Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c.1850–1960

How colonial governments in Asia and Africa financed their activities and why fiscal systems varied across colonies reveals the nature and long-term effects of colonial rule.

Ewout Frankema (Edited by), Anne Booth (Edited by)

9781108714297, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 September 2022

319 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.431 kg

This book examines the evolution of fiscal capacity in the context of colonial state formation and the changing world order between 1850 and 1960. Until the early nineteenth century, European colonial control over Asia and Africa was largely confined to coastal and island settlements, which functioned as little more than trading posts. The officials running these settlements had neither the resources nor the need to develop new fiscal instruments. With the expansion of imperialism, the costs of maintaining colonies rose. Home governments, reluctant to place the financial burden of imperial expansion on metropolitan taxpayers, pressed colonial governments to become fiscally self-supporting. A team of leading historians provides a comparative overview of how colonial states set up their administrative systems and how these regimes involved local people and elites. They shed new light on the political economy of colonial state formation and the institutional legacies they left behind at independence.

1. Fiscal capacity and the Colonial State. Lessons from a comparative perspective Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth
2. Towards a modern fiscal state in Southeast Asia, c. 1900–60 Anne Booth
3. Why was British India a limited state? Tirthankar Roy
4. Indigenous and colonial institutions in the fiscal development of French Indochina Montserrat López Jerez
5. Fiscal development in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria: was Japanese colonialism different? Anne Booth and Kent Deng
6. From coast to hinterland. Fiscal capacity building in British and French West Africa, c. 1880–1960 Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
7. New colonies, old tools. Building fiscal systems in East and Central Africa Leigh Gardner
8. Local conditions and metropolitan visions: fiscal policies and practices in Portuguese Africa, c.1850–1970 Kleoniki Alexopoulou
9. How mineral discoveries shaped the fiscal system of South Africa Abel Gwaindepi and Krige Siebrits.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], African history [HBJH], Asian history [HBJF]