British Empire, Colonialism & Slavery: Did Empire Enrich Britain? | IEA Podcast
Join Matthew Lesh, Public Policy & Communications Director at the IEA, in a thought-provoking discussion with Dr. Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director at IEA, as they delve into the controversial question: Did empire make Britain rich?
In this week's episode of the IEA Podcast, Dr. Niemietz presents insights from his latest book, "Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism," offering a critical examination of the economic impact of colonialism and slavery on Britain's prosperity.
From the historical critiques of empire by Adam Smith to modern-day debates fuelled by movements like Black Lives Matter, the conversation explores the economic arguments surrounding colonialism. Dr. Niemietz discusses how the traditional narrative of empire's economic benefits has been challenged, examining the costs of empire maintenance, the profitability of colonies, and the long-term effects on colonised nations. Through meticulous analysis and historical context, the podcast sheds light on the complexities of Britain's colonial legacy and its implications for understanding modern economics.
Timestamps:
00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:32: Exploring the Economic Debate on Colonialism
00:02:16: Unpacking the Economic Impact of Empire
00:03:40: Historical Context and Modern Perspectives
00:06:11: Critiquing Traditional Views on Empire
00:07:28: Revisiting Adam Smith's Economic Arguments
00:08:41: Analysing the Costs and Benefits of Empire
00:09:03: Examining the "Williams Thesis" and Its Critiques
00:11:07: Assessing the Contribution of Colonialism to Britain's Wealth
00:13:08: Debunking the Myth of Colonial Prosperity
00:15:18: Understanding the Role of Extractive Institutions
00:17:34: Lessons from Other Colonial Empires
00:20:36: Impact of Colonialism on Colonised Nations
00:22:27: Addressing the Legacy of Colonial Institutions
00:24:45: Exploring Alternatives to Colonial Explanations for Britain's Wealth
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Do you believe today's UK living standards, compared globally, are primarily influenced by colonialism and slavery? Is this widely held view accurate?
Hard to believe. I read William Dalrymple's book on the British east India company. The company's main business in India was tax farming - essentially governing large regions and squeezing the local population. Using revenues from that they would hire soldiers for their army, conquer other regions and increase their tax revenues. They had a monopoly on international trade in the regions they governed so would trade UK goods very advantageously with the local populace. If necessary they would prohibit local competition - there are examples of such prohibitions from the weaving of cloth to the manufacture of salt. Are they saying that the east India company was unprofitable? Sounds pretty incredible as a claim
Profitable as a company does not mean it was beneficial to the UK in the long run. Damn, I had to amend: I had written unprofitable at first...:(
Well that basically what the contemporary Adam Smith criticized these charter-companies for. It only benefits a minority, not the British Empire as a whole.
@@annepoitrineau5650after destroying native manufacturing industries in INDIA, British east India company started looting raw materials and selling products from UK at premium back to INDIA. This is just one example.
@@martin96991 It is not an example. It is a pattern that was reproduced by most colonising countries, doing this to most colonised countries. So, as I always say: we invaded them without asking for permission, and in many instances, we created famine situations or did not alleviate existing famines (Kenya, China, India, Ireland, to mention the ones I know about) but continued exporting/getting rich off their backs. I will never get over the fact that planters got compensation from the government when slavery was abolished, but slaves and their descendants NEVER got anything. Payback time.
@@annepoitrineau5650 The concept of security of property is fundamental to economic success, and however repulsive the idea, slaves were owned legally. The payments per slave were not really compensation they were a compulsory purchase order by the government, which then freed them. If it hadn't been paid the slaves would not have been freed. It would not have got through Parliament. The import thing to understand is who paid this money, and funded the ships which enforced the ban on the slave trade? The British taxpayer, A very small group of people got very rich from slavery 200, 300, 400 years ago, but most of that money was long since frittered away.
Isn't this missing the point? Slavery and empire made its investors fabulously wealthy. Many of heir descendants are still wealthy and powerful people today. It was never a project to make the country wealthy just the main players.
Of course. Read Thomas Hardy or Dickens - the wealth absolutely did not trickle down to the peasantry or the urban working class.
Some of that legacy was donated to the public, this can be seen in magnificent public buildings in many western countries that's one example, they even built schools
@@briopalumpus8676 The poor people of Britain would far rather have had bread on the table than magnificent public buildings which were after all just vanity projects.
@@rodjones117 Absolutely. Of course, it could be argued that these mgnificent buildings could only be built by people, who were thus getting a job...but they were paid a pittance and promoters/builders were not big on Health&Safety.
And the extraordinary scientific and engineering advances in Britain were not made by the poor!
If you read the Eltis and Engerman article on Jstor on this subject ("The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain"), the slave sugar trade was at its peak 0.5% of the profits of the UK economy. Even saying 2-3% grossly overrepresents it.
I agree with Adam Smith, but see a bigger role for innovation factors. Where slavery and captive colonial markets undermine business investment in productive technology and product innovation, this created a competitiveness limitation. British industries struggled to compete in a more competitive world as former colonies gained their independence.
I have often heard it said that being rich in natural resources is a disaster for a country's economy (but excellent for its elite). It looks like having overseas colonies may have been very similar.
The Empire was hugely important for Britain's cultural and military power. Its reach is responsible for the extent of the English Language and the influence of our traditions. The neccessity of maintaining it justified the huge navy and other military spending. But this was paid for by the industrialisation of the 18th and 19th century, and the degree to which Britain was the great innovator in this. Though its undoubtably the case that some people who had made money from Slavery then invested it in industry, but there is no evidence that it caused it, or was essential to it. The leading figures of industrialisation had few links to slavery, and where they did it was mostly incidental. A large number of plantation owners were the British landed classes, supplementing the income they could get from rents. Many of them found they were sitting on the most important resource of industry, coal. The reality is that industrialisation marginalised the value of the Caribbean sugar trade, particularly when producing sugar from home grown beat became an alternitive.
Perhaps the focus should be on be on personal fortunes and those of the banks and royal houses… which states often subsidized.
Stolen oil money paid for the NHS. Should we give that back too?
He‘s (a German?) totally right on the sudden swing in Germany from an anti-colonial stance to overseas expansionism („jingoism“). In the beginning of that era the German state didnt specifically like those „privateers“ going to Africa in order to „teach“ (Christianity and civilisation) and „extract“ (natural resources). Colonial propaganda was entirely organized and financed by private pressure groups. But, as soon as the fait accompli was made and the „African explorers“ got into trouble it was argued that the state was somehow obliged to bail them out and to protect them militarily. „We cant let them perish“. This, it was further argued, is what any state was ultimately made for. The rest is simply the psycho-social and military dynamics from „protection“ to submission and conquer. Needless to say that after WWI and the loss of all its colonies Germany seemingly didnt suffer much specifically from that loss. Nearly all shortcomings of natural resources (rubber first and foremost) could finally ( by the end of WWII) completely be overcome by technical innovation ( with the exception of oil of course).
"overseas expansionism („jingoism“)" - "jingoism" does not mean "overseas expansion". Apart from this elementary error, your comment barely even makes sense.
British industry had monopolies in all of the empire. You could not get a licence to manufacture anything that was made allready in Britian. Had to be imported. In addition toll was extracted by creating all the trading platforms of the resources that came from the colonies in London.
The development of the financial services industry in the City of London was a direct consequence of empire. Not sure how anyone could argue otherwise.
Watch the Yanks, they're catching up on the City in terms of money laundering, assuming that the Oliver Bullough book Moneyland is correct.
And you think this development is a good thing? look at the state of the economy. It was not a good thing.
Could it not have been the other way round?
The Bank Of England and the National Debt were imposed on England by the Dutch military coup of 1689. Likewise a change of monarchy and merger with Scotland
@@annepoitrineau5650 Who said it was a good thing? The question was did the Empire enrich Britain? Maybe we created the Empire for a laugh?
It should be possible to perform the comparative analysis to compare the profits and costs of running plantations using hired vs sl*ve labour?
Dear gintasvilkelis2544, Tempting thought that sounds as a theoretical project, I'll bet my non-existent OBR pension, that actually trying to (a) identify all the relevant variables and values to feed into both the actual and counterfactual model, and (b) measure the hypothetical outputs of the alternative model, would be nightmarishly difficult, and require massive and dubious, and often question-begging, assumptions and simplifications. Still, anyone doing it, after engaging in heated but usually vacuous debates, could pat themselves on the back, on the basis of another highly productive day in the halls of the Bourgeois Academy. Yours satirically and with love, Andrea
@@andreapandypeterpan4062 The most important part of that analysis, actually, would be rather simple and straightforward, as it would focus on the narrow subject of direct costs and productivity of using sl*ves (incl. the costs of keeping them, since you still have to house and feed them at least, if you want them to last more than a few days) vs. hiring plantation workers at the contemporaneous market wages. I expect all that data to be available and quite easily accessible.
@@gintasvilkelis2544 Dear GV2544 (I hope those are you initials), Thanks. Indeed, I can see the attractive simplicity of a comparison of unwaged VERSUS waged costs of labour. With a few "savoury factors" on one side only, such as rat-infested housing, feeding, buying nre slaves to replace those dead from disease and malnutrition, whipping, chains, insidious moral degradation of the slave-owning classes, the obscene moral costs of treating our fellow humans as degraded property, etc, etc. However, as the later debate in the video shows, the difficulty is attempting to compare (a) the "size of the total economy" in say 1895 (a many factored notion) with several actual factors, costs or inputs being "dependent" on the colonial and imperial system, VERSUS a hypothetical completely free-trade economy, with no such factors. One of the trickiest elements in the latter analysis would be to determine which factors really were in fact necessarily dependent upon imperialism, in the sense that other non-imperial equivalents were not practically substitutable at the same (or indeed lower price). That seems to me a somewhat mystifying counterfactual accounting exercise. What do you think, dear GV? BTW, I'm amused by patriarchal-capitalist propaganda, along the lines of "bourgeois-liberal" rule of law, rights-based, free-market, contract-enforcing, low taxation, Chicago-School, Milton Freeman rhetoric. It's a nice fairy tale to teach to naïve 1st year economics students in Chicago or the LSE. But I also think that no actual current or previous advanced economy has existed without huge military and institutional-backed expropriation of people and lands and wealth, carried out ruthlessly in territories and jurisdictions outside the home-country, and the concomitant imperial systems of naked terror and mass murder. The British got fabulously rich through parasitising India, by inter alia, prohibiting all Indian manufacturers from accessing external markets, and attempting to depress prices, by raising taxes on Indian producers, in order to buy goods from those same producers. UK based manufacturers used British laws, administrative, police and military power to systematically undermine Indian competitors, both in the Indian markets, and in British markets, and throughout imperial markets. Nasty people with zero sympathy for subjugated colonial peoples can get rich very quickly, by pure theft, murder, and expropriation. kzhead.info/sun/mq2zgdyGkZh9gGw/bejne.htmlsi=X7Ouyhrab5fywf_i Americans are clever and ruthless people who lean quickly. Witness the present Yankee Petro-Dollar Empire, a despicable regime of chaos, assassinations, manufactured civil wars, and ludicrously infantile propaganda against bad-guys such as Qaddafi and Hussain, who were previously such reliable allies and good-guys. The GDP of American, and the financing of its obscene, globe-spanning military empire, and servicing the jaw-dropping US long term structural federal debt, are all hugely dependent on the status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and particularly the foundational petro-dollar recycling system. Good for inhabitants and consumers in New York and Washington; and top-brass sitting in plush offices in the Pentagon playing AI wargames; and international petroleum companies; and sly international financiers buying government debt. Not so good for inhabitants in Tripoli, Baghdad, Ukraine, Palestine, Raqqa. Millions of whom are dead, homeless or starving. But, as Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying recently, "Fuck them!" And as the Pentagon planners have been joking, "General Lincoln Hardarse III, shall we supply that stupid puppet Zelensky with the same script and some more anti-aircraft missiles? Or is it time to cut and run on this particular Moscow-teasing little escaped?" Regards, andrea
Precisely why this topic is asinine. There is simply too much empirical evidence refuting the business secretary's assertions. - The Plantation’s Colonial Modernity in Comparative Perspective by Adom Getachew - The Wealth of the Plantations by Trevor Burnard - Enslaved Household Variability and Plantation Life and Labor in Colonial Virginia - Free Labour and the Plantation Economy by William A. Green - 1000s more... HOWEVER, why don't we just completely ignore slavery (just for once) and focus on the wealth extraction from other colonies such as India. The empire included other parts of the world not just Africa even if Africa was one of the most lucrative along with the jewel in the crown!!!
Economic investigator Frank G Melbourne Australia is following this very informative content cheers Frank
Wow, you actually made an effort. That would be helpful not just for those places famously colonized by the English but also other empires, and good example of Spain as a colonizer and South Korea as a long-time colony until recently and their economic situations today, the examples are telling.
Milton Friedman quotes Jacob Viner on this topic but I have never found the source.
The UK would still have needed a big navy (as the US does now) to ensure freedom of navigation for trade even without an empire. The army could have been smaller- but even at the height of Empire the UK army was always small by international standards.
“ if you want to trade with people, just do it”.., Britain spent more on the military because it was policing other countries to stop them gaining wealth from the slave trade. Which would threaten Britains hold on colonies So how was the Industrial Revolution funded if not from slavery? Lloyd’s got its come up from slavery Britain got its notion of being great based on its history of slavery and “ world domination “ that it still tries to trade on to this present day
You ask: "So how was the Industrial Revolution funded if not from slavery?" Britain was already a relatively wealthy country in the middle ages from the wool trade and other agricultural produce. There was also mining, fishing, and the usual artisinal trades. People with money made from these sources then invested in new industries.
@@28pbtkh23 my concern isn’t did Britain benefit or not from slavery. It’s that it involved itself on an industrial scale. Not only that but those involved were compensated for their “ loss,” for which the tax payer has only just finalised payments (2015). In fact it makes it more egregious that such a wealthy country should involve itself in such acts of barbarity.
well first off i feel like we should be pushing rights when it comes to modern slavery looking at phones and clothes and things like this because i personally dont have alot of silk and the sugar i have is not only fair trade but the old stuff is probably gone by now and i dont think most people would have even seen the stuff unless there the upper crust the metal we used in the industrial era is European the work houses were run by English children and the country is in debt maybe if we charged the world for all the inventions and breakthroughs weve done like the internet whats free then maybe wed actully have some money but last time i checked everyone and there grand wants to be in england so whos benefiting from what?
was expecting some figures. sir colin the coloniser owned 5 ships Each ship doing the triangular trade made £100 profit per year. After 5 years he built a cotton mill an so on.
That's nothing my mate Colin got a ladder and started a window cleaning business. After 5 years he was able to buy a bucket. What, exactly, is your point?
He gave a figure of 2-3% of GDP, but said that it doesn't factor in the downside costs, such as increased defence spending etc. Following the money for everyone who made money from the slave trade is very difficult. People tend to focus on the headline examples of smart, successful investors, not the people who blew all their wealth on hare-brained schemes or on blackjack and hookers. They then extend the examples of the smart, successful investors and assume ALL people who profited from slavery were equally savvy. There’s been a lot of research on lottery winners, suggesting that most engage in excessive spending on luxury items, quit their jobs without having a realistic financial plan, make risky speculative investments, and so on. Ten years out, many are no richer than they would be if they hadn't won. I expect there’s an element of this with some of the families who profited from slavery.
@@georgesdelatourThe absurdity of the op lies in the fact that he hasn't even read the basics - cotton was not very profitable in times of slavery and empire. As slaves were freed in the US , profits increased - yet more evidence that Smith was right. Life expectancy in London went up because of the availability of cotton. This stuff is basic economic history - but has been buried by Marxist distractions, gibberish and pseudo-religious lunacy. Also, if Smith isn't right, what kind of message does that give the elite? And, if true, why hasn't slavery flourished in the free world? None of this makes any sense and we should laugh at the cranks who push this Marxist gobshite.
I don't even need to listen to this to know that they will conclude that the business secretary's assertions were correct. It is a far-right think tank/lobby after all. There is no point wasting 25 minutes on it.
Bravo Online and well said This "lecture" from the people who brought the UK Liz Truss
Just as a matter of simple logic. Britain wouldn't have been able to colonize much larger countries on the other side of the world from it if it wasn't already much tecnologically advanced (and therefore wealthy) than them.
From the book Jews and Muslim in British Colonial America For most Americans, the story of their nation’s origins seems safe, reliable and comforting. We were taught from elementary school that the United States was created by a group of brave, white Christians drawn largely from England who ventured to these shores in search of religious freedom and the opportunity to fulfill their own destiny. Recent revisions to this idealized and idyllic narrative have never seriously questioned its basic tenets. So although we now recognize some of the contributions made by Africans to America’s success and feel perhaps a heightened sense of regret, remorse and even guilt over the destruction of American native cultures, we never have had much reason to doubt the basic premise of the story. Our founding mothers and fathers were white, Christian and British. In this work, we present a series of Colonial documents, contemporary firsthand accounts, records, portraits, family genealogies and ethnic DNA test results which fundamentally challenge the national storyline depicting America’s first settlers as white, British and Chris- tian. We postulate that many of the initial colonists were of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish ancestry. Usually arriving as crypto - Jews with their religious adherence disguised, and crypto-Muslims, these immigrants served in prominent economic, political, financial and social positions in all of the original colonies. The evidence in support of this radical new narrative begins with an examination of the British colonial companies organized in England to bring settlers to North America and exploit the natural riches believed to be there. Of course, both Spain and France had already made forays into North America, founding St. Augustine and exploring parts of the coastline as far north as Newfoundland, though their activities as foreign powers are given short shrift in our Anglo-centric version of the birth of America. What is even less frequently mentioned regarding these Spanish and French settlements and voyages is that many of the colonists and sailors were of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish descent. Several of those aboard Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 and famously even Columbus (Colon) himself were of Jewish ancestry. They were Jews or crypto-Jews. One historian of Inquisitional Spain and biographer of Christopher Columbus, Simon Wiesenthal, notes that throughout the sixteenth century the movement of the Marranos to the New World had continued,” and that “after the expulsion of the Jews and flight of the Marrano element, it was the turn of the Moriscos to serve as scapegoats for the ills of society.” The same writer estimates that, all told, Spain lost one and one-half million people in sequence of the ‘purification’ of its population of Jews and Moors. Many occupations were virtually abandoned,” he writes. “Trade, the crafts, and the sciences languished. Moreover, since these branches of endeavor had been the domain of Jews and Moriscos, they had become in themselves suspect. Spaniards had to be extremely careful about entering any of these fields Spanish life as a whole was the worse for these injustices Spain was swamped with fortune hunters from all parts of Europe … but they could not revive the Spanish economy. Just as the irrigation canals dug by the Moors in Andalusia were allowed to silt up, so the very channels on which the country’s health depended fell into neglect.” We document that Spain’s loss was Britain’s gain. Beginning with the initial planning, organization and promotion of the first British colonial efforts, Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors were present as navigators, ship captains, sailors, metallurgists, cartographers, financiers and colonists. Among these we find Joachim Ganz, Simon Ferdinando, Walter Raleigh, John Hawkins, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Hakluyt Sr. and Jr., Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher and Abraham Ortelius. The first and second British colonies in North America, Virginia and Massachusetts were provisioned, funded and peopled by persons of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish descent. Current genetic genealogical studies of the Appalachian descendants of these early colonists demonstrate that they carried DNA haplotypes (male or female lineages) and genes from Sephardic, Ottoman and North African founders. Further, these early North American colonists often bore straightforwardly Jewish and Muslim surnames. Attested are Allee, Aleef, Sarazin, Moises, Bagsell, Haggara, Ocosand and even Saladin. Indeed, given the patently non-Christian backgrounds of so many settlers up and down the Atlantic coastline of the American colonies, it becomes difficult to ignore the significant declarations of religious tolerance inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. Even (and particularly) New York, founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam, was heavily peopled by Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors. The presence of persons from these ethnic affiliations on the governing boards of the Dutch West and East India Companies is no accident. They included Jonathan Coen (Cohen) and Cornelius Speelman (another classic Jewish name). Other New Amsterdam, and later New York, residents were Jacob Abrahamsen and Denys Isacksen. We present contemporaneous testimony suggesting that even the leading Knickerbocker families of the New York colony - the van Cortlandts, Philipses, van Rensselaers, De La Nos and De Lanceys - were of Sephardic ancestry. This fresh look at Colonial American genealogies and settler lists presents for the first time in one source the Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and Jewish origins and meaning of more than 5,000 surnames, the vast majority of them widely assumed before to be sturdy British family names of ancient bearing. Many of our name etymologies plainly contradict the standard reference works. The decipherment of surname history is an involved subject, one that can extend over centuries of transformation in several countries and require knowledge of a multitude of languages. For instance, in order to understand the sea change suffered by the ancient Jewish name Phoebus to English Phillips (and Scottish Forbes and Frobisher), with stages along the way as Pharabas and Ferebee and Furby, one must have an appreciation for the synthesizing religions of the Roman Empire, including the Cult of Mithras and naming practices of Greek-speaking congregations of Jews, as well as conversion of Berber populations to Judaism, conquest of Spain by Berber armies in 710 and subsequent development of Judeo-Arab culture, not to mention the medieval French, Norman, Anglo-Saxon and Scottish linguistic, orthographic and social filters the surname passed through until it became enshrined in modern times as “good ole English” Phillip
How is this relevant to the video please?
A mind-blowing misrepresentation of history - “the settler colonies were hugely successful”, but not for the people who lived in North America or Australasia prior to the arrival of the ‘settlers’. Without even conceiving of the moral aspect of this process… it’s a perspective which is effectively blind to the fundamental truth of the biggest ethnic cleansing process in the history of the world.
Are we seriously invited to consider the possibility that the economic and military power of Britain arose spontaneously from our inherent genius and mercantile success with no consideration of the military aspects of this situation.
I’m not even suggesting that we necessarily sit in judgment over the actions of people from history, and certainly not in a simplistic manner… but I’m deeply shocked that we’re being asked to consider that there was no economic motive for the actions of the British East India Company and the British state. The profits made in the triangular trade were unprecedented, the importance of Britain’s possession of India were widely acknowledged… in large part the colonial countries paid for their own colonisation and any additional costs were more than compensated by the profits from monopoly trade relations. Britain made war to pursue these economic opportunities (each of the Caribbean islands was fought over relentlessly by the European powers, the Boer War was directly linked to the discovery of gold, the opium wars were a direct effort of Britain to force China into an unfavourable trade relationship with Britain).
I’m not suggesting that all of the world’s ills should be blamed on colonialism… but it’s an extreme leap to mischaracterise history in this way. Did Cecil Rhodes engage in colonial activity out of the kindness of his heart or to become the one of the richest, most powerful people in the world? Again, I’m not sitting in judgment at this stage, but to suggest that the motivation for empire had nothing to do with gold, diamonds, raw materials, huge profits and military control over the worlds oceans and 2/5s of the land mass over a period of 2-300 years… well I’m shocked lol… and in expectation of all the vitriolic accusations I’m expecting from my few comments - I’m not commenting on whether this was right or wrong… merely that it happened and that it contributed hugely to the economic and military power of the U.K. To deny these facts is frankly delusional lol
Wasn't Britain the 1st colonial power to ban slavery?
yes and no. 1832 abolition act included an exception clause which allowed indentured servitude for indian workers.
Well kind of but we were the one who went into debt and spent the most in history to stop international slave trading.
Nelson's ships at Trafalgar were built with Irish oak; India's industry was expunged by England's rapine; Bristol, Plymouth and Liverpool were built on the sugar and tobacco trades from the Caribbean; Rhodes named a country after himself because he could; Australia replaced the cost of building prisons following the loss of America; Britain earned millions from the drug trade imposed on China. There were British opponents of the crimes against humanity committed in the name of King, Queen and Empire but they were a minority and were effectively marginalised. The fact that the Romans had slaves (Ottomans, Vikings, Aztecs, etc, etc) does not excuse the horror of the British Empire. It puts it in context but the modern sin is not invasion and genocide, it is the huge self delusion of those British who believe Empire brought benefits to the conquered. To be clear, as the descendant of colonial victims, British imperialism eliminated people, cultures, languages, societies and millions and millions of people. The key differences between the Nazis and the British Empire are only those of timing and scale. The British killed more people but did it over a longer period of time.
Sounds like you are little salty that the English tribe and not your tribe absolutetly dominated the World for the best part of 300 years. Look at it from the Englishmens perspective. We don't care what happened. We won, and now you speak the language of my ancestors. :)
Pretty obviously, having the English language is a big advantage for a country. One could say Shakespeare enriched the world by bequeathing a remarkable problem solving tool to mankind.
Yes but...any other language would have done the job just as well. As a matter of fact, for a time, French was doing it, and in 50 years, it might be Chinese or Arabic.
@@annepoitrineau5650 No, as a native French speaker told me when I was astonished that she had addressed her French business partners not in their native tongue, but in English: 'English is a softer language." Certainly, Spanish isn't capable of 'doing the job just as well'. There is a reason why English went from a local dialect spoken by only a few thousand islanders to the most common international language of all in a few hundred years.
@@patricksullivan4329 No. The reason is the British empire.
@@patricksullivan4329 By the way, by the time English was English as we know it, it was spoken by millions of Islanders :) When these fair Isles were peopled by a few thousand people, they were not speaking English, nor Brythonic even.
@@annepoitrineau5650 Why do you think I mentioned Shakespeare?
Slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833 and the first country to actively oppose it internationally. So it is garbage in these comments about Britain making money out of it. and there never were any imported slaves in Britain. Plus nothing is mentioned about the millions and millions of £s in aid and teaching and logistic services given to Africa by Britain ever since.
Even though slavery was abolished in 1833, you had an exception where indentured slaves from india were still exported around the world.
@@kayn6858The only Indian slaves were by their own people in India, these were known as 'the untouchables' which were regarded as the lowest form of caste and worth nothing to the rest of the Indians - but they had equal rights when the British were there.
@@Comfortzone99 oh yes! They were enslaved but also treated like equals by the british! Typical deceptive english nature.
@@kayn6858India today is recognised as having the largest number of slaves in the entire world? You do realise that British colonial rule was not enforced throughout India don’t you?
Your post is well-meaning but does not take intoo account the duplicity/hypocrisy of international politics and economics. A government can abolish slavery, and still trade/make money with countries were slavery is not abolished. See how some European companies are still trading with Russia, iin spite of the official discourse. Biden remonstrated the Ukrainians for bombing oil plants in Russia for that very reason.
Did it make us poorer?
Why did Britain fight a hugely expensive war in North America in the 18th century? Because it was benefitting massively from the slave based tobacco trade in Virginia amongst other agricultural exports.😊
Did this person not want the compulsory jab? Before that I had some respect for him though like most promoted by the powers that be is no doubt an overrated megalomaniac
.. Britain was the 1st International Drug Barons - Tobacco and Opium..
The British empire was very important. Yes, the way wars are important. It means they had widely felt consequences...It does not mean the consequences were good. They were bad.
Not bad economically for everybody - a very small elite made huge sums of money.
“They were bad”, rather reductive?
@@georgehetty7857 It's a KZhead comment, not a doctoral thesis.
@@georgehetty7857 Reductive yes. In the way that the bottom line of a bank statement is reductive: you are in minus, or not. There may have been moments during the month which completely contradict this final figure, but the final figure still stands. I upticked your post because it is a good point.
@@annepoitrineau5650 Try and imagine, if you’re capable, what the lives of those millions of Africans and Indians were like living under the rule of whichever local chieftain and his mercenary cabal was actually like? It is no coincidence that the nations that continued to live democratically, ruled by law and with capitalist economies prospered especially the Anglophiles. Compare the legacy of British colonialism and its Commonwealth to the alternatives that mankind devised as alternative, Communism, Islamic Caliphates, Dictatorship, Facism, is the penny begging to drop? No political system is perfect but some are more than others!
Only a lefty economist would ask such a stupid question and kick off with a bizarre premise..That the wealth of empire kick starts technological advancement..This is totally back to front..England's invention of the printing press,the rule of law under the Protectorate,the most advanced shipbuilding,the first to establish a canal network etc gave us the means to build an empire..Most of the Footsie 100 is based on companies with vast overseas holdings due to empire..Otherwise London would be a shadow of itself,with a stock market the size of Sweden's and basics like tea,coffee and bananas would be way more expensive.. The irony is such a trade advantage takes good minds away from own grown development but this is not the fault of empire..Which explains the rise of Germany,Japan and China..Sometimes having ashes to rise from helps..An empire is a symbol of economic success..You'll be questioning whehther Ancient Rome was next..In fact the only empire which wasn't was the Soviet one,a system that collapsed without even needing an outside push,a system which you probably still yearn after..
England did not invent the printing press. Gutenberg. Germany.
England did not invent the printing press. That was Gutenberg in Germany, and he had got the idea from China. Some inventors progressed Gutenberg's invention, and some of them were English.
@@annepoitrineau5650 Maybe not but we were the first to make widespread use of it..And Gutenberg did not live in Germany since Germany did not exist until centuries later..The US did not invent smartphones or pcs but they will be remembered for them not us Brits or Finns..
@@rodjones117 You can't say Gutenberg,Germany since Germany did not exist as a state until centuries later..Many of the regions talented people moved to England since the German city states were plagued by the hundred years war at the time..
@@eddiemilne4989 Gutenberg's press was in Mainz, which was within the Holy Roman Empire - one of the Holy Roman Emperor's titles was "King of the Germans". Although there wasn't a unitary Germany state, (unless you count the HRE as a proto-Germany), there certainly was a concept of "Deutschland", the land of the Germans. So yes, you can talk about Germany in this context - Gutenberg would probably have thought of himself as primarily a citizen of the Imperial Free City of Mainz, but he would have identified as German. Gutenberg invented his printing press in about 1440. The Hundred Year's War started around the same time, but did not involve Mainz or the Holy Roman Empire - it was a war between England and France concerning the right of the English Kings to rule France. I assume you are thinking about the Thirty Year's War, but that didn't start until 1618, and Gutenberg was, of course, long dead by then. Before you blunder into these discussions it's a good idea to make sure you know what you're talking about.
When listening bear in mind these arguments are being made by the same Think Tank that championed Liz Truss. Make of that what you will
It would have been interesting if you had someone on who knew what they were talking about.
Could you suggest someone who agrees entirely with your own view?
The IEA is the right wing equivalent of the SWP.
Who funds you?
The money it generated certainly pulled up the working classes in the early 1900s. It built them quality houses, our NHS after the war, and gave working people a decent standard of living.
Slavery and colonisation made Britain very rich. When Napoleon lost Haiti to the slave revolution, the French defeat led to the Louisiana Purchase. Belgium Gongo was instrumental in creating the foundation wealth of Belgium.
I think the sale of Louisiana is much more complicated than that. 1) Napoleon was engaged in a war against just about every other great power in Europe, and needed the money. He really cared a lot more about Europe than the Americas. 2) He calculated that, eventually, the USA would become strong enough to just take Louisiana by conquest. So better sell it now than lose it later. This is the same reason Russia sold Alaska to the USA. 3) Since the USA was then an anti-British power, he calculated that strengthening the USA might weaken Britain. The USA might invade Canada, for example.
And I thought you could only have such a completely self deluded pair on the left.
It is misleading to infer that the state is the primary beneficiary -the early multinational investment houses , the Spanish royal house and the banks were winners.Wealth does not evaporate…ask the Swiss.
what about just one e.g. The East Indian Company making Huge profits from just India alone when their huge profits(surplus monies) were returned to UK most certainly. The monies would be deposited in the banks and subsequent loan out to investors to fund the Industrial revolution. I disagree with Lesh. I call this extraction of surplus wealth made from the colonies. This talk is just an excuse.
Dunno where they're getting their data from. Simply take the Indian colony model. UK made gazillions from taking low cost exports from India and sending back expensive manufactured goods😊
Wtf. Is this comedy? lmao
Imperialism did make empire rich and powerful. It also enabled empire to export poverty.
It was also a drain on resources, inflated prices, sucked in investment money into non-competitive markets and disproportionately hit the poor. Empire made no sense, cost a fortune and killed many - including British soldiers. 'Exporting of poverty'? you can always spin it another way. I'm guessing you not a glass half-full guy - more a glass half pissed in.
Export poverty? Weren't, say African territories already poor before Europeans arrived?
@goo8295 Export poverty? Poverty is the default state. The natives of Australia weren't singing Kumbaya, they were impoverished and can't even use metal tools when the colonizers arrived while nearby natives in the East Indies had a rich history of bequeathing wavy metal swords and intricately forged armor out of gold to sultans and rajas more than a millenium before that.
@@tinyleopard6741 Excuse me, Rousseau was right! The natives would be living a happy and contented life if we didn't colonise them. Also, no one , anywhere, colonised anyone before the Europeans did it! It never happened - ever! Life was natural and no one hurt anyone. Western scholarship showing that primitive life is related to war and death is all propaganda. So there!
@@patricksullivan4329 Africa was very rich before colonisation, underdeveloped via Western standards but wealthy.
Of course ! 41 Tn USD just from INDIA !