Lindsey Pruett wins the APCG Best Graduate Student Paper

The award committee has decided to award the APCG-African Affairs Best Graduate Student Award to Lindsey Pruett for her paper “Resisting the Blood Tax: Capacity, Railroads and Draft Evasion in Colonial West Africa.” In this pathbreaking paper, Pruett studies the effect of infrastructure expansion on state coercive capacity. She particularly investigates the way that railroad expansion in West Africa affected the colonial regime’s ability to monitor the population and extract conscripts. Pruett finds, perhaps counter-intuitively, that railroad infrastructure heightened draft evasion, by increasing mobility and undermining social control.

The committee was deeply impressed by this paper. It excels not only in its theoretical innovation but also in its impeccable execution. Theoretically, the paper asks us to consider colonialism as a process of continual power negotiations, where local elites had more complex options available to them than merely to resist or collaborate with colonial overlords. Second, the paper moves away from understanding colonial military recruitment as a process centered around ethnicity. Instead, Pruett shows that the process of colonial military recruitment embodied fraught colonial power relations between the centerand the periphery. Empirically, the paper excellently combines archival research with advanced statistical analysis. In all, the paper is a stellar contribution to the literature on colonial history, state capacity, and African political institutions, it is a worthy winner of the APCG-African Affairs Best Graduate Student Award.

The award committee also gave an honorable mention to Nicole Wilson (Northwestern University) for her paper titled "Seeing like an estate: middle-class tax compliance after collective exit."

Congrats to both!