The Unique Historical Context of States in Developing Societies

Why does a constitution that works beautifully in one country collapse in another? Why did India build a functioning democracy after independence while many states with similar colonial pasts slid into military rule? The answer rarely lies in the present. It lies in history. States in developing societies were not born the way states in Britain, France, or the United States were. They carry the deep imprint of colonial conquest, the energy of anti-colonial struggle, and social structures that no Western theory fully anticipated. To understand them, we need analytical tools built for their actual past, not borrowed wholesale from the West.

Why the developing state is fundamentally different 🔗

In classical political theory, the state emerged from within society. In Western Europe, the modern nation-state was largely the creation of an indigenous bourgeoisie that built legal and political institutions to protect capitalist property relations and trade. The state grew out of domestic economic forces over centuries. Society came first, and the state followed.

The developing state inverts this sequence. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the state did not grow organically from local society. It was imposed from outside through colonial conquest, or it was assembled in a hurry at the moment of independence. As the scholar Hamza Alavi famously put it, in Europe nations were turned into states, but in post-colonial societies states had to be transformed into nations. This single reversal explains much of why these states behave differently. The institutions arrived before the shared national identity that was supposed to support them.

This is the core of what scholars call the historical specificity of the developing state. Its character cannot be read off from a generic model of “the state.” It has to be traced back to the particular colonial encounter, the particular nationalist movement, and the particular social structure of each society.

The colonial inheritance 🔗

The colonial state was unlike anything before or after it. It was not a traditional kingdom resting on custom and loyalty, nor a modern democracy resting on the consent of citizens. It was an apparatus of control, designed to extract resources and maintain order for the benefit of a distant metropolitan power. It ruled through coercion rather than consent, and it never sought genuine legitimacy among the people it governed.

The “overdeveloped” state 🔗

Perhaps the most influential idea here comes from Hamza Alavi’s 1972 study of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Alavi argued that the colonial state was overdeveloped in relation to the society it controlled. To subordinate all the indigenous social classes at once, the colonial power had to build a powerful bureaucratic and military apparatus whose real base lay in the metropolitan economy, not the local one.

When independence came, the new state inherited this oversized machinery. The bureaucracy and the army were far more developed than the weak indigenous business class or the fragmented civil society. The result, in Alavi’s analysis, was a state with a high degree of relative autonomy. Rather than being the simple instrument of one ruling class, as classical Marxist theory expected, the post-colonial state stood above and mediated between several propertied groups, the indigenous bourgeoisie, the old landed classes, and the foreign metropolitan capital that remained.

This insight matters for analysis because it explains a recurring feature of developing states: the unusual dominance of bureaucrats and the military. In India, the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, built by the British to administer the empire, became the foundation of the post-independence bureaucracy. The institution survived the political transition almost intact, carrying colonial habits of hierarchy and aloofness into a democratic republic.

Extraction, dependency, and artificial boundaries 🔗

The colonial economy was structured to serve the colonizer. Colonies supplied raw materials and bought finished goods, a relationship that hollowed out local industry and created lasting patterns of economic dependency. Even after political independence, many states remained tied to former colonial powers through trade, aid, and investment, limiting their room for independent policy choices.

The colonial map was equally damaging. Borders were drawn for administrative convenience or imperial bargaining, with little regard for the people living inside them. This was most extreme in Africa, where European powers carved up the continent and forced together diverse ethnic groups while splitting others apart. Research on Sub-Saharan Africa suggests that the British system of indirect rule, which governed through local chiefs and hardened the link between ethnic identity and access to land and services, left a legacy of weaker national identification and more conflict than the more centralized French system did. The style of colonialism, not just its existence, shaped the state that followed.

The mark of the nationalist movement 🔗

If colonialism built the structure of the developing state, the anti-colonial struggle gave it much of its political character. Nationalist movements had to forge unity among people divided by language, religion, caste, and region, in order to confront a common ruler. The way they did this shaped the politics of the new nation for decades.

India and Pakistan offer a striking comparison. Both shared the same colonial ruler, the same administrative traditions, and the trauma of Partition. Yet India sustained a democratic system while Pakistan repeatedly fell under military rule. The difference is not explained by colonialism alone, since the colonial experience was largely shared. It lies in the divergent patterns of civil-military relations, party organization, and political leadership that each movement developed. The Indian National Congress built a broad, deeply rooted mass party; the politics that produced Pakistan left its civilian institutions far weaker relative to the bureaucratic-military core it inherited.

Nationalist movements also had to manage the religious and ethnic divisions that colonial rule had often suppressed or deliberately sharpened. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims and India as a secular state with a Hindu majority shows how religious identity became woven into the very act of state formation. These foundational choices continue to shape political conflict generations later.

Why broad generalizations fail 🔗

Given all this, why is it a mistake to analyze developing states using theories built for the West? Because those theories assume conditions that simply did not hold. They assume a state that grew from domestic society, an economy that industrialized through internal forces, and a national identity that preceded the state. Developing states satisfy none of these assumptions.

The trap of the universal model 🔗

The history of “developmental state” theory illustrates the danger of one-size-fits-all analysis. The model was built from the East Asian success stories of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, where strong, autonomous bureaucracies guided rapid industrialization. It became so dominant that India was often labeled a failed developmental state by comparison.

But this judgment rested on a mistake about the level of analysis. As Aseema Sinha argued, India is not a single, uniform case. Under the same national policy regime, some Indian states performed far better than others. The real story of Indian development is a joint product of central rules, provincial strategic choices, and subnational institutional variation, not a single national success or failure. Applying the East Asian template directly produced a distorted verdict. India looked like a failure only because it was being measured against a model that did not fit its scale, diversity, and federal structure.

More broadly, comparative work shows that neither a strong state nor a free market alone explains who develops. Strong, interventionist states have both succeeded and failed, and the most autonomous states sometimes turn predatory, using their power against society rather than for it. Outcomes depend on the specific social and political configuration of each country.

Colonialism shaped even the capacity to develop 🔗

The deepest comparative studies trace developmental success and failure back to the type of state each society inherited. Atul Kohli’s analysis of state-directed development classified post-colonial states into types ranging from cohesive-capitalist states like Korea, through fragmented-multiclass states like India, to neo-patrimonial states like Nigeria. He found that these different state types, and their very different capacities to drive industrialization, originated in the different forms of colonialism that built them. The colonial past did not just leave a difficult inheritance; it shaped the institutional machinery that determined whether development was even possible.

Toward a historically nuanced analysis 🔗

The conclusion that flows from all this is methodological. To understand the developing state, we have to take history seriously as an explanatory tool rather than mere background. The historical method insists that political phenomena cannot be understood apart from their specific contexts, and that what works in one setting may fail in another because of different legacies and institutions.

This does not mean abandoning comparison. It means comparing carefully. Recent scholarship on building developmental states in the Global South has put colonial legacies and historical path dependence at the center of its analysis, alongside questions of welfare, industrial policy, and elite political alliances. The comparison between Kerala and Bihar, two Indian states with broadly similar colonial histories and the same constitution but sharply different human development outcomes, shows the value of this approach. By holding the shared factors constant, the analyst can isolate what actually differed: land reforms, educational investment, and patterns of political mobilization.

The right framework, then, is one that treats colonialism, the anti-colonial struggle, and the particular socio-economic conditions of each society as central variables rather than footnotes. Generalizations that ignore these factors will keep producing tidy theories that misread messy realities. Historically grounded analysis is harder, but it is the only kind that explains why states that look similar on paper behave so differently in practice.

What do you think? If colonial legacies run as deep as this analysis suggests, can a developing state ever fully escape its inherited structures, or is it always working within limits set generations ago? And when you compare two countries, how much weight should history carry against the choices their leaders make today?

References

1. https://adarshbadri.me/notes/hamza-alavi-overdeveloped-postcolonial-state/
2. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i74/articles/hamza-alavi-the-state-in-post-colonial-societies-pakistan-and-bangladesh.pdf
3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12595
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263536161_Rethinking_the_Developmental_State_Model_Divided_Leviathan_and_Subnational_Comparisons_in_India
5. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0491.1994.tb00187.x
6. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/statedirected-development/FF2DE2441F160254D72E3815D0FC750A
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1455143