The history of the world between 1700 and 1960 was characterized by a great increase in total economic product. This growth has been especially large in certain European, North American, and Oceanic countries. Some of these countries conquered other countries and turned them into colonies. This paper raises the question of whether the colonizing countries as a whole benefitted from the colonies.

Certain scholars have attributed the growth of some countries to the colonizing policy. Some assert that the colonial policies have had little or no impact of the growth of the colonizing nations. Finally still others have argued that colonial policies lowered the colonizing nation’s growth.

The argument behind the latter outcome is that groups controlling the governments of the colonizing countries used the resources of the home country to set up colonies that were beneficial to them and/or certain small groups but not to the home country citizens as a whole.

In this paper, I use the Maddison data on GDP and other economic variables to test the hypothesis that the colonial endeavor led to decreases in the total wealth as measured by the GDP of the home country.

At this point I plan to use a Bayesian methodology which is atheoretical in that it makes no stringent assumption about the underlying model of colonizing behavior. It merely estimates a large number of aggregate GDP models to see if the hypothesis of colonizing activity lowering GDP holds under a large number of different assumptions. This method answers the question --- are the results robust.