"This volume recasts our understanding of the practical and theoretical foundations and dynamic experiences of early modern imperialism. The imperial encounter with political economy was neither uniform across political, economic, cultural, and religious constellations nor static across time....

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but we have little systematic evidence about their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, I show that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within 16 British and French African...