The tax haven that wasn’t: Imperial statecraft, capital, and the politics of corporate taxation in the French colonial empire, 1920s-1950s - Madeline Woker

Madeline Woker (Collegium Helveticum and the University of Sheffield) presents ‘The tax haven that wasn’t: Imperial statecraft, capital, and the politics of corporate taxation in the French colonial empire, 1920s-1950s’, as part of the International Tax Governance and Justice workshops.

To register for this workshop, please email Peter Lernyei.

Abstract:

What is a tax haven? What does it take to make or break one? And what role have states played in this process? Historians have so far focused on the Anglo-American world or blatant cases like Switzerland. Instead, this story will take us to the French colonial empire where, by the end of the 1920s, a growing number of colonial firms were transferring their headquarters from the metropole to the colonies with the aim of evading taxation on investment capital income. These transfers threatened to transform French colonies into tax havens. Why was this averted and why didn’t the French empire generate tax havens when the British empire did? This article explores the links between empire, decolonisation, and the expansion of tax havens via an unusual route: that of the politics of tax planning in the French colonial empire and shows that French colonial tax havens could have materialised on a large scale at two critical junctures: first in the interwar period and then in the aftermath of the Second World War. It argues that they eventually did not come into being because successive administrations within the French Ministry of Finance did not let it happen. Broader structural determinants – the relative weakness of the French metropolitan fiscal state in the interwar period and the unwillingness to let international capital dictate French development strategies in the late colonial period - crucially influenced the positions taken by the Ministry of Finance. Post-war dreams of restored grandeur made French authorities much more reluctant to outsource development and let go of state prerogatives. By exploring an unrealised possibility, this article makes a broader intervention in the nascent historiography of tax havens and highlights the role of state power in their (un)making.