This first concluding chapter discusses the ways that social science literature has analyzed the legacies of colonial rule, and argues that colonial state-building may represent a more fruitful approach to analyzing complex regimes and their long-term consequences. It presents a discussion of the logic of historical legacies in relation to the comparative-historical framework of critical junctures and path dependency. It then discusses the drawbacks to dominant approaches that focus on causal inference in assessing colonial legacies.