Economic Legacies: Did Empire Develop or Underdevelop?

Few historical questions are as contested as whether empire helped or harmed the economies of colonized regions. Some historians, such as Niall Ferguson in his 2003 book Empire, argue that British rule spread institutions such as the rule of law, property rights and free trade, along with railways and ports, that could support growth.

Others, such as the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, argue that colonial economies were designed to extract raw materials, leaving colonies dependent on a few exports and lacking industry. In 2001 the economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson argued that where colonizers settled, they built inclusive institutions, but where they extracted, they built institutions that harmed later development; they shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 for this kind of work.

Measuring the effects is difficult, because we cannot know how regions would have developed without empire. Evaluating the evidence carefully matters more than choosing a side.