WHITEFLAG prices every nation as a sovereign enterprise from a handful of channels: industrial base, human capital, resources, land, stability, governance, debt. This page is a thought experiment that asks one question of that model: what would each country be worth today if European colonial extraction (c. 1500 to 1975, plus the Russian continental empire) had never happened? A counterfactual present cannot be measured. What we can do is use the model fully: move its own inputs on the channels colonisation is known to have acted on, push them back through the model's own arithmetic, and read the result as a range.
| Nation | Model today | Possible present | Δ |
|---|
Click a row to see which model channels moved and why. Values are rounded to two significant figures on purpose; the range spans every swept parameter at its smaller-effect and larger-effect settings.
A reader asked: how can the model decide that the United States would be worth less if colonisation had never happened? The honest answer is that it can't, and this page no longer pretends to. There is no coherent "USA without settlement" for a valuation model to price: the polity, its people and most of its capital exist because of it.
What the model can do is look at its own channels and ask which of them exist only because of dispossession or coerced labour. For settler states those channels are land value (all of it sits on dispossessed land), subsoil resources (most of them), and a small share of the industrial base traceable to enslaved or coerced labour (largest for South Africa's apartheid labour system and the antebellum United States, near zero for Canada and New Zealand, zero for Israel, whose dispossession is outside the classic era and is flagged as such). Those channels are re-attributed to Indigenous and enslaved-descendant claims. The total value on the territory does not change; what changes is who the model says holds it. Human capital is not re-attributed (people's own earning power is theirs), and nothing is said about the value of the societies that were displaced, because the model has no channel for them.
The totals above are not a finding about whether colonialism was "zero-sum". The colonizer side is, by construction, a share (central 10%, swept 5% to 20%) of what the colonised side regains; the rest is value the model treats as destroyed instead of transferred. That share is a parameter, and the range shows what it does.
Absolute figures scale with population and with how the model values each country today, so India and Brazil dominate the total. Relative figures are the better reading: Haiti, Sierra Leone and the Congo register several-fold restorations because the model's own human-capital and productivity inputs for them sit furthest below the never-colonised benchmark. Ireland barely moves because on every channel the model has it now exceeds the benchmark, and the model has no channel for the people the famine killed or drove away.
Published drain and reparations estimates (Patnaik on India, the Brattle report on transatlantic slavery, the CARICOM plan, the 1825 Haitian indemnity) are context for whether the orders of magnitude are sane. They are not inputs; nothing on this page is computed from them.
WHITEFLAG is a research and educational art project. It is not a financial advisory service, a historical claim of precision, nor a statement of any government's policy. This page is a structured way to see what the site's own valuation model implies when colonial extraction is taken out of its inputs. Every figure is model output under stated parameters, not a measurement and not a reparations claim. See the site-wide disclaimer for the full terms.