State capacity, violence and industrialization in Rwanda and England

Economic prosperity across African countries has greatly diverged over the last decades. One the one end, countries like Botswana, Ethiopia and Rwanda have grown rapidly. Others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are poorer in the 21st century than they were at independence. Growing evidence shows that a considerable share of this variation is explained by the presence of centralized precolonial polities within these countries (Michalopoulos & Papaiannou, 2013). In this thesis, I investigate whether there is an effect of having a tradition of statehood matters for development outcomes today. I also investigate potential mechanisms behind the effect of a longer tradition of statehood and ask if there are interaction effects between historical states and intermediate outcomes. I furthermore attempt to understand the effects of large-scale state intervention in the rural economy of England on industrialization. This dissertation, then, is a study of the role of the state in comparative economic development.