The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa∗

We examine the economic consequences of the partitioning of Africa among European powers in the late 19th century; a process historically known as the scramble for Africa. First, using information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization we establish that border drawing was largely arbitrary. Apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other geographic, ecological, historical, and ethnic-specific trait predicts which ethnic groups have been partitioned by the national borders. Second, employing data on the location of civil conflicts after independence we show that compared to ethnicities that have not been impacted by the border design, partitioned ethnic groups have suffered significantly more, longer, and more devastating civil wars. Third, we find that economic development —as reflected by satellite data on light density at nightis systematically lower in the historical homeland of partitioned ethnicities. These results are robust to a rich set of controls at a fine level and the inclusion of country and ethnic-family fixed-effects. Our regressions thus identify a sizable causal negative effect of the scramble for Africa on comparative regional development.