Colonial Immigration (FORPRE)

Colonies can be distinguished regarding the presence of people from the colonizing country. While all colonies had officials, clerks, administrators, doctors, traders and some military and religious personnel (cf. Laux et al. 2009), they differed significantly in regard to settlers. Undoubtedly, a higher presence of colonial population has a stronger social transformation effect than a lower. Lange et al. (2006: 1426) even use the size of the European population as statistical proxy for the “level of colonialism”. As many others, we defined the situation at the end of the colonial period as crucial, except in those cases where a big proportion of settlers had left some years earlier (usually due to wars; e.g. Libya, where WWII drove most Italian immigrants home, before independence in 1951). Not citizenship is decisive, but colonial immigration. Therefore, we coded “presence of Europeans (Americans, Japanese), years before independence”. Most data come from the UN Statistical Yearbooks, the Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire (Kuczynski 1977), the Dictionnaire de la colonisation française (Liauzu, ed., 2007), Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 (Benjamin, ed., 2007), and the Handbuch 3.Welt (various vol.), Maddison (2007: 137; Foreign Presence 1929-41) and were checked by colony-specific sources and complemented for countries/areas not mentioned. Following the construction of other variables, we transformed the data into a pentatomy:

• 0 = colonial population under 1%
• 1 = colonial population 1-2%
• 2 = colonial population 2-5%
• 3 = colonial population 5-10%
• 4 = colonial population over 10%

Only three cases of our Africa/Asia-sample had a colonial population over 10%, namely Algeria, Libya and South Africa. Also all four ‘level 3’-countries are in Africa: Djibouti, Tunisia, Morocco and Angola. At ‘level 2’, we find among 11 cases (13%) also non-African colonies: Fiji, Vanuatu and the Japanese colonies Korea and Taiwan. Between 1-2% colonial population had six cases (Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Egypt and Papua New Guinea), which makes the overwhelming majority of the cases in our sample (58, 70%) ‘level 1’-countries, with a very low number of immigrants from the colonizing country in relation to the dominated population.

Colonies with a higher level of investment in infrastructure, plantations and mining activities (INVEST, PLANT, MINING) as well as more protectionist trade policy (TRADEPOL) had more immigration from the metropole country than others (see 'Descriptive Statistics'). There are no statistically significant differences between sub-Saharan Africa and Asian/North African countries and French/British colonies.