This article shows that the intensity of violence in Rwanda’s recent past can be traced back to the initial establishment of its pre-colonial state. Villages that were brought under centralized rule one century earlier experienced a doubling of violence during the state-organized 1994 genocide. Instrumental variable estimates exploiting differences in the proximity to Nyanza—an early capital—suggest that these effects are causal. Before the genocide, when the state faced rebel attacks, with longer state presence, violence is lower. Using data from several sources, including a lab-in-the-field experiment across an abandoned historical boundary, I show that the effect of the historical state is primarily sustained by culturally transmitted norms of obedience. The persistent effect of the pre-colonial state interacts with government policy: where the state developed earlier, there is more violence when the Rwandan government mobilized for mass killing and less violence when the government pursued peace.

We use the effect of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries after 1535 to test the commercialization hypothesis about the roots of long-run English economic development. Before the Dissolution, monastic lands were relatively unencumbered by inefficient feudal land tenure but could not be sold. The Dissolution created a market for formerly monastic lands, which could now be more effectively commercialized relative to nonmonastic lands, where feudal tenure persisted until the twentieth century. We show that parishes affected by the Dissolution subsequently experienced a rise of the gentry and had more innovation and higher yield in agriculture, a greater share of the population working outside of agriculture, and ultimately higher levels of industrialization. Our results are consistent with explanations of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which emphasize the commercialization of society as a key precondition for taking advantage of technological change and new economic opportunities.