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

My book project, The Colonial Origins of Education Inequality, tries to address this gap. It asks an important question: why do local education outcomes vary so dramatically across the developing world? Conventional answers to this question typically focus on top-down approaches emphasizing the supply of public schools and teachers or bottom-up approaches which look at the demand for public schooling.  I argue that variation in both supply and demand can be better understood by focusing on a key feature of the modern state: the ability to collect individualized information. I show how variation in the implementation of the civil registry, a centralized, secular, system for registering births, first developed following the French Revolution, played a key role in the expansion of public schools across the former colonies of the French Empire.  Civil registration was compulsory for European citizens throughout the French Empire, but the decision to include or exclude subjects and the timing and extent of their inclusion differed dramatically across colonies. Where subjects were included in the civil registry, demographic data collected by the colonial government facilitated the expansion of mass schooling at independence.  The civil registry’s role was particularly important in majority Muslim countries where a traditional lunar calendar, combined with an absence of age-based religious rites, meant that a precise conceptualization of age, as legally established by compulsory schooling, was otherwise irrelevant to most people’s daily lives.  Parents of registered children by contrast knew their children’s date of birth and eligibility for primary schooling, information also available to local officials.

I test this theory in three Muslim majority countries in Africa. A preliminary empirical chapter demonstrates the generalizability of my theory by comparing differences in education outcomes across Africa between households in the same localities with differing registration outcomes.  Three subsequent empirical chapters trace how differences in the implementation of the civil registry, helped reduce gaps in education outcomes in post-independence Tunisia but increased them in post-independence Morocco and Senegal.  A final chapter examines compulsory schooling in colonial Egypt to consider registration’s role outside the former colonies of the French Empire.

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