Interesting papers on colonial legacies

The first "History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India" by A. Banerjee and L. Iyer available from
Abhijit Banerjee's Home Page.
Summary from a review paper The Importance of History
for Economic Development by Nathan Nunn (section 2.2):
"Like Dell (2008), Banerjee & Iyer (2005) also analyze the long-term effects of colonial institutions, but they examine differences in revenue collection institutions across districts within colonial India. The authors compared districts where revenue was historically collected directly by British officials against districts where revenue was collected by native landlords. They found that, after independence, districts with nonlandlord systems have higher levels of health, education, and agricultural technology investments relative to those levels in landlord systems.
....
Although the analysis of Banerjee & Iyer(2005)and Dell(2008)provide evidence of the long-term impacts of initial colonial institutions, the studies do differ from that by Acemoglu et al. (2001) because the transmission mechanism is not the persistence of these initially implemented institutions. In Dell (2008), the hypothesized mechanism is the concentration of wealth and power and the resulting provision of public goods. Similarly, in the analysis by Banerjee & Iyer the transmission mechanism is not through the persistence of these initially implemented institutions, because the differences in colonial land revenue collection systems no longer exist."
The other work mentioned is "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita" by Melissa Dell which is also available online ( but the later discussion towards the end of section 2.3 by Nunn of Dell's work does not seem to be correct)http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/3144 or http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/forums/index/cageseminars/dell.pdf