Essays on education and social divisions in colonial India

There has been an emerging consensus among economists that more ethnically diverse populations are less apt to provide public goods. Despite agreement on the negative association between fragmentation and the provision of public goods, we still do not understand the specific mechanisms underlying this relationship and several questions remain unanswered: What are the key causal mechanisms and do they vary across contexts? Does economic and political inequality among the population play an important role? Can we attribute all the negative affects of fragmentation to problems of collective action? This dissertation takes a historical approach to answering these questions in the context of colonial India.; Chapter 1 documents the historical origins of education policy in British India and the development of schooling institutions, particularly at the primary level, from 1850 to 1917. In this period, secondary education received an undue emphasis, while primary education was decentralized to local district councils that were financially ill-equipped to provide schools for a large share of the population. Moreover, since private efforts determined a large proportion of primary schools, educated and rural elites who established schools disregarded the spillovers from providing schools to all groups within the population.; Chapter 2 explores the relationship between social divisions and the provision of local public goods by district councils in British India. I find that districts with a higher degree of social fragmentation along caste and religious lines allocated lower shares of expenditures to education and higher shares of expenditures to local roads and bridges. I interpret these results as reflecting how the effects of unequal political power among groups were more pronounced in more heterogeneous districts. Groups with greater representation on district councils were able to influence local policy and tailor the allocation of public expenditures to reflect their preferences and interests. The results highlight the difficulties of decentralized provision of public goods in the presence of significant inequality between groups. These findings also stress the need to explore political inequalities across groups as potential channels to explain lower public investments towards quasi-public goods like education in more diverse communities.