Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 13/06/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R1.15

MO Zhexun ()

Soldiers versus Laborers: Legacies of Colonial Military Forced Labor in Mali

In this paper, we study the coercive military forced labor regime instituted by the French colonial authorities in Mali (ex Soudan Français) from 1927 till 1950. Due to endemic labor scarcity, the colonial authorities resorted to activating military reservists as forced labor for public infrastructure construction. By digitizing more 180,000 hand-written individual soldier files as well as colonial-time district conscription tables, we find that historically speaking, the activation of military forced labor was very strongly correlated with local population density and specific demands of various public infrastructure projects. The intensity of forced labor at the time even drove local Africans to evade the system by volunteering more into the regular army. Over the long run, we also find that Malian localities that were historically more exposed to military forced labor (as opposed to regular army recruitment) have displayed lower development outcomes till this day. However, inequalities within these localities have also decreased further, which points to dynamics on long-term persistence of forced labor regimes. These results highlight the importance of understanding the particular historical set-up of extractive colonial institutions, and how this in turn would affect the dynamics of their enduring legacies on development outcomes.