Did European rule in Asia and Africa really make colonised people poorer?
Few questions in economic history generate more heat than the one that seems, on the surface, most straightforward: Did European rule in Asia and Africa make colonised peoples poorer? The intuitive answer – of course it did – has animated a long tradition of scholarship stretching from Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974). At its core, this tradition advances a surplus-transfer thesis: that imperial powers systematically extracted value from subordinated territories, concentrating wealth in the metropole while deepening poverty at the periphery. If true, this would neatly invert the predictions of economic convergence theory, which holds that poorer countries should, over time, catch up with richer ones.
