“To Hell or to Connacht”: Expropriation, Inequality, and Local Legacies of Settler Colonialism

Abstract Violent upheavals in landownership following conquest often change not only the concentration of land across individuals, but also the inequality of its distribution between groups. We argue that variation in landowners’ group identity has important implications for the provision of local public goods. We test this claim by studying the aftermath of the Cromwellian Settlement in seventeenth-century Ireland. Leveraging the lottery-based allocation of expropriated Catholic land to distinct groups of English Protestants, we find significant local variation in the extent of Protestant landownership. Drawing on rich original data, we find fewer local public goods in the long run in areas with more Protestant elites, with the largest reductions in goods that were either directly elite-funded or disproportionately benefited the Catholic majority. The results illustrate how conquest reshapes not just institutions but also long-run local inequalities, and highlight the distinct consequences of between-group inequality for the provision of public goods.