Colonialism in Europe: Imperial Legacies in the Balkans

There is a plethora of research examining European colonial legacies around the world. There is however a dearth of research when it comes to colonialism in Europe. Some recent scholarship in economics argues that some countries in Eastern Europe are doing worse economically than others due to the lingering legacy of the Ottoman Empire. Such research however does not take into consideration the variety of formal and informal political institutions that the Ottomans set up in the different regions of Eastern Europe. For example, one typical outcome associated with colonial legacies is corruption. Therefore, parts of Eastern Europe that were under the Ottoman Empire should have similar levels of corruption. Nevertheless, an empirical subnational examination of household survey data from the Life in Transitions Survey (LITS) from 2006 and 2010 from places like Romania and Croatia reveals a puzzling picture: places that were Ottoman in Romania have on average perceptions of higher incidence of corruption compared to non-Ottoman places. In contradistinction, places that were Ottoman in Croatia have on average perceptions of lower incidence compared to non-Ottoman places. In this project, I provide a more nuanced picture of the effect of the Ottoman Empire than previous works, by arguing that the Ottoman Empire has not had the same influence everywhere. I argue that the different institutions that the Ottomans set up in Eastern Europe (whether direct or indirect rule) together with the size of bureaucracy and level of monitoring had a long-lasting effect on human behavior today.