Ferguson is more careful but commits a subtler version of the same error: attributing post-colonial success to colonial institutions without controlling for what those places would have developed on their own.
On the other side, the crude counter ("colonialism made Africa poor, end of story") collapses a complex causal chain into a single cause, ignoring pre-colonial variation, post-independence policy disasters, and the fact that some former colonies (US, Canada, Australia) are among the richest countries on earth. Both Gilley and his crudest critics are bad at the argument. The scholarly debate (AJR, Nunn, Albouy, Glaeser et al.) is far more precise about mechanisms and careful about what the causal identification can and cannot show.
Ferguson's version is more defensible: the British Empire spread common law, property registration, and trade networks that persisted after independence. Nunn (2008) shows the slave trade devastated trust and social capital, but this cuts both ways, because late-colonial reforms in some territories did build institutions that outperformed pre-colonial alternatives.
The steelmanned Gilley would say: don't compare colonialism to an idealized alternative. Compare it to the realistic counterfactual of fragmented pre-colonial polities with limited state capacity. In that comparison, at least some colonial institutions represented an upgrade.
Albouy (2012) showed the IV estimates are fragile, but even the weakened results point to extractive colonialism causing harm. Second, Gilley's framework cannot explain Botswana (colonized, yet high growth primarily due to post-colonial institutional choices), China (never fully colonized, yet poor until 1980 then spectacular growth), or Ethiopia (never colonized, yet one of the poorest). Third, Michalopoulos & Papaioannou (2013) show that pre-colonial ethnic institutions predict current outcomes within African countries. Colonialism interacted with pre-existing variation rather than creating inequality from a blank slate.
Gilley's article was not retracted because it was politically incorrect. It was retracted because it was empirically indefensible.
Ferguson's more nuanced version (that some colonial legacies, like common law and trade networks, had positive long-run effects) has more empirical support, but even here the weight of Nunn's slave trade research, Dell's work on the Peruvian mita, and the broader institutional persistence literature shows the net effect was deeply negative for most colonized populations.
The real lesson from the Gilley affair has little to do with political correctness. The institutional economics of colonialism is precise enough to adjudicate the claim, and the claim fails on the evidence. Colonialism is a major cause of institutional divergence and persistent poverty. The policy implication "fix the institutions" is correct in direction but nearly empty in content. Telling a country with extractive institutions to adopt inclusive ones is like telling a sick person to get healthy.
Who decides what "enlightened" means? Friedman assumes benevolent technocrats because it makes his column work, not because he has a theory of why autocrats would be benevolent. Bell's book is more rigorous but commits the same error at a deeper level: political meritocracy sounds elegant until you ask who designs the exam and who grades it.
On the other side, the crude dismissal ("China's growth is fake, built on debt and cooked statistics") cannot explain 800 million people exiting poverty. That is not a statistical artifact. Both Friedman and his laziest critics are bad at the argument. The developmental state literature (Amsden, Wade, Justin Yifu Lin) makes a careful case that state coordination can solve market failures in early-stage development. The skeptical tradition (Acemoglu, Robinson, Pei) makes a careful case that extractive institutions produce growth that eventually stalls. Neither endorses Friedman's op-ed version.
Vietnam is successfully adapting many of these strategies now (Doi Moi reforms, SEZs, gradual liberalization) and growing at 6–7%. South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all used authoritarian-era state direction before democratizing. The transferable insight is real: institutional experimentation within contained spaces can unlock growth. Bell would say democracy isn't necessary for that, and the East Asian evidence is at least consistent with the claim.
More fundamentally, the Acemoglu-Robinson framework predicts exactly what happened next: authoritarian growth episodes are real but temporary. Extractive institutions can mobilize resources for catch-up growth but cannot sustain innovation-led growth because they cannot credibly commit to protecting creative destruction. China's growth slowdown since 2015, its crackdown on tech entrepreneurs (Ant Group, Didi, the tutoring industry), and increasing reliance on state investment over private dynamism are exactly what "reasonably enlightened" autocracy looks like once private actors accumulate enough power to threaten the political monopoly. The crackdown is the feature Friedman was praising, not a bug in the system.
Russia under Putin, Rwanda under Kagame, and Ethiopia under the EPRDF all attempted versions of authoritarian developmental states. None achieved China-scale success. The sample of "enlightened autocracies" is almost entirely survivorship bias.
The specific policies (SEZs, dual-track pricing, gradual liberalization) are genuine institutional innovations that other countries can study, and Vietnam's success confirms the ideas travel. But the starting conditions were China-specific, and the Acemoglu-Robinson prediction is playing out in real time: growth decelerating as the economy reaches the innovation frontier where extractive institutions become binding constraints.
The transferable insight is narrower than "authoritarianism works." It is that institutional experimentation within contained spaces can unlock growth, and that insight is compatible with eventual democratization, as South Korea and Taiwan demonstrated. Friedman got the mechanism backwards: China grew not because of one-party autocracy but despite it, through localized pockets of institutional inclusion. The autocracy is now destroying the very dynamism it once tolerated.
