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Fiscal Capacity and Dualism in Colonial States: The French Empire 1830–1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2021

Denis Cogneau Open the ORCID record for Denis Cogneau [Opens in a new window] ,
Yannick Dupraz  and
Sandrine Mesplé-Somps
Denis Cogneau
Affiliation:
Professor, Paris School of Economics, IRD, EHESS, 48 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris, France. E-mail: denis.cogneau@psemail.eu.
Yannick Dupraz
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. E-mail: yannick.dupraz@ucd.ie.
Sandrine Mesplé-Somps
Affiliation:
Senior Researcher, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, UMR LEDa, DIAL. E-mail: sandrine.mesple-somps@ird.fr.
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Abstract

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830–1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 441 - 480
Copyright
© The Economic History Association 2021

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Footnotes

This work was made possible thanks to the funding of the French National Agency for Research (ANR), Project Afristory ANR-11-BSHS1-006, and EUR grant ANR-17-EURE-0001. Supplementary funding from Cepremap was also very useful. We are grateful to Cédric Chambru, Anna Peixoto-Charles, Ariane Salem, Manon Falquerho, Cyprien Batut, Quynh Hoang, and Björn Nilsson for excellent research assistance. We thank Elise Huillery for participation in the kickoff of the collection effort. Jean-Pascal Bassino was kind enough to give us access to his data on Indochina. We thank Gareth Austin, Guillaume Daudin, James Fenske, Ewout Frankema, Leigh Gardner, Bishnupriya Gupta, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, Elise Huillery, Sylvie Lambert, Peter Lindert, Eric Monnet, Alexander Moradi, and Thomas Piketty for their helpful comments, as well as conference and seminar participants at WEHC Kyoto (2015) and Boston (2018), and at Aix-Marseille School of Economics, Universities Bocconi, Bordeaux-IV, Carlos III, Delhi School of Economics, Groningen, Keele, Manchester, NES Moscow, NYU Abu Dhabi, Oxford, Paris-X Nanterre, Sussex, and Warwick. We also thank the editors William J. Collins and Eric D. Hilt, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

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