage the partial destruction of the original Down Survey maps in a 1711 fire which, we demonstrate, generates plausibly exogenous within-parish variation in map survival. Drawing on rich individual-level data relating to property ownership and taxation in the early 19th century, we examine the impact of this variation across majority Protestant versus Catholic areas, with Catholics economically and politically marginalized throughout this period. Specifically, we study whether: (1) the increased precarity of property rights facilitated land expropriation, especially in majority Catholic areas; (2) the local burden of taxation was inhibited, due to the state’s loss of cartographic information, or enhanced, since this loss simultaneously weakened citizens' legal recourse to state predation. In so doing, we both emphasize the group-stratified incidence of the state’s informational capacities while underscoring the centrality of specific resources for broader conceptions of state capacity.

Authors

• Jeremy Bowles, University College London

• Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, New York University Abu Dhabi