The final chapter brings the findings to the current context of Spanish American countries. Two centuries after independence, rural conflict is a rarer occurrence than in the 1800s; yet, the spatial segregation of indigenous minorities and the limits to political representation remain. Relying on contemporary data from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, the chapter shows that subnational territories with more intense office-selling in the past exhibit greater childhood malnutrition and stunting as well as low weight at birth. This is unlikely to be driven by alternative factors – such as the mere presence of indigenous populations or postcolonial developments – as the differences are visible with fine-level data only comparing localities straddling the borders of former colonial jurisdictions. Sides of the border with greater venality have today lower public good and economic well-being vis-a-vis neighboring ones, consistent with effects running through local governance. The chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the study of corruption; the Spanish Empire; as well as for understanding other contexts where office-selling also took place (China, France, and Iran).

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.