Persistence or Reversal of Fortune? Early State Inheritance and the Legacies of Colonial Rule*

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329217704431
• Author: Roberto Stefan Foa
• Date: 01 June 2017
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329217704431

Politics & Society

2017, Vol. 45(2) 301 –324

© 2017 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329217704431

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Special Issue Article

Persistence or Reversal

of Fortune? Early State

Inheritance and the Legacies

of Colonial Rule*

Roberto Stefan Foa

University of Melbourne

Abstract

This article assesses the relative merits of the “reversal of fortune” thesis, according

to which the most politically and economically advanced polities of the precolonial

era were subject to institutional reversal by European colonial powers, and the

“persistence of fortune” view, according to which early advantages in state formation

persisted throughout and beyond the colonial era. Discussing the respective

arguments, the article offers a synthesis: the effect of early state formation on

development trajectories was subject to a threshold condition. Non-European states

at the highest levels of precolonial political centralization were able to resist European

encroachment and engage in defensive modernization, whereas states closest to, yet

just below, this threshold were the most attractive targets for colonial exploitation.

Since the onset of decolonization, however, such polities have been among the first

to regain independence and world patterns of state capacity are increasingly reverting

to those of the precolonial era.

Keywords

colonialism, state formation, state capacity, decolonization, precolonial legacies,

institutions, defensive modernization

Corresponding Author:

Roberto Stefan Foa, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010,

Melbourne, Australia.

Email: roberto.foa@unimelb.edu.au

*This special issue of Politics & Society titled “The Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies”

features an introduction and four papers that were presented as part of a workshop held at The Ohio

State University, April 2016, organized by Marcus Kurtz and Jan Henryk Pierskalla.

704431PASXXX10.1177/0032329217704431Politics & SocietyFoa

research-article2017

302 Politics & Society 45(2)

Among the best-known theses concerning the effect of colonial rule on patterns of

political and economic development is that of the “reversal of fortune,” according to

which the most urbanized and centralized non-European polities at the start of the

modern era, such as the Inca and Aztec Empires, Bengal, or the Malacca Sultanate,

subsequently became the most underdeveloped as a result of Western colonialism.

Building on the arguments of world-systems and dependency theorists, for example,

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson argue that coercive labor institutions and natural

resources made centralized polities attractive to European powers: they could subse-

quently be turned into extractive colonies for the purpose of securing rents from min-

ing, slaving, and tax farming.1 By contrast, the more sparsely populated territories of

Australasia, Northern America, and the African Cape offered fewer possibilities for

labor-extractive practices and were instead made into centers of settlement, inheriting

European political and economic institutions. In this way the most powerful empires

outside Europe on the eve of the modern age became peripheral zones of the world

economic system, whereas formerly marginal territories in the Americas and Antipodes

became linked to its core and sites of productive growth.

However, in recent years a contrasting argument, which we might call the “persis-

tence of fortune” thesis, has maintained that the most centralized non-European states of

the early modern era were the most likely to resist European encroachment, undergo

defensive modernization, and experience “catch-up” growth in the late twentieth cen-

tury, citing Japan, China, and Turkey as examples.2 Historical studies including Michael

Mann’s Sources of Social Power, Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, and Francis

Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order argue that non-European powers such as China

and the Ottoman Empire were the first to implement measures such as military conscrip-

tion or merit-based examination, whereas Japan after the Meiji Restoration offered a

path to defensive modernization subsequently taken up by other Asiatic powers, linking

with an earlier literature on the developmental state.3 Advocates of the “persistence”

view point out that the countries experiencing the fastest rates of economic growth in the

era following decolonization were almost universally non-European states with long

state histories, capable of implementing policies of state-directed development, many of

whom, including Thailand, China, or Iran, had already resisted attempts at European

colonization. The persistence of fortune argument thus contends that non-European

powers that entered the modern age strongest also left it the strongest.

These “reversal” and “persistence” arguments would appear to generate flatly

contradictory expectations regarding the relationship between political development

in the early modern era and the strength of political institutions today. According to

the reversal view, areas of the world that hosted centralized empires at the start of

the modern era should now contain the poorest and most fragile states; according to

the persistence view, such areas should today contain politically integrated and high

capacity regimes. That both persistence and reversal arguments are supported by

rich historical, sociological, and economic literatures only makes the contradiction

more acute.

This article attempts a reconciliation by arguing that each is correct—subject to a

threshold condition. If a non-European polity had sufficient state capacity at the start