Nation Building in the Andes. Evidence from the Chilean Invasion of Peru in the XIX Century

Abstract

Can war increase nation-building and social capital? This paper studies the effect of fighting a foreign invasion via self-organized resistance on nation-building in a developing country during the nineteenth century. I use the case of the Sierra Campaign, the last stage of the Pacific War (1879-1884, between Peru and Chile), where local indigenous communities fought a guerrilla war against a professional invader army. Using a novel dataset on the events of the Campaign, I find that people living today in municipalities more exposed to this Campaign reduced indigenous ethnic self-identification but increased political participation, democratic values, and civic capital. To address endogeneity concerns, I controlled for geographical, climatic, and pre-conflict socioeconomic characteristics, tested robustness to matching algorithms, and estimated the Oster test, all indicating that the evidence is causal.