A NEW MEASURE OF FOREIGN RULE BASED ON GENETIC DISTANCE

Abstract

This paper constructs a novel measure of past foreign (or minority) rule—the genetic distance of a country's ruling elite in the year 1900 from its ethnic majority—by mapping historical information to data on bilateral genetic distances between populations. It documents robust negative conditional correlations of this “elite‐population genetic distance” with current income levels and with current fiscal capacity, controlling for an extensive set of country characteristics including existing measures of foreign rule, the genetic distance of the ethnic majority from that of the United Kingdom, continent fixed effects, and state antiquity (i.e., the history of state‐building capacity). (JEL O10, N40, H20)