This paper uses a historical natural experiment – the opening of the Suez Canal – to investigate the relationship between geography and the formation of institutions. While the conventional view is that good geography (commodity endowment) inevitably favours the creation of extractive...

This paper investigates the impact of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire on the integration of regional and colonial commodity markets in the Near East during 1923-1939. Exploiting a novel dataset on quarterly wholesale prices in interwar Syria, Egypt, Turkey, France and the UK, it tests for...