Forthcoming). Hither thou shalt come, but no further - reply to the colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation. American Economic Review

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) established that economic institutions today are correlated with what was expected mortality for Europeans if they moved to countries within their colonial empires. David Albouy argues that this relationship is not robust. Speci\u85cally, he wants to drop all data from Latin America and much of the data from Africa, making up almost 60 % of our sample. This is unwarranted- there is a great deal of speci\u85c information on the mortality of Europeans in those places during the colonial period. He also includes a campaign dummy that is coded inconsistently and seriously at odds with the historical record; even modest corrections undermine his claims. We also show that limiting the e¤ect of outliers signi\u85cantly strengthens our results, making them robust to even more extreme versions of Albouys critiques. We thank Robert Mo ¢ tt, the editor, for guidance. We also thank Joshua Angrist, Victor Chernozhukov, and Guido Imbens for useful suggestions, and Melissa Dell and Karti Subramanian for their help and suggestions. We are also grateful to the sta ¤ at the library at the Institute of Actuaries in London for help with archival material. Military returns [reports of disease and death] serve to indicate to the restless wanderers of our race the boundaries which neither the pursuit of wealth nor the dreams of ambition should induce them to pass, and to proclaim in forcible language that man, like the elements, is controlled by a Power which hath said, Hither thou shalt come, but no further.(Tulloch, 1847, p. 259)