The 1950s and 1960s was also the era of decolonisation, as many Asian and African colonies of the British, French and other European empires fought for, and achieved, independence. The proliferation of offshore tax havens just as the colonial empires were coming undone was no coincidence. Many Europeans in the colonial world, especially those who owned land, farms, factories and other enterprises, began fretting about what the end of white rule would mean for their business interests and personal wealth. After decades of coercive and violent European conquest and colonialism, European elites feared that vengeful new leaders might impose taxes and restrictions on their business activity, investments and capital movements after independence. Worse, the new leadership could expropriate and nationalise European property without compensating its former owners.
Savvy and well-connected, the better-off among the European colonists decided not to leave matters to chance. Lawyers and bankers in London, Nairobi and Nassau eagerly rushed to help. White Britons and other Europeans with colonial investments and property liquidated their assets – assets previously extracted from the land and labour of their colonised subjects – and, where possible, sent the proceedings abroad. An enormous outflow of money from the late colonial world began – much of it fuelling the expansion of tax-haven business.
White settlers in the British colonies of Kenya and Rhodesia began sending funds to the Bahamas and the Channel Islands, thus contributing to the growth of tax-haven activity there. Often, former colonial officials and businessmen not only sent their money to low-tax jurisdictions but decided to settle there themselves: in the early 1960s, affluent Britons retreating from empire settled in Jersey, while later in the decade, Malta, another tax haven to emerge from the folds of the British empire, sought to attract imperial returnees as permanent settlers through special tax incentives.
Similar developments unfolded in other European empires. In the French empire, it was above all the sizeable settler colonies of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria that sent money to tax havens. Wealthy Frenchmen had for centuries relied on Swiss bankers to conceal their riches from prying tax authorities and revolutionary fervour alike. During the years of decolonisation, former residents of French colonies and investors in the empire quietly moved their liquid funds to low-tax Switzerland, and some, like their counterparts in the British empire, chose to relocate entirely to a tax haven, in this case, Monaco. The tiny principality had seen some small-scale tax-haven activity in the interwar years, but really took off in the 1950s, partly as a result of funds and settlers from French North Africa and Indochina.