Essays on economic developmentpre-independent Algeria at the beginning of the 1900s

Resumen

Economic theory argues that factor endowments — i.e., the relative intensities of land, labor, and capital — together with institutional factors — such as the enforcement of property rights and technological innovation — explain the causes and constraints of economic growth and development. However, the underlying mechanisms are still unclear, and the numerous models built to account for economic development provide results that are frequently far from reality. In economic history the understanding as to how all these factors, namely factor endowments and institutions of different kinds, forged prosperity (or poverty) across countries is often traced back to colonialism and agriculture. Thus, the analysis of historic cases during colonialism, illustrating the way crops, agricultural techniques, and farm sizes adapted to the new environments generated by colonial settlement, can contribute to the understanding of economic growth and development. This thesis examines rural settlement in the department of Constantine in French Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century, shedding light onto the mechanisms through which its agrarian structure was altered. With historic data, primary and secondary literature, and quantitative empirical methods, this study identifies the forces explaining the regional differences in population densities and the colonial rural origins of land concentration (i.e., more land in fewer hands). Extensive research on economic development builds on Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (2001, p. 1369) argument that ``Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with very different associated institutions'' to explain long-term economic growth and income distribution. However, only a few scholars have taken into account that Europeans adopted different colonial land appropriation and redistribution policies within a colony itself, depending on the region being occupied and the timing of settlement. The data available for Constantine provides a unique opportunity to study how settlers responded to regional differences in institutions (which depended on the timing of settlement), relative factors of production, and the development of infrastructure. By combining agricultural statistics collected by the French administration with information on the timing of settlement at a municipal and sub-municipal level in Constantine at the turn of the twentieth century, I argue that the regional differences mirror what Olmstead and Rhode (1993) defined as ``a fossil record, capturing the production choices made as the region reached [settlement] maturity.'' These choices ultimately relate to numerous studies that rely on past local endowments and/or institutions to disentangle the causes of long-term growth and inequality (Engerman and Sokoloff, 2002; Easterly, 2007; Acemoglu et al., 2002).