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Obstacles to progress

Challenges

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“ The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" (1899) proposes that the "white

race" is morally obliged to "civilise" the "non-white" peoples of planet Earth, and to encourage
their progress (economic, social, and cultural) through settler colonialism. The implication, of
course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit-economic or strategic or otherwise-of

Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with

British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized). “
"The White Man's Burden" 176
Wikipedia

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Ethnic Fractionalisation & Political instability
“...analysis of the data is consistent with historic accounts suggesting that the slave trades

impeded the formation of broader ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalisation, and that
the slave trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of political structures. The

countries from which the largest numbers of slaves were taken are also the areas that had the
most underdeveloped political structures at the end of the 19th century, and they are also the
areas that are the most ethnically fragmented today “
.
"The Historical Origins of Africa's Underdevelopment." 177
Nathan Nunn

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Diversity

Fractionalization

“ Fractionalization is the probability that two individuals drawn randomly from the country's

groups are not from the same group (ethnic, religious, or whatever the criterion is). The
following are fractionalization scores for African countries produced in 2003 and based on

ethnicity, religious and linguistic data directly from the Encyclopædia Britannica lists.
Ethnic fractionalization is approximated by a measure of similarity between languages, varying
from 1 = the population speaks two or more unrelated languages to 0 = the entire population
speaks the same language. “