Comment by tempfile

It doesn't take that many people to perform rent extraction -- you can have an entire country run by one absentee landlord so long as you can pay the local police to maintain order for you. Obviously the counterfactual is not available to us, but the colonial administration presided over the deaths of tens of millions due to disease and famine. Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).