Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner's Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain's Great Loss of Empire in India
Public Choice Society Conference, 2006
The Ninth Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Conference, 2006
36th Annual Conference on South Asia, Center for South Asia, 2007
35 Pages Posted: 14 Oct 2006
Date Written: May 2005
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence.
Keywords: confiscatory taxation, multi-person assurance game, strategic civil disobedience
JEL Classification: H73, P16, C72, N45
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, ...
-
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, ...
-
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, ...
-
By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, ...
-
By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, ...
-
By Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, ...
-
By Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, ...
-
By Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, ...
-
Geography and Economic Development
By John Luke Gallup, Jeffrey D. Sachs, ...