Historical Political Economy of the Middle East

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In an era where contemporary political landscapes are shaped by intricate historical dynamics, our proposed panel seeks to delve into how imperial, colonial, and post-colonial states in the Middle East navigated through the challenges of political and economic development posed by low state capacity.

Baydar, Cansunar, and Beramendi challenge the conventional view that building administrative and infrastructural capacities is crucial for sustainable development and democratization, and that coercive institutions undermine development and democratization. Instead, using data from early republican Turkey, they demonstrate that coercive state institutions can improve the legibility of diverse populations and broaden the state’s reach.

Magiya and Goldstein introduce a formal model of elite bargaining which identifies the conditions that wars contribute to state building in contexts of indirect rule. The model predicts that while wars can contribute to state building up until a certain level of intensity, too strong wars should be detrimental for state capacity building because they decrease the bargaining power of the central state. Another main result of the model is that low capacity is sticky in contexts with high reliance of the central states on local elites. They empirically test the predictions of the formal model with cross-country data and a case study of the Ottoman Empire.

Kaplow focuses on land policies in post-colonial Morocco and argues that the continuity of colonial policies can emerge due to the active reproduction of colonial policies rather than sheer persistence or path dependency, due to a shared set of goals, conditions, and constraints by elites in these regimes.

Finally, Dunham investigates how colonial powers manage resource constraints when apportioning information-gathering strategies across territory. He argues that the variation in legibility emerging from the interplay between the nature of the colonial entity and characteristics particular to the regions the colony is trying to control forces colonial powers to apply “next-best” strategies of information collection, resulting in stunted repressive information capacity. He tests his arguments with a novel dataset of British use of airpower for monitoring and repression in early twentieth century Iraq.

Sub Unit

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Individual Presentations

• Iron Fist of Development: Coercive Institutions and Public Services - Berfin Baydar, Duke University; Pablo Beramendi, Duke University; Asli Cansunar, University of Washington

• Bargaining over State Building in the Shadow of War - Daniel A N Goldstein, University of Oslo; Yusuf Magiya, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Dynamic Durability: The Reproduction of Colonial Land Policy in Morocco - Benjamin Kaplow, Yale University

• Seeing Iraq: Intelligence, State Capacity, and Imperial Control - Samuel Edward Rolfe Dunham, Yale University

Chair

• Yusuf Magiya New York University Abu Dhabi

Discussants

• Allison Spencer Hartnett University of Southern California

• Mark Dincecco University of Michigan