Perhaps it is not a coincidence. Settler colonialism was not having a good press in late 2024 – genocide rarely looks promising or inclusive (unless you are a sociopath, and many have articulated their sociopathy in 2024). This is when the Nobel Prize Committee came to the rescue, rescuing a 2001 article to award a group of economic historians for their work on explaining the reasons for the settler polities’ record of sustained economic growth.[1] These economists were asking: how is it that these former colonies are wealthy, while most other postcolonies are doing so poorly? Fair question. Could it be that if the colonisers reside in the metropole profits accrue in the metropole, whereas if they reside in the settler colony profits build up in the settler colony? Could it be about where precisely the loot of a callous system of expropriation and dispossession is accumulated?

Not so, according to Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors, and according to the members of the Nobel Prize Committee, who assumed that colonialism was neither bad nor good, but observed that ‘different colonial strategies have led to different institutional patterns that have persisted over time’.[2] ‘Extractive’ states or colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America were bad; ‘inclusivity’ in North American and Australasian settler colonial institutions was good. It is not whether the loot is shipped away or accumulated on site, these economists argued; it is settler colonialism in the ‘Neo-Europes’ that is characterised by ‘inclusive institutions’, while other forms of colonialism are defined by ‘exclusive institutions’.[3]

Acemoglu et al consider several variables but focus on institutions. What institutions exactly? Secure private property rights, security for foreign investments, and a ‘low risk of expropriation’ – the institutions they talk about are those that protect and enforce private property.[4] But not everybody’s property, of course, which is remarkable, as talking about ‘security’ of property and ‘settler colonies’ in the same sentence can only happen if one entirely neglects that the security of Indigenous property was systematically denied (this is not a minor detail, as the settlers’ protection from the risk of expropriation was entirely predicated on Indigenous dispossession).

How could these authors entirely disregard the Indigenous peoples of the countries they focus on? Similarly, how could the Nobel Prize Committee disregard these economists’ disregard of Indigenous peoples? Alas, disregard begets foreclosure; and the awarded authors and the Committee are contemporary epitomes of a very long-lasting tradition. Settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination is after all premised on disavowing the very presence of Indigenous collectives and polities, and in 2024 neither set of laureate scholars departed from this pattern of perception. The members of the Committee said that they now understood ‘differences in prosperity between nations’; but the whole episode may rather have shed light on a consistent pattern of misperception.

Acemoglu and his collaborators are adamant that it is not geography that ensures long term economic development, not the availability of resources, and not a privileged location (again, could it be a relation of domination?), and they state the obvious: that the settler colonies did better than the other ones:

Our argument rests on the following premises: (1) Europeans adopted very different colonization strategies, with different associated institutions. In one extreme, as in the case of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, they went and settled in the colonies and set up institutions that enforced the rule of law and encouraged investment. In the other extreme, as in the Congo or the Gold Coast, they set up extractive states with the intention of transferring resources rapidly to the metropole. These institutions were detrimental to investment and economic progress. (2) The colonization strategy was in part determined by the feasibility of European settlement. In places where Europeans faced very high mortality rates, they could not go and settle, and they were more likely to set up extractive states. (3) Finally, we argue that these early institutions persisted to the present. Determinants of whether Europeans could go and settle in the colonies, therefore, have an important effect on institutions today.[5]

Acemoglu and colleagues received the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on economic history, but they failed to consider history or the economy, and completely and possibly deliberately misrecognise the ‘determinants’ shaping the ‘strategies’. GG well played, but it was never a fair game.

They neglect economics because the settler colonies cannot be appraised as isolates. Over the long term, settler colonial expansion in some locales was predicated on other forms of colonial expansion in other ones. Considering one set of colonies and the other one without appraising their co-constitutive development and interaction is methodologically unsound and misleading. There would have been no settler colonies without the extractive ones providing markets, or a geopolitical context where the permanent emigration of Europeans would be even conceivable. Acemoglu and coauthors also neglect economics because extraction and appropriation were invariably the primary reason for establishing settlements. They fail to mention the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, or to note that expropriated land was an endowment that the settler polities deliberately utilised to promote development, sustain immigration, fund their institutions (including their universities), and further marginalise Indigenous collectives. The settlers got the land, while in the other colonies it was colonists keen on returning to the metropole and non-resident shareholders who got to own and exploit resources. The institutions themselves were not different at all; all colonialisms, including extractive colonialism, developed institutions that protected all colonisers from the ‘risk of expropriation’. Not observing flows of capital from one location to another is unbecoming for economic historians.

But Acemoglu et al neglect history too, as they assume that settlement was always one of the available ‘strategies’, and that extraction was the default recourse only once the feasibility of ‘European settlement’ had been disproved. It was the other way around! As far as the metropolitan colonists were concerned, the settler colonies were established only wherever the preferable option of establishing extractive colonies was unavailable. The English and the French were latecomers, and found themselves cut off from the most profitable colonies by Iberian ascendancy. They settled for settlements because they could not extract elsewhere, as they would have preferred. If anything, the settlements they initially established were aimed at extracting some loot from someone else’s extraction. There never was a real choice between ‘extractive’ and ‘inclusive’ institutions, the colonising powers opted for settlements because they faced constraints that could not be overcome.

These scholars also neglect history because they do not see Indigenous resistance as a determinant (as well, as noted, as Indigenous systems of property). The purpose of their work is to demonstrate a direct correlation between initial settler mortality and the feasibility of establishing colonial settlements with early representative institutions. But their historical data on the comparative morbidity of colonists and settlers is largely unusable because they do not compare apples with apples (sailors and soldiers would die at a higher rate than farmers wherever they are), and their assumptions about ‘institutions’ are unsupported by sufficiently inclusive data (I am using this adjective deliberately, as I expand below). The British colonies in the West Indies, for example, had very early representative institutions, and they were very respectful of property rights, especially in enslaved persons. And the strategy was to build settlements, and the colonists faced very high mortality rates. Mortality and institutions mixed differently there, and these colonies were not marginal, and only in the nineteenth century their relevance subsided. Neglecting history is routine for economic historians.

It is likely that the settler colonies and the settler societies that superseded them diverged from other colonies and the postcolonial successor states for reason that Acemoglu and colleagues did not reflect on. The extractive colonial economies are born in the context of their immediate subsumption in international circuits of unequal trade; loot and tribute aside, even if loot and tribute are significant, they offer commodities that are monopolised by metropolitan concerns, and they purchase articles of trade that are monopolised by metropolitan concerns. The demand is to produce what the metropole wants and to buy only what the metropole allows. Once their economies take shape, once their entire productive capacity is concentrated in a limited number of staples, it is extremely difficult to revert to an autonomous pattern. And by then the wealth of the country has generally been literally shipped away. Is this systematic siphoning not a form of expropriation?

For the settlers it is different. The settler economies are born in explosive ‘booms’ and only later are reconnected to international circuits of trade.[6] At first, self-consumption and an escape, then they reproduce at a fierce rate, supported by massive immigration; only later the settler societies recover from the busts that succeed the booms by relying on extractive industries. They are born autonomous, and it is this foundational independence that proves resilient – the institutions Acemoglu et al are talking about come later.

Finally, Acemoglu and collaborators neglect history because the feasibility of settlement was not determined primarily by the disease environment (as measured by settler mortality), but by the ability of accessing the interior of continents away from easier to get to seaboards, together with the ability of decisively defeating Indigenous resistors. They note that ‘the colonization strategy was influenced by the feasibility of settlements’, but do not consider that it was the ‘transport revolution’ of the early nineteenth century that allowed masses of settlers to access areas that had been unavailable until then, and that it was the ability to industrially mobilise military resources for sustained periods and project force inland that finally enabled settler colonial collectives to enforce a regime of ‘low risk of expropriation’.[7] There is a history to global settler colonialism, conditions changed over time, and Indigenous resistance and capabilities changed over time too. The temperate regions were colonised at a later stage because they were for a very long time the least appealing. Fierce and unsurrendered Indigenous polities constituted for centuries a significant threat of settler mortality, and this threat affected colonising strategies and settlement feasibility recommending circumspection (which determined the low mortality rate Acemoglu and collaborators rely on). A settler colonial genocidal determination increased over time, before generally receding in fits and starts during the twentieth century. Acemoglu et al have no time for this history and read it backwards.

They conclude: ‘settler mortality alone explains 27 percent of the differences in institutions we observe today’.[8] Using specific numbers may look impressive, but how is it that when modern medicine comprehensively transformed disease environments and enabled the deployment of settler colonial strategies in areas that had been previously spared the settler colonial onslaught the settlers generally failed (and yet they did try)?[9] Mortality and institutions were the same. And how can it be that it is an aggressively expropriating former semicolony that has become (again) the world’s second largest economy and global economic powerhouse?

Surely these are questions worth asking, but the most dismaying feature of Acemoglu et al’s contribution (and of the Nobel Prize Committee’s choice), however, is their use of ‘inclusive’ as an adjective describing the settler institutions. The settler societies may look inclusive now, but only after the accomplished elimination and violent marginalisation of the Indigenous polities and communities, a repression that is ongoing. Only after ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation these societies may appear inclusive. By this logic, former president of Uganda Idi Amin’s expulsion of Indian Ugandans looks quite inclusive too. Inclusive? Really?

These economists in 2001 and the distinguished members of Nobel Prize Committee in 2024 inhabited and inhabit a fantasy world where Europeans could do anything anywhere they went and could rationally adopt one strategy or another. It is a world where Indigenous people offered no substantive resistance, where their resistance is not even worth considering against other variables affecting the feasibility of settlement, and where the only limit to settlement was the accident of European exposure to tropical disease. They still see terra nullius wherever they look; they see a world where the ‘whole world was America’ or should have been, a world that would have been better and simpler if Europeans had established settler societies everywhere they went rather than ushering in wretched postcolonies. As if you could really conceive to have the ones without the others. But is a US-centric and implicitly racist exercise in wishful thinking even economic history, yet alone worth a prestigious prize?

[1] See Kate Meagher, ‘Does the Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Signal a Reversal of Fortunes for Settler Colonialism?’, LSE Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Series, 29/10/24; available at https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/126368/1/internationaldevelopment_2024_10_29_does-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-2024-signal-a-reversal-of-fortunes-for-settler-colonialism.pdf

[2] Kalyeena Makortoff, Larry Elliott, ‘Trio of Professors Win Nobel Economics Prize for Work on Post-Colonial Wealth’, Guardian, 15/10/24; available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/14/three-us-based-professors-win-nobel-prize-in-economics-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-james-robinson See also Nobel Prize Press Release, ‘They have helped us understand differences in prosperity between nations’, 14/10/24; available at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/press-release/#:%E2%88%BC:text=This%20year%E2%80%99s%20laureates%20in%20the,or%20change%20for%20the%20better

[3] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation’, American Economic Review, 91, 5, 2001, pp. 1369-1401. The article is available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930?seq=1

[4] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1370.

[5] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1395.

[6] New Zealand and Oxford historian James Belich has talked about ‘recolonisation’. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. I mention Belich’s work, but Shahram Azhar, who has also offered a recent critique of Acemoglu et al, refers to the pioneering work of Paul Baran, who emphasised colonialism’s unwavering rapacity and its consequences. See Shahram Azhar, ‘Daron Acemoğlu’s or Paul Baran’s prize? A critique of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics’, Human Geography, 2025; available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19427786241313267; Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1957.

[7] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1370.

[8] Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development’, p. 1384.

[9] See, for example, Caroline Elkins, Susan Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies, New York, Routledge, 2005.