Book Review - Uncommon Wealth: Britain And The Aftermath Of Empire By Kojo Koram

Modern Britain’s relationship with the British Empire is one of deep ambivalence. On one hand it is a distant thing buried in the past with no relevance to today, on the other we are surrounded by it with reminders everywhere from statues dotting town squares, to looted artifacts sitting in museums. It is a huge aspect of our history, yet one which is largely ignored. Occasionally politicians might make some vague references to Britain’s imperial legacy as a cheap way to drum up some support but for the most part that’s about it. We have endless World War I and II documentaries, yet four centuries of empire has generated a fraction of that coverage. Despite this the echoes of the British Empire are still felt throughout modern Britain socially, legally, demographically and economically. The economic impact is the focus of Uncommon Wealth: Britain And The Aftermath Of Empire by Kojo Koram. Uncommon Wealth examines the British Empire through an economic lens, with particular attention paid to how it treated its former colonies once they started gaining independence. It is a meticulously researched book while successfully sidestepping the trap of getting too bogged down in impenetrable technical jargon. Koram shows the ways in which economics and history intersect, and the way both influence the present showing that while the British empire may have ended decades ago it never really went away.

  While Koram’s main focus is exploring how Britain’s relationship with its colonies shifted over time he also turns his lens inwards looking at how Britain rewrote its own story and history to deal with the independence of its former colonies. To Koram the idea that the British empire is a thing of the past that has no bearing on today is the spoonful of sugar that helped the medicine go down. He focuses on the sudden and dramatic shift in Enoch Powell’s attitudes towards empire as an example of how quick and all-encompassing this national lie was. According to Koram, and according to Powell’s own words, in his earlier career he was a diehard supporter of Empire who developed a particular fascination with India. Koram says he was at times almost a caricature of a British colonialist in terms of his attitude. However shortly after the independence of India in particular his rhetoric practically reversed itself. Koram points out that in Powell’s 1965 book A Nation Not Afraid Powell reframes the former colonies as burdens which Britain was right to get rid of as quickly as possible. With such a sharp shift in tone and language Powell made Britain seem almost like a petulant ex-boyfriend who was telling everyone he’s actually glad his partner left because she was crazy, and that he’ll be better off without her. Britain and its empire had been synonymous for centuries, now without its empire Britain needed a new identity, a new national myth for people to rally around. Many, Powell included, seemed to settle on this new idea that Britain was an independent exploring nation that never really wanted an empire and just kind of got saddled with the colonies. Powell even went so far as to insist that the British Empire never really existed in the first place. The perspective that the empire never really mattered so we don’t need to think about it anymore has been frustratingly persistent on the public consciousness over the decades. It’s a view which Koram, and others like him, have put in a lot of hard work to refute, showing the link between modern Britain, and its empire is real, and continues to have consequences for both Britain and its former colonies.

  One of the ways he demonstrates this throughout the book is what Koram calls a boomerang effect. He credits Aimé Césaire, a highly acclaimed poet, writer, and politician from Martinique with this idea. In Koram’s view, history isn’t the straight line moving forward towards greater development that some might think it is. Rather he says it moves like a boomerang with the effects of colonialism on the British empire flying back at Britain given enough time. The effects might not be immediate, but Koram shows that on a longer timeline colonial mechanisms of extraction and exploitation returned to Britain using deep dives into Iran, Jamaica, Ghana, and Singapore among others. He uses these examples to demonstrate how the same financial pressures that ravaged former colonies now drives modern Britain’s privatised public services, austerity, corporate profiteering, and the wealth gap. A particularly stark example of this is how Koram details the way the machinery of Britain’s empire was maintained not by the government directly, but by private companies like the East India Company, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP).

  Koram paints an image of a Britain that was more than happy to outsource the day to day running of empire and draws the obvious lines from its reliance on private companies back then, to modern Britain’s seeming addiction to privatisation. As he puts it “The British instinctive reliance on the private sector to do the job of government is not only a result of contemporary fiscal pressures but is also connected to deep assumptions about the role of the state, partly formed through the imperial project.” When you boil it down to its essence, a government should be an entity designed to maintain the wellbeing of a large group of people. A private company on the other hand exists primarily to make as much money as possible and keep its shareholders happy. This seems obvious enough that I shouldn’t have to write it down but sometimes the main priority of a government, and the main priority of a private company can come into conflict. To see the damage passing off essential public services has had on modern Britain you only need to look at Thames Water. One quick search online will bring up a laundry list of controversies which are all only one click away. The ongoing struggle between the government and Thames Water is a perfect encapsulation of the boomerang effect Koram describes. The actual work of maintaining empire was largely handled by private companies, and today the outsourcing of everything has resulted in corporate corruption, higher bills for worse service, and widespread pollution.

  In his deep dives, Koram showed not just how the economics of a place drives its history, but they uncovered aspects of the British empire that I never knew about, and aspects which I certainly wasn’t taught about in school. One example of this is when he turns his attention to The Cayman Islands. Its common knowledge that The Cayman Islands are a tax haven to the point where there was a joke in an old episode of The Simpsons from the 90’s about it. I knew it was a tax haven but before reading this book I never really stopped to ask myself why, or how it ended up like that. Koram examines The Cayman Island’s special place as a British Overseas Territory and how it used its position as an internally self-governing country that retained the protection of being under the umbrella of the British empire. Especially after the independence of Barbados it became, as Koram puts it, “a tax haven that doesn’t seek to run away from the law, but instead runs towards the law and learns how to use just enough of it to legally keep much of the wealth in the global economy marooned safely ‘offshore’, away from the redistributive demands of the masses.” He further writes about how the path to becoming a global financial centre pursued by The Cayman Islands is one which has been followed by other British Overseas Territories like Bermuda and Jersey building a unique position for Britain in the world of modern capitalism. Similarly to Britain’s habit of privatization however, this also boomeranged back according to Koram. He looks at how especially in a post 2008 financial crash world Britain’s resistance to substantiative tax reform has only further increased the already obscene wealth gap with average people struggling more and more to make ends meet as a result.

Koram does all this and more than I could possibly fit in the relatively narrow confines of a book review and makes it look easy. He does it with a writing style that is always accessible and compelling, even when writing about something complex like international economics. Despite jumping forwards and backwards in time, and to sometimes vastly different countries I never felt overwhelmed by his delivery or like I lost the thread of his narrative. Koram provides the historical and analytical grounding to expand discussions about the substantive economic reforms necessary for genuine equity. I’ve read books about the history of the British Empire before for past reviews, but this one, with its focus on economics specifically and on the boomerang effect Koram expands upon opened my eyes to aspects of it which I hadn’t considered or even been aware of before. I would recommend Uncommon Wealth to anyone and everyone, but especially for activists, students, and those committed to dismantling the intertwined legacies of empire and racism.

To buy this book yourself, please click here: https://tinyurl.com/3ku79xjj