The British Empire and the Culture War

We didn't start the culture war...It was always burning, since the world’s been turning.

In May, the IEA published Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism, a mini-book on the economics of empire, in which I rebut the idea that Britain’s wealth is built on colonial plunder. It is fair to say that it has ruffled a few feathers.

Interestingly, the most common criticism it has received is not that I got the numbers wrong, but that I am "politicising history" in order to “instigate a Culture War”. My critics suspect that I am not actually all that interested in the history of the British Empire as such, and that I approach this issue with present-day debates in mind.  

They are not entirely wrong. I could not honestly claim that I have always had a burning passion for the history of the British Empire. Like most people, I never really thought much about the British Empire at all, until it became a major part of the national conversation in 2020. It was only in that context that I first expressed the idea for what would later become Imperial Measurement.