The establishment of colonial elites

The establishment of colonial elites Professor Erik Green discusses research on the formation and persistence of colonial elites, highlighting unique historical data from the Cape Colony to analyze how economic and political elites emerged and evolved. It is widely recognized that high concentrations of economic and political power hinder long-term economic development in the Global South. This is a central message in the work of the 2024 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) – as well as in the contributions of many others (Amsden & DiCaprio, 2012; Robinson, 2012; Alfani, 2023). This literature often identifies European colonialism as a root cause of the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few. Despite this recognition, systematic quantitative analyses of the formation, persistence, and transformation of economic and political elites in European colonies remain limited. This gap largely reflects the scarcity of detailed, long-term data on these processes.