The Origins of Colonial Investments in Former British and French Africa

Abstract

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but there is little systematic evidence of their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, this article shows that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within sixteen British and French African colonies. What led colonial states to invest much more in some districts than others? The author argues that natural harbors and capes led some places to become centers of pre-colonial coastal trade, which in turn increased later colonial investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Furthermore, distance from pre-colonial trading posts helps explain the diffusion of investments within each colony. The author finds limited support for alternative explanations such as natural resources and pre-colonial ethnic characteristics, including pre-colonial political centralization. These two findings suggest an economic origin for the regional and ethnic disparities observed in the colonial and contemporary periods.

Colonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality in Africa

“…The presence of a pre-colonial trading post in the district increases colonial education and distance from trading posts decreases it (Supplemental Table C9). This is consistent with evidence that colonial investments in coastal colonies were concentrated around pre-colonial trading posts (Ricart-Huguet, 2021). Once we account for pre-colonial trade, other geographic explanations such as distance from the coast, terrain ruggedness, disease environment (Alsan, 2015), natural resources (Curtin et al, 1995), and various pre-colonial characteristics are largely irrelevant.…”

The Search for Spices and Souls: Catholic Missions as Colonial State in the Philippines

“…The first set of controls accounts for the presence of pre-colonial settlements or of competing religions, particularly Islam. Extant work has empirically linked the long-run impact of pre-colonial organization on contemporary state capacity (Dincecco et al, 2020; Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2013) and on the institutions that colonizers establish given the existing pre-colonial settlements (Ricart-Huguet, 2021). To account for pre-colonial settlements, I create a binary variable equal to 1 if a municipality had a pre-colonial settlement and 0 if it did not.…”

Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation

“…Ethnic empowerments under colonial rule can be classified into those that were specifically based on communal membership and those that were a by‐product of investments in industry, mining, agriculture, transportation, and education that were largely driven by nonethnic considerations like geography or natural endowments (Horowitz, 1985, p. 156–157). The postcolonial continuity of empowerments of the latter type has been broadly demonstrated and analysed in the social‐scientific literature on colonial investments (Huillery, 2009; Ricart‐Huguet, 2021, 2022; Roessler et al, 2022), although such studies are usually limited to Africa and seek to explain modernisation or development rather than political inclusion.…”