Verghese 2019

823120
research-article2019
PASXXX10.1177/0032329218823120Politics & SocietyVerghese and Teitelbaum
Article
Politics & Society
2019, Vol. 47(1) 55–86
Conquest and Conflict: The © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218823120
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329218823120
Violence in India journals.sagepub.com/home/pas
Ajay Verghese
University of California, Riverside
Emmanuel Teitelbaum
George Washington University
Abstract
Does colonialism have long-term effects on political stability? This question
is addressed in a study of India’s Naxalite insurgency, a Maoist rebellion
characterized by its left-wing proponents as having roots in the colonial period.
The article highlights three mechanisms linking colonialism with contemporary
Naxalite violence—land inequality, discriminatory policies toward low-caste and
tribal groups, and upper-caste-dominated administrative institutions. It analyzes
how the degree of British influence relates to Naxalite conflict in 589 districts
from 1980 to 2011. A positive association is found between British influence
and the strength of the Naxalite rebellion across all of India, within both the
“Red Corridor” region and former princely states. The results are robust to a
coarsened exact matching analysis and a wide array of robustness checks. The
findings call into question whether the supposedly beneficial administrative and
institutional legacies of colonialism can be evaluated without reference to their
social costs.
Keywords
colonialism, conflict, India, Maoism, political stability
Corresponding Author:
Ajay Verghese, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2219 Watkins Hall,
Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
Email: ajayv@ucr.edu
56 Politics & Society 47(1)
The era of European colonialism that began in the sixteenth century transformed state-
society relations in many parts of the world. Colonial powers generally sought to
increase the colonial state’s penetration of society while minimizing the risk of rebel-
lion. They achieved this dual objective not only through substantial investments in
infrastructure and administration but also by manipulating social divisions and hierar-
chies to promote buy-in among local elites and mitigate resistance by the masses. How
did policies that enhanced state capacity at the expense of social cohesion affect levels
of political stability over the long run in the postcolonial world? Are former colonies
more (or less) prone to political dysfunction, violence, and armed insurgency than
countries that were never colonized?
This article addresses the long-term effects of colonial rule through an analysis of
India’s Naxalite insurgency—a Maoist uprising largely supported by low castes and
indigenous tribal groups.1 The insurgency now dates back over half a century and was
famously billed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as “the single biggest internal
security challenge ever faced by our country.”2 The movement is estimated to have
mobilized between 6,500 and 9,000 fighters, at one point operating in roughly 40 per-
cent of India’s districts, and has, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs, claimed
more than 13,000 lives since its inception.3 Moreover, the Naxalite movement has clear
historical antecedents in a sizable number of peasant uprisings that occurred during the
colonial era. Naxalite leaders themselves have cited Britain’s role in establishing “semi-
colonial” and “semifeudal” conditions that make India ripe for revolution.4
It is generally recognized that the Spanish undermined governance by setting up
extractive institutions,5 and that the French diminished state capacity by undermining
traditional forms of governance.6 However, scholars frequently portray British colo-
nialism as promoting bureaucratization, stronger state capacity, and better judicial sys-
tems because it was less direct and because the British tended to colonize the least
developed areas in any given region.7 British rule has been tied to a robust legal-
administrative capacity in Mauritius,8 higher levels of state capacity and cohesion in
Singapore,9 and strengthened rule of law and more robust democracy in Africa.10
British colonies became democratic faster than other colonies, and British colonialism
is positively associated with GDP per capita.11
At the same time, the long-term social effects of colonialism are known to have
been overwhelmingly negative. Numerous studies demonstrate how Europeans gen-
erated political instability around the world by disrupting native societies and encour-
aging antagonism between indigenous groups. Scholars have linked Belgian colonial
legacies to the Rwandan genocide,12 French legacies to ethnic violence in Mali and
Sudan,13 Portuguese legacies to civil war in Angola,14 and British legacies to the Mau
Mau uprising in Kenya.15 In such cases, the standard colonial “divide-and-rule” strat-
egy generated enduring horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups that have con-
tinually reemerged as the primary source of contemporary conflagrations.
In this article, we develop and test a theory that connects British colonialism in
India to grievances among low-caste and tribal populations. We hypothesize that
these grievances in turn led to these subaltern groups joining the Naxalite insurgency.
Verghese and Teitelbaum 57
Over the past several years, scholars have analyzed the effects of colonialism in India
by leveraging the fact that the British governed the country through forms of direct
and indirect rule. Direct rule (by British administrators) occurred in the provinces,
whereas indirect rule (by native kings) occurred in the princely states. This system
emerged in the mid-nineteenth century when several native rulers initiated a revolt
against the British, who had been rapidly expanding their power across the entire
subcontinent. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, Queen Victoria officially
renounced the policy of annexation. Consequently, 45 percent of the land in India and
25 percent of its population (in 1901, almost 60 million people) remained under the
rule of native kings, and after 1858 none of these territories were annexed.16 Scholars
have assessed the impact of colonialism by comparing outcomes across provinces
and princely states.17
From a governance standpoint, this divide between direct and indirect rule was his-
torically paramount. It was more consequential, for example, than the divide between
north and south India, or that between the large presidencies (Bengal, Bombay, and
Madras) and smaller British provinces, as evidenced by the fact that British censuses,
maps, and government data were all broken down by provinces and princely states.
Even more consequential, the British dealt with princely states as sovereign polities
with their own separate administrative entities and systems of government.
It is important to note that there is, nevertheless, substantial heterogeneity within
the categories of direct and indirect rule. By 1857, British rule had been established
much longer in some provinces than others, and colonialism had a greater impact in
areas that were ruled longer. Further, although the British stopped annexing princely
states after 1857, they continued to interfere in the internal affairs of many of them. In
this article, we focus on the degree of British influence across provinces and princely
states, a more sensitive measure of the impact of British colonialism. We measure
British influence in the provinces by counting the number of years a territory was
governed directly, and we measure British influence in the princely states through the
number of guns in British salutes, a proxy for how much colonial administrators inter-
vened in a princely territory.
We use a mixed method research design that combines historical analysis to show
how colonialism is linked to insurgent violence and statistical analysis that demon-
strates a robust association between the two variables. We draw on the rich qualitative
historical literature on colonial rule and peasant rebellion in India to identify three
specific mechanisms linking British rule to contemporary low-caste and tribal griev-
ances. First, the British exacerbated land inequality by granting property rights to
landlords and by commandeering forestlands on which tribal populations traditionally
relied for sustenance. Second, the British rigidified social inequalities by systemati-
cally categorizing and ranking caste and tribal communities. Third, the British installed
an upper-caste-dominated bureaucracy that cemented these inequalities through
administrative practice and ultimately fostered distrust of India’s law enforcement and
legal institutions among low-caste and tribal groups. We also draw on contemporary
census and survey data to show that the degree of British influence in former provinces
and princely states is positively associated with present-day land inequality, caste con-
flict, and citizen distrust in the police.
We then demonstrate the relationship between colonialism and conflict with a sta-
tistical analysis of insurgent activity and violence across 589 Indian districts over a
thirty-one-year period. We find that in both provinces and princely states, the likeli-
hood and intensity of Naxalite violence are substantially higher today in areas of
greater British influence, even when controlling for a variety of confounding factors
that may also contribute to Maoist conflict. This relationship between British influ-
ence and Naxalite violence is robust to a series of additional tests. We perform a coars-
ened exact matching analysis that helps address concerns about endogeneity, namely,
that the British did not select districts at random but sought to annex or influence areas
that were more prone to rebellion. We also account for possible sensitivity of our mod-
els stemming from a high degree of correlation among our controls (multicollinearity),
as well as for bias stemming from a causal relationship between the treatment and
controls (posttreatment bias) by dropping the control variables and including different
sets of controls in the analysis.
Our study of the Naxalite insurgency makes several important contributions to the
literature on conflict and political violence. Our analysis questions whether the sup-
posedly beneficial administrative and institutional effects of colonialism can be evalu-
ated without reference to their social costs. The very agencies that served as the
administrative “steel frame” of the British Raj, and subsequently the Indian bureau-
cracy, also enacted policies that generated the economic inequality and social divi-
sions that fuel Maoist violence. By showing how institutions that provided better
administration and governance overall may concurrently have given rise to long-term
instability and conflict in some parts of India, we integrate disparate literatures on the
long-term administrative and social impacts of colonial rule. Further, we provide his-
torical context to the recent literature on horizontal inequalities and conflict by dem-
onstrating how colonial policies that attempt to order native populations and exclude
minority groups contribute to grievances and rebellion by marginalized communi-
ties.18 Our study also helps to fill a gap in our understanding by exploring the less
understood colonial origins of peasant rebellion and conflict in the countryside.19
Finally, we contribute to the literature on Naxalite violence in India by concretely
establishing the connection between historical factors and the more immediate causes
of the rebellion that have so far been the focus of most studies.
Colonialism and Patterns of Maoist Violence

Most studies of Maoist insurgent violence focus on the “Red Corridor,” a vast expanse
of territory in central and eastern India, and use a variety of contemporary political and
economic factors to explain the conflict. The prevailing view is that Naxalite violence
has been substantially fueled by poverty and horizontal inequalities structured by caste
and tribal identities. Naxalite violence is associated with unemployment and labor
income shocks,20 the presence of mineral wealth and mining operations that dispossess
tribal populations of their land,21 the rural population’s heavy dependence on renew-
able resources,22 economic inequality structured by caste and tribal identities,23 and
the political exclusion of low castes and tribals.24 Poverty, economic inequality, and
political exclusion make low-caste and tribal populations uniquely vulnerable to the
appeals and recruitment strategies of insurgent leaders who promise to provide justice
and retribution against high castes and to provide short-term economic benefits rang-
ing from negotiating wages to help with securing government contracts.
These explanations are no doubt compelling, but there are reasons to suspect that
colonial institutions and policies also play an important role in explaining violence in
the Red Corridor. First, the British contributed enormously to the scope and severity
of peasant and tribal unrest during their rule.25 Ranajit Guha, compiling only a partial
list, records 110 separate revolts during the colonial period.26 Furthermore, Maoist
leaders have consciously drawn connections between their movement and these ear-
lier uprisings against the British. Naxal ideologues view the history of India as one of
“uninterrupted historic struggles carried out by the Indian people against the British
imperialists” and subsequently “against feudal exploitation and oppression” stem-
ming from the colonial period.27 They argue that “British imperialism has been
organically linked to feudalism from the very beginning,” as has the “comprador big
bourgeoisie . . . that serves the capitalists of imperialist countries and is nurtured by
them.”28 Naxal propaganda further states that independence from the British was
essentially “fake” and that although the British left India, colonialism never ended
but instead took on newer and more insidious forms. In this way, they see their move-
ment as the climactic struggle in a long “series of peasant struggles and rebellions
against the British colonialists and their feudal props, such as the Santhal revolt of
1854–56” that marked the “beginning of the Indian democratic revolution.”29
The broader geographic patterns of Maoist violence provide additional preliminary
support for the idea that colonial legacies contributed to the uprising. The Naxalite
insurgency has undergone three distinct phases that differ somewhat in their geo-
graphic location and social composition.30 The first relatively short phase began in
1967 with an uprising in the village of Naxalbari in a part of West Bengal that the
British ruled for more than a century. During this phase, Naxalite leaders pursued a
“politics of assassination” and urban warfare under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar,
with very little emphasis on mass mobilization or the rural sector. As a result, this
initial mobilization was crushed in 1971 following Mazumdar’s death in police cus-
tody and the arrest of other key leaders. The movement subsequently underwent a long
period of reorganization. During the second phase, a new consensus emerged on a
revolutionary line emphasizing mass mobilization around the concerns of low-caste
sharecroppers and agricultural laborers in the plains regions of Bihar and Andhra
Pradesh, where, in most districts, the British had ruled between 150 and 182 years.
The movement’s third phase, still ongoing, saw its reunification under the banner
of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004 and intense mobilization and activ-
ity across the Red Corridor. Recently, the conflict has spread into the more forested
areas of the newly formed states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, as well as the tribal
Figure 1. Insurgent Activity and Violence in India’s Red Corridor.

Note: Panel 1.1 depicts the districts in which Maoist activity was detected by the Government of India
between 2008 and 2011. Panel 1.2 displays a dichotomous coding of Maoist violence. Panel 1.3 depicts
the number of years Indian districts were directly ruled by the British. Panel 1.4 displays the number of
guns in salutes given by the British to princely states.
Source: Panel 1.1 data are from a Right to Information petition filed by the South Asia Terrorism Portal;
Panel 1.2 data are from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System and the data set compiled by Joseph
Flavian Gomes, “The Political Economy of Conflict in India: An Empirical Analysis,” World Development 68
(2015): 96–123; Panel 1.3 data are drawn from gazetteers and other official British documents; Panel 1.4
data are from Lakshmi Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences,”
Review of Economics & Statistics 92, no. 4 (2010).
regions of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa. There has also been a gradual
shift among movement leaders from a sole focus on mobilizing dalits (untouchables)
against feudalism and landlordism to mobilizing adivasis (indigenous tribal commu-
nities) against displacement stemming from mining and industrial activity.31
Throughout these three stages of conflict, insurgent activity has been greater in
areas of former British influence than in other parts of India. Panels 1.1 and 1.2 of
Figure 1 depict the spatial breadth of the insurgency. The first map highlights the
administrative districts in which Maoist organizational activity was detected between
2008 and 2011 by the Government of India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The
second displays a measure of insurgent violence that codes whether a district experi-
enced any Maoist attacks or casualties from 1980 to 2010. This coding is based on two
variables discussed in greater detail in the data and analysis section: the number of
attacks carried out by Maoist rebels between 2005 and 2009 recorded in the Worldwide
Incidents Tracking System (WITS) database and the number of deaths resulting from
Maoist attacks for the period 1980–2010 recorded in a data set compiled by Joseph
Flavian Gomes.32
Panels 1.3 and 1.4 depict the degree of British influence in India. Before their
experience in India, the British brought most of their colonies fully under direct
rule,33 but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the British from conquering the entire
subcontinent. Panel 1.3 illustrates the number of years that a district was governed
directly by the British. Many of the Maoist-affected districts in Andhra Pradesh,
Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal were governed by the British for 100
years or more, whereas districts that were never governed by the British in such
places as Gujarat, Rajasthan, and northern Karnataka have not witnessed any
Maoist activity. Panel 1.4 illustrates the number of guns in the salutes granted by
the British to princely states.34 Many princely kingdoms and their rulers were
given a salute by the British (ranging from zero to twenty-one guns) that was a
ceremonial marker of prestige during official functions and ceremonies.35 A higher
number of guns entailed more deference in the eyes of the British and therefore
less colonial intervention. Although there were over 600 princely states, only five
large and independent kingdoms—Hyderabad, Mysore, Jammu and Kashmir,
Gwalior, and Baroda—were given twenty-one-gun salutes. The twenty-four king-
doms that received salutes of seventeen or more guns accounted for 70 percent of
the total princely state population.36 Smaller states with lesser salutes (or no salute)
were afforded little latitude by colonial officials, and they often continued to expe-
rience British influence after 1858. With the exception of Hyderabad, the princely
states in today’s Red Corridor had either no gun salutes at all or very small ones.
The princely states with the most stature and independence were concentrated in
the west, where there is virtually no Maoist activity today.
The Legacies of British Rule: Inequality, Discrimination,

and Elite Capture
How did colonial policies generate horizontal inequalities and grievances among
low castes and tribals? And to what extent do the legacies of colonial rule persist
into the modern era? Although the notion espoused in Naxalite propaganda that
India continues to be ruled indirectly by the British or other foreign powers is
far-fetched, the divergent histories of provinces and princely states in fact led to
persistent differences in the ways citizens viewed and participated in government
institutions and in the degree to which these institutions incorporated or excluded
low-caste and tribal groups. We identify three ways that the British aggravated the
horizontal inequalities and grievances that frequently contribute to peasant unrest:
(1) by instituting new landholding systems that generated land inequality; (2) by
implementing new discriminatory policies against low-caste and tribal communi-
ties; and (3) by facilitating the capture of bureaucratic institutions by upper castes.
Princely states were often insulated from many of these divisive policies instituted
in British India. As we show, the relationship between peasants and rulers in the
princely states also differed considerably from the relationship between peasants
and British administrators or landlords in the provinces.37 Following independence,
the leaders of the central government failed to change key features of the colonial
state that had previously led to peasant unrest, whereas former princely states con-
tinued to pursue policies that were more egalitarian than those being imposed in the
former provinces.
Land Inequality
The Maoist Party Programme states that “the British colonialists preserved the feu-
dal forces” by giving power to “Zamindars, who acted as their social props, through
permanent settlement.”38 Most historians would agree with that assessment. The
British radically disrupted precolonial landholding systems when they became the
paramount rulers of the subcontinent by empowering a new class of landlords. This
process began in 1793 with the institution of a zamindari system (the “Permanent
Settlement”) in the Bengal Presidency (much of modern day Bihar, Jharkhand,
Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal). Zamindars were present in the precolonial period;
they served as intermediaries between peasants and the rulers of the Mughal
Empire—revenue agents who had no property rights. Drawing on English concep-
tions of land ownership, British administrators enacted a system of land tenure that
abolished the top layer of property administration existing under the Mughals (the
jagir) and gave ownership rights to zamindars in the hope of incentivizing them to
make productive investments in their estates.39
In reality, these “reforms” had the opposite effect, generating subinfeudation and
inequality rather than productivity and growth. Under zamindari tenure, peasants
became tenants at will and could be dispossessed for any reason. And rather than trans-
form into nascent capitalists as the British hoped, landlords governed their territories
like feudal despots. Consequently, land began to be heavily concentrated in the hands
of landlords throughout north India: in the sprawling United Provinces, all the land
was owned by less than 5 percent of the population by independence.40 Policies that
increased land inequality were not unique to the north; when the British brought cen-
tral-eastern India under their control in the mid-nineteenth century, they instituted the
similar malguzari system.41 Moreover, the areas held by the British for the longest
period were most likely to have landlord-based systems because British administrators
who, in the shadow of the French revolution, initially feared the peasantry came under
the influence of utilitarian thought as time went on.42
Princely kingdoms utilized a variety of landholding systems but, in contrast to the
British, generally treated cultivators on their lands as hereditary and did not displace
them arbitrarily.43 Moreover, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many
native rulers began to establish ryotwari settlements in which land tributes were col-
lected directly from cultivators without the use of landlords. For example, Baroda in
South India implemented several reforms geared toward the peasantry in the late nine-
teenth century, lowering agricultural taxes and incorporating cultivators into a more
direct relationship with the government.44 Jaipur and Jodhpur in north India imple-
mented ryotwari tenure, while Mysore, Bikaner, and Cochin made substantial invest-
ments in irrigation networks.45
In addition to instituting zamindari tenure systems, the British colonial state
fundamentally altered adivasi land rights by declaring itself the conservator of for-
estlands in which tribals had lived without interference for generations. This policy
was instituted throughout central eastern India (much of modern day Andhra
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa) where the country’s tribal population has his-
torically been concentrated. Huge swaths of forest were suddenly placed in reserve,
especially areas that contained rich forest produce or mineral wealth. The Indian
Forest Act of 1878, as Guha and Gadgil note, “by one stroke of the executive pen
attempted to obliterate centuries of customary use of the forest by rural populations
all over India.”46 Furthermore, forestlands became overburdened by an influx of
Forest Department officials, immigrants, moneylenders, and commercial firms, and
illiterate adivasi cultivators often unknowingly signed away their land to such
encroachers.
Subsequent attempts to rectify the inequality generated during the British period
mostly met with failure. The results of ambitious land reforms in the 1950s were lim-
ited as large landlords evaded new land-ownership ceilings through such simple tac-
tics as distributing title deeds among family members.47 The failure of land reform
following independence led to the persistence of land inequality into the modern era.
Panel 2.1 of Figure 2 shows that district-level land inequality, measured by the 1991
land Gini index, is highly correlated with the duration of British rule. Inequality and
landlordism continue to have serious developmental consequences: former landlord
districts still underperform nonlandlord districts in agricultural investment, yields, and
public investments in health and education.48
Discriminatory Policies
Another major change during the British period introduced several new policies
that discriminated against low castes and tribals and reified the social inequalities
inherent in India’s caste system. Caste existed long before British rule, but colo-
nialism—and more specifically, colonial administrators’ desire to simplify and sys-
tematize a complex and foreign society—led to an emphasis on caste previously
unknown in India.49 The first scientific census, in 1871, attempted to place
Figure 2. Colonialism and Contemporary Grievances.

Note: Figure 2 depicts the relationship between the number of years of British rule and hypothesized
mechanisms in our analysis.
Source: The number of years Indian districts were directly ruled by the British is taken from information
found in gazetteers and other official British documents. In Panel 2.1 land inequality is measured by the
1991 land Gini index taken from the Agricultural Census (http://agcensus.nic.in/document/introagcen
.htm). Measures of caste conflict and public confidence in institutions in Panels 2.2–2.4 are from the 2005
Indian Human Development Survey (https://ihds.umd.edu/).
thousands of diverse jatis (endogamous birth groups) into a four-tiered (varna)

structure, a practice that helped rigidify the caste system and increased the salience
of caste in the administrative context.50 In the 1901 census, enumerators ranked
jatis. The deleterious results of these new policies were laid out by L. Middleton,
director of census operations for Punjab:
Caste . . . was rigid among the higher castes, but malleable amongst the lower. We
pigeon-holed everyone by caste, and if we could not find a true caste for them, labeled
them with the name of an hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its
effects on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system
we deplore.51
This process of ranking castes led, in the short term, to the mobilization of thousands
of claimants from various castes who jockeyed for better positioning in the caste
system and, over the long term, to the augmentation of caste identity in mainstream
Indian politics.52
The British likewise instituted the Criminal Tribes Act pertaining to certain
tribes with a history of criminal behavior. This legislation, first enacted in 1871,
criminalized every member of a “criminal tribe,” including those who had never
committed a crime. Such tribes were heavily stigmatized, prevented from travel-
ing freely, and jailed for not reporting their movements. In 1949, A. V. Thakkar,
a member of the Bombay Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee,
noted that “it may be said that a much larger percentage of these tribes were led
into criminality by giving them the stigma of criminal tribes.”53 The British dis-
rupted tribal life in several other ways, such as by introducing a monetary econ-
omy to replace a barter system and by allowing an influx of Christian missionaries
into tribal areas.
Generally speaking, rajas and nawabs did not implement the same type of dis-
criminatory policies toward tribals and low castes. Most kings protected and gave
ceremonial deference to adivasis whom they regarded as the original inhabitants
of India. Princely governments often incorporated adivasis into the government
apparatus: tribes in the northern region of Rajputana, for instance, were employed
as hunters and guardians of the royal treasury.54 In Travancore and Cochin, laws
were passed that prevented outsiders from settling in adivasi territory.55 In Jammu
and Kashmir, members of the Bakkarwal tribe were employed as tax collectors and
were an important part of the government.56 In 1942, most of the rulers of the
Eastern Feudatory States approved a policy (although it was not implemented)
declaring that tribal groups be the first claimants to forestlands and that they must
be governed by independent panchayats (village councils).57 Several kings were
similarly noteworthy for taking the lead in fighting caste discrimination. The ruler
of Kolhapur responded to low-caste agitation by stipulating that 50 percent of all
government jobs be reserved for non-Brahmin (priestly) castes.58 Travancore pro-
vides an example of the sea change with regard to caste in the princely states after
1857. In the mid-nineteenth century, Travancore was run by orthodox Hindus who
upheld a rigid and strict caste hierarchy. By 1936, however, the kingdom’s maha-
raja, Sri Chithira Thirunal, allowed untouchables for the first time in Indian his-
tory to enter Hindu temples, a liberal policy that was instituted in Travancore
before anywhere in British India.59
Discrimination against low castes and tribals likewise continues as a major fea-
ture of contemporary politics. Although the postcolonial state technically abolished
the caste system through a modern liberal constitution, the legacies of policies first
instituted under British rule did not dissipate; caste is the “specter that continues to
haunt the body politic of postcolonial India.”60 Despite affirmative action policies,
low-caste and tribal communities still suffer enormous discrimination,61 and some
scholars argue that government quotas have only exacerbated discrimination
against them.62
A brief analysis of survey data from the 2005 Indian Human Development
Survey (IHDS) suggests a relationship between British rule and long-term caste
conflict (Panel 2.2 of Fig. 2). The IHDS includes responses to questions on social
relations from 44,000 randomly selected individuals in about 320 districts. One
questions asks, “In this village/neighbourhood, how much conflict would you say
there is between communities/jatis that live here?” In the original data set, responses
were coded 1 for “a lot of conflict,” 2 for “some conflict,” and 3 for “not much
conflict.” We flip and truncate the scale so 2 reflects high conflict and 0 represents
low conflict and plot the variable against the number of years British. The analysis
demonstrates a clear correlation between the number of years a district was ruled
by the British and the sense by individuals living in these districts that caste groups
were in conflict.
Elite Capture
The third way British rule disadvantaged low castes and tribals was through the intro-
duction of a new centralized, westernized bureaucracy. Among the organizations they
constructed were the Indian Civil Service, the Imperial Police, and the Imperial Forest
Department. These organizations are often considered to have promoted bureaucrati-
zation and the rule of law, but they were dominated by upper-caste elites who tilted the
promulgation of rules and their enforcement toward their own interests. This domina-
tion by elites is essentially what Naxal ideologues are referring to when they charac-
terize the Indian government as a “semi-colonial state” dominated by a “comprador
bourgeoisie.”
Three institutions have come under special scrutiny by historians and social activ-
ists for their role in oppressing low-caste and tribal minorities—the police, the courts,
and the Indian Forest Service. Sandria Freitag argues that the police and the courts
formed “a colonial social order designed to reinforce those at the top of the hierarchy
of groups.”63 The British purposely isolated police officers from low castes and adiva-
sis, and over time the police became an increasingly repressive instrument of social
coercion.64 New courts adjudicated land disputes against low castes and adivasis, codi-
fying land dispossession. And corrupt Forest Department officials were complicit in
cheating adivasis out of their land. W. J. Culshaw, a Christian missionary in India,
detailed in a contemporaneous account how British administrators allowed the Santhal
tribe to be dispossessed by outside groups.65 The Santhals, decades later, would insti-
gate the 1967 rebellion in Naxalbari.66
Following independence, India’s new leaders made an explicit decision not to dis-
mantle the main institutions of colonial rule. All three main arms of the contemporary
All India Services—the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), the Indian Forest Service
(IFS), and the Indian Police Service (IPS)—are direct descendants of British organiza-
tions. Postcolonial leaders considered the IAS pivotal for establishing political order,
and the institution has been incredibly resistant to reform.67 Similarly, the IFS has not
altered colonial forest policy, failing to make substantive reforms after independence.68
The All India Services remain elite and largely undemocratic governing institutions
that derive their manpower primarily from the dominant groups in society.
Before independence, the princely states were governed quite differently from
the provinces. In princely states, the court of the raja or nawab was the center of
government activity, and the main administrative institutions of British India like
the civil service and the police extended only to the provinces.69 The Indian govern-
ment imported these institutions of British India into former princely areas follow-
ing independence, but differences in styles of governance between British and
princely India remained salient for some time. Many former kings continued to
govern their territories in the first decades after colonialism, and policies in these
areas often remained unchanged.70 As late as 2004, the states of Rajasthan, Punjab,
and Himachal Pradesh had chief ministers from former princely families.71 Princely
rulers also managed to have their officers appointed to newly established adminis-
trative institutions.72 In the princely states of Indore and Gwalior, for example,
most of the new IAS force simply transferred from the princely bureaucracy, even
though the law stipulated that they should be selected from outside the state on the
basis of a competitive examination.73
It is likely that such differences in the culture of state-society interactions have
persisted, especially in institutions with clear roots in the colonial era. The Naxalites
have themselves pointed to the police as an institution that has aggravated tensions in
rural areas by consistently discriminating against low-caste and tribal communities. To
explore the relationship between colonialism and trust in the police, we looked at
responses to a question from the IHDS about how much confidence citizens have in
the police “to enforce the law.” In the original data set, responses were coded 1 for
high confidence, 2 for moderate confidence, and 3 for low confidence. We flip and
truncate the scale so that 2 reflects high confidence and 0 reflects low confidence. As
Panel 2.3 of Figure 2 demonstrates, the length of British rule correlates negatively
with citizen trust in the police. Further analysis shows that this distrust extends to other
colonial-era institutions, such as the courts, but not to democratically elected postco-
lonial institutions such as legislatures. For example, Panel 2.4 is based on a question
about how much confidence citizens have in the state government “to look after the
people” and provides no evidence that British rule undermines citizen trust in demo-
cratically elected state-level government.
Data and Analysis

We have identified three ways that British colonialism contributed to the economic
and political exclusion of low-caste and tribal groups. We contend that grievances
associated with such exclusion led to higher Maoist violence in areas formerly ruled
by the British. Although the maps we showed in Figure 1 highlight a clear spatial rela-
tionship between British rule and the Maoist insurgency, we conduct a statistical anal-
ysis to estimate more precisely the effect of colonialism above and beyond a variety of
potential confounding factors. We analyze Maoist organizational activity and conflict
outcomes in 589 Indian districts covering the period 1980–2011. We explore the rela-
tionship between British influence and violence at an all-India level by asking, What
makes the Red Corridor red? We also look at the relationship between British influ-
ence on levels of violence within the Red Corridor region and within regions that were
formerly governed as princely states. In this analysis, we demonstrate a relationship
between the level of British influence and measures of insurgent organizational activ-
ity and violence that is robust to a variety of specifications and a coarsened exact
matching analysis.
Measuring Insurgent Activity and Violence

Our dependent variables consist of four measures of Maoist insurgent activity and
violence. First, we examine whether colonialism is correlated with the organizational
capacity of Maoists across India. The data on Maoist organizational activity in each
district come from a Right to Information (RTI) petition filed by the South Asia
Terrorism Portal (SATP), an online terrorism database.74 The Ministry of Home
Affairs’ (MHA) response to the RTI request lists all districts between 2008 and 2011
in which the MHA’s Naxal Management Division (now the Left Wing Extremism
Division) recorded Maoist-related violence or organizational activities. From this list
of Maoist-affected districts, we created a binary variable coded 1 if the government
detected Maoist activity between 2008 and 2011, and 0 otherwise. This variable repre-
sents the most sensitive measure of insurgent presence at the height of the Naxalite
conflict. Maoist insurgents may engage in organizational activities in a district, like
disseminating propaganda and recruiting new cadres, without in fact executing any
attacks. Such activities would be recorded by the MHA’s Naxal Management Division
but would not appear in conflict data sets.
As a second measure of Maoist presence, we coded a binary variable 1 if a district
experienced any Maoist attacks or related casualties from 1980 to 2010 and 0 other-
wise, based on conflict data from Gomes’s Maoist conflict data set,75 and the Worldwide
Incidents Tracking System (WITS), a database of terrorist and conflict events com-
piled from press reports by the National Counterterrorism Center between 2004 and
2012.76 The Gomes data set covers the period 1980 to 2010 and combines data from
WITS and three other sources: the Global Terrorism Database (GTD); the Rand-MIPT
Terrorism Incident Database; and the SATP.
Our third conflict measure is the number of insurgent attacks recorded in the
WITS data set. Although available for a shorter period, the WITS data reflect lev-
els of insurgent violence more accurately than other publicly available data sets,
and they are as accurate as unpublished police data in reporting incidents with two
or more fatalities.77 The WITS data also provide a unique advantage in measuring
the frequency of insurgent attacks. Specifically, the WITS coding protocol includes
an “intentionality” requirement: “there has to be no evidence in the incident that
the event was started by someone other than the group committing the attack.”78
This coding requirement enables the researcher to distinguish between Maoist-
initiated attacks and the infamous “fake encounters” in which police initiate con-
flict with the intent to eliminate suspected Maoist rebels or to intimidate the local
population.
We use data compiled by Gomes to measure the number of conflict-related casu-

alties. The Gomes data set includes counts of the number of dead and wounded in
Maoist-related incidents. Unlike the WITS data set, Gomes’s data are not limited to
insurgent attacks but also include casualties resulting from police actions taken
against insurgents, as well as conflagrations in which it is unclear who initiated the
violence. The obvious advantage of the Gomes data set is its comprehensiveness.
Combining data from four separate sources, it covers almost the entire duration of
the insurgency’s most recent phase, and it records more events than are recorded in
any one of the four sources alone.
The data we use in our analysis offer distinct advantages over those used in
many previous analyses of Maoist insurgent violence, including data sets based on
vernacular press reports,79 machine-coded data,80 and government reports col-
lected during field research.81 First, the data sets we rely on are all publicly avail-
able, thereby making our analysis easily replicable. Further, the data cover all of
India, rather than just conflict outcomes in a handful of districts in the Red
Corridor, so we can explicitly address the question of why Maoist conflict concen-
trates in some areas and not others. Another advantage of these data is that they are
based on codings of reports found in the major English daily newspapers. Although
local language dailies typically record more incidents than national English dai-
lies, their journalistic standards are not as high. Reporters for the national English
dailies are less likely to accept bribes or to report an event unless it has been con-
firmed by multiple sources.82 In addition, by incorporating a wide variety of
sources (MHA, WITS, GTD, Rand-MIPT, and SATP), our data enable us to cover
a longer time frame than most previous analyses, which tend to focus on a handful
of years in the early to mid-2000s. Mukherjee’s study, for example, is based on a
coding of an unpublished MHA report pertaining to only fifty districts for the
truncated period 2000–2003.83
Measuring British Influence

Our analysis directly exploits variation in the extent to which British institutions influ-
enced or replaced local institutions. We go beyond the simple direct-indirect rule dis-
tinction used in previous studies to focus on the level of British influence within
provinces and princely states. Among provinces, we measure British influence with
the number of years the British controlled a district, on the logic that colonial policies
became more institutionalized over the long term. This variable was constructed by
referencing district websites maintained by the Government of India,84 and by cross-
referencing information with British gazetteers (encyclopedic entries) and other his-
torical sources. To measure British influence in the princely states, we drew on data
pertaining to gun salutes taken from Iyer.85 We use this variable as a measure of the
amount of British interference in a native state.
Figure 3 provides historical examples to illustrate how our measure of British influ-
ence builds on and improves the standard dichotomy between direct and indirect
Direct Colonial Rule Indirect Colonial Rule

(Provinces) (Princely States)
High British influence Medinipur, West Bengal. Bastar, Chhattisgarh.
Years British: 190 Gun salute: 0
Low British influence Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Gwalior, Madhya
Years British: 91 Pradesh. Gun salute: 21
Figure 3. Forms of Colonial Rule and British Influence.

Source: Authors’ elaboration.
colonial rule. Within British areas, Medinipur in West Bengal was ruled by the British
for 190 years, as Bengal was the beachhead of British India. Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh,
on the other hand, was controlled for only ninety-one years, having been annexed right
before the 1857 Rebellion. Some princely states, such as Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh,
had a twenty-one-gun salute and were largely independent. Others, such as Bastar in
Chhattisgarh, the current epicenter of Maoist insurgent activity and a state we discuss
in greater detail below, were subject to ceaseless British interference in their internal
affairs.
Conceptually, these two measures improve on the use of dummy variables to
measure direct and indirect rule,86 although our results are robust to the use of
dichotomous measures as well. Our measurements of British influence also differ
from Mukherjee’s coding scheme,87 which conceptualizes indirect rule as taking
two discrete forms: formal indirect rule (princely states) and an informal indirect
rule (British zamindari and malguzari tenure). This coding is problematic because
it is at odds with mainstream historiography and because, in focusing solely on
land tenure, it ignores the many other previously discussed negative effects of
colonial rule on Indian society, such as the reification of the caste system and the
privileging of high-caste elites in the colonial bureaucracy. It also ignores the fact
that the British were responsible for the establishment of the zamindari system in
North India.88
Alternative Explanations
In our models, we controlled for a number of factors commonly associated with Maoist
violence. We included controls for poverty and levels of human development, mea-
sured as the percentage of the population that reports having “no assets,” and literacy
rates from the 2001 Indian census.89 Since many analysts and observers point to min-
ing as both a major grievance and a source of revenue for the Maoist leadership,90 we
include an indicator variable coded 1 if bauxite, iron ore, or coal mining is reported by
the Ministry of Mines. We also controlled for the percentage of the population that is
made up of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs)—the main groups
who have taken up arms against the state—and we included squared terms to test for a
curvilinear relationship between SC/ST populations and insurgent activity.91 We con-

trolled for the geographic area of a given district, forest cover, and population density
because the state is typically thought to have a harder time rooting out Maoists in
larger, forested, and less populated districts.92 We also clustered all of our standard
errors by state to account for regional effects.
Models
We ran three sets of regressions to test the link between colonialism and Maoist con-
flict. At an all-India level, we regressed our dichotomous measures of insurgent activ-
ity and violence on the number of years a district was controlled by the British using
logit models. This enabled us to better determine what makes the Red Corridor red and
to explore whether British rule is related to some districts’ greater vulnerability to
Maoist influence and violence than others. Next, we analyzed the effect of British rule
on violence outcomes within the Red Corridor by regressing the number of Maoist
attacks and related casualties on the number of years a district was controlled by the
British. For our analysis, the Red Corridor is defined as the districts in which the
Government of India reported Maoist insurgent activity in its response to the SATP
RTI request, or in other words, the districts coded 1 in our first measure of insurgent
activity. Finally, to test our argument about British influence in princely states, we
regressed the number of Maoist attacks and related casualties on the gun-salute mea-
sure. For the second and third set of regressions, we ran negative binomial models to
account for the discrete, nonnegative nature of the counts of Maoist attacks and casual-
ties. If our argument about the long-term effects of British influence is correct, then we
would expect the number of years a district was ruled by the British to be positively
correlated with Maoist violence but the gun-salute measure to be negatively correlated
with Maoist violence.
Main Results
The results of our analysis, presented in Table 1, provide strong support for the
argument that contemporary Naxalite violence is related to colonial rule. Our logit
models of insurgent activity and violence at the all-India level are presented in
Columns 1 and 2.93 Our negative binomial models of insurgent attacks and the
number of dead and wounded within the Red Corridor are presented in Columns 3
and 4. The coefficients for the number of years of British rule are positive and
statistically significant at the .01 level in all four of the models. Mining activity is
also a significant predictor of Maoist activity in all four models, while district size
is statistically significant in Models 3 and 4, suggesting that within the Red
Corridor, Maoists are more likely to concentrate their attacks in less administra-
tively dense areas. Other controls, including literacy, caste and tribal identity, for-
est cover, and population density, are not consistent predictors of Maoist activity
and violence.
Table 1. Colonial Rule and Maoist Violence.

All India Red Corridor Princely States
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist

Activity Violence Attacks Casualties Attacks Casualties
(MHA) (WITS/Gomes) (WITS) (Gomes) (WITS) (Gomes)
Years British 0.0111*** 0.0115*** 0.00560** 0.00812***

(0.00313) (0.00367) (0.00238) (0.00290)
Gun Salute −0.147** −0.195*
(0.0746) (0.102)
% No Assets 0.0208 0.0266 0.0373 0.0539** −0.0222 −0.0306
(0.0198) (0.0194) (0.0269) (0.0273) (0.0377) (0.0536)
Literacy Rate −0.0286 −0.0504*** −0.0571** −0.0437 −0.0755** −0.122**
(0.0196) (0.0128) (0.0257) (0.0381) (0.0328) (0.0612)
Mining 0.907** 1.334*** 1.413* 1.363*** 1.303 1.606*
(0.417) (0.325) (0.746) (0.410) (0.925) (0.879)
% SC 11.98 18.39* −1.956 −1.548 33.11* 83.86**
(8.413) (9.867) (8.701) (14.28) (19.84) (32.77)
% SC Squared −14.06 −38.66 −2.603 −12.29 −114.9 −332.0**
(23.01) (25.19) (19.06) (25.52) (72.79) (137.0)
% ST 6.193** 2.876 0.896 1.335 2.364 −3.052
(2.984) (3.252) (5.231) (5.513) (6.361) (9.599)
% ST Squared −9.703*** −4.729 −0.167 −2.031 −5.449 −0.488
(3.201) (3.703) (7.065) (8.296) (5.906) (9.380)
Area (Log) 0.0442 0.533 0.905*** 1.046*** 2.697*** 4.152***
(0.332) (0.383) (0.253) (0.265) (0.959) (1.320)
% Forested 0.0247** 0.0140 −0.00443 −0.00186 0.0324 0.0679***
(0.0101) (0.00939) (0.0135) (0.0189) (0.0237) (0.0233)
Population Density −1.09e-05 0.000178* −0.000424 −0.000123 0.00120 0.00126***
(6.02e-05) (0.000102) (0.00078) (0.000470) (0.00237) (0.00024)
Constant −3.456 −7.417** −5.014 −6.410 −20.14*** −30.63***
(3.417) (2.996) (3.653) (4.620) (7.368) (9.507)
lnalpha 1.292*** 1.561*** 2.296*** 2.747***
(0.320) (0.280) (0.698) (0.613)
Observations 516 516 168 168 174 174
Note: Models 1 and 2 are logit models of Maoist activity in all Indian districts. The dependent variable in
Model 1 is an indicator variable coded 1 if a district was identified as falling under the influence of “Left
Wing Extremists” in 2008–11 and 0 otherwise. The dependent variable in Model 2 is a dummy coded 1 if
attacks or casualties were recorded in the districts between 1980 and 2010. Models 3 and 4 are negative
binomial models in the Red Corridor. The dependent variable in Model 3 is the number of attacks in
2005–9. The dependent variable in Model 4 is the total number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants
killed and wounded in fighting, 1980–2010. Models 5 and 6 are negative binomial models in the princely
states. The dependent variable in Model 5 is attacks (2005–9), and the dependent variable for Model 6 is
casualties (1980–2010). Robust standard errors, clustered by state, in parentheses.
Source: Authors’ calculations using data from the MHA, WITS, and Joseph Flavian Gomes, “The Political
Economy of Conflict in India: An Empirical Analysis,” World Development 68 (2015): 96–123.
***p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1.
Figure 4. Predicted Values Based on Models 1 and 2 of Table 1.

Source: The predictions and associated confidence intervals depicted in these graphs were produced by
the authors using the “marginsplot” postestimation command in Stata 14, holding all other variables in
the model at their means.
Columns 5 and 6 present our negative binomial models of insurgent attacks and
the number of dead and wounded within the former princely states, where British
influence is measured by the gun salute given to each kingdom. Gun salutes are
negative and significant across both models, meaning that lower-salute states (those
with more British influence) have more violence. These results make sense in his-
torical context and constitute an important rejoinder to the argument that because
some former princely states experience Naxalite attacks and violence, princely rule
could be a cause of Maoist violence.94 Consider, for example, a comparison of the
kingdom of Hyderabad (the most populous and prestigious princely state in India)
and the princely state of Bastar (which requested a nine-gun salute but did not
receive it), both located within the Red Corridor. Although the British generally
avoided meddling in Hyderabad State,95 they governed Bastar directly (quite nota-
bly through Englishmen rather than native Indian officials) for forty-two years
between 1891and 1947. This period, during which the British commandeered for-
ests from local tribes and instituted heavy land taxes, led to a series of tribal rebel-
lions.96 Although there has been serious violence in many districts in the former
Hyderabad State, Bastar has become the epicenter of Maoist conflict—it is the
single deadliest region for Naxalite violence in India today.
In addition to their statistical significance, the models also predict a highly sub-
stantive impact of British rule on Maoist insurgent activity. Panels 4.1 and 4.2 of
Figure 4 show the predicted probabilities of insurgent activity and violence based
on Models 1 and 2 of Table 1. The predicted probability of insurgent activity triples
from around 20 percent in a district formerly part of a princely state to about 60
percent in a district governed by the British for 190 years. The likelihood of Maoist
presence increases sixfold, from around 5 percent to more than 30 percent. Our
models suggest a similarly large substantive impact of British rule on insurgent
attacks and casualties within the Red Corridor and princely states. Models 3 and 4
predict that districts within the Red Corridor governed by the British for the maxi-
mum number of years will experience double the number of attacks and four times
the number of casualties compared to those with no history of direct rule, while
Models 5 and 6 predict that princely states with full twenty-one-gun salutes will
experience close to zero insurgent attacks and casualties.97 In the next two sections,
we turn to some important concerns about our analysis, including endogeneity,
multicollinearity, and posttreatment bias.
Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis

One issue that impedes our analysis is that the experience of colonization was not
randomly assigned across the subcontinent. The British never had a coherent master
plan for conquering India, and British officials were often conflicted about the objec-
tives of empire.98 But the territorial expansion of the Raj tended to be profit-driven. A
chief consideration for British administrators when annexing territory was thus the
productivity and value of land. As Barbara Ramusack notes, by the time “Queen
Victoria renounced any further British annexation, the princely states were located
mainly in less economically productive areas.”99 To the extent that enduring geo-
graphic features of some districts influence the organizational capacity and behavior
of Maoist insurgents and are also related to the likelihood that a region was governed
by the British, they could bias the results of our analysis.
To address this threat to validity, we utilize coarsened exact matching (CEM) to
create better balance between “treatment” and “control” groups in the data set.
Although there is no perfect solution for dealing with endogeneity bias, studies show
that matching performs as well as pure experiments.100 CEM is less sensitive to mea-
surement error than competing specifications such as Mahalanobis, genetic, or pro-
pensity score matching,101 and it helps to produce less model-dependent causal
inferences.102
For our analysis, we first divided districts into treatment and control groups by the
number of years each district was ruled by the British. Districts that never came under
British rule were automatically categorized as control cases. For the remaining dis-
tricts, we used the implementation of the “Doctrine of Lapse” (DOL) in 1848 as a
cutoff for distinguishing between treatment and control cases—those the British
annexed before the DOL was implemented were categorized as treatment cases, and
those that were annexed after the DOL fell into the control category. The DOL was an
aggressive annexation policy, instituted from 1848 to 1856, that allowed the British to
annex any princely state in which a ruler died without a direct male heir.103 From a
theoretical standpoint, the implementation of the DOL is a natural cutoff because it
radically changed the logic of conquest during the time it was in force. It is important
to note, however, that 95 percent of districts ever controlled by the British were
acquired before the implementation of the DOL and that our results are robust to other
cutoff points, including the average number of years that districts were controlled by
the British and the 1857 Rebellion (after which the British halted their annexation of
new territories altogether).
Next, we preprocessed the data to match treatment and control districts based on
four variables that we believe are consistent with the logic used by the British to annex
economically productive territories: coastal access, the existence of mineral-rich allu-
vial soil, rainfall levels, and the extent of forest cover. We expect that the British were
more likely to colonize the coastline, areas with more productive soil and higher rain-
fall, and agriculturally settled regions as opposed to forests. Basic t-tests show statisti-
cally significant differences for each of these variables between areas governed by the
British and those that remained princely states, and matching on these variables helped
to improve the balance between treatment and control cases.104 The CEM procedure
left us with a data set of 458 matched observations—230 districts governed as princely
states and 228 districts ruled by the British.
After preprocessing the data with CEM, we reran our analysis using the DOL cutoff
as the treatment and the two binary measures of Maoist presence (MHA and Gomes/
WITS) as the dependent variables. Table 2 reports models with no controls, to account
for potential multicollinearity and posttreatment bias, as well as models with a full set
of controls. The results of the models with full controls suggest that the odds of coming
under Maoist influence are 4.8 times greater for districts that came under British rule
before 1848 than for those that did not. The odds of experiencing Maoist-related deaths
or casualties are 3.4 times greater for districts that came under the control of the British
before 1848 than for those that did not. These effects are statistically significant at the
.01 level.
Additional Robustness Checks

In addition to the analysis presented so far, we performed a series of robustness checks
to ensure that our results were not an artifact of any specific variables, measures, or
cases. (See Appendixes C and D in the online version of the article) We performed
stepwise regressions to ensure that our results were robust to the inclusion or exclusion
of different sets of control variables.105 To address concerns about multicollinearity
(instability stemming from a high level of correlation among our control variables),
we estimate variance inflation factor (VIF) scores for the control variables used in
Table 2. Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis.
Dependent Variable: Dependent Variable:

Maoist Activity Maoist Violence (WITS/
(MHA) Gomes)
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Province (before 1848) 1.279*** 1.564*** 1.221** 1.218***
(0.455) (0.420) (0.581) (0.438)
% No Assets 0.0366** 0.0394**
(0.0180) (0.0189)
Literacy Rate −0.0393* −0.0595***
(0.0212) (0.0150)
Mining 1.138** 1.326***
(0.523)
(0.375)
% SC 11.77 20.41*
(12.65) (11.54)
% SC Squared −12.86 −41.03
(29.94) (30.71)
% ST 4.577 0.911
(4.330) (3.900)
% ST Squared −8.611* −4.644
(4.981) (4.969)
% Forested 0.0229 0.0226
(0.0163) (0.0138)
Area (Log) −0.115 0.275
(0.411) (0.489)
Population Density −2.47e-05 0.000146
(9.16e-05) (0.000124)
Constant −1.472*** −1.932 −2.056*** −5.036
(0.401) (4.181) (0.510) (3.869)
Observations 458 420 458 420
Note: Logit models of Maoist activity in Indian districts run after preprocessing the data with coarsened
exact matching (CEM). The CEM “treatment” and the main independent variable in the parametric
models are indicators for whether the British ruled a district before 1848. Robust standard errors,
clustered by state, in parentheses.
Source: Authors’ calculations using data from the MHA, WITS, and Joseph Flavian Gomes, “The Political
Economy of Conflict in India: An Empirical Analysis,” World Development 68 (2015): 96–123.
***p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1.
Table 1, rerun as an OLS regression. The VIF scores indicate that there was collinear-
ity among some of the controls but not between the treatment variable (British influ-
ence) and the controls, and we find that the results still hold when we drop controls
with high (+10) VIF scores.106
A related concern is posttreatment bias, or the possibility that colonial rule is

causally related to one or more of our control variables. Our results could be biased
if colonialism affected the ethnic mix of society or economic development, for
example, because some of the effects of colonial rule would be accounted for in the
coefficient estimate of the controls. To deal with this concern, and as a further
check against multicollinearity, we provide a series of regression tables with mini-
malist models—for example, British rule with only area and population density
covariates as controls.
To further test the robustness of our results, we ran our models using a number of
additional controls, including landlord tenure, land inequality, distance to state capital,
an alternative measure of percentage of forested land, and a variety of terrain mea-
sures.107 We also reran models from Table 1 with an added measure of land tenure,
which helps account for one of the other big political differences in colonial India,
between the north (where zamindari rule was prevalent) and the south (which had
more ryotwari areas).108 We substituted a dummy variable for British direct rule in our
main regressions and the test of the mechanisms, instead of the number of years
British, to see if an alternative measure of our main independent variable would mat-
ter.109 We examined whether our results regarding the effect of colonialism on Maoist
violence across all of India were robust to using a count variable with negative bino-
mial models rather than logit models.110 To ensure that the conflict dynamics of no
single state were driving our results, we reran our models of Maoist presence while
dropping each state in our data set one at a time.111 We explored different model speci-
fications for our CEM analysis, using additional soil types to preprocess our data and
dropping each of the variables used to preprocess the data in turn.112 Finally, we ran
additional models using state fixed effects.113 Our results remained consistent across
all of these models.
Conclusion
Social scientists have long debated the effects of European colonialism on political
stability across the postcolonial world. Colonizers faced the continual challenge of
maximizing their authority and control while minimizing the risk of inciting rebel-
lion in the process of doing so. Some scholars have emphasized the benefits of
bureaucratization, infrastructure, and the rule of law; others have focused on the
disruptions that colonialism caused by engendering political conflicts among local
communities.
We integrate these two disparate literatures through an analysis of India’s
Naxalite movement, an insurgency of low castes and tribal groups that has been a
major threat to Indian political stability over the past several decades. We test
three hypothesized mechanisms that we argue link colonial rule to contemporary
Naxalite violence: the favoring of landlords, the implementation of discriminatory
policies toward low-caste and tribal communities, and the establishment of undem-
ocratic administrative practices that produced long-term distrust of government
institutions. We show that British direct rule is associated with contemporary land
inequality, distrust between castes, and citizen distrust in the police. Using conflict
data triangulated from three distinct data sources, we then analyze the strength of
the Naxalite insurgency across provinces and princely states in 589 districts over
the period 1980–2011. We find that Naxalites have been more active in areas
where the British were more influential.
Whereas previous studies have approached similar questions by comparing the
legacies of different European powers,114 our contribution lies in comparing the long-
term effects of British influence across areas of direct and indirect rule within the same
colony. Ours is also the first study to look at internal heterogeneity within provinces
and princely states in India, instead of assuming that both kinds of territories experi-
enced the same level of British influence. These uneven effects of British influence
were enduring. In postindependence India, the policies that created rural insurgency in
regions of heavy British influence were mostly retained, while princely states with
greater independence remained under the control, often for decades, of princely fami-
lies that largely continued their own inherited policies.
This article offers two future avenues for research on colonialism and ethnic
conflict. Scholars can expand on our analysis to consider some of the variation in
Naxalite violence over the past several decades, including how certain policies can
contribute to the reduction of conflict. In Bihar, for example, violence has declined
considerably as low castes have been incorporated into that state’s party system.
These important cases highlight how negative colonial legacies can be overcome.
On a related point, scholars can expand our analysis beyond the Indian case. After
the 1857 Rebellion, the British exported the “Indian model” of combining direct
and indirect rule to other cases across the Indian Ocean, such as Malaysia115 and
Nigeria.116 Whether similar path dependencies linking colonialism and persistent
horizontal inequalities that generate armed conflict exist in other former British
colonies remains to be seen, but this is a question that certainly seems to be a fruit-
ful area for future research.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank participants, and especially our discussants, at the annual meetings of the
American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the Madison
Conference on South Asia, the Ethnic Politics Workshop at George Washington University, and
the Lansing Lee Seminar at the University of Virginia, as well as students and faculty at Korea
University, for helpful feedback on previous versions of this article. We also thank Shaun
Bowler, Evgeny Finkel, Patricia Swart, and especially Joseph Flavian Gomes for sharing his
data with us.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to acknowledge funding by the US
Institute of Peace and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
1. India’s Naxalite movement is named for the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, where a
small tribal revolt in 1967 against a local landlord sparked a major uprising throughout the
region. See Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
2. “India’s Deadly Maoists,” Economist (July 26, 2006), https://www.economist.com/
news/2006/07/26/indias-deadly-maoists.
3. South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP), “Fatalities in Left-wing Extremism: 1999–2018*
(MHA),” http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/data_sheets/fatalitiesnax-
almha.htm, accessed November 13, 2017.
4. See, e.g., Central Committee, CPI (Maoist), “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian
Revolution,” chap. 2, http://www.satp.org/document/paper-acts-and-oridinances/strategy
–tactics-of-the-indian-revolution–central-committee-(p-cpi-(maoist.
5. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity
and Poverty (New York: Crown Business Publishing, 2012).
6. I.A. Asiwaju, “The Alaketu of Ketu and the Onimeko of Meko: The Changing Status of
Two Yoruba Rulers under French and British Rule,” in Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime,
eds., West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule in Africa (New
York: Africana Publishing, 1970), 134–60.
7. Matthew Lange, James Mahoney, and Matthias vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development:
A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies,” American Journal of Sociology
111, no. 5 (2006): 1412–62.
8. Matthew Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State
Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
9. W.G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
10. Sandra Fullerton Joireman, “Inherited Legal Systems and Effective Rule of Law: Africa
and the Colonial Legacy,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 4 (2001): 571–96;
Nathan Jensen and Leonard Wantchekon, “Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in
Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 37, no. 7 (2004): 816–41.
11. James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, “Colonialism and Modern Income: Islands as Natural
Experiments,” Review of Economics & Statistics 91, no. 2 (2009): 245–62.
12. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
13. Kalifa Keita, “Conflict and Conflict Resolution in the Sahel: The Tuareg Insurgency in Mali,”
Small Wars & Insurgencies 9, no. 3 (1998): 102–28; Alexander Sydney Kanya-Forstner,
The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military Imperialism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969).
14. David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and Their Neighbours
under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
15. David Throup, The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53 (London: James
Currey, 1987).
16. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32.
17. See, e.g., Abhijit Banerjee, Lakshmi Iyer, and Rohini Somanathan, “History, Social
Divisions, and Public Goods in Rural India,” Journal of the European Economic
Association 3, nos. 2–3 (2005): 639–47; and Lakshmi Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect
Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences, “Review of Economics & Statistics 92,
no. 4 (2010): 693–713. Native kings were known by a variety of names. To the British
they were princes, a diminutive title meant to indicate their status relative to the colonial
state. Hindu kings were known as rajas or maharajas; Muslim kings were known as
nizams or nawabs.
18. Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Horizontal
Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison,” American Political
Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011): 478–95; Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Gleditsch, and
Halvard Buhaug, Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013); Frances Stewart, ed., Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding
Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
19. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
20. Aditya Dasgupta, Kishore Gawande, and Devesh Kapur, “(When) Do Anti-poverty
Programs Reduce Violence? India’s Rural Employment Guarantee and Maoist Conflict,”
International Organization 71, no 3 (2017): 605–32; Thiemo Fetzer, “Can Workfare
Programs Moderate Violence? Evidence from India” (manuscript, University of
Warwick, 2014); Oliver Vanden Eynde, “Targets of Violence: Evidence from India’s
Naxalite Conflict,” Economic Journal 128, no. 609: (2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/
ecoj.12438.
21. Kristian Hoelscher, Jason Miklian, and Vadlamannati Krishna Chaitanya, “Hearts and
Mines: A District-Level Empirical Analysis of Maoist Conflict in India,” International
Area Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2012): 141–60.
22. Kishore Gawande, Devesh Kapur, and Shanker Satyanath, “Renewable Natural Resource
Shocks and Conflict Intensity: Findings from India’s Ongoing Maoist Insurgency, “Journal
of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 1 (2015): 140–72.
23. Joseph Flavian Gomes, “The Political Economy of Conflict in India: An Empirical
Analysis,” World Development 68 (2015): 96–123.
24. Kanchan Chandra and Omar García-Ponce, “Why Ethnic Subaltern-Led Parties Crowd
Out Armed Violence” (manuscript, New York University, 2015); Benjamin Pasquale, “Can
Inclusive Institutional Reform Reduce Insurgent Violence? Field Evidence on Village
Governance and Conflict in India” (manuscript, New York University, 2015).
25. Kathleen Gough, “Indian Peasant Uprisings,” Economic & Political Weekly 9, no. 32
(1974): 1391–1412, 1392.
26. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999).
27. CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme,” pt. 4, http://www.satp.org/document/paper-acts-and

-oridinances/cpi-maoist-party-programme.
28. CPI (Maoist), “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution,” chap. 3.
29. Ibid.
30. Sumanta Banerjee, “Reflections of a One-Time Maoist Activist,” Dialectical Anthropology
33, nos. 3–4 (2009): 253–69.
31. John Harriss, “What Is Going On in India’s ‘Red Corridor’? Questions about India’s
Maoist Insurgency—Literature Review,” Pacific Affairs 84, no. 2 (2011): 309–27, 318.
32. Gomes, “Political Economy of Conflict in India.”
33. Lange, Lineages of Despotism and Development, 31.
34. The gun-salutes measure is taken from Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in
India.”
35. Robin Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the
Indian Princely States (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).
36. Dick Kooiman, Communalism and Indian Princely States: Travancore, Baroda, and
Hyderabad in the 1930s (New Delhi: Manohar Press, 2002), 18.
37. Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, noted that “the Indian peasantry is an inert mass. If it ever
moves at all it will move in obedience, not to its British benefactors, but to its native chiefs
and princes.” Quoted in Ian Copland, “The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Non-Brahmin
Movement, 1902–10,” Modern Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (1973): 209–25, 210.
38. CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme,” pt. 2.
39. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of the Permanent
Settlement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981); Angus Maddison, Class Structure
and Economic Growth: India and Pakistan since the Moghuls (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1971 ), chap. 3.
40. Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion
in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 205.
41. In the southern Madras Presidency, colonial administrators instituted a ryotwari sys-
tem in which the revenue was collected directly from cultivators without intermediary
landlords. See Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, “History, Institutions and Economic
Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India,” American Economic
Review 95, no. 4 (2005): 1190–1213. The decision to implement ryotwari in the South may
explain why there was significantly less low-caste and tribal unrest in directly ruled areas
around Madras and Bombay. T.H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of
Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1966). The overriding tendency of the British, however, was to enhance the power of land-
lords relative to peasants, sometimes even in areas where cultivator-based systems pre-
dominated. Ajay Verghese, “Colonialism, Landlords, and Public Goods Provision in India:
A Controlled Comparative Analysis,” Journal of Development Studies (2018), https://doi.
org/10.1080/00220388.2018.1487057.
42. Banerjee and Iyer, “History, Institutions and Economic Performance,” 1196.
43. Hira Singh, “Princely States, Peasant Protests, and Nation Building in India: The Colonial Mode
of Historiography and Subaltern Studies,” Social Movement Studies 2, no. 2 (2003): 213–28.
44. David Hardiman, “Baroda: The Structure of a ‘Progressive’ State,” in Robin Jeffrey, ed.,
People, Princes, and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely State
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).
45. Barbara Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 191. Peasant unrest over land was not completely unknown to
the princely states. One battleground was the kingdom of Hyderabad in the Telangana
region, which experienced tenancy agitation and rural rebellion in the 1940s and
later became a hotbed of Maoist activity. Notably, however, this area was controlled
by large landlords (deshmukhs) that had been given individual property rights in the
mid-nineteenth century through reforms instituted by Salar Jung, Hyderabad’s chief
minister. Inukonda Thirumali, “Dora and Gadi: Manifestation of Landlord Domination
in Telengana,” Economic & Political Weekly 27, no. 9 (1992): 477–82. Thus, the
Telangana region is the exception that proves the rule—caste hierarchies were more
rigid and relations between landlords and tenants more contentious because the policies
of Hyderabad’s rulers more closely resembled those of the British than those pursued
by most other rajas.
46. Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British
India,” Past & Present 123, no. 1 (1989): 141–77, 145.
47. Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 244.
48. Banerjee and Iyer, “History, Institutions and Economic Performance.”
49. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
50. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), chap. 3.
51. G.S. Ghurye, “Excerpt from Caste and British Rule,” in Ishita Banerjee-Dube, ed., Caste
in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 43.
52. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
53. Nadeem Hasnain, Tribal India (Lucknow: New Royal Book Co., 2007), 237.
54. S.C. Varma, The Bhil Kills (New Delhi: Kunj Publishing, 1978).
55. P.K. Mohanty, Encyclopaedia of Scheduled Tribes in India (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing,
2006), 178.
56. Rajeshwari Tandor, ed., A Case for Conservation of Tribal Heritage & Environment of
Tribal Areas (New Delhi: INTACH Press, 2005), 24.
57. David Edmunds and Eva Wollenberg, eds., Local Forest Management: The Impacts of
Devolution Policies (London: Earthscan, 2003), 184.
58. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty, and
the State in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 129.
59. Robin Jeffrey, “Temple-Entry Movement in Travancore, 1860–1940,” Social Scientist 4,
no. 8 (1976): 3–27.
60. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 17.
61. Narula Smita, Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s “Untouchables” (New Delhi:
Human Rights Watch, 1999).
62. Ghanshyam Shah, Dalits and the State (Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2002); Steven Ian
Wilkinson, “India, Consociational Theory, and Ethnic Violence,” Asian Survey 40, no. 5
(2000): 767–91.
63. Sandria B. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian
Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61, 261.
64. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
65. W.J. Culshaw and W.G. Archer, “The Santal Rebellion,” Man in India 25, no. 4 (1945):
208–17.
66. Prakash Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 1995).
67. David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986).
68. Sharad Kulkarni, “Towards a Social Forest Policy,” Economic & Political Weekly 18, no.
6 (1983): 191–96; Richard Haeuber, “Indian Forestry Policy in Two Eras: Continuity or
Change?,” Environmental History Review 17, no. 1 (1993): 49–76.
69. Ramusack, Indian Princes and Their States.
70. William Richter, “Princes in Indian Politics,” Economic & Political Weekly 6, no. 9 (1971):
535–42.
71. Stig Toft Madsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Uwe Skoda, Trysts with Democracy: Political
Practice in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2011).
72. Viswambhar Nath, Administration and Development Planning in India (New Delhi:
Concept Publishing, 2011), 198.
73. Rodney Jones, Urban Politics in India: Area, Power, and Policy in a Penetrated System
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 100.
74. For an example of an RTI petition, see http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/mao
ist/data_sheets/2008-2011.pdf.
76. WITS was discontinued in April of 2012 when its funding was cut by the US Congress. We
were able to obtain and analyze data for the period 2005–9.
77. Behlendorf and colleagues compare events reported in GTD, WITS, and SATP with official
police statistics in the state of Andhra Pradesh. According to their study, WITS reported 31
percent of left-wing terrorist events reported in police data, whereas SATP reported 21 percent
and GTD just 4 percent. The difference between WITS and official police reports narrows
with the increased lethality of attacks; WITS tracked 50 percent of fatal events listed in police
records and 100 percent of events involving more than two fatalities. Brandon Behlendorf, Jyoti
Belur, and Sumit Kumar, “Peering through the Kaleidoscope: Variation and Validity in Data
Collection on Terrorist Events,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39, nos. 7–8 (2016): 641–67.
78. Ibid., 649.
79. Dasgupta, Gawande, and Kapur, “(When) Do Anti-poverty Programs Reduce Violence?”;
Gawande, Kapur, and Satyanath, “Renewable Natural Resource Shocks and Conflict Intensity.”
80. Fetzer, “Can Workfare Programs Moderate Violence?”
81. Shivaji Mukherjee, “Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India: Historical Institutions
and Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 10 (2018): 2232–74, https://doi.
org/10.1177/0022002717727818.
82. Interview with Ajai Sahni, director of the Institute for Conflict, New Delhi, March 2015.
For a good illustration of the role of money in reporting on state and local politics, see
Adam Roberts, Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation: The Relentless Invention of Modern
India (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), 122.
83. Mukherjee, “Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India.”
84. See, e.g., Government of India, National Informatics Centre, Districts of India, http://dis
tricts.nic.in/.
85. Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India.”

86. Ibid.; Hoelscher, Miklian, and Chaitanya, “Hearts and Mines.”
88. We present a more detailed discussion of our coding scheme in relation to Mukherjee’s in
online Appendix B.
89. Assets include televisions, cars, access to banking, etc. See online Appendix A for detailed
descriptions of the control variables used in our analysis.
90. Jason Miklian and Scott Carney, “Fire in the Hole,” Foreign Policy, August 16 (2010).
92. Paul Collier, V.L. Elliott, Håvardm Hegre, Anke Hoeffler, Marta Reynal-Querol, and
Nicholas Sambanis, Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy, World
Bank policy research report (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003).
93. Columns 1 and 2 of Table 1 are also robust to including the “landlord” control variable. See
Table C9.
95. Sarojini Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 1724–1857 (Hyderabad: Booklovers, 1963).
96. Ajay Verghese, “British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The Curious Case of Bastar,”
Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 5 (2016): 1619–44.
97. See Fig. D3.
98. Francis Wylie, political adviser to the viceroy, alluded to this fact in 1970 by reminiscing
that the empire in India was “surely the oddest political set-up that the world has ever
seen.” Kooiman, Communalism and Indian Princely States, 17.
99. Ramusack, Indian Princes and Their States, 86.
100. Rajeev H. Dehejia and Sadek Wahba, “Causal Effects in Nonexperimental Studies:
Reevaluating the Evaluation of Training Programs,” Journal of the American Statistical
Association 94, no. 448 (1999): 1053–62.
101. Stefano Iacus, M, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro, “Causal Inference without Balance
Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching,” Political Analysis 20, no. 1 (2017): 1–24, 11,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpr013.
102. Daniel E. Ho, Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Elizabeth A. Stuart, “Matching as Nonparametric
Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference,” Political
Analysis, no. 15 (2007): 199–236.
103. Iyer uses the DOL itself as an instrumental variable for colonial rule, arguing that since
the law allowed the annexation of princely states where kings did not produce natural
male heirs, annexation following the implementation of the DOL was random—i.e., based
on the death of a ruler. However, several princely states that should have lapsed were not
annexed (e.g., Karauli and Chhatarpur), suggesting that annexation was not randomized
in practice. Moreover, only 5 percent of Indian districts were annexed under the policy.
Consequently, we think that the DOL is better leveraged as part of a matching strategy
rather than an instrumental variable analysis. See Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect Colonial
Rule in India.”
104. Table C2 contains the results of the t-tests. Balance can be summarized with the mul-
tivariate imbalance measure, L1. Stefano M. Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro,
“Multivariate Matching Methods That Are Monotonic Imbalance Bounding,” American
Statistical Association 106, no. 493 (2011): 345–61. L1 ranges from 1 to 0, with 1 indi-
cating that the distributions of the treatment and control groups exactly coincide, and 0
indicating no overlap of the two groups. The CEM matching procedure reduces L1 by about
30 percent, from .51 pre-CEM to .29 post-CEM.
105. See Tables C3–C8.
106. See Table C23 for VIF scores for all variables in Tables 1 and 2, and new models with those
variables with +10 VIF scores dropped.
108. See Table C22.
109. See Tables C14 and C15.
110. See Table C16.
111. See Figs. D1 and D2.
113. See Table C21.
114. Robert Blanton, T. David Mason, and Brian Athow, “Colonial Style and Post-colonial Ethnic
Conflict in Africa,” Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 4 (2001): 473–91; Lange, Mahoney,
and vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis”; Alexander Lee
and Kenneth A. Schultz, “Comparing British and French Colonial Legacies: A Discontinuity
Analysis of Cameroon,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 7, no. 4 (2012): 365–410.
115. Rupert Emerson, Malaysia: A Study in Direct and Indirect Rule (New York: Macmillan,
1937); Abdul bin Abdul Mahid Zainal, ed., Glimpses of Malaysian History (Kuala Lumpur:
Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka, 1970).
116. Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious
Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); C.K. Meek, Law
and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
117. William Wilson Hunter, James Sutherland Cotton, Richard Burn, and William Stevenson
Meyer, eds., The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908).
118. Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and
the Residency System, 1764–1858 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Karen
Leonard, “Reassessing Indirect Rule in Hyderabad: Rule, Ruler, or Sons-in-Law of the
State?,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (2003): 363–79; Ramusack, Indian Princes and
Their States.
120. Digital South Asia Library, Statistical Abstract relating to British India from 1840 to 1865
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1867), http://dsal.uchicago.edu/digbooks/dig
pager.html?BOOKID=HA1711_1867&object=65.
Author Biographies
Ajay Verghese (ajayv@ucr.edu) is an assistant professor of political science at the University
of California, Riverside. His research interests are focused on Indian politics, ethnicity, political
violence, historical legacies, and religion. His book, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in
India, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. His research has received support
from the Fulbright Program and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He received a BA in
2005 from Temple University and a PhD in 2013 from George Washington University, and he
was a postdoctoral fellow in 2012–13 at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.
Emmanuel Teitelbaum (ejt@gwu.edu) is an associate professor of political science and

international affairs at George Washington University. His research examines the political
roots of class conflict and the foundations of class compromise. His articles have appeared in
leading journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics,
Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics,
the Journal of Development Studies, and Critical Asian Studies. His book, Mobilizing
Restraint: Democracy and Industrial Conflict in Post-reform South Asia, explores the dynam-
ics of state-labor relations and industrial conflict following the implementation of neoliberal
economic reforms. Professor Teitelbaum’s research has received support from the United
States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the
Social Science Research Council. He was the recipient of the 2007 Gabriel Almond Award
for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and a
BA from John Carroll University.

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823120

Colonialism and Patterns of Maoist Violence

Figure 1. Insurgent Activity and Violence in India’s Red Corridor.

The Legacies of British Rule: Inequality, Discrimination,

Figure 2. Colonialism and Contemporary Grievances.

thousands of diverse jatis (endogamous birth groups) into a four-tiered (varna)

Data and Analysis

Measuring Insurgent Activity and Violence

We use data compiled by Gomes to measure the number of conflict-related casu-

Measuring British Influence

Direct Colonial Rule Indirect Colonial Rule

Figure 3. Forms of Colonial Rule and British Influence.

curvilinear relationship between SC/ST populations and insurgent activity.91 We con-

Table 1. Colonial Rule and Maoist Violence.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist Maoist

Years British 0.0111*** 0.0115*** 0.00560** 0.00812***

Figure 4. Predicted Values Based on Models 1 and 2 of Table 1.

Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis

Additional Robustness Checks

Table 2. Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis.

Dependent Variable: Dependent Variable:

(1) (2) (3) (4)

A related concern is posttreatment bias, or the possibility that colonial rule is

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

27. CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme,” pt. 4, http://www.satp.org/document/paper-acts-and

85. Iyer, “Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India.”

Emmanuel Teitelbaum (ejt@gwu.edu) is an associate professor of political science and

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Years British 0.0111* 0.0115* 0.00560 0.00812*