Can local colonial institutions continue to affect people's lives today, nearly 50 years after decolonization? Can meaningful differences in local institutions persist within a single set of national incentives? In this dissertation I answer this question in the affirmative. I begin by showing that colonies which had more bureaucratically advanced tax systems have better local governance today. I continue by focusing on the within-country governance effects of local institutions to avoid the problems of endogeneity, missing variables, and unobserved heterogeneity common in the institutions literature. I show that different colonial tax institutions within Nigeria implemented by the British for reasons exogenous to local conditions led to different present day quality of governance. People living in areas where the colonial tax system required more bureaucratic capacity are much happier with their government, and receive more competent government services, than people living in nearby areas where colonialism did not build bureaucracy. Next, I show that places in Ghana where the Asante empire built advanced bureaucracies have better local governance than those areas which were under less intensive British rule. Finally, I explore how these local institutions could have persisted across so many years.