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Chirol
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Chirol

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October 20th, 2006

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Who was the best colonizer?

Slate has an article of interest for all you Victorians out there:

Which country is the best colonizer?
By Joel Waldfogel

A generation ago, Christopher Columbus was a hero. No longer. Even my preteen kids can tell you that Columbus’ followers brought disease and death to many New World natives. But as the forerunner of European colonization, can Columbus also claim to have ushered in an era of higher standards of living?

One of the deep questions in economics is why some countries are rich and others are poor. It is widely believed that institutions such as clear and enforceable property rights are important to economic growth. Still, debates rage: Do culture, history, government, education, temperature, natural resources, cosmic rays make the difference? The reason it’s hard to resolve this question is that we have no controlled experiments comparing otherwise similar places with different sets of legal and economic institutions. In new research, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history””?the length of European colonization””?on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?

You’ll be surprised who the best was.

Comments to this entry

sembawang squid
October 20, 2006
1:27 pm
Entire article here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jfeyrer/islands.pdf

Interesting but I'm not sure just what kind of broad conclusions can be drawn. Not surprising that experience as a US possession seems to be the best economically - apart from phosphate mining on certain islets the main focus of US "colonization" was strategic positioning. Also, the US entered the game pretty late in the day, and was thus at a much more enlightened stage.
Rommel
October 20, 2006
2:26 pm
Why suprised Curzon? What were you expecting? After I read what you said I expected it to be Portugal!
Dan tdaxp
October 20, 2006
2:38 pm
Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States"”?as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese.


Agree with Rommel -- is "obviousness" a new category of "surprising"?

:-p
Curzon
October 20, 2006
2:58 pm
Rommel: the post author is Chirol. I am surprised for different reasons.

Feyrer and Sacerdote got this study _sooo_ wrong it makes me laugh out loud. Actually, it's worse than just being wrong. They pulled a typical academic stunt and deliberately chose data that would meant their preconcieved conclusions. Welcome to exhibit #58,203 of why academia isn't taken seriously anymore.

This study fails logic 101. Let me get this straight: the authors looked at islands -- which account for a fraction of 19th century empires, ignoring the continent of Africa, India, thus most of Japanese imperialism, most of French imperialism, most of British imperialism, all of Russian imperialism -- and then conclude that this defines the success of all colonial government. C'mon people. That's equivalent to taking opinion polls in Connecticut and Rhode Island to surmise which candidate will win a US presidential election. By only looking at islands the authors built a fatal flaw into their study. But they wanted to draw a conclusion and this data fit what they wanted to say.

Looking at the current state of all 19th century colonies, by any measure -- literacy, per capita GDP, democratic government, education, health care, life expectancy, child mortality -- the former colonies of Taiwan and South Korea makes Japan the best colonizer by far. Japanese rule may have been authoritarian, but it built a solid civil society with native elites, education, infrastructure, and all the other solid makings of a modern and prosperous state. Japan is only mentioned in passing in the Slate article. But I wonder if these clowns even bothered to take into consideration Okinawa?
jon
October 20, 2006
3:40 pm
Curzon,

In addition to not counting Japanese colonization of Taiwan etc, and British colonization of India. The study does not take into account the British colonization of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the US. I would say those four countries alone would count for a pretty good record.
von Kaufman-Turkestansky
October 20, 2006
4:02 pm
jon,

We should put "european settler colonies" for want of a better name in a different category. Since we are speaking Victorian and thinking pagan, I think we are looking at who was the best colonizer in terms of "mission civilatrice", to be generous to the Europeans, or left the least disaster behind. Annihilating the native population first (whether deliberately, innocently - oops! - or both) with disease and massacres and replacing it with your own, presumably already "civilized" population, shouldn't count. I guess you could do a "european settler colony" comparison - USA/Aus/NZ/Canada for Britain, Quebec for an idea of the French version, Siberia and the Russian Far East for Russia, Argentina and Uruguay for Spain, maybe Brazil for Portugal.
Rommel
October 20, 2006
5:09 pm
Lord Curzon,

My apologies Good Sir!
Alfred Russel Wallace
October 20, 2006
8:11 pm
I think Lord Curzon was rather harsh - I saw nothing that suggested that the authors did any sleight of hand. They are merely comparing today's performance of a group of islands, and trying to assign causality - or at least an explanation.
I didn't find anything that smacked of 'and then conclude that this defines the success of all colonial government'.
I thought it was amusing, especially the history..... but my visual take on Figures 1 and 2 was that the lines are not obviously correct!
Chirol
October 20, 2006
8:59 pm
I agree that one must distinguish between settler colonies and resource colonies. I also obviously see that you can't make a definitive judgement on colonization based only on islands. I nevertheless find the article/paper interesting. That was all!
Yago
October 21, 2006
12:55 am
I agree that Japanese colonialism wasn't as brutal as it's always described, but can you really say that it "built" civic society in Taiwan and SK? I mean, those were already civilized countries before Japan came, one could say that belonging to the same civilization. The "local elites" were already there when Japan came in, it didn't suddenly build a civilized society from scratch. Of course they modernized them, they made them build roads and schools, but is that all? North Korea was probably more modernized in the Japanese times, and look it now. One would say America has also something to do with SK and Taiwan's freedom and prosperity.
Mutantfrog
October 21, 2006
1:18 am
Taiwan's success has a lot of contributing factors. One is Japanese colonization, another is the vast amount of wealth that Chiang Kai Shek looted from the mainland, and the close US ties are another.

Then there's also the very important fact they were the largest Chinese community outside of Communist China, so Taiwanese had a competitive advantage in international trade in place that had their own local Chinese communities, which you may notice is major cities all over the world. I think that last part is often overlooked.
Yago
October 21, 2006
4:27 am
I'd say he actually saved that wealth from Communist looting.
needles
October 21, 2006
5:40 am
It is clear that Japan was the best colonizer. Second place England, third USA. Korea is last because it only colony is takeshima island.
sunbin
October 21, 2006
8:38 am
the question itself is flawed.

e.g. who is the kindest murderer? :)
Dave Schuler
October 21, 2006
6:01 pm
The article did say “European colonization” although how the United States snuck onto the list I have no idea. The last time I looked at a map the U. S. wasn't in Europe.

I suspect that the standards need a tiny bit of adjustment. Picking colonies with the best future prospects (which would certainly be the case for Japanese colonization) probably isn't what they were studying.

One minor anecdote on American colonies. During the Philippine Insurrection Aguinaldo was quoted as saying that the U. S. had made his job tougher by not being oppressive enough.