The Institute of
Economic Affairs isn’t exactly famous for being a politically-neutral
organisation. It has an agenda which it vigorously promotes, based around the idea
that ‘free’ markets are the answer to just about everything. Having an agenda
isn’t a good enough reason to reject everything they say, but it’s a pretty
good reason for reading what they say with a sceptical eye. They recently
produced some research
on the economics of the Empire, and it makes for interesting reading. It claims,
on my reading of it, that the wealth of the UK is not to any significant
degree based on its imperial past nor on the slavery which was a part of that
past, but would, in general terms, have accumulated anyway, based largely on
innovation and enterprise. It’s a thesis which is not
universally accepted, to put it mildly. Other interpretations and analyses
are available.
It's a conclusion
which some on the ‘right’ of the Tory Party, such as Kemi
Badenoch, have seized on, though, to validate their own interpretation of
the pros and cons of Britain’s imperial past. But even if, as she wishes, we
were to accept the contentious conclusion that the UK benefited only slightly
if at all, even the report itself notes that that doesn’t mean that it was a
good thing from the point of view of the colonised. As the author puts it, “The
implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that
benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a
negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former”.
A shortish blog isn’t the place to develop a detailed analysis of the
economic arguments; I’m more interested in the political implications for the
way we remember our own history and what it means for identity. As the
author himself says, “The reader will have noticed that we have avoided
promoting any specific narrative about Britain’s (or any other country’s)
history or expressing a view of how that history should be collectively
remembered today. A cost–benefit analysis cannot tell us any of that and is not
supposed to”. That hasn’t prevented Badenoch from trying to use the report
to do precisely that.
For those who want
to cling to the traditional British view of history, it is important to their
political and historical identity that the Empire should be remembered for the ‘good
things’ which it did, rather than the bad ones. For sure, the argument goes, the
Empire might have destroyed communities, stolen resources, wiped out languages
and cultures, and enslaved populations, but look, we gave them Christianity,
democracy and the rule of law, the English language and Shakespeare. And cricket. Those who
claim that taking an alternative view involves ‘rewriting history’ are
themselves rewriting history because, even if it were to be accepted that those things were indeed advantages, they were never the motivation for the initial
colonisation. It’s very much a post hoc rationalisation of a mindset which was
based on a desire for conquest and exploitation. Even if the IEA were to be
proved right about imperialism not being very cost-effective, that would merely
show that the imperialists failed to achieve their aims, not that they were
somehow acting charitably.
It's also a very
arrogant and ethnocentric view of the world. It assumes that the colonised could
not and would not have developed their own systems of law and democracy without
having them imposed by the colonisers, and it assumes that the culture, values
and beliefs of the colonisers were and are superior to those of the colonised. However, presenting imperialism as having been, on the whole, a good thing is absolutely
key to the identity and belief systems of Anglo-British nationalists, and they
feel threatened by any alternative view. Their increasingly desperate lashing
out at alternative views is a sign of weakness, not strength.
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