"The Left clings to the idea colonialism was the root of all our wealth. In fact, it was a white elephant project – the HS2 of its day"

Telegraph: 22nd April 2024: Kristian Niemietz (Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs) gives his view on whether colonialism made Britain rich 

...Kemi Badenoch has ruffled a few feathers with a remark she made at TheCityUK International Conference. “It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.”

According to Badenoch, it was the rule of law, and the limitation of state power, that made Britain rich – not the slave trade, and not the British Empire... 

...In the 1860s, Karl Marx wrote about how “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe” had to be complemented by “slavery pure and simple in the new world”. In the 1940s, Eric Williams, the future Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, wrote a book on this idea, which later became known as the “Williams Thesis”...

Fashionable though the Williams thesis is, one small problem remains: it is almost certainly empirically wrong... The economic benefits of the Empire, then, were modest at best. Its economic costs, on the other hand, were substantial...Of course, some individuals got extremely rich through colonial trade. But Britain as a whole did not. The Empire was a White Elephant project, the HS2 of its day, a prestige project which benefitted some at the expense of others... 

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE 

You can also read "What Kemi Badenoch get's right about colonialism" in the Spectator (£££) here.