The Economic History of Colonialism by Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy

Reviewed by: The Economic History of Colonialism by Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy Klas Rönnbäck The Economic History of Colonialism By Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020. The economic aspects of (European) colonialism have been under debate for a long time. In this book, economic historians Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy attempt to review key literature in this field. Thematically, the book covers a number of economic aspects of colonialism: patterns of the process of colonization (Chapter 2); colonialism's role for economic globalization, i.e. trade, capital and migration flows (Chapter 3); economic growth and development in the colonies (Chapter 4); the costs and economic benefits of colonies to the colonizing power (Chapter 5); how colonial states worked, most importantly in terms of taxation (Chapter 6); the institutions and institutional legacy of colonialism (Chapter 7); the colonial impact upon the environment (Chapter 8); business ventures under colonial rule (Chapter 9), and decolonization (Chapter 10). A core argument emphasized in several chapters of the book is the diversity of European colonialism. It is, according to the authors, not possible to reduce the history of European colonialism to one single narrative (or, for that matter, to a binary model). One example is that there is not one single factor, such as economic interests, driving the process of colonialism; the authors instead suggest four more or less distinct routes to colonialism, fundamentally attributable to different factors (politics, trade, settler-farmers and settler-planters/slaveholders). The consequences of colonialism also differed substantially between the colonies, for example in terms of the institutions that developed in the colonies, and furthermore changed over time. A second core argument of the book is that the process of colonization, the colonial institutions this came to form, as well as the process of decolonization, was the outcome of the interaction between (interests in) the colonizing power and the population in the areas that came to be colonized. A third core argument of the book is that the process never was as simple as, for example, core-periphery theories presumably would have it in terms of who gained from the process; colonialism did not lead to a position of one-sided dependency for (or exploitation of) the colonies, but led to economic exploitation in some places and of some people, but in some instances also created opportunities that some local entrepreneurs in the colonies were able to benefit from. The authors are occasionally rather vague as to who might oppose the arguments they put forth, or whom they criticize. They can for example refer to "Marxist theories" (e.g. 21) without citing any particular scholar or literature. In the main (most evident for example in Chapter 7), the authors do, however, criticize some particular scholars in the field of comparative economics for their all too simplified analyses of colonial history. Many historians will, no doubt, agree with much of this criticism. The book only covers certain chapters of the history of European colonialism: focus is upon colonialism in Africa and India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While this is not obvious from the title, it becomes evident from the description on the cover of the book. Other periods and places do, however, figure occasionally in the narrative. European colonialism prior to the eighteenth century is thus mentioned on a couple of occasions. The whole of the American continent is, however, almost completely omitted from the analysis, with the exception of some of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean island colonies discussed over a few pages. This omission is perhaps the most problematic in Chapter 2, dealing with the origins of colonialism, as the American continents were colonized prior to the chronological focus of the book; in Chapter 5, discussing the costs and benefits of colonies to the colonizing power, as these changed substantially over time; and in Chapter 10 on decolonization, as decolonization in the Americas took place in a very different historical setting than decolonization in the twentieth century. The chronology also mattered for the second wave of imperialism in focus in most of this book, as experiences of earlier colonialism in the Americas undoubtedly contributed to shaping expectations of later

Colonialism · Decolonization · Economic history · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law