| The component essays of my dissertation identify historical mechanisms that have been successful in fostering tolerance and cooperation among members of different social or ethnic groups and derive possible implications for contemporary policy. "Trade, institutions and religious conflict in India" analyses the different incentives that shaped Hindu and Muslim interaction in India's towns from the 7th to the 17th century, and shows that differences in the degree to which Hindus and Muslims could provide one another with complementary, non-replicable services in this period has resulted in a sustained institutional legacy of contemporary religious tolerance. Medieval trading ports---where Muslim religious advantages in accessing Indian Ocean trade routes provided such complementarities over this period---were 20% as likely as otherwise similar towns to experience a religious riot between 1850-1950 and continued to exhibit fewer and less widespread religious conflict during the Gujarat riots of 2002.;Using an econometric study of new data on the prior economic interests of members of the Long Parliament of 1640, "Trade, joint-stock corporations and the struggle for democratic governance in revolutionary England" highlights the importance of a new organisational form, the overseas joint-stock corporation, in England's political development. Investment in joint-stock corporations aligned landowners' incentives with those of merchants, shifting individuals who were otherwise likely to be Crown supporters into active opposition. Thus, corporations created a broad coalition that successfully opposed the Crown during England's Civil War and helped shape its subsequent parliamentary democracy.;"A theory of group formation and social hierarchy", joint with Susan Athey, explores how informal institutions may sustain cooperation among members of large populations when the legal ordering is weak. We characterize the cooperative equilibria that emerge from the creation of "communities" or subgroups. By coordinating their exchanges within communities, individuals are able to sustain cooperation even in the presence of attractive outside options. We construct equilibria where players adhere to a "social hierarchy" that comes with seniority within a community and contrast such hierarchical equilibria with other social conventions that involve conditioning trust on "culture-specific" capital. |
