European empires dominated entire continents for centuries. Yet, the literature on colonial legacies has largely focused on the long-term effects of colonialism in former colonies, overlooking its consequences for the former colonial powers themselves. In this article, we study the effect of Italy's colonial expansion in East Africa on contemporary political outcomes. Using data on all Italian soldiers buried in Eritrea and Ethiopia and the contemporary distribution of surnames across Italy, we construct an index of exposure to colonial wars at the municipality level. To isolate exogenous variation in municipalities' exposure, we exploit the historical geographical distribution of mountain troops of the Italian Army, which were largely deployed in East Africa because of Ethiopia's mountainous territory. We show that exposure to the 1930s colonial campaigns increased support for neo-fascist and nationalist parties in the immediate postwar electoral cycles, and still increases support for far-right parties today. Exploring possible mechanisms, we find that: (i) the effect is amplified in municipalities with a larger presence of Black African immigrants; (ii) far-right parties obtain larger electoral returns from anti-immigration rhetoric in municipalities with stronger colonial exposure. Taken together, our results suggest that the racial narratives used to justify the colonial expansion may have persisted across generations and continue to shape political attitudes today.

Historians agree that the modern political conception of Europe is the secular descendant of the medieval concept of Christendom. Yet, what forged Christendom as a political – rather than merely religious – community remains an open question. We conjecture that Christendom started its process toward becoming a political entity as a result of the conflict against Islam from the 8th century. We present two pieces of empirical evidence to support this argument. First, we translate and classify a corpus of nearly 13,000 clerical Latin texts written over 200–1500 using a Large Language Model (LLM). In this context, we show that references to Muslims as a threat are associated with a shift in the framing of Christendom from a religious to a political sense. Second, we use the LLM to analyze both Latin and Arabic written sources and identify the dates and locations of 194 Muslim raids in Western Europe over 711–1074. We build a city-level measure of exposure to these raids. Using data on crusaders' origins and an instrumental variable approach, we show that greater exposure to the Muslim raids significantly increased the likelihood of participation in the Crusades to the Holy Land over 1096–1204.

Artisanal fishing is crucial for employment, food security, and the sustainability of marine ecosystems. Identifying the factors that threaten this sector is essential for designing efficient and effective policies. In this article, I study the effect of offshore hydrocarbon discoveries – 31 percent of all hydrocarbon fields ever discovered, and 79 percent of those found since 2020 – on artisanal fisheries. Using data on coastal countries from 1950 to 2017, I exploit variation in the plausibly exogenous timing and location of offshore discoveries in a staggered difference-in-differences design. I find that the fishing effort of the motorised artisanal fleet declines steadily, by about one third by the tenth year following a discovery. To investigate the mechanisms, I then focus on Senegal, which offers highly granular census data. I estimate a difference-in-differences model comparing fishing municipalities located close to discovery sites with those farther away. Consistent with the cross-country evidence, artisanal fishery employment falls significantly. About two thirds of this decline is offset by a rise in high-seas fishery activity. Using data on fish catches and chlorophyll-a, a proxy for marine conditions, I provide suggestive evidence that fishers reallocate toward high-seas fishing due to restricted access to fishing grounds and coastal ecosystem degradation. This suggests that existing marine protected areas and inshore exclusion zones may be insufficient to protect artisanal fisheries from the consequences of offshore resource development.