Fiscal Capacity and Dualism in Colonial States: The French Empire 1830-1962

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were
they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in
the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival
sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-
1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were underadministered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a
strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in
fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.