Thread by @ShahramAzhar

🧵1/5 Acemoglu or Paul Baran’s Prize?

Acemoglu’s argument on settler versus non-settler colonialism was first presented, in almost the same language, by the Marxist economist Paul Baran decades before the publication of AJR 2002 in his book The Political Economy of Growth.

Baran argues that the divergence between colonies such as US/Australia versus colonies in Africa/Asia has to be sought in the fact that in the former case “Western Europeans…. SETTLED in those areas..” (pg 273).

In contrast, Baran continues, in Asia/Africa, the “climate and natural environment” were different. In other words, AJR’s story is IDENTICAL to the story first presented by Paul Baran. But there IS a key difference:

In contrast to the original Baran story, where EXTRACTION (the verb) of the SURPLUS by imperialist colonizers is the cause of underdevelopment, in its AJR form the argument is turned on to its head: it is a NOUN (extractive state) not the verb (extraction) that is to be blame.

Baran’s story is one of CONFLICT. His argument is that where European colonizers faced resistance from an EXISTING state, they had a higher mortality, and hence decided to create “extractive” states. In places where they could easily wipe out the indigenous population=>neo europe

This is best demonstrated by the befitting critique of AJR by David Albouy’s 2012. Here, Albouy zoomed into the data used by AJR to construct “settler mortality”. To his shock, Albouy discovered that many data points in AJR were not settler but SOLDIER mortality rates

Obviously, a SOLDIER mortality rate story provides a befitting confirmation of the ORIGINAL story first presented by Paul Baran- a contribution that, till this date, remains UN-CITED and UN-recognized by AJR. Maybe, today is the day to remember Paul Baran.