Essays in Internationsl Political Economy

This dissertation studies three important questions in international political economy: The long run consequences of social divisions created by historical colonialism, the importance of trade shocks in shifting political power balances and shaping institutional development and the influence that major political powers have over the decisions of smaller nations. I study these three questions empirically in four papers that span three distinct regions and time periods. The first paper asks whether the large differences in economic development across Native American reservations today can be explained by social divisions that were created more than 150 years ago when the US government forcibly integrated distinct Native American bands into shared reservations, condemning them to a system of shared governance that was not consistent with their political traditions and tribal identities. The second and third papers study the effect of the first globalization on the political and economic equilibrium in seventeen 19th century British Caribbean plantation colonies. I use this set of highly comparable but in precise ways distinct islands as a laboratory to study the effect of globalization on the long run development of representative institutions and on the coerciveness of labour markets at the time. The first of two papers provides insights into the working of colonial institutions and traces the mechanisms through which the planter elite managed to maintain a monopoly over policy making and retard long run development. The second paper highlights the importance that exogenous output price changes had for the willingness of planter elites to engage in costly coercion that distorted labour markets in their favour. In the final paper I test whether major aid donors use foreign aid to buy the votes of developing countries. Taking advantage of a unique long-running dispute between major donors in the International Whaling Commission, I am able to address the three major empirical challenges in answering this question: that aid moves much slower than voting behaviour, that alliances constantly change with issues and that most international organizations vote frequently and on a range of issues while data on aid disbursals is available only in yearly aggregates.Ph