Marion Richard

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Soldiers versus Laborers: Legacies of Colonial Military Forced Labor in Mali”.

Abstract: We study the coercive military forced labor regime instituted by the French colonial authorities in colonial Mali between 1927 and 1950. Due to endemic labor scarcity, the colonial authorities resorted to activating military reservists as forced laborers for public infrastructure construction. This acted as an in-kind tax on the most productive workforce, as only the 20\% healthiest individuals were selectively recruited by the conscription system. By digitizing more than 180,000 hand-written individual soldier files as well as colonial-time district conscription tables, we find that historically speaking, the activation of military forced labor was strongly correlated with local population density and specific demands of different public infrastructure projects. We further document that the severe working conditions in this coercive labor system seems to have propelled the conscripts to join the regular army as volunteers, whose total numbers were capped. In the long run, greater exposure to forced labour seems correlated with worse human capital outcomes.