Indigenous resistance in colonial Mexico (PI Franco-Vivanco, with Jenny Guardado (Georgetown))
The goal of this project is the large-scale digitization of judicial claims from colonial Mexico (16th to 19th centuries) to explore the ways in which indigenous people engaged with judicial institutions, how a limited form of rule of law emerged in an authoritarian context, and how indigenous institutions adapted to colonial exploitation. Because existing digitizing tools are not suitable to recognize the convoluted handwritten text of these documents, the lab will develop novel protocols and algorithms. These new tools will have a broader impact as they can be applied to increase the readability of other handwritten documents from the same time period.
Lynching and state-building in Mexico (PI Franco-Vivanco, with Gema Kopple-Santamaría (Loyola), and Mariano Sánchez-Talanquer (COLMEX))
This project explores the violent responses of rural communities to state-building efforts in 20th century Mexico. The project challenges conventional interpretations of state expansion which assume that communities would have a preference for higher levels of state presence and that this presence will eventually reduce violence. The main data from this project comes from a collection of Mexican newspapers since the early 20th century. Using layout models, we are creating a dataset of lynching events to map the instances in which these violent responses targeted government officials.
“Africanization” of colonial institutions (PI Nathan, with Sarah Brierley (LSE) and George Ofosu (LSE))
The goal of this project is to digitize archival records of the complete set of indigenous bureaucrats hired into the colonial civil service in the Gold Coast, as well as several other British African colonies. This data will be used to explore the long-term legacies of the “Africanization” of colonial institutions, examining how differential initial access to formal sector employment through contact with state institutions can help explain patterns of post-independence political competition and economic development.
The Security Dilemma and Paths to Modern Development (PI Dincecco, with Yuhua Wang (Harvard))
To explain long-run development paths across Eurasia, this project highlights the enduring security imperative that rulers and elites must jointly confront to maintain external and internal protection. We argue that historical differences in geopolitical features across contexts – the level of political fragmentation, polity size, and the importance of money in warfare – produced diverse governance outcomes in light of this imperative. Next, we analyze the likelihood of modern economic development under each governance outcome. To empirically validate our argument, we construct a new historical database on interstate and intrastate military conflicts that spans nearly 1,000 years across Eurasia.