Expropriation, Financial Exploitation

Because of their ubiquity and the variety of forms applied we were not able to code the core aspects of economic colonialism, the degree of expropriation (1), especially of land, and of financial exploitation (2).

1. Very common in all colonies was the expropriation of terre vacante (French), the so called “uncultivated / vaste land”, usually communal property, and of the land of “rebels”. In all settler colonies, the best parts of the arable land ended up in their hands, by more or less legal means. Furthermore, they excluded the local population from the access to mines, as in South Africa, where “any black person was de facto excluded from owning diamond claims or trading in diamonds” (Thompson 2001: 118). For obvious reasons, there are no consolidated colonial statistical data on the amount of expropriated land. However, we are of the opinion that the coding of colonial settler numbers, the level of infrastructure investment, mines and plantations all indirectly measure the degree of land expropriation.
2. In all colonies, foreign companies transferred profits back to the respective metropole country, the same did officials with their savings and pensions (the so-called drain). However, there are no reasons to assume that its volume relative to the economy has been the same in all colonies. Therefore, it would have been desirable to code these differences of impact. However, there is no dataset which provides information on the drain of financial resources in a comparative manner for former colonies in Africa/Asia, and collecting colonial data and computing aggregate statistics would clearly go beyond the scope of this research project.

To cover the costs of colonial administration and investment in infrastructure (and often further conquest), all colonial governments relied on different forms of resource organization out of the colony. Most colonies relied initially on corvée, forced labor, and substituted that in course of time through paid labor. Common were also direct and indirect taxes (e.g. land, village or hut tax; custom duties on exports/imports) and mono¬polies (salt, tobacco, liquor etc.). While traditional forms of forced labor were relatively easy to be continued by colonial governments (e.g. for big infrastructure projects), taxes (especially direct ones) were difficult to collect and met frequently with resistance and/or emigration. Immigrants from the metropole country usually profited from different rules, many exemptions and numerous loopholes. The financial systems of colonies were a mix of different elements and frequently subject of changes over time. Certainly, the levels of financial exploitation were higher in some colonies than in others, and some forms more exploitative than others, but this proved impossible to code in a systematic manner. We consider this to be a major gap in our coding of the impact of colonialism. However, here as in the case of expropriation, we measure these effects to a certain degree indirectly: the more wars and violence, the more investment in infrastructure, the more distortive the trade policy, the higher the costs for which the colonial population had to pay.