The Long Tail of Colonialism

Introduction

The idea that colonialism ended when the flags came down is attractive because it is tidy. Armies withdrew, administrations were wound up, and sovereignty passed to new governments, so the story can be told as a closed chapter. The opposite claim is equally tidy: that the formerly colonised remain colonised, with missionaries and merchants simply replacing the soldiers. Neither survives contact with the evidence. A growing body of historical and economic research shows that colonial institutions, extractive systems and violent ruptures left measurable legacies that outlasted formal rule by generations or centuries. The same literature shows that those legacies work through specific, identifiable channels, that they vary enormously from place to place, and that they are not a destiny. This essay argues that the long tail of colonialism is real and demonstrable, and that its most important feature is how it persists: through institutions, land, trust and law, rather than through a simple continuation of foreign control. It then tests that argument against three comparisons, India, Nigeria and China, and asks what religion adds as a fault line.

The Shape of the Colonial Encounter

The popular sequence of soldiers, then preachers, then merchants captures something but not the whole. European expansion between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries was driven by entangled motives, and the order of arrival differed by region. In the Spanish Americas, conquest, conversion and extraction advanced together, with priests following the conquistadors closely and systems such as the encomienda and the mines running in parallel with evangelisation. The Portuguese in Africa and Asia generally began with fortified trading posts, such as Elmina and Goa, protected by naval power, with missionaries following. The British East India Company was a commercial enterprise from its 1600 charter and acquired territory and administrative power only later, while its early policy actually restricted missionary activity. French North America combined fur trading and Jesuit missions in a thinner pattern of settlement built on trade and alliance. The lesson is that force, faith and commerce were interlocking tools whose relative weight shifted with local conditions.

This matters for the question of persistence, because it means there is no single colonial legacy. What a colonial power built depended on what it wanted from a place and on what it found there. A colony designed to move silver, labour or agricultural commodities to a distant metropole left different institutional residues from a colony designed to receive European settlers. The research on persistence is largely an effort to trace those differences forward in time.

Institutions as the Carrier of History

The most influential argument in this field is the one made by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson in 2001. They proposed that where European settlers faced high mortality from disease, they were unlikely to settle in numbers and instead built extractive institutions designed to move resources to a small elite, and that these institutions survived independence. Using historical settler mortality as an instrument for present-day institutions, measured by the risk of expropriation, they reported large effects of institutions on income per head (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001). The paper became one of the most cited in modern economics because it offered a causal story rather than a mere correlation.

It has also been seriously contested, and an honest account has to say so. David Albouy argued that mortality rates were assigned to 36 of the 64 sampled countries from the experience of other countries, often on mistaken or conflicting evidence, and that once these problems are corrected the relationship between mortality and expropriation risk loses its robustness (Albouy 2012). Others have defended the original thesis. Raphael Auer instrumented mortality with a geographic model of disease and concluded that the original results reflect the early institution-building hypothesis rather than measurement error (Auer 2007). The fair summary is that the broad claim, that colonial-era institutional choices shaped later outcomes, remains well supported by many lines of evidence, while the specific settler-mortality instrument is a point of live dispute. The strongest evidence for persistence therefore comes from studies that do not depend on that one instrument, and several of the best are narrow, local and unusually clean.

Forced Labour in the Andes

Melissa Dell’s study of the Peruvian mining mita is among the most persuasive. The mita was a forced mining labour system that operated in Peru and Bolivia between 1573 and 1812. Spanish authorities drafted indigenous communities within a defined boundary to supply labour for the silver mines at Potosí and the mercury mines at Huancavelica. Because the boundary cut through otherwise similar terrain, Dell could compare districts on either side of it using a regression discontinuity design. She found that the mita lowers household consumption by around 25 per cent and raises child stunting by around six percentage points in the subjected districts today (Dell 2010).

What makes the study valuable is that it identifies mechanisms. Dell shows that the mita’s influence persisted through land tenure and public goods: mita districts historically had fewer large landowners and lower educational attainment, are today less integrated into road networks, and have residents who are substantially more likely to be subsistence farmers (Dell 2010). The finding also complicates a standard assumption. Large landholdings are often blamed for Latin American underdevelopment, yet here the absence of large estates in the conscripted districts was part of the story, because the haciendas elsewhere provided some access to roads, markets and protection from the state. A system abolished more than two centuries ago still shapes who eats well and who does not, through the physical and legal arrangements it left in the ground. A later replication using machine-learning methods has reported that the legacy may be more substantial and more uneven across districts than the original estimates suggested (Karakas 2025).

The Slave Trades and the Erosion of Trust

If the mita shows persistence through property and infrastructure, the work of Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon shows persistence through social capital. The Atlantic and other external slave trades were not a colonial invention in the narrow sense, but they were bound up with European commercial expansion and they preceded and shaped formal colonial rule. Nunn’s own tabulation estimates that about 18.2 million people were exported across the four trades between 1400 and 1913, including roughly 12.7 million across the Atlantic (Nunn 2011).

Nunn’s earlier work found that the slave trade, which lasted more than four hundred years, had a significant negative effect on long-term economic development (Nunn 2008). The weakness of that cross-country analysis was that it could not say why. Nunn and Wantchekon addressed this by testing a specific channel. Using survey data matched to historical slave shipments by ethnic group, they found that people belonging to the groups most exposed to the slave trades today report lower trust in relatives, neighbours, co-ethnics and local government (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011). They also reported something that fits the historical record: the effect on trust in people close to the respondent was as strong as the effect on trust in more distant people. That pattern is consistent with a history in which raiding and betrayal eventually turned neighbours and even kin against one another. The legacy here is a lasting change in how people relate to one another, carried across many generations without any formal institution doing the carrying.

Settler Colonialism and the Australian Case

The studies above concern extractive colonies, but the long tail is longest where colonisers stayed. In settler colonies the colonial state did not withdraw; it became the permanent state, and the dispossessed population lived inside it. Australia is the clearest case. The legal fiction that the continent belonged to no one governed land law until the High Court’s decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) in 1992, and the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children under state policy, documented in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, continued into living memory (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). These are matters of record, and they set the context for what current data show.

The most recent official data make the persistence concrete. The Productivity Commission’s 2026 Closing the Gap report found that, of the 15 targets assessed, only three are on track to be met: employment, land and sea rights, and legal rights and interests (Brennan 2026b). Adult imprisonment, early childhood development, children in out-of-home care and suicide are all going backwards, and the commissioner noted that the deadline for most targets is 2031, so the halfway point has passed (AAP 2026). Earlier in the year, the Commission’s data showed suicide rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at more than three times those of non-Indigenous Australians (Brennan 2026a). Life expectancy gaps have shown no improvement, with Indigenous males and females expected to live 8.8 and 8.1 years less than other Australians respectively (Maxwell 2026).

These figures should be read carefully. They do not prove by themselves that colonial history is the cause of each outcome, and a serious analysis would examine mechanisms such as child removal, policing practices, and the design of services. But the pattern is the one the persistence literature predicts: the worst outcomes cluster in the domains where state systems most directly intersect with Indigenous families, namely child protection, criminal justice and health, while the targets that are on track are those connected to land rights, legal recognition and community-controlled services. The pattern of where progress has occurred is itself evidence about where the problem lies.

Economic Dependence and the Neocolonial Argument

A second kind of persistence concerns economic structure rather than social institutions. Kwame Nkrumah and others argued that political independence without economic autonomy leaves former colonies exposed to the terms of trade, to debt, and to the policy preferences of wealthy states and corporations (Nkrumah 1965). The argument has force in specific cases. Haiti is the starkest: after its revolution, France demanded in 1825 an indemnity of 150 million francs as the price of recognition, later reduced, and the debt took generations to service and drained the new state of capital it needed for schools and infrastructure. Many former colonies also inherited economies built around a few raw exports, which left them vulnerable to commodity price swings and limited their ability to diversify.

Here, though, the claim must be bounded. Calling all ongoing trade, investment or cultural exchange colonisation stretches the term until it loses meaning. Colonialism in the classic sense involved formal sovereignty held by a foreign power, administrative control, and often settlement, and former colonies today are sovereign states with their own governments, militaries and legal systems. The neocolonial argument describes real asymmetries of power and dependence, but it describes them as a different phenomenon, one that is also visible in relations among states that were never colonised and in the growing commercial and infrastructure presence of powers such as China in Africa.

India: Contested Counts and Weak Growth

India’s colonial legacy has been studied closely, and the findings are more contested than either side usually admits. The best-known institutional study compared districts that the British placed under different land revenue systems. Banerjee and Iyer found that areas where proprietary rights went to landlords have lower agricultural investment, lower agricultural productivity and lower public goods investment after independence than areas where those rights went to cultivators (Banerjee and Iyer 2005). The result has been challenged. Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen argued that the Central Provinces were miscoded as landlord-based, and that with a corrected classification there is no evidence the landlord system hurt post-independence agricultural performance (Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen 2013). The land tenure channel is plausible, but it is not settled.

The same is true of the larger debate over whether Britain drained India’s wealth. Utsa Patnaik estimates that between 1765 and 1938 Britain extracted about £9.2 trillion, or roughly $45 trillion, using India’s export surplus as the measure and compounding it at 5 per cent (Patnaik 2018). Tirthankar Roy replies that her method rests on poor economics, cannot be tested, and assumes that money not sent to Britain would automatically have been invested in India (Roy n.d.). Because the headline figure depends so heavily on the compounding assumption, it is better read as an illustration of scale than as a measured loss.

The growth record is less disputed. Rai and Burman report no growth in India’s GDP per capita in the colonial era, and a rise of only 0.8 times, about 1.6 per cent a year, between 1947 and 1987 (Rai and Burman 2022). The Maddison series is slightly more generous for the nineteenth century, putting India’s income at $533 in 1820 and $673 in 1913 in 1990 dollars (Institute for Competitiveness 2019), but both accounts describe an economy that did not industrialise under colonial rule and grew slowly in its first decades afterwards.

Nigeria: A State Assembled for the Colonial Administration

Nigeria’s colonial legacy is mostly about how the territory was put together. The British amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates in 1914 and governed through indirect rule, delegating local administration to traditional authorities (The Conversation 2023). The method did not work the same way everywhere. In the north it built on existing centralised structures; in stateless southern societies, rulers known as warrant chiefs were imposed (Library of Congress n.d.). The effect on education and politics was lasting: the south gained a head start in Western education, northern leaders feared southern domination, and southerners feared northern domination (Library of Congress n.d.).

The economic outcomes are poor, though the causes are mixed. The World Bank reports that per capita income in 2024 was about 12 per cent below its 2014 peak, that oil and gas make up only about 4 per cent of GDP but typically more than 80 per cent of exports, and that government revenue, at around 8.4 per cent of GDP, is among the lowest in the world (World Bank 2026). Colonial policy that favoured extraction over diversification is part of that picture, but not all of it. Resource dependence, military rule and weak taxation are post-independence developments. Nigeria shows how colonial borders and administrative choices can set a trap, and how domestic politics then decide whether it closes.

China: Semi-Colonial Rather Than Colonised

China is a different kind of case, and it should not be treated as simply a country that escaped colonialism. From 1842 until 1943 Western powers held China in a semi-colonial relationship, centred on dozens of treaty ports where Western residents established themselves most forcefully (National Bureau of Economic Research 2021). Foreign powers never took over the governance of the whole country, but inside the treaty ports foreigners administered, policed and taxed, and Chinese residents fell outside their own government’s jurisdiction. The Qing state kept a bureaucratic tradition, an army and a territory too large to administer from outside. India and Nigeria had no such buffer, so China is less a test of colonised versus uncolonised than of heavy foreign pressure on a state that kept its institutional core. The same research notes that many former treaty port areas are among the most advanced regions of China today, which complicates any simple story of damage.

On the numbers, China started the post-colonial period behind India. Between 1913 and 1950 India’s per capita income fell from $673 to $619, while China’s fell from $552 to $439, and by 1978 the two were almost level at $979 and $966 (Institute for Competitiveness 2019). The Mao years produced real gains in human development, with China’s score on the long-run index rising from 0.163 to 0.407 between 1950 and 1973 against India’s rise from 0.160 to 0.289, and in 1980 life expectancy was 64 years in China against 54 in India (Institute for Competitiveness 2019). They also included catastrophe: growth fell drastically during the Great Leap Forward and again during the Cultural Revolution (Ghose 2019), and the Great Leap famine killed millions, with estimates ranging widely. Expelling foreign powers was not sufficient for growth.

The sustained divergence began later. After 1978 growth accelerated in both countries but far more in China, whose growth was manufacturing-led while India’s was services-led (Ghose 2019). China’s per capita income has been higher than India’s since 1970 and was about double by 2018 (Rai and Burman 2022), though the size of the gap depends on the measure and the year (Ideas for India n.d.). One feature cuts against the idea of a purely independent economy: by 1998 foreign direct investment per head in China was $183 against $14 in India (Institute for Competitiveness 2019). China’s success came from controlling the terms of its engagement with foreign capital rather than from separating from it, which is close to the neocolonial argument’s own diagnosis that the terms of dependence matter more than the existence of trade.

Religion as a Fault Line

Religion is one of the most visible ways the colonial inheritance still divides people, and Nigeria is the clearest example. Pre-colonial Nigeria already had a religious gulf between north and south, and indirect rule preserved it rather than bridging it. The north was largely shielded from missionary activity, which gave the south its head start in Western education (Library of Congress n.d.). The country was then built around two blocs that differed in religion, schooling and politics, and its politics still reflects that. Nigeria is now roughly evenly split between a mostly Christian south and a Muslim-majority north, and many conflicts in the central Middle Belt have roots in tensions over land between Muslim herders and mostly Christian farmers, sharpened by climate change (eNCA 2026).

How much of the current violence is religious in character is disputed. One reading emphasises targeting. An advocacy report using data from a Nigerian partner organisation and the ACLED database counted 22,835 Christian and 10,519 Muslim civilians killed, a ratio of 2.2 to 1 that rose to 4.4 to 1 once adjusted for population in the affected states (Christian Solidarity International 2026). A 2020 report by a British parliamentary group on religious freedom found that some Fulani militants had adopted radical Islamist ideology and intended to target Christians and symbols of Christian identity, a finding reported alongside official Nigerian rejection of claims that the violence is primarily anti-Christian (Worthy News 2026). The other reading emphasises land, climate and governance. Analysts and survivors say the violence cuts across faiths and is driven as much by land disputes, climate change, poverty and weak governance as by religion, and that claims of a Christian genocide lack state-led evidence (News24 2025). Both readings can hold in different places, since Boko Haram in the northeast, banditry in the northwest and the Middle Belt farmer–herder conflict are different problems. The advocacy sources are not neutral, so the casualty ratios should be checked against independent datasets.

The China comparison sharpens the point without settling it. China did not avoid religion’s entanglement with colonialism. The treaty system forced open missionary access, with the 1842 treaty opening five coastal cities and the 1860 treaties the whole country. The Taiping Rebellion, a movement with Christian-derived ideology, is usually estimated to have killed between 20 and 30 million people, and the Boxer Uprising targeted missionaries and Christianity. China’s later approach was to expel foreign missions by 1953 and to control religious life tightly, though the attacks on religious institutions during the Cultural Revolution carried their own costs. Whether religion’s suppression contributed to economic performance is hard to show, and the evidence that religion as such drives development outcomes is thin.

The stronger conclusion concerns combinations. Religious difference becomes most destructive where it coincides with regional, ethnic and economic fault lines and a state that cannot provide security evenly, which is what the colonial administrative design left behind in Nigeria. India’s Partition in 1947 shows a similar pattern, in which colonial-era political categories hardened religious identity into political camps. Religious difference alone does not separate these outcomes. Religious difference fused with unequal regional development and low state capacity is a serious liability.

Agency, Variation and the Limits of the Thesis

The weakest versions of the persistence thesis treat the formerly colonised as passive recipients of a fixed inheritance, and the evidence does not support that. Outcomes diverge sharply among societies with similar colonial histories. Some former colonies in East Asia, themselves under colonial or quasi-colonial rule in the twentieth century, became among the most prosperous economies in the world. Religious change also resists a purely colonial reading: Christianity in much of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is now thoroughly indigenised, led by local clergy and shaped by local forms of worship, and indigenous religious practice persists and hybridises alongside it. The missionaries did not simply remain as agents of foreign control; congregations made the faith their own, sometimes against the wishes of the churches that brought it.

There is also a methodological caution. The best studies identify persistence through carefully constructed comparisons, and the effects they measure are specific: a consumption gap in certain Andean districts, a trust differential among certain ethnic groups. Generalising from them to the claim that colonialism explains the present condition of any given country goes beyond what they show. Geography, demography, internal politics and later policy choices all matter, and a responsible account keeps them in view. Persistence is also not permanence. Institutions can be reformed, as the growth of land rights recognition in Australia, which is one of the few on-track areas in the national data, suggests. The deepest lesson of the research is that these legacies run through human-made arrangements, and what people built can be rebuilt.

Conclusion

The long tail of colonialism is best understood as a set of mechanisms rather than a single continuing condition. Forced labour systems shaped land tenure and public goods in the Andes for centuries after they ended. The slave trades altered patterns of trust that still show up in survey data. Settler colonialism left justice, child protection and health systems whose outcomes for Indigenous Australians remain badly out of line with the rest of the population. Economic dependence, from the Haitian indemnity to modern commodity reliance, constrained the choices of young states. The comparison of India, Nigeria and China adds that outcomes depended heavily on what states did after independence. India’s growth stayed slow for decades, Nigeria’s colonial administrative divide combined with oil dependence and weak revenue, and China, though only semi-colonised, started poorer than India and diverged from it only after 1978, at high cost in the earlier decades. Religion matters most where it coincides with regional inequality and a weak state, as in Nigeria. Against this, the evidence on variation, local agency and indigenised institutions rules out the totalising claim that the colonised remain colonised in any simple sense. The defensible position lies between the two tidy stories: formal colonialism ended, its effects did not, and the work of tracing exactly how they persist is also the work of identifying what can be changed.

References

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S. and Robinson, J.A. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation. American Economic Review 91(5): 1369–1401.

Albouy, D.Y. 2012. The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation: comment. American Economic Review 102(6): 3059–3076.

Auer, R.A. 2007. The colonial origins of comparative development: comment. A solution to the debate on settler mortality rates. Swiss National Bank Working Paper 2007-09.

Australian Associated Press (AAP) 2026. ‘Not good enough’: please to act on Indigenous targets. Reported 30 July 2026 (Productivity Commission 2026 Closing the Gap report).

Banerjee, A. and Iyer, L. 2005. History, institutions, and economic performance: the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in India. American Economic Review 95(4): 1190–1213.

Brennan, D. 2026a. Closing the Gap: suicide, incarceration and child development targets go backwards; land and economic participation show progress. National Indigenous Times, 12 February 2026.

Brennan, D. 2026b. Closing the Gap data paints ‘sombre picture’ despite preschool milestone. National Indigenous Times, 30 July 2026.

Christian Solidarity International 2026. Nigeria: Fulani militants killed four times more people than Boko Haram and ISWAP. Report summary, csi-usa.org, 6 July 2026.

Dell, M. 2010. The persistent effects of Peru’s mining mita. Econometrica 78(6): 1863–1903.

eNCA 2026. Central Nigerian town rebuilds religious trust in shadow of Trump’s threat. enca.com.

Ghose, A.K. 2019. Economic development in China and India: a tale of great divergence. Institute for Human Development Working Paper 01/2019.

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: HREOC.

Ideas for India n.d. Has China really outperformed India? ideasforindia.in.

Institute for Competitiveness, India 2019. What India can learn from China’s 70 years of economic growth; and The Asian divergence. competitiveness.in.

Iversen, V., Palmer-Jones, R. and Sen, K. 2013. On the colonial origins of agricultural development in India: a re-examination of Banerjee and Iyer, ‘History, institutions and economic performance’. Journal of Development Studies 49(12): 1631–1646.

Karakas, A.D. 2025. The persistent effects of Peru’s mining mita: a double machine learning approach. arXiv:2506.18947.

Library of Congress n.d. Nigeria: a country study, chapter on government. Federal Research Division.

Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.

Maxwell, R. 2026. Healthy babies and land on track but other gaps still wider. Indigenous Business News, 21 January 2026.

National Bureau of Economic Research 2021. Working Paper 29404, on the economic consequences of the treaty port era in China.

News24 2025. Nigeria: ‘Christian genocide’ or a crisis of narratives? 21 October 2025.

Nkrumah, K. 1965. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons.

Nunn, N. 2008. The long-term effects of Africa’s slave trades. Quarterly Journal of Economics 123(1): 139–176.

Nunn, N. 2011. Empirical evidence on the long-term impacts of Africa’s slave trades. Presentation slides, Harvard University, 7 October 2011.

Nunn, N. and Wantchekon, L. 2011. The slave trade and the origins of mistrust in Africa. American Economic Review 101(7): 3221–3252.

Patnaik, U. 2018. Revisiting the ‘drain’, or transfers from India to Britain in the context of global diffusion of capitalism. In Chakrabarti, S. and Patnaik, U. (eds), Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rai, S. and Burman, A. 2022. India’s GDP per capita since independence. Carnegie India, 16 August 2022.

Roy, T. n.d. Did the British loot India? History Reclaimed, https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/did-the-british-loot-india/

The Conversation 2023. Nigeria at 63: four reasons for persistent disunity six decades on. 30 September 2023.

World Bank Group. Nigeria Development Update. Beyond the Federal Purse: How Higher Revenues Shaped State Priorities. October 2026.

Worthy Christian News 2026. Christians massacred in Nigeria as Middle Belt violence deepens. 20 August 2026.

A note on sources

The Closing the Gap figures are drawn from news reporting of the Productivity Commission’s 2026 releases, and readers who need to cite them formally should check the Commission’s own published reports. The account of the Haitian indemnity and of the Mabo decision is drawn from the historical record generally, not from the sources above, and should be checked against a specialist source before publication. The statements on the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising, the Great Leap famine, the missionary clauses of the treaties and India’s Partition are likewise drawn from general historical knowledge. The Patnaik, World Bank, National Bureau of Economic Research and Ideas for India references were located through web searches, and their publication details should be confirmed before formal citation. The casualty figures for Nigeria come from an advocacy report and need independent verification.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, November 2026

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