The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics, commonly known as the nobel prize in economics went to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR henceforth). Nobel prizes lend a certain credibility and normalisation to the ideas of the awardees. One of their papers which has become extremely influential is The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation published in 2001 in which they argue that countries that perform better today are where European colonisers found it easier to settle. Using European mortality rates they show that wherever Europeans found it easy to settle (i.e. they faced lower mortality rates), they set up ‘good’ institutions which help those countries perform better even today. Those countries in which they faced higher mortality rates, they set up extractive states and institutions and those continue to have low per capita incomes even today. Paradoxically, this year’s prize comes at a time when the brutality of imperialism is in full display with widespread destruction of lives and livelihoods in the global south, especially in west Asia. This destructive feature bears a continuity with old style colonialism and much of the horrors of settler colonialism remain true for many parts of the globe, e.g. the ongoing genocide in Palestine and west Asia unleased by settler colonialists in Israel. It is obvious that developed countries and underdeveloped ones are very much impacted by the colonial past – one set of countries developed by colonising the others. But AJR don’t state this, what they do is to create a false dichotomy of good colonial institutions as opposed to extractive ones.

There are three contestable premises on which AJR’s basic argument rests. The first one is that countries that do well in terms of developmental indicators are those where colonisers found it feasible to ‘settle’ as opposed to where the feasibility of settling was far more challenging. So countries that the Europeans found conducive for settling (measured by their mortality rates), they invested in building good institutions because they found it in their long-term interests to settle and make the settlement resemble their Europe. So AJR show statistically that the feasibility of settlements can be measured by colonisers mortality rates – so wherever this was less, they settled well. Also in measuring mortality rates, they use disease deaths as their mainstay explanation. Thus, the settlements where colonialists encountered disease were unfeasible or unfit for their long-time settlement and hence they were more extractive in those countries. This is a fallacious argument both in terms of the method and the claim. Purely, in terms of statistics, incidence of deaths could be higher due to wars and violent conflicts and not just disease deaths. Their feasibility of settlements is measured by colonisers mortality rates and explained largely as disease deaths – so wherever this was less, they settled well. This feasibility argument could be flipped if one looks at anti-colonial resistance as an indicator instead of disease deaths – high mortalities could be because of resistance battles and wars fought by the colonised subjects and not disease. The theoretical leap that they then take is to differentiate between good and extractive colonialism. They give Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States as examples of good as opposed to Congo which was extractive. What this cleverly hides is the fact that in a place like United States, there was a near total genocide on the indigenous population inflicted by the white settler colonialists.

Coming to their next premise, the better performing states were those where colonisation policies were ‘non-extractive’. This better performance they broadly trace to institutional structures that were put in place by colonialism. In simpler terms, their central claim is that well defined private property rights and good institutions were a result of colonialism. In short, the preconditions of a well-defined private property rights for capitalist accumulation were sown by colonialism, thus clearing the way for conducive capitalist development in post-colonial periods. This conveniently makes the colonial past benign and in fact makes the performance of post-colonial societies a function of how good colonial institutions were. The argument that there were different types of colonisation policies, and they can be differentiated between those that can be clubbed as being extractive states vis -a-vis the term that they borrow from the historian Alfred Crosby “Neo-europes” (i.e. non-extractive states with well-defined property rights and good institutions) is even more baffling. Neo-Europe betrays a deep seated Eurocentricity of terminology by making an almost obvious natural reference to developed Europe by default. This hides the preliminary fact that colonisation is by definition taking over someone else’s land by force, much like denying primitive accumulation as the birthing moment of capitalism. This leads to their third premise –persistence of colonial state and institutions post-independence have led to better performance.

This premise is one sided because it paints private property rights and capitalist institutions as the foundation for better performance. In other words, better capitalist principles/institutions lead to better post-colonial performance. This conveniently invisibilises the decolonisation articulation which most ex-colonies had made the basis of their national liberation - anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. Thus by focusing on good institutions of private property and claiming these to be the basis for better performance what they are in fact arguing is for the demise of the decolonisation agenda. They betray this bias by the examples they give – West and East Germany and North and South Korea. The Institutionalist school’s mask slips away by trying to run down socialist experiments by trying to establish that capitalist democracies like West Germany and South Korea have done better because of good institutions. Convenient indeed, since both South Korea and West Germany are stellar examples of being squarely within the imperialist camp. One wonders where in this scheme would South Africa fit? Afterall, this is where the colonialists found feasibility in settling, setting up and running an apartheid state (read good institutions) for the longest possible duration and leaving the country and its people in utter devastation due to its extractive accumulation process. White-washing European colonisation and painting capitalist institutions as good institutions is the ideological core of the Institutionalist school. And this obfuscation is obviously noble!