Education drives development. Decades of experimental and observational evidence demonstrate that education has been a, if not, the key driver of economic development for more than a century. Despite education’s prominent role in theories of development and demonstrated empirical impact, we are only beginning to understand why some countries expanded access to public schooling while others did not, and why these efforts were successful in some cases but not others. In other words, we know much more about the effects of mass education than its origins.

My book project, Who Counts? How Registration Shapes Educational Inequality, tries to address this gap. It asks an important question: why do local education outcomes vary so dramatically across the developing world? Conventional answers to this question typically focus on top-down approaches emphasizing the supply of public schools and teachers or bottom-up approaches which look at the demand for public schooling.  I argue that variation in both supply and demand can be better understood by focusing on a key feature of the modern state: the ability to collect individualized information. I show how variation in the implementation of the civil registry, a centralized, secular, system for registering births, first popularized following the French Revolution, played a key role in the expansion of public schools across the former colonies of the French Empire.  Civil registration was compulsory for European citizens in colonies from Morocco to Madagascar, but the decision to include or exclude subjects and the timing and extent of their inclusion differed dramatically across colonies. Where subjects were included in the civil registry, demographic data collected by the colonial government facilitated the expansion of mass schooling at independence. Because eligibility for compulsory schooling was determined by age, enforcement and planning were much more difficult where children were not registered. The civil registry’s role was particularly important in majority Muslim countries where a traditional lunar calendar, combined with an absence of age-based religious rites, meant that a precise conceptualization of age, as legally established by compulsory schooling, was otherwise irrelevant to most people’s daily lives.  Parents of registered children by contrast knew their children’s date of birth and eligibility for primary schooling, information also available to local officials.

I test this theory in three Muslim majority countries in Africa. A preliminary empirical chapter demonstrates the generalizability of my theory by comparing differences in education outcomes across Africa between households in the same localities with differing registration outcomes.  A second chapter traces the origins of civil registration back to parish registries in Europe, and uses samples of historic population censuses to illustrate how this indispensable institution of Church administration gradually changed the salience of an individualized and precise conception of age. The lack of any equivalent to baptism or confirmation in Islam, heightened the importance of this institution in the Muslim World, but because the civil registry was generally introduced through colonization and administered in a highly uneven way, its influence varied wildly both across and within former colonies.  Two subsequent empirical chapters test and illustrate my argument showing how the mandatory introduction of the civil registry helped reduce gaps in education outcomes in post-independence Tunisia, but increased them in Morocco and Senegal where registration was not compulsory until after independence. A final chapter illustrates the persistence of these administrative legacies by examining contemporary variation in child marriage, a problem generally understood to be particularly acute in Muslim majority countries, especially for girls.  Using census microdata I show that marriage before the age of 18 dramatically reduces schooling outcomes, but that this effect is much more acute for girls than boys, and is overwhelming concentrated among girls who were not registered at birth.  A final chapter considers how insights from the administration of the civil registry shed light on a range of contemporary challenges ranging from the issue of biometric ids, to broader themes of the use of ‘big data’ for governance.

I make three contributions to the study of colonialism and development. Much of the comparative politics literature on the legacies of colonialism focus on comparisons across countries. Given how varied policy implementation was within colonies, I show that we still have more to learn about the developmental legacies of colonialism by exploring variation in common policies within national borders. Theoretically, the book illustrates how the scope of colonial administration shaped development trajectories post-independence. When colonial officials in Tunisia made the civil registry mandatory for Muslim and Jewish subjects in 1920, they did not anticipate that the demographic statistics collected would facilitate the expansion of mass schooling by an independent Tunisian state 40 years later. Nonetheless by making a key function of local administration mandatory for both citizens and subjects, local bureaucrats gradually routinized the process of registering births, especially among Muslim subjects. Finally, the book highlights how variation in registration status provides a consistent, generalizable, and retrospective measure of the inclusiveness of administration over time.