Jean-Paul Faguet

And when they left, they basically left similar public administrations and constitutions that were written in a great rush in the late 50s and early 60s that looked very similar to one another. But man, these institutions work in very different ways. Some of them are stable. Some of them are horrifically unstable. Some are actually pretty honest and straightforward. Others are massively corrupt.

But you look at the black and white and it's almost identical or very similar.

Sean, this is about as charged a question as it's possible to ask these days. That's why we pay you the big bucks. So I've got a two part answer to that. On the first level, you know, it kind of is a normative issue.

I don't think anyone really thinks or certainly no one is willing to say out loud that colonialism was a good idea and we should repeat it in the sense of foreigners taking over foreign society, foreign people and pushing them around and making them do things that they don't want to do. Nobody thinks this is a good idea.

And although there are many, so nobody, I mean, you know, academics and researchers working in this field. Partly you can't say it because you'll be pilloried, but also like I would never say that and I don't know anyone serious who would say that in the way that people did until fairly recently.

I mean, you know, as late as the 70s, there were still academics holding forth that, you know, thank God for all of these countries that were colonized by the British and got civilization, you know. People would make that argument. Nobody says that anymore. Now, there is a separately...

a series of interesting questions about what were the empirical effects of colonialism, because it did happen and it had lots of effects. And the best statement, you know, the sort of the cutting edge of the field today is that colonialism was a complex treatment that did a number of different things, many of them bad, some of them absolutely horrific, immoral, etc.

But others, you know, had good effects, like the colonies, without doubt, built some infrastructure. And as between in places that didn't have paved roads and didn't have railroads, as between having them and not having them, it was better to have them. So the process of generating that was awful. And illiberal and abused human rights, etc.

So that's not to say, thank God for colonialism because now India got railroads. No, that's not the argument. On the other hand, you can try to separate what is the incremental effect or the marginal effect of having the railroads. And without doubt, that led to economic integration and lower transport costs.

And it makes it easier to have a national economy than before when these places just operated as separate sort of economic spheres and fiefdoms.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's the way in which the field has moved. And that sort of ties back to your previous comment about Asimoglu, Johnson, Robinson's work and that whole stream. Not only them, people like Engerman and Sokoloff or North, Wallace and Weingast have a major or Besley and Pearson have major books and major streams of research trying to answer questions along these lines.

And now what my co-authors and I and a couple of other people, but literally a couple of other studies are trying to do is is break up this idea of institutions as high level national complexes in multidimensional space that are either extractive or inclusive. We think that's just like way too high level of aggregation in multiple ways. In terms of space, institutions are not only national.

You have a country like India or Brazil or the US for that matter. And there's a lot of institutional variation beneath the national level, right? Mississippi is not the same as Massachusetts in lots of important ways.

And also separating it in terms of dimensions because a set of institutions, you can break it down into the legal system separately from that policing, separately from that electoral norms, separately from that the political party system and its dynamics.

operating within a set of electoral rules, for example, like is it first-past-the-post or is it proportional representation, and on and on and on and on. And so we start looking at particular institutions and how they vary across space, and then we actually come up with very different answers compared to the big extractive versus inclusive argument.

Yeah, and I want to say I'm grateful to Duran and others for the big picture because, you know, maybe quite my view is without that, we wouldn't be having these discussions now. It sort of it brought so much interest to the field that then helped generate data that then pushed people like us to go, well, hang on a minute. You know, what if we go deeper, which is really all we're doing.

Okay, so fantastic. Thank you for that. I love talking about this, and I tend to go on, so you should interrupt me.

So the Columbus sails over and discovers Hispaniola, which is now Dominican Republic in Haiti. And pretty quickly they kind of run out of room in the sense of an empire that can sustain itself. And there's not that much gold there. Columbus dies thinking he made it to India, right? He's convinced he's in the Indies as in Asia. So he never actually realized where he was.

And that kind of ignorance is shot through this whole project for the first hundred years at least. From there, the colonialists go to Mexico and they start making their way down through Central America and they make it to Colombia. And they have an outpost in a place called Santa Marta, which today is an important city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

And this colonial outpost is a little place. It's got about 40 soldiers and maybe... maybe eight or 900 people, Spaniards, who are living there. And the indigenous people that they're predating on are fierce, they have poison arrows, they know the geography and the flora and the fauna way better than the Spanish do.