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Sun 8 Oct, 2006 02:11 am
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Colonialism may have been morally bankrupt, but it was good for business, according to US academics whose research suggests that the longer the 80 islands they studied were under the yoke of a European power, the healthier their economies are today.
James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College, used historical data to show a positive link between the number of years an island economy was colonised and current GDP per head. 'Time spent as a colony is strongly positively correlated with modern economic outcomes,' they say.
From The Observer:
Colonialism: was it so bad
Concluding Remarks from
Colonialism and Modern Income -- Islands as Natural Experiments by James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote (PDF-data):
Quote:We have argued for an "islands as experiments" where random variation in the colonial experiences of islands can be used to think about the long run effects of colonial history on economic performance. The most interesting fact in our sample is a robust positive relationship between the years of European colonialism and current levels of income.
While some of this relationship could be driven by smart selection of islands by colonizers, we suspect that part of the relationship is causal. When we instrument for colonization and settlement using wind patterns, we obtain coefficients on years of colonization that are identical to our OLS result. While the basic results suggest that longer European colonial exposure is good for the modern inhabitants of the islands in our sample, there are a few interesting caveats that we can introduce. First, there is a discernable pecking order amongst the colonizers.
Years under US and Dutch colonial rule are significantly better than years under the Spanish and Portuguese.
Second, later years of colonialism are associated with a much larger increase in modern GDP than years before 1700. These findings are consistent with the Acemoglu et al. result that the quality of the colonial experience is important for modern outcomes. It is not difficult to believe that colonialism in the post-enlightenment era led to more efficient and beneficial institution transfer than colonialism under the encomienda system and its contemporaries. This is not to say that we find the early colonial years to be detrimental to modern GDP - we do not. However, given the human toll on the early natives, it is not unreasonable to think that pre 1700 colonialism should be considered as a net negative.
This is another topic, but just to be mentioned as an aside:
Northeastern New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago were annexed by Germany in 1884. Over the next few years, Germany added Western Samoa and most of Micronesia to its colonial empire.
An interesting reading:
Germans and Their Colonies
The United States was a colony and there was a Revolutionary War and won Independence in 1776 which is still celebrated in America.
When we consider, just to take several of the most egregious examples of the deleterious effects of colonialism, the three centuries or so of the European-run slave trade, the Belgian atrocities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Congo, the opium trade in China and sourthern Asia, and apartheid in South Africa, to consider the purely economic outlook of these authors as colonialism being not bad because in some cases it led to higher GDP, is a really narrow-minded way to look at it.
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