Congrats to Professor Anil Menon for his Emerging Health Politics Scholar Award and Weber Best Conference Paper in Religion and Politics Award at APSA!
Early career researcher award. "The purpose of this award is to recognize a junior scholar (pre-tenure or equivalent) who is emerging as a leader in the field of health politics through their teaching, research, and service."
The Weber Best Conference Paper in Religion and Politics Award was granted based on Professor Menon's work with co-author Alexander Persaud on their unpublished work "Externalities of Missionary Activity". The direct effects of missionary activity are well documented. Missionaries also constituted a powerful interest group, creating externalities in the form of institutional reform. We test this argument using novel sub-district panel data for polities that today compose South India. Differential literacy gains in the princely states of Travancore and Cochin during the early decades of the twentieth century align temporally with the institutional reforms pursued by these states and not missionary educational efforts dating back to the early nineteenth century. To document the institutional mechanism, we analyze original panel data on supply, demand, and financing of these educational efforts. Travancore and Cochin made primary education free and increased capacity. Women and Hindus saw the largest gains in literacy. Together, these findings suggest that research on the political economy of missionary activity should pay greater attention to the externalities of missionary activities.
