User:Crcarey/sandbox

This is a summary of the changes I plan to make on the article Impact of Western European colonialism and colonisation.

Impact of Western European colonialism and colonisation

I don’t feel that this page actually focuses on the impacts of Western European colonialism. The only section that truly focuses on this is ‘Health Impacts of Colonialism.’ I want to break the impacts down by types, which I have split into three sections: economic impacts, political impacts, and social and identity impacts.

Economic impacts will be further broken down into two sub-sections: investments and land rights. There are numerous other topics that could be covered as well, but this would be a good place to start. Investments will discuss the different types of colonial investments and their impacts. Elise Huillery has a paper that focuses on the long-term impact of educational investment. She notes that this type of investment in French Western Africa during the colonial period had a greater impact than any other type of investment. She cites the increase in GDP and private wealth.

I would also like to review the impacts of infrastructure investment. In his book The African State in Comparative Perspective, Crawford Young discusses the lack of infrastructure investment and what that meant for different regions of the continent. There is also some counterfactual literature that discusses what could have happened if more infrastructure investment had occurred.

Another facet of economic impacts deal with the outcomes of different land rights. Elizabeth Colson and Markus Goldstein and Christopher Udry studied the impact of colonial land rights in Western Africa and Ghana respectively.

In the next major section I plan to add, I will focus on different political impacts. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson analyze the effects of different political institutions, both formal and informal. They also discuss the impacts of distribution of de jure and de facto political power. I would like to look into the impact of direct versus indirect rule. Michael Crowder discusses those types of rule and their nature in Africa.

I will also discuss Jeffery Herbst's article War and State in Africa. This section will look into how colonialism prevented traditional state building through war and violence. It will also explore the problems of state consolidation in Africa that was the direct result of colonial intervention.

The third large section I will add is an analyze of the social and identity impacts of Western European colonization. Here I will use Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject to look into the problems of post-colonial democratization that stemmed from the colonial legacy that "mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects."

I would also like to discuss the literature that looks into how colonial Belgium's manipulations of Rwandan identity is partially to blame for the Rwandan genocide. I will use Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda and Scott Straus' The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda in this section.

Outline

History

Economic Impacts

• Investment types
  • Educational investment
    • History matters: the long-term impact of colonial public investments in French West Africa by Elise Huillery
  • Infrastructure investment

• Land rights
  • The Impact of the Colonial Period on the Definition of Land Rights by Elizabeth Colson
  • The Profits of Power: Land Rights and Agricultural Investment in Ghana by Markus Goldstein and Christopher Udry
• Alternate theories?
  • How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

Political impacts

• Types of governments put in place
  • Impacts of different types
• Creation of professional armies
• Delay of political maturity
  • How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

Social/identity impacts

• Citizen and Subject by Mahmood Mamdani
• Identity explanations of Rwandan genocide
  • When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani

Potential Benefits

• Benign colonialism?

Changes to existing sections

Introduction

This section will be rewritten to reduce the focus on defining colonialism. It will be give a brief introduction to the period of withdrawal by colonial powers.

Debate about aspects of colonialism

This section will be removed and the information will be added to the new sections I will create. Each new section I add will have a subsection dedicated to alternate points of view that exist in current literature.

Imperialism and dependency theory

The information from this section will be brought into the larger, new section I am planning on adding called “Economic impact of colonialism.” I plan to remove the references to imperialism because I do not feel there is an explicit link made between the impacts of imperialism and the impactions of colonialism.

Health impacts of colonialism

I plan to largely leave this section alone aside from possibly making minor copy editing changes. The focus of my research will not be focused on health and medical effects but rather political, economic, and sociological.

Benign colonialism

The neutrality of this section has been debated on the talk page.  It is possible that this section will be brought into the other sections. For example, it discusses possible positive economic impacts on colonialized nations due to investments and improved institutions and I plan to discuss that in the section “Economic impact of colonialism.”

History

This section will be a brief history of the start of western colonization in Africa. Using information similar to Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa by Leander Heldring and James A. Robinson. Contextualizing history before colonization so one can understand the level of development and government that existed.

Economic impacts of colonialism

Types of investment and their impacts

Educational Investment -  History matters: the long-term impact of colonial public investments in French West Africa by Elise Huillery

• Current educational outcomes are determined by colonial investments in education
• Regions that were more heavily invested in during early colonialism continued to get more investments
• La Porta et al. (1998) and Acemoglu and Johnson (2003)
  • Nature of the legal systems imported had an impact
  • English colonies benefit from better institutions than French colonies
• AJR (2001)
  • Settlement colonies perform better extractive colonies because they inherited better property rights
• This paper only focuses on West Africa
  • Homogenous
  • Controlled identity of colonizers
  • Looks at public investments
• “Colonial public investments have been a strong determinant of current districts’ development” (5)
• Description of organization
  • The administration was “officially centralized but effectively decentralized” (08)
• Could decide on a local level where the money went
• Results
  • “The general picture that emerges from these tables is that districts which received more investments over 1910-1928 have significantly better performances today.” (24)
  • “Adding one teacher per 100,000 inhabitants over 1910-1928 would lead the percentage of 7-12-year old children attending school in 1995 growing up to about 1 point. Adding one doctor per 100,000 inhabitants over 1910-1928 would lead the percentage of 0-5-year old children suffering from stunting in 1995 falling down to about 0.5 points. Finally, adding one franc per capita devoted to public works over 1910-1928 would lead the percentages of households having access to a private water tap and using a modern fuel growing up to about 3 points.”
• Long-term impact
  • Schools and infrastructures continue to be built in the places that already have them from the colonial period. (33)
  • When someone else had already invested in a location, other investors were more inclined to build there later.
  • “Current educational performances are specifically determined by colonial investments in education, as current health performances by colonial investments in health and current infrastructures’ development by colonial investments in infrastructures and health. According to our estimates, the enduring influence of early colonial investments can be explained by the fact that later investments continued to be located in areas that had many of them already: the more investments over 1910-1928, the more new investments over 1930-1939, and the more public goods today.” (39)
• Conclusions
  • Because of the structure of districts in West Africa, must look at spending an results on a district level

Bibliography

Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale University, 1994.

Guest, Robert. The Shackled Continent: Africa's Past, Present and Future . London: Macmillan, 2004.

Huillery, Elise. "History matters: the long-term impact of colonial public investments in French West Africa." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2009: 176-215.

Huillery, Elise. "The Black Man's Burden: The Cost of Colonization of French West Africa." The Journal of Economic History 74, no. 1 (2014): 1-38.

Huillery, Elise. "The Impact of European Settlement within French West Africa: Did Pre-colonial Prosperous Areas Fall Behind? ." Journal of African Economies 20, no. 2 (2011): 263-311.

Heldring, Leander, and James A. Robinson. Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair . New York: Public Affairs, 2005.

Migdal, Joel S. Strong Societies and Weak States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univestiy Press, 1988.