Was colonial infrastructure a net economic benefit?

Colonial governments and companies built railways, ports and roads with differing purposes and funding mechanisms. A railway can be useful and still have been built for deeply unequal purposes.

The route of a track tells you something about the priorities behind it. Some projects moved goods efficiently while also directing resources toward extractive trade and state control.

Evaluating infrastructure requires asking who paid, who gained access and how alternatives were constrained. The people financing and using an asset weren't always the same.

A useful asset in later decades does not settle the ethical or economic assessment of the political regime that built it. Later usefulness is not a moral excuse for the system that constructed it.

Can we praise infrastructure without excusing colonial exploitation?