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Decompressing Legacies of Public Goods Delivery, 1880–2012

In this chapter, I turn to an original dataset of historical public service investments to test a final implication of my theory. While the previous two chapters demonstrated that congruent local governments engage in spatially distinct redistributive politics, my argument holds uneven temporal predictions: the influence of the precolonial past on redistributive politics should be contingent on its congruence with formal institutions. As I show in the following pages, the precolonial past only influences social service delivery following the 1996 decentralization reforms that transferred authority over public goods placement to local governments. Built from archival documents, my historical dataset also enables me to assess a set of possible alternative explanations first raised in Chapter 2. The colonial era brought numerous changes to rural Senegal that have been shown elsewhere to radically alter development trajectories. Could the findings I document be driven by divergent experiences with the colonial state and not exposure to precolonial centralization? I test a range of arguments about colonial influences on long-run development trajectories but find little evidence that colonial legacies mediate those of the precolonial past. Thus, while French colonization did intimately influence the contours of Senegal’s social service infrastructure, the political and economic interests of the colonial state only appear to have shaped proximity to basic services in the colonial and immediate postcolonial period. Colonial effects have almost entirely faded by the early 2000s. In this way, this chapter “decompresses” history to engage in two broader debates animating the recent turn to history among students of political economy of development. By explicitly examining the impact of precolonial and colonial legacies over time, I offer a corrective to the tendency to gloss over the question of temporal process that defines much of our recent interest in historical legacies. As the empirical evidence marshaled in the following pages shows,