JUSELTRA stands for Justice, Electricity and Transport Infrastructures. This is a three-year research project, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, that will measure the long-term effects of Portuguese colonialism in those three main infrastructural spheres in Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. We assess if colonial capacity-building affects today’s African states’ infrastructural power, that is considered key to post-colonial human and economic development.

Former Portuguese colonies present today uneven levels of human and economic development. They not only fare worse than many other instances of colonial rule, they actually diverge across and within themselves. Why is that? While many scholarly works aim at identifying and measuring the long-term effects of colonial institutions, these do not take Portugal and her ex-colonies into account in a comparative manner. This may be due to the lack of aggregated comparable data on indicators related to Portuguese colonial state’s infrastructural power, both for central and local levels of government. At a time when former European metropoles begin to answer restorative justice demands from their old colonial possessions, we can no longer afford such a delay.

Bringing together experts from political science, social and economic history and law, our project aims at filling this gap by designing a new framework of analysis, by generating new data and by establishing three partnerships that will help boost the social usefulness of our tasks. Our main argument is that colonial capacity-building affects today’s African states’ infrastructural power (SIP) and that post-war repressive developmentalist (RD) policies (1945-1974) were crucial in reproducing or reverting previous patterns of pre-colonial and colonial capacities.

Following a two-tiered mixed research design, combining cross-national and subnational analyses, we assess the extent to which current institutionalist and human capital theories hold in accounting for divergent human and economic development across forced settlement (Cape Verde) and occupation (Angola and Mozambique) cases. We thus wish to know if higher SIP levels on the eve of independence correlate to present levels of state capacity, expecting the former to persist in the long run. This otherwise very conventional approach, while drawing on the assumption that extractive institutions and indirect rule are linked to worse developmental prognoses, innovates in being the first study to empirically measure colonial degrees of direct rule and SIP in ex-Portuguese colonies based on new, still unavailable, archival evidence on state coercion (the spatial dynamics of the colonial judicial system and police structures). Because colonial human capital is a stronger predictor of uneven degrees of postcolonial literacy rates and democracy than types of colonial rule, we will also test whether societal/cultural variables may be driving these trends. However, both these theories fail to adequately explain how unequal patterns of state-building account for subnational outcome disparities. Departing from previous work on RD carried out by our team, we believe that state-led grassroot schemes of securitized welfare distorted patterns of the colonial state’s capacity for delivering law and order and other public goods, which explain district-level differences today.