The role of precolonial history on contemporary development has become an important field of study within development economics. Here we examine the role of precolonial political centralization on contemporary development outcomes with detailed subnational data from Uganda. We use a variety of data sets and obtain two striking results. First, we find that precolonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes such as GDP, asset ownership, and poverty at the subcounty, district, and individual level; additional results using an instrumental variable approach confirm this finding. Second, we find that public goods such as immunization coverage and primary school enrollment, as well as perceptions of local government quality, are not correlated with precolonial centralization. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between precolonial centralization and private rather than public goods, thereby suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the precolonial period to the present.
