Abstract This book examines why forced settlement colonies, where European colonists established large-scale agricultural plantations with enslaved African labor, show favorable developmental outcomes relative to colonies of occupation, whose indigenous nonwhite populations predate the onset of European colonial expansion. Both patterns of imperial control were extractive and labor-repressive, yet forced settlement colonies emerged from European domination with higher levels of education attainment, greater postcolonial democratization, and favorable human development outcomes relative to Global South countries that emerged from colonial occupation after 1945. This book explains this paradox by examining the distinctive legal-administrative institutions used to control emancipated Afro-descendants and indigenous colonial subjects in the Global South. It highlights the importance of liberal reforms that expanded the legal rights and political agency of emancipated Afro-descendants and undermined the political dominance of local white planters following the abolition of slavery in the New World. By contrast, the late nineteenth-century territorial expansion of colonial occupation generated extractive legal-administrative institutions that restricted the legal rights and political agency of indigenous colonial subjects following the abolition of slavery. These distinctive patterns of state-building and administrative control ultimately favored the long-term development and postcolonial democratization of forced settlement colonies like Jamaica, Cape Verde, and the French Antilles colonies relative to continental African states that experienced colonial occupation. The book’s core arguments are supported by statistical evidence from more than 90 developing countries that gained independence after World War II, and comparative-historical evidence from the British, French, and Portuguese colonial empires.
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