30 June 2026
Research wins recognition from leading academic association
A King’s academic has been awarded a prestigious prize for a research paper which has shed new light on the impact of colonialism on development.
Tugba Bozçağa and co-authors Robin Harding (University of Oxford) and Arinze Nwokolo (Lagos Business School) have received the American Political Science Association’s David Brian Robertson Prize for the paper Putting Property Rights in Context: Colonial Cotton Concessions, Customary Land Tenure, and Development in Mozambique.
The study argues that areas of Mozambique affected by cotton concessions imposed by Portuguese colonialists have worse contemporary outcomes in education, health, wealth, and access to services.
Problems did not stem just from the systems of coercive labour that existed, but the institutional changes they created: shifting power from local authorities to state institutions, reducing community-based governance, and increasing opportunities for corruption.
Dr Bozçağa said: "What makes this research striking is the paradox at its heart: colonial cotton concessions actually increased individual property ownership, yet produced worse long-term development outcomes.
"This challenges the conventional wisdom that individual land ownership is inherently beneficial; our findings suggest it can undermine development when it displaces functioning customary institutions, at least those customary institutions relatively untouched by colonial intervention.”
Dr Bozçağa, from the Department of European and International Studies at King’s, will receive the award with colleagues at the American Political Science Association’s annual awards in Boston in September.
In this story
Lecturer in Politics