Inequality has long been a focus of scholarly exploration, but we know little about its origins in the Middle East and North Africa, the region with the highest estimated income inequality in the world in 2019. Previous scholarship highlights the importance of historical variation in state institutions and resources, particularly oil, for contemporary development, but these studies focused almost exclusively on cross-national comparisons, neglecting profound local disparities in administration and development as dramatic as the national contrasts that animated research on state building in the Middle East and North Africa for decades.

High levels of inequality across the Middle East and North Africa and profound gaps in the local provision of administration and public goods, suggest the importance of two related questions: why are levels of social welfare high in some areas and low in others? Why do these disparities in education and health outcomes persist in some localities but not others?

My book project, The Colonial Origins of Local Inequality, explains why local variation in governance are particularly stark in former colonies, where it is common to encounter administrative regions with relatively high levels of development adjacent to areas where administration and development are limited. I argue that local variation in social development is shaped by the expansiveness of state building, the formal institutions that provide and administer public goods like education and health care. Where state building was exclusionary, specifically, where separate institutions were created to administer different ethnic groups, inequalities in public goods provision and social welfare outcomes were likely to be higher and more likely to persist. Where state building was inclusive, meaning that different ethnic groups enjoyed access to the same institutions, inequality in public goods provision and social welfare outcomes were likely to be lower and less likely to persist.

I test this theory by examining patterns of state building in the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on a comparison of the former “protectorates” of Morocco and Tunisia. Despite a brief colonial period, post-independence governments in Morocco and Tunisia were confronted by extreme disparities in access to public infrastructure like running water or public schools, as well as rates of literacy, schooling, and employment. Although governments in both countries faced this common challenge, I show how the emergence of a broader post-colonial political elite in Tunisia, led to a much more expansive commitment to state building, reducing but not eliminating the inequalities exacerbated by colonialism. In Morocco by contrast, a relatively narrow political elite, meant that efforts to expand the state were limited for decades after independence. Two empirical chapters employ methods of causal inference to measure the effect of these local legacies of state building on education and gender inequality, key dimensions of underdevelopment across the region. A final empirical chapter examines local variation in social development in Egypt to test the generalizability of my theory under a different colonial power and a distinct form of colonialism.

This theory has significant implications for understanding the origins of inequality, as well as local variation in contemporary economic and political development in former colonies. As opposed to Western Europe where the expansion of the modern state gradually reduced gaps in public goods provision and social welfare outcomes, under colonialism the modern state exacerbated local inequality. Overcoming these legacies of inequality required the post-independence state to incorporate politically and administratively the peripheries neglected by colonialism. Where post-independence political coalitions and administration were expansive, inequalities in social welfare were more likely to be reduced. Where post-independence political coalitions and administration were narrow, inequalities from the colonial period were more likely to persist.