Colonialism as If the Colonized Matter: Professor Acemoglu and the Ainu
J. Mark Ramseyer
Abstract
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson posit that colonizing countries promoted growth in places where their citizens planned to live by introducing rational economic and legal institutions. By contrast, where they faced high mortality rates, they introduced only “extractive” legal institutions. They took what they could and left. The former places thrived; the latter failed.
All this attributes economic performance to the colonizers rather than the colonized. Less tactfully, it denies the colonized (whether the indigenous groups in the U.S., the Inuit to the north, the Australian aboriginals—or the Japanese Ainu), their agency. Disproportionately, Acemoglu, et al.’s countries with high settler mortality rates were places that had only recently made the transition from hunter-gatherer economies to settled agriculture, if they had made it at all. Unlike agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers generally lack a sense of private ownership over the most obvious capital asset—land. Without legal title to that capital asset, they have little reason to defer gratification and invest in it. For the most part, they also fight each other at rates generally unseen among agricultural societies. With no tradition of legal ownership or long-term investments in land, but with chronic and lethal violence, Acemoglu, et al.’s high- mortality-rate communities would not have been able effectively to exploit rational legal institutions anyway.
I illustrate (only illustrate; not claim to prove) this intuition with an example outside of the (perhaps excessively debated) range of Canada, the U.S., or Australia. Instead, I take the example of the Japanese Ainu. As of the mid-19th century, most Japanese lived either in settled agricultural communities or in booming commercial cities. The hunter-gatherer Ainu, however, lived in the northern-most island of Hokkaido. When the Japanese government introduced western legal institutions at the turn of the century, it applied the new rules both to the agricultural and commercial regions outside of Hokkaido and to the hunter-gatherer communities within Hokkaido. Over most of Japan, men and women quickly learned to exploit the opportunities presented by the new legal system. In Hokkaido, the Ainu failed to do any of that. Contrary to the stories told by western scholars who try so hard to shut down discussion of failure among indigenous groups, the Ainu simply intermarried with the other Japanese and disappeared. The innovation and investment that would eventually transform Hokkaido came instead with immigrants from the rest of Japan.
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Author information:
J. Mark Ramseyer
Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard Law School
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Recommended citation:
J. Mark Ramseyer, Colonialism as If the Colonized Matter: Professor Acemoglu and the Ainu, 1 Indep. L.J. 153 (2026)