were subject to urban curfews that prevented their freedom to travel. Without
checks the system gave absolute power to European officials:
For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power.
As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as Holland
or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the
next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labour,
ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose what-
ever punishments you wanted ... here one is everything! Warrior, diplomat,
trader! (Hochschild, 1999:136)There was little or no investment in human capital. At the time of independ-
ence in 1960 there were only 30 Congolese university graduates, no doctors,
no secondary school teachers and no army officers (Meredith, 2005). The post-
independence era preserved the extractive nature of the state through its domi-
nant figure,President Mobutu:
Aside from the colour of his skin,there were few ways in which he did not
resemble the monarch who governed the same territory a hundred years
earlier. His one man rule. His great wealth taken from the land. His naming
a lake after himself. His yacht. His appropriation of state possessions as his
own. His huge shareholdings in private corporations doing business in his
territory. (Hochschild, 1999:304)The mixed colonial state: British India
The origins of the British colonial state in India lay in the rise of the East India
Company in Bengal after 1757, which culminated in the British Crown taking
over the sovereignty of India between 1858 and 1947. Per capita income
growth was 0.2 per cent per annum in the fifty years before independence. Net
investment during colonial rule never exceeded 2–4 per cent of GDP. In 1950,
modern industry contributed only 6–8 per cent of national income and
employed only 2.3 per cent of the labour force (Sivasubramonian, 2004). At
independence life expectancy was only 30 and the Bengal famine had just
killed three million people. In 1951 84 per cent of people (92 per cent of
women) were illiterate (Mukherjee, 2007). In an address to Oxford University
in 2005, Manmohan Singh, then Prime Minister of India, argued that the
British colonial experience did have some benefits, including notions of the
rule of law, constitutional government, a free press, a professional civil service,
modern universities, the judiciary, legal system and police, the English
language and the modern school system (Maddison, 2007). In fact, British
colonialism in India contained aspects of both the extractive and settler models
described by Acemoglu et al.
The British colonial government set up many European-style state institu-
tions with an emphasis on private property and checks on government power.
Colonialism 187