This is a review of Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across European empires, edited by Gurminder K Bhambra and Julia McClure.
A shorter version was published by International Relations and can be read here (paywall)
‘The world is wrong’, Claudia Rankine[1] has written ‘You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you’. Rankine’s words kept recurring to me as I read Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across European empires, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure. This is an important book whose contributors collectively demonstrate how the inequalities and harms of colonialism are buried deeply into today’s political and economic systems. Being organised into thematic sections, rather than being structuring geographically or through periodization, allows the collection to read coherently from cover to cover. This has given the book a lucidity despite the fifteen chapters, including contributions from a range of disciplines, covering the whole-time span of European colonialism. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate how central colonialism is to taxation, trade, welfare and the world’s wider economic system. That core arguments recur throughout the book no doubt reflects its origins in a workshop and conference organised in collaboration with the Tax Justice Network. Bhambra and McClure, in their introduction, highlight themes that reappear repeatedly throughout the collection. Firstly, the need to understand that the state, both in Europe and its former colonies, emerged as a colonial and imperial creations rather than as free-standing nation states. Secondly, that colonisation was a historic process that generated wealth for European countries and made the colonised places poorer. Thirdly, that is a process that continues, with today’s political and economic social order structured to continue deepening inequalities between the West and its former colonies.
The mechanisms employed to fund early colonialism are explored in David Brown and Julia McClure’s chapters. Brown’s focus is on England’s colonisation of Ireland and its implications to the wider colonisation process. An elite group of financial speculators, in partnership with the royal family, were able to extract, from Ireland, the capital that enabled them ‘to transform Barbados and Jamaica from sleepy producers of sugar into the principal slave markets in the Caribbean’ (p. 30). In a similar way, McClure shows, how the Spanish colonisation of the Americas was also organised through a ‘public-private partnership pathway’ (p. 128). Through plunder, mortgaging of seized lands, tax farming and economic restructuring colonialisation not only became self-funding but also directly transferred vast wealth from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan centre. Madeline Woker details how early 20th century French colonies had their economies restructured so as to both become self-financing and serve French exporters and investors. Emma Park’s account of the short history of the Imperial British East African Company (IBEA) provides another example of the public-private partnership that characterised European colonisation. Her case history also highlights the centrality of the imposition of market economies, with the IBEA’s attempts to ‘transform work into labour’ (p. 87) and introduce money tokens as a replacement for bartering. Both were essential for many taxes and Maarten Manse describes how to impose its tax system in the highlands of Western Sumatra the Dutch colonial state failed to acknowledge either lineage ownership of land or its inheritance through the female line, instead nominating a male family member as the taxable subject. Likewise elected village leaders were granted authoritarian powers and hereditary succession. Manse, like other contributors, records the state’s limited success at times, as communities developed strategies to resist being governed.
The way in which colonialism has shaped, and continues to shape, the global economic order is another recurring theme. Alexia Yates details how, in return for recognition, Haiti was forced to compensate former French colonists and concede tax privileges to French traders. The subsequent enforcement of the terms by the French state meant a continuation of ‘imperial extraction’ (p. 234), and laid the foundations for the extreme poverty experienced by Haitians today. In her account of Kenya’s independence Lula Latif details how the structural inequalities of colonialism were built into the post-colonial state. Colonial Kenya’s tax system had granted exemptions and other tax privileges to white settlers and businesses whilst locals had hut, poll and land taxes imposed on them. This tax burden forced Africans to labour on white settler farms, thereby contributing to their tax-free profits. Independence required Kenyan acceptance of a Lancaster House crafted constitution that embedded Western economic market values. Its colonial tax system remained largely intact, replicating colonial inequalities. Taxation remained a fiscal tool to stimulate foreign investment and private sector growth. Growth that was supposed to generate the funds for Kenya to build a welfare state; an unfulfilled aspiration. The ending of colonialism posed a dilemma for the settlers and European business interests in the newly independent states. Should they risk keeping their assets in the independent states or repatriate them to the UK and expose them to its taxation? The UK’s network of tax havens, Alex Cobham’s chapter shows, provided the perfect answer; allowing this wealth to be extracted from former colonies, whilst dodging all tax responsibilities ‘without losing the protection of empire’ (p. 289).
In her chapter Bhambra looks at the British imperial state and its implications for taxation and welfare in Great Britain. She cites statistics from the 1880s which shows that only 44% of funds available for government expenditure in Britain were generated in Britain. The majority came from British colonies, including 36% from India. This was without taking into consideration military spending that was largely borne by India and other colonies. Colonialisation allowed nineteenth-century Britain to be both a low tax state and begin to develop a domestic Welfare state. The 1945-1951 British Labour government is often lauded for beginning Britain’s decolonisation and creating the modern Welfare State. In his chapter on the Crown Agents and the CDC Group Paul Gilbert reveals the price paid for these achievements by Britain’s colonies and former colonies. The Crown Agents at this time were central to colonial public procurement and currency management. By prioritising UK public finances, and the funding requirements of the Labour government’s nationalisation and welfare state construction, development opportunities in the colonies were constrained and tax burdens increased. Similarly, the establishment of the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) in 1948 was not an initiative designed for the benefit of colonies but instead intended to secure food and materials for the UK that could be paid for in sterling rather than dollars, creating sterling reserves in the colonies, that the Crown Agents could manage in Britain’s interest.
Edouard Glissant[2] famously argued that the West ‘is a project, not a place’ and this collection exposes both the history and present of this ongoing project. Although not comprehensive – there are no chapters specifically focused on India or the Atlantic slave trade or Europe’s settler colonies – this book is a devastating critique of the foundations of our world’s economic and political order. It shows that our colonial past is not only buried in the individual trauma of the descendants of those colonised by Europe, but also within our institutions and world order. This collection suggests that if we are to really address the inequalities and other legacies of Europe’s empires revolutionary change rather than a reform agenda is required.
Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across European empires; Edited by Gurminder K Bhambra and Julia McClure; Manchester; Manchester University Press; 2022; pp 354; £90; ISBN 978 1 5261 6614 2
[1] Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. (London: Penguin Books,2015), p. 63
[2] Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 2.
Trincomalee walks 