Author Meets Critics: Bogdan Popescu’s "Imperial Borderlands"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel brings together a cross-disciplinary group of leading experts in historical political economy, comparative politics, and European politics to discuss Bogdan Popescu’s book, “Imperial Borderlands: Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier” (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

“Imperial Borderlands” challenges the simplicity of the notion of extractive institutions proposed by previous scholarship – the process by which elites extract goods and opportunities from those under them. Extractive institutions are a crucial factor associated with colonialism, whereby historical states exploited local populations to benefit the former. A whole range of studies investigate the negative effect of Western extractivism, while more recent works indicate that extractive institutions can have positive long-term outcomes. This book argues that these views are incomplete. The reason for these contrasting views is that both sides take extractive institutions as monolithic, omitting that extractive institutions could entail a variety of dimensions, including imperial investment, the transformation of the local property rights regime, and coercion, which could directly impact development.

“Imperial Borderlands” proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the ambivalent effect of extractive institutions, which depends on investment, property rights, and violence. The worst outcomes for development are cases of extractivism with low state investment in infrastructure, high transformation of local society by removing property rights, and increased physical coercion.

To substantiate these claims, this book draws from a diversity of historical and modern data sources, tracing the evolution of the Habsburg military frontier zone, which is an area where the state adopted extractive institutions. Specifically, people were exposed to a rigid communal property rights regime, had lower provision of public goods in the form of roads, hospitals, and railroads, and were exposed to a highly disciplined labor market where locals were farmer-soldiers with limited options outside of the military industry, The book shows how these three elements induced negative laggard developmental trajectories. In addition, exposure to these institutions generated a series of norms and attitudes that further contributed to adverse developmental outcomes and were transmitted over time through intergenerational family transmission.

The conceptual framework of extractivism applies to many other cases, including Dutch Indonesia (1830-1870), Belgian DRC (1880-1920), and Spanish Peru (1573-1818). In addition, similar military frontiers were adopted in the Russian Tsardom and French Algeria.

This “author meets critics” panel is designed to bring together a diverse group of leading experts to critically engage the book’s contributions and assess its effort to reconnect research on state-making and imperialism to the fields of comparative politics, European politics, and historical political economy.

Chair: Jason Wittenberg, University of California, Berkeley

Discussants:
Iza Ding, Northwestern University
Lenka Bustikova, University of Florida
Mark Dincecco, University of Michigan
Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University
Jeffrey Kopstein, University of California, Irvine

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chairs

• Jason Wittenberg University of California, Berkeley

• Lenka Bustikova University of Florida

Presenters

• Bogdan Gabriel Popescu John Cabot University

• Iza Ding Northwestern University

• Mark Dincecco University of Michigan

• Grigore Pop-Eleches Princeton University