Exploitation or Development: an analysis of the balance of trade between colonies and colonial empires, from 1870 to 2000

This dissertation is aimed to shed light on possible exploitation behaviors held by the European colonial empires during the 19th and mid-20th centuries towards their colonies. Some authors agree that the presence of external governments and interests brought also benefits to the colonies, helping their economic development. The thesis’ objective is to help finding more evidences, about either exploitation or development, by looking at the balances of trade between colonies and colonizers from the 1870 to the de-colonization. The method uses a different approach with respect to the works already existing, benefitting from a different perspective. In order to do so, I gathered fragmented information about their bilateral commerce to build a yearly representation, in which it is possible to exhibit the various trends and patterns of the imports and exports, together with some information about the most exported commodities from the colonies. Subsequently, I add the settler mortality rate, the GDP pro capita of the colonies and the index of goodness of the institutions set up by the colonizers, which is inversely related to the settler mortality rate. It emerged that the colonies with lower GDP pro capita are more likely to trade at surplus and to exhibit a higher settler mortality rate, whereas the colonies trading at deficit and exhibiting a lower settler mortality rate appear to enjoy somewhat a higher GDP pro capita and better institutions. To this extent, the evidence of exploitation is stronger for the former case, while the possible hypothesis of development is more probable in the latter. However, the analysis of the balances of trade as a method to identify possible evidences of exploitation and development, as I will explain during the dissertation, is undoubtedly limited. Nevertheless, it is interesting to study this long-debated issue from a different perspective.