Trajectories of Local State Building in Colombia: The State, Property Taxation, and Landed Elites

The failure of states to provide basic goods and services, protect rights, keep peace and exercise effective authority is a major problem in Latin America and many developing countries. Social, political, and civil rights protection depend on effective state power. Some countries are consistently good providing services, extracting resources from society, and exercising high levels of state capacity over their territory. Another group of countries performs consistently bad and the majority of the population experiments scarcity or low-quality service provision regardless of their location inside the country. Between these extremes, problems of medium levels of state capacity are generally driven by wide asymmetries within states. There is a rich literature on the differences of state capacity and state building between states based on the European experience and expanded to other regions like Latin America and Africa. However, we still know little about what explains the uneven development of state capacity within states. To answer this question, I study local trajectories of state building in Colombia, examining the relationship between the state and landed elites in Colombian municipalities. I focus on the early formation of the Colombian state, using new self-collected historical data on land use, property tax collection, and public goods provision merged with recent taxation records. I argue that the ways in which elites had used their land influenced their decision whether to cooperate or resist state taxation. Data confirms the persistent relationship between patterns of land use and state capacity across the territory. This suggests that different patterns of state development are a consequence of the material interests (e.g. need for public goods and services) of the elites determined by their economic use of the land.