There is a fascinating passage in Antony Beevor’s Berlin where he describes the bemusement experienced by Soviet soldiers when they entered Germany proper, and discovered how rich the Germans were. Beevor describes this bemusement turning rapidly to anger, as the Soviets began to ask themselves why a nation that was so much richer than them would want to invade them at all. Why didn’t they just stay home and enjoy their riches? Beevor even ascribes some of the Soviet soldiers’ furious treatment of German civilians (especially women) to their response to this discovery.
I am travelling at the moment, and my travels start with Swiss and Germany. Obviously the Swiss are fantastically wealthy, but when I enter Germany I am always struck by how staggeringly rich Germans are. I don’t mean in the sense that there are a lot of obviously fantastically wealthy people with a million ferraris; rather, the average German is just stupidly wealthy. Furthermore, their infrastructure is stupidly modern: trains are gleaming and new, cars are silent modern things, hotels are well-appointed and modern, farms are always well built and have the latest stuff. Everyone has solar panels. This is a nation not only of private wealth but of public investment. This is particularly interesting because Germany is cheaper than Switzerland or the UK – the price of living is really low – but it’s really obvious that the country is not doing badly despite this.
My next stage in my travels will be London. London is so remarkably different from either Berlin or rural southern Germany, where I am currently staying. It is filthy, rundown and seething with discontent. Nothing works properly, the infrastructure is crumbling, and very few people take any pride in either the service they provide or in the way their nation treats strangers. The contrast from Germany is remarkable – even though the price of living in the UK is much, much higher. How can it be that a nation of such historical greatness can be so decrepit in comparison to Germany?
Many leftists wish to blame all of this on Margaret Thatcher, but this isn’t really a tenable argument. For starters, the UK had serious economic problems before Thatcher (see e.g. the three-day week), and it had a long period of Labour rule after Thatcher, during which it could have fixed some of Thatcher’s worst excesses. Not to mention that Germany has had its share of economic troubles, backward-looking leaders, and of course the need to absorb all of East Germany. Furthermore, Britain has highly valuable resources – oil and gas – that Germany lacks. It’s also unusual for a country’s entire economic troubles to be linked to just one leader – they tend to be more systemic than that – and other nations like Japan and Australia have also had serious economic problems, but still seem wealthier than the UK. So what is it?
Looking around Europe, I note that among the five big ex-colonial powers, only two are still doing well. The five big powers are the UK, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. If we add in Italy for its African possessions, we have a pretty low rate of economic success for the ex-colonialists. Meanwhile the nations of northern Europe that weren’t colonists are doing very well, as is Japan. (Note that here, by “the colonial powers” I don’t include those nations such as Japan and Germany that tried it for a few years and failed – I mean only those nations who held colonies long enough to benefit from them). I guess some would argue that France is doing okay, but I’m not convinced. But the UK, Spain and Italy are obviously in huge economic trouble. I don’t think that this can be sleeted home to the welfare state – Germany, Japan and the Scandinavians all have excellent welfare states, but they’re much better off than the UK. It also isn’t due to that old British canard, “diversity” – Australia and Germany are actually just as diverse as (or more diverse than) the UK.
I think it might be that colonialism creates a kind of resource curse – nations with large colonies they can exploit don’t bother building up the cultural, economic and political attitudes necessary to be economically successful in the modern world. They stagnate under the influence of colonialism’s apparently beneficial balm. I remember in reading A.N. Lee’s the Victorians that he tries to understand how it is that the UK never experienced the revolutions and civil wars of Europe, and he mentioned one possible reason was the ability to loot Ireland and India. In this version of history, the Irish famine was partly brought about by the need of the British ruling class to subsidize British food supplies, to ensure the poor didn’t revolt. I think Beevor points out that India suffered huge famines in world war 2 as the British exported as much food as possible to the UK. George Orwell notes this phenomenon as well, and in Burmese Days his lead character gives an anti-colonial diatribe in which he points out that the UK basically set India up as a captive market, preventing any industrial competition on the sub-continent in order to ensure that British industrialists had somewhere to sell their products[1].
By way of comparison, Germany and Japan have had a couple of revolutions and, in the absence of either colonies or resources, have had to develop a strong industrial base and a society built around competing with the rest of the world. They have the advantage of having populations large enough to support internal markets and a solid industrial policy – but so does the UK. The difference is that they have never been in a position to decide it’s all too hard and resort to stealing from foreign territories. The economic model the UK worked on until the 1950s was a pretty successful one – you have a small group of people willing to do dirty work, who ensure a regular supply of money to the government by ripping off people who have no power to resist. Such a system is a very tempting way of avoiding facing deep structural problems in your economy, and an excellent way of buying off your poorest class but when the system collapses you find yourself in very difficult economic circumstances[2]. And I think that might partly explain the problems that the UK, Portugal, Spain and France are facing – for too long they were able to belay their economic challenges onto others, and loot weaker nations to plug economic gaps of their own. Since the 1950s the UK’s colonial empire has rapidly unwound, with the jewel in the crown (India) lost in the 1940s. The result is that all those structural problems that were previously being prevented by colonial money have come to the fore, and increasingly desperate attempts to solve them have all come to naught. My favourite example of this zeitgeist is the museum of the crown jewels in the Tower of London: it houses a fantabulous display of colonial bling, showcasing the rapacious powers of the British Empire, but when you get to the end you are confronted with a request to donate to maintain the thing – because the British government no longer has the cash to properly fund its public sector.
Japan and Germany learnt through hard and bitter experience that the colonial powers weren’t going to welcome any new colonial projects in the 20th century, but Japan’s horrible acts and horrible end led directly to the unraveling of the colonies. And when those colonies unwound, I think that Germany, Japan and the other rich non-colonial nations (like Australia and Canada) were in a much better position to face the new world order that resulted. The UK will continue to be unable to adapt to the new world while its politicians, public intellectuals and even its general public are unable to face the true history and legacy of colonialism. Of course, facing this legacy isn’t going to be enough in and of itself – the UK needs to find a way to dig itself out of its economic troubles. I don’t think they will, and instead they’ll be left reflecting on past colonial glories as they slowly slide into the ranks of the low-income countries. Eventually their old colonial possessions will surpass them, and the cycle of colonial history will be complete.
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fn1: the lead character of that book is a racist, sexist puppy murderer, so make your own judgments about whether you think they have much worthwhile to say about politics.
fn2: any similarity to Tony Blair’s plan to finance welfare through the finance industry is purely coincidental, I’m sure
Compromise and Conceit 
February 16, 2014 at 7:56 am
Hmmm. I’m not sure it’s as simple as “Karma gets you for your colonialist arrogance” (to sum up two pages of thought into a pithy TL;DR for internet consumption).
Looking at where the nations are now, Germany and Japan are both export focused economies with strong social welfare safety nets. Both produce high value goods and have a reputation for excellence/quality. Australia is an export focused resource provider which has a small enough population that the resource sector isn’t totally oversupplied with bodies. The other nations (UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc) have poor reputations for quality and no longer support significant manufacturing for export markets, they also don’t have massive resources compared to population.
Simplistically, I’d say those factors (quality, exports and resources) define the current circumstances each nation finds itself in. But I can’t see a clear line from colonialism to those factors – for example Japan isn’t an exporter of high quality goods because it wasn’t a colonialist. It is because the reconstruction experts after WWII included some people who really focused on quality and that resonated with pre-existing cultural elements focused on doing a perfect job (Gumbatte!). Germany also has a culture that looked towards doing a great job and constant improvement. By contrast the UK’s acceptance that going above and beyond your role is more than your jobs worth [1] isn’t because of colonialism, it’s just a sad and pathetic strand of their culture.
[1] I never came across the idea of Jobworths till I lived in the UK. Then I came to understand it every time I had to deal with the public service there. [2]
[2] Now I can see it constantly in Australia too, especially in banking here, but I just did’t have the concept expressed so neatly previously.
February 16, 2014 at 11:09 am
Some odd notes:
The Red Army response to German riches was not just anger over the rich robbing the poor, it was also anger at the rich treating the poor like dirt and then going into pure mean mode when they started losing – their last acts in retreat were often to torch the local library and museum and string up a few kids in the town square. As one Red Army veteran noted that “they thought they could treat us like animals. We showed them they could not, and the ones who did not learn we shot.”
The century 1870-1970 was marked by constant social tension as old structures tried to deal with the emergence of an industrial class. One way to adjust was, as you note, to export population and exploit colonies (I think AJP Taylor notes the enormous importance of the imperial structure in providing jobs for the British middle and aspiring lower classes). The US did the same – but internally, at the expense of the Indians and Mexicans.
World War II was, for Germany and Japan, a catharsis. They finally accepted that that neither was nor the political finagling that marked the Bismarck and Weimar periods would work. The natural upshot was an export-oriented emphasis on industrial collaboration (quality circles, workers councils and so on). The French came half-way along this track, the British are stuck, as you note, in having to reverse out of what turned out to be a dead-end lane, and the US has decided to deal with it by de-industrialising.
Paul – I worked in the UK. If you think the public service is bad, try the private sector.
February 16, 2014 at 5:28 pm
Paul, I don’t think it’s karma anymore than “dutch disease” is karma. I think your answer that it’s a “sad and pathetic strand of their culture,” while true in a trivial sense, doesn’t have much explanatory power. How did their culture get that way? This is the country that built the industrial revolution, after all? It can’t be the case that culture is some immutable and eternal thing that doesn’t and cannot change. In the case of the UK, the question is how they went from world power to shambling economic zombie in just 100 years. It’s also worth noting that historically the UK and France both contributed enormously (perhaps more than any other post-enlightenment nations) to scientific development. How is it that they faded so fast? My argument is that being able to plunder other nations and force them to buy your stuff stifles innovation, industrial culture and political inventiveness. For probably the entire industrial revolution the UK was in class conflict, and at every turn the solution to every class problem was colonialism – loot Ireland to feed the British poor, send your discontents and criminals to Australia, siphon off excess population to the new world, stock your army with colonial troops when your war goals exceeded your population’s productive capacity. This kind of thing – happening for 100+ years – is surely going to stifle political ingenuity, and then when you suddenly lose your colonies …
Also I think you underestimate Japan’s industrial history in your response. Japan’s postwar industrial growth is just a small part of their history as an industrial and economic power, and although they are famous for having redefined quality in the 1980s, this is just a tiny part of their story. Japan was an industrial power from almost the onset of the Meiji era, and in the early 20th century was a major engineering exporter. If you visit the Kawasaki museum in Kawasaki (one of my two or three recommended places to visit to get a deeper insight into Japanese history and culture) you’ll see that even in the early 20th century they were already threatening global industrial powers – exporting trains, boats and building bridges around the world. They didn’t have their modern quality-control ideals but they still developed quality – it was the Japanese who refined carrier battle tactics, for example. Going further back in time, Japan was once the richest nation in the world due to its silver deposits (or so the exhibition at Iwami Ginzan heritage site tells me). Basically from the onset of the Meiji era, Japan was a nation with no natural resources but an intense desire to compete with the colonial powers. This is why the British and American powers began to squeeze them so strongly after WW1 with things like the Treaty of London and the refusal to include an anti-racism clause in the League of Nations – they could see Japan as a major new international competitor. Has it always been an aspect of Japanese culture, or did Japanese culture reorient around these principles as they overcame the shock of being re-exposed to a dangerous and competitive world?
Peter T, thanks for the additional material on the Soviet experience, and the excellent quote – the Soviet Union does provide a very fine range of pithy and grim one-liners doesn’t it? You make a good point about internal colonialism too – I think that Australia’s colonial history may partially explain our complete lack of ability to manage our own environment, because people tend to treat stuff they stole with a great deal less respect than stuff they bought[1]. Slavery in America is also, I think, often associated with a loss of productive ingenuity – I have read many people arguing that the South lacked industry to support it in the civil war because it was just so easy for the ruling class to sit back making money from agriculture.
I know many people see WW2 as an extension of WW1 for Germany, but for Japan I see it as the endpoint of a long, drawn out struggle by the military class to revoke the Meiji restoration. These kinds of long, slow-burning political disputes – between classes in the west, and between castes in Japan – come to extremely unpleasant cathartic ends, as you observe. France maybe avoided this by having a vicious revolution early, and maybe Russia did too. But Germany, the UK and Japan had to work through their political disputes more slowly, and the UK has always been able to put off its class tensions through its colonial projects. I wonder, if the UK leaves Europe and finds itself without a cheap foreign underclass to do the dirty work, whether it will finally have to come to terms with the huge inequality in British life…?
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fn1: Even though I obstinately reject all attempts to compare national psyche with individual psyches, when making dumb observations about my own country I reserve the right to break my own rules
February 17, 2014 at 1:23 am
“your answer that it’s a “sad and pathetic strand of their culture,” while true in a trivial sense, doesn’t have much explanatory power”
My argument wasn’t “culture explains it full stop” it was that your thesis fails to draw adequate links to the cultural problems that can be explained. It looks superficially attractive but fails to address the detail of why the UK/Spain and others are not exporters of high quality goods. “Because they’re used to looting others” isn’t an answer unless you can show that that leads to poor work practices or whatever.
Basically, you’re missing a couple of steps.
Peter T – I lived and worked in the UK. I found that the “Jobsworth” attitude wasn’t present in the investment banking areas I worked in, but I can readily believe it is widespread in the private sector too (as per my Australian experiences).
February 17, 2014 at 11:00 pm
Well if you can find a better explanation, Paul … I think all the others have just as many holes. And “it’s culture” by itself isn’t very informative. Also I hope it’s clear that I don’t think colonialism explains what’s wrong in these countries 100%. After all, Spain and Italy have only relatively recently emerged from dictatorship, which surely is relevant to the culture of public service they support!
I also lived and worked in the UK, and had the singular displeasure of going to school there as a child. When I worked there I was in a “non-profit” and had some dealings with the public sector (primarily NHS). I didn’t get the impression it was any worse or better than the private sector – I have a million horror stories of private sector incompetence just from trying to do things in my private life, and I guess banks were the worst with mobile phone companies a close second. The NHS is a bit of a monolith in itself, so I guess it’s not fair for me to judge the entire UK public service by the performance of the NHS, but similarly I probably shouldn’t judge the entire private sector by the absolutely unbelievable incompetence of Barclays bank. My general view is that the UK’s problems extend across both public and private sector and are, as Paul observes, some kind of cultural phenomenon – my interest is in why this phenomenon comes about, because I obviously don’t believe it is some fixed or racial effect. Also, the jobsworth concept is fascinating. I also hadn’t encountered that phrase before I moved to the UK but just a few months after living in London I understood it implicitly. The mere existence of that word is an insult to humanity!
February 18, 2014 at 11:40 pm
Germany is currently in a psuedo-colonial relationship with most of Europe (that isn’t France/UK) – they control the ECB and through it enforce neoliberal austerity regimes on the less powerful countries in Europe that siphon wealth back to Germany. They are responsible for the collapse of Greece and for overthrowing Italy’s government & replacing it with a technocratic administration dedicated to “paying Italy’s debts”. Germany is just in the midst of its own colonial boom right now, as the UK was in the late 1800s.
Japan is a more interesting case, since its success relies on the US replacing its economy of manufacturing with one of, to use David Graeber’s term, bullshit jobs (most notably the financial industry, whose value is, for most intents and purposes, entirely fictional) and using its military hegemony to enforce recognition of that fictional value – or, in essence, extract tribute, not in the common form of natural resources or unskilled labor but in the form of complex manufactured goods.
February 19, 2014 at 12:19 pm
“bullshit jobs (most notably the financial industry, whose value is, for most intents and purposes, entirely fictional”
It’s the laziest form of analysis to assume that something you don’t understand has no value.
If you think it’s so worthless, then please go back to storing your money in a sock rather than let us financial services plebs cloud up your purity with Paypass.
On the other hand if you think it’s fictional because of some stat like “The value of the derivative market is three times greater than the value of all actual markets in the world”[1], then that’s just a poor understanding of the meaning being discussed tripping you up (and given how badly that stat is reported/explained I can understand how that happens).
[1] I can’t remember the real figure quoted and I don’t care because I understand the difference between face value and price.
February 19, 2014 at 12:37 pm
One thing that amazed me in the UK was that most of my working class friends and neighbours were incredibly talented and hard-working in their own time. When you got to know them you found they were restoring antique cars, or breeding racing vultures, or cataloguing the fossils of the Devon coast or some such. They just refused to put any of this talent at the service of their bosses, who in turn treated them (and me) as if we were barely-literate serfs. In the end I put it down to a class system gone wrong.
Paul – the bs jobs label is less because they don’t do something useful. It’s because the this sector (and some others, like medical and academic administration) have clearly metastasized out of proportion to their actual contribution – they have gone from being a service sector to being an avenue for rent-extraction.
February 19, 2014 at 10:01 pm
@Paul: lol at the bourgeois simpleton trying to defend his privilege. if you think your prosperity results from being clever at math and not from the barrel of a gun, enjoy your delusions while they last.
February 19, 2014 at 10:07 pm
Let’s not turn this into a debate about the worth of banking, whether it be retail or investment. I think the point Circadianwolf makes – that the UK has focused on banking over manufacturing – is a reasonable one and if you think the eggs aren’t rotten (as the UK govt clearly did), putting them all in one basket is not necessarily wise. It smacks of easy options, and many people have commented on the socially destructive path it leads to: a small group of highly profitable individuals supporting through taxes a population increasingly forced to welfare by the loss of good quality jobs in other sectors.
Peter T, that’s an interesting point. I think I’ve written before on this blog about how class holds back the British working class: specifically, there is no benefit to doing a working class job well or getting training or improving skills to work better in a low-paid job, because the chance you’re going to be rewarded for commitment to your job is low – you’re going to be stymied by class at every turn. I don’t think this happens as much in Australia or Japan, where working hard and putting commitment into your job gets you noticed and treated better (or, in Japan, the assumption that you’ll do this is backed up with the guarantee of regular pay rises and seniority). I get the sense therefore that Britain contains a large middle class aiming to become managers, who will primarily manage foreign workers; a large underclass who have given up seeking work because work contains no rewards; and a working class who are being increasingly impoverished by economic forces out of their control, and feeling increasingly isolated and frustrated by the lack of rewards for what should be considered honest and serious work. I’ve also talked on this blog before about how the concept of “social mobility” in countries like the UK is a ponzi scheme, and that a system of good pay for working class labour is more rewarding and more equitable. Britain combines the dream of social mobility with the reality of class discrimination.
Today’s Guardian, incidentally, has a beautiful object example of how the British fail to face their own colonial past. The front page has an article apologizing to Scotland for various things but the tone of the article is defensive and sneering, and many of the apologies come with back-handed insults. Furthermore, the highland clearances and other brutalities are relegated to the middle, and conspicuously so: apology 4 is for outlawing tartan as part of the Highland clearances, but the Highland clearances themselves and associated brutality have to wait for the 30s. You’d think that Britain’s most left-wing newspaper would be a little less churlish about Britain’s colonial past, but apparently not … and so the 76 apologies turns into a cunningly crafted effort at belittling genocide, along with a series of nasty little jokes about how crap Scotland is.
In fact even the existence of a tricky joke article about this sort of stuff is itself telling. Try to imagine an Australian newspaper publishing a similar article in a similar tone about Aboriginal history…
Circadianwolf, less revolutionary threats please!
February 20, 2014 at 1:17 am
I didn’t intend my threat to be revolutionary, actually, just the opposite. I meant that if you’re an upper/middle class person benefiting from imperial prosperity but not one of the 1% or their muscle, you’d better face the reality that there will come a time when the 1% turns on you just like they have everybody else. The amount of middle class Americans with office jobs wherein they literally do nothing but who are nonetheless convinced that, unlike everyone else who’s been dumped to the curb over the past 40 years, *their* jobs are secure is… either darkly hilarious or tragically pathetic, depending on your mood.
February 20, 2014 at 6:18 pm
I see your point now Circadianwolf, thanks for clarifying. I don’t think that the 1% are going to turn on everyone, and in some countries (like Japan) I don’t think that the 1% vs. the rest debate is a particularly relevant one. It’s more for the UK and US, I think. In Australia the class conflict is between the working class and the upper middle, who are subsidized by the govt; with a subsidiary conflict between generations as the wealthier baby boomers rob the children of the poorer boomers. In Japan there is little inequality, primarily because of strong restraints on the wealthy, and the conflict here is between a class of part-time workers and the salary-for-life types; the former can be drawn from any class background, all that’s needed is for them to drop out of university and make a few lifestyle errors …so I don’t think Paul has much to fear from the 1%. I certainly think that the world as a whole has a lot of reasons to be concerned about the behavior of e.g. the 85 people who own half the world’s wealth; but this is primarily (from my point of view) an environmental concern – if they keep using their grip on the reins of power to prevent essential environmental reforms we’re all toast.
In Britain the big class conflict is not between teh 1% and the rest, in my opinion; it’s between the upper class and the rest – and a failure to resolve this conflict is driving the UK into desperate times. In my opinion part of the reason that this conflict isn’t being resolved is an unwillingness by British to face up to their colonial past (and thus understand the source of their wealth, and part of the reason for their recent economic decline).
Which leads me to this question for Paul. If Britain still had its colonies, do you think it would be on the same downward path? Would it, for example, have needed to rest its economic fortunes heavily on the finance industry? How would things be different?
February 21, 2014 at 12:36 am
circadianwolf: “most notably the financial industry, whose value is, for most intents and purposes, entirely fictional”
Peter T: ”the bs jobs label is less because they don’t do something useful. It’s because the this sector (and some others, like medical and academic administration) have clearly metastasized out of proportion to their actual contribution”
faustusnotes: ”the point Circadianwolf makes – that the UK has focused on banking over manufacturing – is a reasonable one and if you think the eggs aren’t rotten (as the UK govt clearly did), putting them all in one basket is not necessarily wise”
@Peter T and faustusnotes: I can understand where you guys are coming from and can agree with elements of such a view. But that’s not what he said (though I concede that mostly entirely fictional is a concept that can be parsed multiple ways).
An argument for a balanced economy is a reasonable stance to have. The key point of debate will revolve around the concept of “what is balanced?” as you don’t want to head towards an autarky because of the inevitable losses.
circadianwold: ”if you think your prosperity results from being clever at math and not from the barrel of a gun, enjoy your delusions while they last.”
Yeah, thanks mate. I’ll keep waiting for your revolution. This ain’t the first time I’ll be up against the wall when it comes nor will it be the last. Even accepting your later comments, my prosperity derives from IT and organisational skills that assist in delivering value to customers. I’ve been retrenched before and I will be again. My lifestyle not about job security it’s about dealing with the lack of it.
@Faustus: I recall debating dog whistle politics with you previously, on the basis I thought you interpreted anything a right wing politician said on race as being a call for (at best) beating up other races. Would you see my point on that if I suggested circandianwolf is invoking dog whistle politics? Such, he claims it’s some reasonable message, but regardless I think I’ll work to ensure he never gets my address. Or can only right wingers use dog whistle political messages?
“Which leads me to this question for Paul. If Britain still had its colonies, do you think it would be on the same downward path? Would it, for example, have needed to rest its economic fortunes heavily on the finance industry? How would things be different?”
Hmm, interesting question. We’d have to describe the situation in more detail to make sure we’re on the same page before suggesting an outcome.
I’d suggest that if the UK still held India (plus whatever other parts you want) as a colony(s) then the relationship would still be fundamentally different to the old Imperial model. As an example, I’m unaware of the UK shifting significant funds from HK to UK prior to returning it to China (in the sense of ongoing welfare flows, not capital flight when they left – which I know did happen).
Based on that I’d expect that, regardless of the increased holdings, the UK probably wouldn’t make more money off them that could be spent inside the UK. However it’d still have some major differences. I’d expect 1) the UK to have a more mobile culture as the “best” of the UK were moved around to administer the Empire, which would probably make for a less parochial (though not necessarily less racist) attitude and 2) I wouldn’t be surprise if the net money flow was towards the colonies (i.e. effectively UK cash is spent administering the colony and not fully recouped) [1]. In this scenario you’d expect the UK to have a strong isolationist movement (similar to UKIP) that advocates cutting the colonies off.
Some alternatives are:
1. That old Imperial views of the Commonwealth (as a brotherhood of nations that work together) would actually work and it would form a free trade/politic zone similar to the EU but geographically distributed. I’d expect that to be less likely due to the large wealth disparities across nations.
2. the UK would extracts a net profit from the colony. I’m not sure that would be possible to sustain in a world with improved movement (i.e. our level of technology). An Indian getting ripped off in India would be freer to say either “I’m a British citizen, I’m moving to the UK” or “Stuff this for a lark” (as really happened). Ultimately, extraction of wealth from colonies led to losing them (obviously there are independence issues too, but Australia shows these aren’t so important as long as you’re not also being robbed). So I’d discard any scenarios where the UK makes money from colonies but also manages to hold onto them.
So, assuming no net flows to the UK from the colonies, I’d still expect the UK to largely be a finance centre because this is more or less the real life scenario. However the UK would probably be better off than real life due to a broader market that could be easily accessed which would give them the flexibility to deal with one sector (i.e. finance) being hit (i.e. manufacturing would have been able to export easily to India).
Note: If the welfare setup was properly configured then it could be vastly better off (so that a UK recession is reduced by welfare from India and UK training and welfare flows move to advance India during the good times for the UK), but such a scenario is far fetched enough to not be likely even under the benign colonialism that my assumed outcome above would require (because it’s one thing to be benign and another to pay a bill to support welfare in another country – just ask the EU).
[1] A benign empire isn’t really a profit making deal. Ask the US how they did out of human rights intervention such as Kosovo. Or even Iraq. [2]
[2] Individuals making money from the empire is a different matter. I’m talking about money you can at least spend on bread and circuses from the government’s pocket.
February 21, 2014 at 9:32 am
It’s important to remember that the UK was very successful for a couple of centuries. It not only gained an enormous empire, it led the way in manufacturing and got through industrialisation and the transition to modernity without a revolution or a civil war. Its institutions were greatly admired – not least the Royal Navy, which stayed on top of a tough game for an astonishingly long period. There seems to be an enormous amount of interia in these systems, which maybe makes the UK case simply a prolonged hangover.