What causes variation in gender equality, especially in female labor force participation? This paper examines French versus British imperialism and claims that the distinct policies pursued by these imperial powers still matter. Specifically, policies over land ownership, agricultural production, and laws regarding social welfare are systematically correlated with different outcomes with respect to gender. The paper evaluates this conjecture using three tests: a cross-country test of former British and French colonies, a regional test of the MENA, and a historical comparison of Syria and Iraq. The latter comparison uses Ottoman-era and colonial records to analyze how policies changed and their effects on the ground, and then uses historical process-tracing to examine under what conditions these policies were maintained or changed. Syria and Iraq are particularly useful examples of British versus French impact on gender. They shared many preexisting characteristics, especially in rural areas, but the British and French impact was for the most part exogenous to individual agriculturalists. Results indicate that, despite our understanding of British colonialism as beneficial for a variety of economic institutions (Acemoglu and Johnson 2004, La Porta et al. 2008, Lipset 1994) French institutions often better promoted gender equality, and that these institutions had long-lasting effects. In addition to adding gender as an outcome of interest to cross-national studies of colonialism, this paper also contributes to the discussion on the relative importance of imperial culture and institutions (also see Charrad 2000, Hatem 1986) relative to natural resource endowments (Nunn 2013, Sokoloff and Engerman 2000, Ross 2008).

Does the legacy left by colonial institutions have an effect on the post-independence judicial system? At first glance, the legal system of the colonizing country seems to have little consequence after independence. Although the Sykes-Picot Agreement gave France and England equal spheres of influence in the Middle East, not one state in the contemporary Middle East has a common law legal system, which one would expect to find in former British colonies. There is more variation, however, when it comes to the place of religious group law in the state judicial system. In some places, like Lebanon, religious groups exercise complete autonomy in the domain of personal status law, such that each group is permitted to use its own legal rules in separate, group-run courts. In others, such as Egypt, minority religious groups have considerably less autonomy. In this paper, I argue that colonial-era reforms are causally linked to variations in the devolution of judicial power to religious minority groups. In most European colonies or protectorates, colonial officials attempted to centralize the court system and unify the country’s laws. Although they initially left personal status law under the control of religious groups, in most places by the 1920s they began to centralize this domain as well. The capacity of groups to resist this change, and to fend off post-independence efforts at centralization, can be explained by the extent to which group legal systems remained strongly institutionalized throughout the colonial period. In Lebanon, Ottoman and French rule served to strengthen religious group cohesion, whereas in Egypt, Ottoman and British rule weakened the unity of Egypt’s strongest minority religion, the Coptic Orthodox church. The ability of minority group courts and legal institutions to survive the disruption of the colonial period intact affects the outcome of strategic negotiations between these groups and the post-independence regime concerning the role of group law in the state legal system.

Western media and analysts increasingly speculate that civil unrest in Syria, Iraq, and Libya might lead to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East and North Africa. These accounts often claim or assume that the states and borders of the region have remained fairly constant since World War I. In this paper, I introduce a geographic information system (GIS) dataset of borders and border changes in the MENA since 1900 and demonstrate that the map changed considerably throughout the 20th century, although more so in some decades than in others. Depending on criteria, between 14 and 39 autonomous territorial polities disappeared (e.g., the Kingdom of the Hijaz, Hatay State, the Republic of Mahabad), most often by being absorbed into or conquered by other states. Other interstate borders moved, either through conquest or negotiated exchanges of land. I use my GIS to identify, classify, and visualize borders. I then ask what characteristics make some borders more durable than others. Are borders drawn by colonial officials without regard to geographic features less durable than those that run along earlier Ottoman administrative boundaries? Are boundaries that divide linguistic, tribal, and sectarian group more or less durable than those that do not? I explore several case studies of border disputes to understand how the characteristics of borders shape policy-makers’ willingness to change them. Did the seeming arbitrariness of the Jordanian-Saudi Arabian frontier (sometimes referred to as “Winston’s Hiccup”) make it easier for two kings to swap 5000 square miles in 1965? How did linguistic and religious divisions shape Turkish, Arab, and French understandings of what should happen to the Sanjak of Alexandretta? The paper concludes by revisiting the claim that the borders and states of the Middle East are artificial and amenable colonial constructs.

What explains variation in the strength of political contention across the Arab region in 2011, especially among resource-poor states? Why did the publics in some countries seize the political opening presented by Tunisia’s overthrow of Ben Ali to revolt wholesale against the incumbent regimes, while in others to hold only small rallies with modest demands? While some studies have attempted to unpack this question, most have privileged second-order explanations like observed material grievances, repression, or access to social media, while providing less insight into the fundamental roots of the observed differences between countries. In this paper I propose a new theory that explains protest variation in resource-poor dictatorships in terms of differences in states’ choices of distributive institutions at the time of state-building. My argument consists of three parts. First, I argue that variation in protest strength in 2011 reflected fundamental differences in participants’ goals – that, contrary to widespread assumptions, protests were not always designed to be oppositional but in some contexts were regime-confirming. Second, I argue that the type of protest – oppositional or regime-confirming – was systematically related to the effectiveness of regimes’ levers for inducing voluntary mass support. Although numerous literatures on regime maintenance, rentierism, social contract, and patron-clientelism point to the critical connection between distributive goods and voluntary public quiescence to autocratic rule, both in MENA (Yom & Gause 2011, Blaydes 2010, Lust 2006, Sadiki 2000) and beyond (BuenodeMesquita 2005, Magaloni 2006, Acemoglu & Robinson 2006), most studies assumed rather simplistically that greater quantities of goods to more people (broader coalitions) leads to more quiescence, and vice versa. A novel and surprising insight of my research, based on detailed qualitative and survey evidence, suggests that in fact more generous, equitable, and broad distribution does not automatically buy loyalty, and that the actual political “work” that distributive goods do for a regime depends critically on the nature of distributive institutions because under different rules of allocation citizens attach a different intrinsic value to the same spoils. Finally and most importantly, I show that the choice of distributive institutions itself is deeply rooted in states’ varied colonial and pre-colonial legacies. Post-independence regimes that, in the early years of state-building, faced economically and politically strong pre-existing elites forged very different governing coalitions and distributive systems than did states which faced weak or declining pre-existing elites. I demonstrate my theory using extensive interviews and detailed survey data from Jordan, Syria, and Yemen.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of European influence in Egypt, and its consequent increased integration within the world economy, that preceded the British Occupation in 1882. A strong manifestation of the then-ongoing integration process was the strong repercussions on Egypt of the cotton boom that took place as a result of the American Civil War in 1861-65 and the subsequent shortage in the world supply of cotton. Interestingly, the boom in the cotton world market had strong effects that shaped the Egyptian economy, with its central reliance on the exportation of cotton, for almost a century. This paper examines the impact of the cotton boom on a relatively less studied phenomenon, the emergence of agricultural slavery in rural Egypt as the mode of production in cotton plantations. Prior to the cotton boom, slavery in Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire at large, was for domestic and sexual services. However, historians recently documented the rise of agricultural slavery in Egypt after the cotton boom, which was reportedly a very rare phenomenon in Islamic history. The paper has two goals: First, empirically, I employ a new and unique data source, the Egyptian individual-level census records from 1848 and 1868 that I digitized from the original manuscripts at the Egyptian Archives, and that are one of earliest pre-colonial censuses, with information on women, children, and slaves. The two censuses allow me to examine if the cotton boom indeed caused a surge in agricultural slavery via comparing the change in the slave population share in cotton plantation districts between 1848 and 1868 to the corresponding change in non-cotton-plantation districts. Second, theoretically, although agricultural slavery in Egypt was a short-lived institution that was abolished in 1877 (because of the European pressure), the Egyptian “natural experiment” may enhance our understanding of the underlying causes behind the emergence of slavery beyond the Nieboer-Domar model. In particular, it appears that international trade in cash crops may be an important determinant of slavery beyond the standard factor endowments hypothesis that emphasizes the relative abundance of land (compared to labor) as the underlying cause behind slavery.