Volume I: The Infrastructure of Borrowed Legitimacy: Direct versus Indirect Rule, Customary Courts, and the Divergent Bureaucratic Legacies of Colonial Empires

How do institutions survive the departure of their creators? This volume explores the foundational divergence between direct and indirect colonial governance, investigating why bureaucratic capacity varies so drastically across postcolonial states. Replicating and extending Matthew Lange's pioneering work across both an initial hand-coded pilot (N=18) and a full sample of former British colonies (N=33), we demonstrate a powerful, robust negative correlation (r = -0.83, R² = 0.69) between colonial reliance on customary courts (indirect rule) and postcolonial bureaucratic effectiveness. Where colonizers built uniform, state-centered legal hierarchies (Mauritius, Barbados, Singapore), they bequeathed impersonal administrative machinery that endured. Where colonizers preserved and manipulated traditional chiefdoms and customary tribunals (Northern Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda), they institutionalized bifurcated despotisms that crippled postcolonial state capacity. Furthermore, we contextualize this finding through comparative historical analysis of imperial longevity in East Asia, explicitly noting that while direct Tang administrative commanderies in Vietnam formally concluded in 938 CE, the civilizational, tributary, and bureaucratic models they introduced endured for centuries under autonomous Vietnamese dynasties.