Our essay will critically survey and attempt to offer an overall interpretation of a growing volume of publications by historians who have attempted to evaluate the costs and benefits for Europe's domestic economies flowing from some five centuries of involvement with empires overseas. That involvement began with the conquest of Ceuta by the Portuguese in 1417 and passed through two epochs: 1417-1825 and 1825-1974. After a first conjuncture marked by the French Revolution, a quarter of a century of global warfare and movements for independence in Southern America, Britain emerged as the hegemonic imperial power in Europe. Its major rivals for commerce and dominion in Africa, Asia and the Americas (Portugal, Spain, France and Holland) ceded control over parts of their possessions overseas to Britain or (in the cases of Spain and Portugal), lost sovereignty over their colonies in Latin America.

Over the 1750s and 1760s, the East India Company became the principal ruler of Bengal. This rise to power was initially achieved by a limited use of military force combined with the clever manipulation of local politics and discontent in Bengal court circles provoked by the young and incautious Nawab Siraj-ud-daula. The Nawaby's army was defeated at Plassey after his most important generals conspired with the British against him. The British concluded a very advantageous treaty with his successor, Mir Jafar, who became increasingly dependent on their goodwill.

The demography of the free and forced migrations to the New World was dramatically different. Between 1500 and 1800 about three million Europeans migrated to the New World resulting in a resident population of about 13.5 million ex-Europeans around 1800. During the same three centuries about nine million African slaves were brought to the New World resulting in a population of only six million ex-Africans.

The historiography of the late colonial era has had a love-hate relationship with the colonial state. In the early years of post-colonial independence, much history was written to record and celebrate the achievements of ‘nation-building’. The founding fathers of independence had defeated the colonial state in their struggle against its oppressions. The old state, now under new management, but with the same boundaries, language and (usually) administrative structure, had become a nation, with an undisputed claim to the loyalty of its former colonial subjects. The task of the historian was to show how a national identity had emerged ineluctably from the bundle of districts cellotaped together by colonialism into a dependency, and how it had been mobilised to throw off colonial rule and create a sovereign nation. Subsequently, as this version of the recent colonial past was undermined by the difficulties and divisions of the independent present, and, in some cases, by disillusionment with its ruling elite, the focus shifted towards the sources of popular resistance in the colonial period. In this ‘subaltern’ history, the emphasis was upon uncovering rural struggles, local solidarities, and ‘hidden’ communities of belief that colonial rulers had ignored, or suppressed but which had played a key part in destroying the legitimacy and exercise of their power. The implication here was that the colonial state was an alien coercive force whose continuation into the post-colonial era (even with a change of crew) had frustrated social justice and the achievement of an authentic post-colonial identity.

On 24 June 1930, the Governor of Nyasaland opened the first session of the Advisory Committee on Education; the Committee had been constituted in accordance with the recently enacted Education Ordinance to replace the Board of Education. He observed that the Ordinance was ‘a radical change in our education policy’ because ‘it does not attempt to control education: schools of any description however inefficient may be opened’.

Using the expression ‘late-colonial State’ obviously induces not only a chronological differentiation, but also some kind of specific institution. Is it possible to show that colonialism changed courses at an identifiable moment in time? If one observes the realities of the colonial presence in French Occidental Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française: AOF), and more particularly in the nomadic zone, a superficial glance could make one think the opposite is true. Nomads of the AOF and the area of land they travel are hardly obvious examples of ‘the colonial development’. The conquest of the Saharan areas was carried out with difficulty, hindered by immeasurable distances, the logistic difficulties of mounting and supply, the ignorance of the routes and wells, and especially the resistance to the French colonial regime from the Moorish and Tuareg nomads. The French managed to impose a lasting peace only after the Tuareg revolts of 1916 and 1917, after the fall of Djanet in the early 1920s, and finally after the pacification at the beginning of the 1930s of the last pockets of Moorish ‘dissidence’, putting an end to the raids against colonial establishments along the Niger river and in Adrar des Ifoghas. French soldiers and administrators initially held a certain mistrust towards the turbulent nomads. This feeling, combined with the apparent economic uselessness of the huge desert spaces they inhabited, makes it possible to understand that the essential efforts of colonial France were concentrated on military aspects and on keeping law and order within the major strategic routes connecting the southern and northern African possessions through the Sahara; routes that in these areas represented creations of major infrastructure.

Since their independence in 1975 the former Portuguese African colonies of Guiné, Angola and Mozambique have been notorious for their instability, while the microstate of Sāo Tome has sunk to become one of the poorest and most debt-burdened countries in the world. The easiest explanation for these disasters can be found in the circumstances of the Portuguese withdrawal from Africa and the maelstrom of the final phases of the Cold War in which these states became embroiled. But are these explanations adequate?

Among the most entrenched criticisms of the record of European colonial rule in Africa is that it discouraged, or actively obstructed, the emergence of diversified colonial and post-colonial economies. Specifically, it is normally argued, the colonial state failed to create the climate in which industrialisation might have been possible. The two basic explanations advanced for this policy of neglect were a desire to ensure that the colonies continued to provide the metropolitan economies with a steady supply of desirable commodities, and a concern to protect the market share of metropolitan exporters. Critics of the colonial legacy, across the ideological spectrum, have often assumed that ‘development’ was a condition which could only be achieved through the process of industrialisation, and that specialisation in commodity production for export could not have been in the colonies' long-term interests. Moreover, in the late colonial period, industrialisation had come to be seen by many as a measure of a state's effective autonomy and economic ‘maturity’, as witnessed by the sustained attempts by many former African colonies to promote their own industrial sectors, often with substantial state involvement or assistance. While it cannot dispute the obvious fact that in most of late colonial Africa, industrialisation was negligible, this paper will offer a refinement of conventional assumptions about the colonial state's attitudes towards this controversial topic. Drawing on examples from British Africa, particularly that pioneer of decolonisation, West Africa, and focusing on the unusually fertile period in colonial policy formation from the late 1930s until the early 1950s, it will suggest that the British colonial state attempted, for the first time, to evolve a coherent and progressive policy on encouraging colonial industrial development.

Les Etats coloniaux, en dépit de leur origine extérieure et de leur imposition brutale en Afrique, développèrent des liens organiques avec les sociétés colonisées. C'est ce qu'ont montré en particulier Bruce Berman et John Lonsdale dans leur analyse sur la ‘formation’ de l'Etat colonial, c'est-à-dire la capacité de celui-ci à être en partie modelé par les sociétés dominées afin de survivre. L'Etat colonial tardif (late colonial state) en Afrique équato-riale française obéit comme d'autres à ce principe, et l'on ne peut découvrir savraie nature qu'en se détournant d'une approche strictement chronologique occupée à découvrir le moment et les causes de son déclin, au profit d'un questionnement sur les conséquences locales et à long terme de cette période. C'est la raison pour laquelle, à parcourir la trajectoire classique des décennies terminales de l'empire français dans cette zone, on préfèrera sonder la mise en place dans cette région d'une culture du politique dont les effets de continuité modèlent encore aujourd'hui les comportements publics.

In Tapanuli, a province in western Sumatra, economic expansion in the late colonial period was frustrated by the problems of transportation in its mountainous and inaccessible terrain. In 1921, Resident F.C. Vorstman of Tapanuli stated in his succession report: ‘The construction of main roads is one of the most powerful means to improve economically backward regions’. This statement is not very surprising in itself, but it does reveal that some government officials had a clear idea of the impediments of economic development in the Outer Islands of colonial Indonesia, and how these obstacles could be overcome. As I will argue in this contribution, the development of infrastructure was one of the major factors in a process of increasing economic integration in Indonesia in the late colonial period. Moreover, infrastructural improvements were more significant in stimulating national economic development than the government policies under the Ethical Policy.

What was the ‘late colonial state’ in India? Purely chronologically, it might be taken to be a period from the 1920s or the 1930s onwards; but this is with the benefit of hindsight. Most writers are in agreement that, despite the political rhetoric of British imperialism in India, it was not until the Second World War that an actual withdrawal from India was seriously contemplated by Britain, with the definite reservation that matters of imperial importance such as defence and economic interest should be controlled by Britain as far as possible. If an acceptance by the colonial power of impending decolonisation is to be the basis of such a characterisation, then it is doubtful whether there was a late colonial state at all. If, on the other hand, a difference in the forms of control and of exercise of power over the colony from earlier periods is to be the basis of the characterisation ‘late’, then perhaps there is more of a case for a use of the term ‘late colonial state’ as more than a mere chronological device.