Long Live the Nigerian-Fijian Empire: Persistent Effects of Horizontal Institutional Transfer in the Late British Empire

This paper examines the origins of institutional differences between colonies, emphasizing the impact of horizontal—inter-colony—ties on subsequent legal-institutional development. During the British Empire, colonies exchanged and transferred personnel between them right up to their independence in the 20th century. Exploiting new biographical data on over 14,000 British and local colonial officials in 44 colonies, we trace the transfer patterns of colonial officials between colonies to proxy the horizontal diffusion of legal-institutional knowledge within the British Empire. We find that pairs of colonies with a higher number of personnel who served in both colonies tend to develop more similar institutions after gaining independence, which reduces GDP differences between them. The effects emerge only after decades of independence, suggesting a persistent channel of shared tacit knowledge, ideas, and norms. Analysis of the sequence of placements confirms that these effects are not driven by underlying shared characteristics of colonies, driving both officer placement and institutional development, but is caused by officer transfers. The results highlight that to fully understand institutional divergence, the existing literature's focus on European influences and internal dynamics needs to be complemented by attention to horizontal colonial ties.