Nation-building efforts, that is policies aimed at "forming countries in which citizens feel a sufficient amount of commonality" (Alesina and Reich, 2015), can have positive economic and political effects. Societies with less ethnic, linguistic or religious cleavages are less prone to political instability and exhibit more economic growth (Alesina et al. 1999; Miguel, 2004). However, we still know very little about which policies or mix of policies are efficient to spread a common identity. One of such tool, often pushed forward by media, is the role of "charismatic leaders", that is specific individuals able to coordinate groups or embody themselves a larger common identity. Prominent actions by leaders, including speeches, could also constitute emotionally charged experiences that help build the "imagined communities" that are nations (Anderson, 1983). To the best of my knowledge, there is however no empirical test of these hypotheses. The goal of the project is to fill this gap and answer the following question: Can leaders successfully shape social norms by forging a common identity? I do so by studying the role of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, in spreading a new national identity. I use time and geographic variation in Kemal’s visits to cities, in a difference-in-differences design, to test whether direct exposure to a charismatic leader causally affects citizens’ take-up of the new national identity. I create a new database using various historical sources, with detailed information on his travels, and cities and district characteristics. I proxy adherence to the new Turkish identity by the adoption of first names in "Pure Turkish", the new language introduced by the state. I find that cities visited are more likely to adopt first names in the new language. The effect is quite persistent, consistent with the Weberian view that charismatic authority can play a role in legitimizing new social orders. I also find that Kemal was more efficient in spreading a new identity compared to Ismet Inonu, his second man, suggesting that he did not only have a pure informational effect. I am currently digitizing additional archives to study his differential effect depending on local characteristics (ethnic and linguistic fractionalization, repression of minorities) and to understand whether he was a complement or substitute to other nation-building tools (such as education, local political clubs or railroad expansion). This project constitutes the first quantitative evaluation of the short and long term effects of nation-building efforts in the region.

This paper focuses on the role of colonial legacies in conditioning patterns of human capital development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It develops a theoretical link between the legacies of the colonial state, the breadth of post-colonial elite coalitions, and contemporary human capital development. We discuss this theory with reference to an original panel dataset from Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Morocco on government health and education provision that documents then development of these services under colonial rule and the first decades after independence. In this chapter we contribute to the historical development literature by theorizing the moment of independence as a critical juncture that either locks in colonial legacies or entails a revolutionary break from the past, setting in motion a new pathway. We argue that levels of state capacity inherited from the colonial period and the politics of the governing coalition post-independence shaped local access to health and education facilities using both cross-national data as well as previously digitized sub-national census data from Tunisia.

An established and growing literature argues that institutional legacies shape long-run economic outcomes. Scholars have studied how Ottoman and colonial state-building played a significant role in shaping modern state institutions across the region, but these imperial legacies are often studied separately. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the late Ottoman period and Europe’s “moment” in the Levant to examine the long-run local effects of foreign taxation on the development of states’ fiscal capacity. We leverage new historical data from the Ottoman and colonial archives and contemporary surveys to evaluate the legacy of Ottoman taxation on colonial fiscal capacity in the Arab region, including the former wilayets of Beirut, Aleppo, Syria, Baghdad, and Basra, corresponding to contemporary Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. We find continuities between Ottoman and colonial levels of taxation, suggesting European neglect of fiscal capacity expansion. We then test whether historical fiscal capacity manifested in sub-national variation post-independence by matching historical taxation levels to municipal revenues in the 1950s through 1970s. Finally, we use data from the Syrian and Jordanian Household Expenditure and Income Surveys to leverage a natural experiment in the former Hawran sanjak to test whether the an area governed as one administrative entity under Ottoman rule demonstrates long-run differences in taxation due to divergent colonial experiences.