Capital travels, templates do not: A directional theory of reverse post-colonial EMNEs’ acquisitions

A growing class of cross-border acquisitions runs counter to the historical direction of post-colonial capital: peripheral firms domiciled in former colonies, including some of the largest, acquire assets in or from their former imperial country. The international business (IB) literature reads these deals as springboards or asset-augmenting acquisitions, or as coefficients on a colonial-ties dummy, missing what is distinctive: the acquirer enters the specific economy with which it shares a colonial relationship. I develop the concept of Reverse Centre Colonial Inheritance Activation (RCIA), a directional component of the post-colonial inheritance topology. Its organising claim is an asymmetry: along the post-colonial channel, capital travels reverse-radially while organisational templates do not. I ground the asymmetry in three mechanisms: absorptive-capacity gaps in the centre, one-directional legitimacy spillovers, and an acquirer-side integration calculus; because it is directional, it is not reducible to symmetric institutional distance. I note, as a bounded corollary, that the corridor also serves as a channel for geopolitical access, allowing firms from balancer states to reach sensitive centre-state assets that rivals cannot. A set of propositions follow on acquirer selection, target choice, performance, and integration, giving the emerging-market multinational literature a directionally specific construct for a pattern it leaves unexplained under rising geopolitical uncertainty.