Built without us: The tax system designed by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy

This series moves from lived reality to the rules. It asks who the system was built for, who it serves, and who it leaves out. The first article looks backwards—to the time before colonialism, to the colonial project itself, and to the economic and social divisions it created—to understand why the tax system still excludes so many.

Before colonialism, value was not only money.

Across Africa, societies organised production, distribution, and collective provision around mutual obligation. What we now call “tax” existed in many forms. Labour contributed to the community. Produce shared for collective needs. Reciprocity between households and leaders. Obligations fulfilled through kinship and social ties.

Wealth was not measured only in cash. It could be measured in cattle, harvests, land, labour, social standing, or the ability to support others in times of need.

Women were central to these systems. They farmed, traded, processed crops, stored food, collected water and firewood, cared for children, the elderly, and the sick. They sustained households and communities. Their work mattered because it sustained life itself. It was visible. It was recognised. It carried social value.

Then colonialism arrived.

Colonialism did not simply conquer territory. It reorganised the economy to serve the colonial state. It separated what counted from what did not count. It created a hierarchy of labour.

Work that generated cash, wages, exports, and taxes became “productive”. Work that sustained families and communities became “unproductive”.

Colonial rule monetised value. Once labour could be taxed, sold, traded, exported, or recorded in state accounts, it counted. Cash crops counted. Wage labour counted. Mining counted. Formal trade counted.

But cooking, collecting water, caring for children, tending the sick, subsistence farming, preserving food, and maintaining households did not count.

Colonial governments built roads for exports, not for women carrying water. They directed credit to commercial agriculture, not to subsistence farming. They built schools to prepare men for formal employment, administration, and trade. They designed tax systems around the recognised wage earner. They named men as heads of household in censuses and land records. They measured poverty at household level rather than individual level. They overlooked women’s agricultural production. They erased care work from official records.

Colonialism created the first layer of tax injustice. It recognised only the labour it could tax. It built revenue systems around men’s wages, cash crops, trade, and property. It relied on women’s unpaid labour to sustain families, reproduce workers, and absorb the costs that the state refused to bear.

Capitalism divided the economy into two worlds.

Capitalism built on the colonial economy. It deepened the divide between work that generated profit and work that sustained life. It valued labour that produced wages, income, exports, and growth. It devalued labour that produced care, food, wellbeing, and social reproduction.

The public economy – markets, wages, property, exports, formal trade – was counted, valued, taxed, and supported. 

The private economy – care, subsistence production, informal trade, domestic labour, social reproduction – was ignored as a contribution, unpaid as labour, and taxed mainly through consumption.

Women’s labour fell largely into the private economy. They farmed for household consumption rather than export. They traded in local markets rather than in formal commercial systems. They cared for families rather than earning wages. Yet this labour subsidised the entire economy. It produced and sustained workers at no cost to the state or to employers.

Even when unpaid labour became more efficient, more visible, or more profitable, it often ceased to be women’s work. Once it entered the market economy, it became monetised, professionalised, and male‑dominated. Cooks became chefs. Food processing became industry. Care became medicine. Household management became administration. The same work gained status only once men entered it, wages were attached to it, and institutions were built around it.

Capitalism reproduced tax injustice by defining value narrowly. If labour did not generate taxable income, it disappeared from economic policy. Care work never became part of the tax base because the system refused to recognise it as work. Informal labour remained excluded from labour protections but included in consumption taxes. Women paid tax when they bought food, fuel, soap, sanitary products, and school supplies – even when they earned little or no income themselves.

In countries with joint taxation systems, the household’s income was assumed to belong to the male breadwinner. A married woman’s earnings were added to her husband’s income and taxed at the higher rate that applied to the household as a whole. Women faced a financial penalty for entering paid work. Their income pushed the household into a higher tax bracket.

Patriarchy confined women to the private sphere.

Patriarchy gave men greater access to public space, property, wages, authority, and decision‑making. It confined women to private space, unpaid care, and economic dependence.

Europe brought its own social model: men worked for wages outside the home; women stayed inside, performed unpaid care, and depended on men’s income. This model was never true for most African women, who had always worked in fields, markets, and homes. But colonial governments imposed it through law, taxation, education, land rights, and employment policy.

The female caregiver / male breadwinner model became a tool of control. Men became the recognised workers, taxpayers, property owners, and heads of household. Women became invisible dependants – even when they were working constantly.

Patriarchy reinforced tax injustice by excluding women from power. Men dominated the spaces where tax laws were written, budgets were set, and resources were allocated. Men controlled land, inheritance, credit, and income. Women carried out the labour that sustained families and communities, but they had little influence over the decisions that shaped public spending and tax policy.

The capitalism and patriarchy splits worked together. They still do  

Capitalism benefits from patriarchal ideas. They justify paying women less. They expect women to do unpaid care work. They treat women’s labour as secondary. Patriarchy benefits from capitalism. Economic dependence keeps women subordinate. A woman with no independent income has less power in the household, less power in the community, less power before the state.

Colonialism enabled both. Colonial powers seized land, labour, minerals, and crops from India, Uganda, Congo, and across the Caribbean and the Americas. Colonised peoples provided cheap labour and raw materials. Profits flowed back to Europe. These were the first illicit financial flows. They persist today.

Women’s unpaid labour at home – raising children, cooking, cleaning, caring for workers – helped sustain the colonial workforce without being paid. That unpaid labour made capitalism more profitable. It still does.

The architecture of extraction was built to last.

Colonial taxes forced men into wage labour; women’s work remained invisible. 

The female caregiver / male breadwinner model was written into law. 

Joint taxation assumed a household with one earner and one dependent. 

Property rights were given to men. 

The household became the tax unit – but households are not neutral.

A household can appear non‑poor while the woman inside it has no independent income. 

It can appear food secure while the woman eats last. 

It can appear to have resources while she has no control over them.

When systems focus only on the household, they hide inequality within it. That was by design.

The prevailing tax injustice is the inheritance that continues

Today’s tax policies did not emerge from a clean slate. They were built on colonial foundations, on capitalist valuations, on patriarchal assumptions.

Who decides what is taxed? 

Who decides who counts? 

Who writes the laws? 

Who benefits from the exemptions, the loopholes, the priorities? 

Who is protected by the system? 

Who is punished by it? 

Who is expected to absorb the cost when the system fails?

The answers are rooted in this history.

Joint taxation still penalises second earners in some countries. 

Informal work is still treated as an exception rather than the norm. 

Care work is still invisible in GDP, in budgets, in tax law. 

The taxpayer is still imagined as formal, male, salaried, documented.

The majority is not the exception. 

The majority is the woman in the market, the woman on the farm, the woman who carries water and cares for children and stretches a shilling until it breaks.

The questions we carry forward

Who was the system built for? Who is it still built for? 

Why does unpaid care work remain invisible in tax law? 

Why do tax systems still penalise second earners and ignore informal workers? 

Who benefits from the silence around care? 

Who is expected to absorb the cost when the system fails?

These are not historical questions. 

They are the questions this series will answer.

The system was built without us. It can be rebuilt with us in mind.

The next articles will trace how this inheritance is reproduced – in tax policy, in taxation laws, in the way taxes are administered and enforced. They will show the line from colonial census forms to contemporary taxpayer registers, from the male breadwinner model to the unpaid care burden, from the household tax unit to the informal worker who is taxed but never counted.

The work continues.

Next: Tax Policy and Law Making – Who writes the rules today, and who is left out?