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World Development

Colonial Instrumentalization of ethnolinguistic/religious Cleavages (ETHNFUNC)

Colonial powers instrumentalized ethnolinguistic and/or religious cleavages mainly in three areas: army/police, administration/education, and in the economy. In all colonies, the upper layers of the administration were staffed by officials from the metropole country, - there is no variance in this regard. Concerning the lower layers and special functions, however, the colonial powers used ethnolinguistic and religious cleavages to occupy them (“martial races”, administrators etc.), to different degrees.

As important this aspect of colonial domination is, it is difficult to measure its impact. Going beyond a simple differentiation between a low/moderate and strong impact would be hazardous.

  • 0 = no indicators for such colonial policies / not applicable
  • 1 = low/moderate impact
  • 2 = significant/strong impact

Related to this variable is the coding of colonially induced work immigration (for the army, infrastructure project, plantations etc.) because the colonial policy in this regard followed similar considerations. The difference is that with the variable ETHNFUNC we measure the degree to which colonial policies – intentionally as well as non-intentionally – created and/or reinforced such occupational specializations along ethnolinguistic and/or religious lines while WORKIMM mainly catches the quantitative aspect of colonially induced immigration.

For more than one third of our cases, we found indicators that there was a strong impact of colonial policy on occupational specializations along ethnolinguistic and/or religious lines, for another 15 cases a low/moderate one. The instrumentalization of ethnolinguistic and/or religious cleavages usually took place on more directly ruled colonies, in colonies with more successful missionary activities and with – unsurprisingly – a higher level of ethnic heterogeneity and work immigration (significant bivariate correlations with DOMFORM, WORKIMM, MISSION, BORDERS; Annex table 3.3) and with a higher dependence on investment from the metropole country (FDICON). It was more often applied in sub-Saharan Africa than in Asian/North African countries (see 'Descriptive Statistics'), what might have to do with the lower levels of ethnic heterogeneity in the latter countries.