CDS Seminar Event - The Payback of Decolonization: Capital Expropriations and Postcolonial Linkages

Speaker: Simon Bittmann

Between 1954 and 1998, France's former colonies compensated metropolitan firms a total of close to $3 bn (2023). In a postcolonial world of foreign aid, investment treaties and Cold War geopolitics, any attempts at nationalization in the Global South would be condoned only inasmuch as 'prompt, adequate, and effective' compensation be paid to Western shareholders. Yet, while most of the literature in political economy and international law concludes to a unilateral victory of Western investment law over 'global settlements', an overwhelming majority of cases involved some degree of issue linkage, and were settled before reaching investor-friendly arbitration courts. Hence, we suggest the notions of postcolonial linkages - the density of postcolonial economic interdependencies between a metropole and a former colony - and linkage power - the capacity to tie [capital compensations] to favorable outside outcomes, through strategic linking/delinking - as new ways to think about the power dynamics at play during economic decolonization. We illustrate these ideas through four case studies: Algeria, Vietnam, Morocco, and Madagascar.

Simon Bittmann is a CNRS tenured researcher and Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on the history of global and racial capitalism, studying how finance and capital markets shape inequalities and political change. His first book, Working for Debt (Columbia University Press, 2024), studies how financial exploitation first arose from battles over workers credit in the early twentieth century. His new project looks at the political economy of colonization and decolonization in the French empire, through the lens of private capital. It shows how financial firms shaped colonial exploitation and expropriation, as well as fueled anticolonial unrest from the end of the First World War until well after independence, when economic sovereignty became a site of postcolonial contention.