Post-colonial Trade across European and non-European Colonizers

As has been established in the literature, colonization has left a lasting imprint on global trade flows (see e.g., Mitchener and Weidenmier, 2008, Head et al., 2010, Lavallée and Lochard, 2015). Even decades after independence, trade between colonizers and their former colonies remains high (Stack et al., 2019, Mazhikeyev and Edwards, 2021). However, evidence of these enduring effects largely comes from studies that cover only a subset of colonial relationships, focusing predominantly on the British and French colonizers (De Sousa and Lochard, 2012, Berthou and Ehrhart, 2017). The experiences of other European and non-European colonizers, such as Belgium, Spain, Japan, or the USA, remain largely unexplored. This narrow focus leaves an important question. Are France and Great Britain representative of other colonizers, and more generally, do European and non-European powers differ in the persistence of post-colonial trade?