Imperial Measurement: a rejoinder to Prof Alan Lester

My new book Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism is a rebuttal of the Williams Thesis, or at least of its popularised, “Guardianised” form: the idea that “so much of the prosperity enjoyed today in the UK […] comes off the back of historical atrocities”, as one of the Colston statue-topplers puts it.

As expected, not everyone agrees. Prof Alan Lester, a professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex, has written a critical reply entitled “Colonialism helped Britain’s economic success” in the Times.

He starts:

“The IEA report seems to be driven by Kemi Badenoch’s claim that colonial exploitation had little to do with Britain’s economic growth during and after the Industrial Revolution.”

I am flattered that Prof Lester thinks I’m this productive! Kemi Badenoch gave her talk on 18 April, and we published Imperial Measurement less than two weeks later, on 1 May.

Sadly, though, in terms of my average writing speed, I am more like Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. I first expressed the idea for this book, in embryonic form, in September 2020, at the height of BLM-mania, when I said that I could imagine an IEA publication on the economics of colonialism. On the day of the Badenoch speech, though, the book was already in print.

But let’s address the substance.

Prof Lester claims that the view “that slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation were a significant component of Britain’s economic success” was “in accord with the scholarly consensus”. If this was a Wikipedia article, it would come with the tag “[citation needed]”. Try search terms such as “colonies”, “empire”, “cost” and “benefit” on JSTOR, and you will easily find numerous studies that strongly reject the idea “that slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation were a significant component of Britain’s economic success”. You will also find that none of those studies are written in the tone of a radical outsider who challenges an established “scholarly consensus”. Rather, they are presented as further additions to an already well-established body of literature.

You will, of course, also find studies from Economic Historians who are more sympathetic to the Williams Thesis, or some variant of it. Imperial Measurement obviously discusses some of those studies, too. But none of them claim to represent “the scholarly consensus”.

Quite the opposite. One of my references is the recent book Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, two Economic Historians who are firmly on Prof Lester’s side of the argument. They believe that the Williams Thesis is broadly correct – but they also make it clear throughout the book that theirs is not the mainstream view in their field. That, indeed, is the whole point of their book. It is framed as a heterodox challenge of a more established view, not as a confirmation of an already existing “scholarly consensus”.

Further, Prof Lester complains that each of the academic studies I cite to make my point only “examines one part, or one period, of economic activity relating to the colonies”, rather than the total. This is true. But this is precisely why I cite a bundle of studies, covering different aspects of imperialism. None of them is all-encompassing on its own, but as a package, they still cover a lot of ground. If there was any one single study which already does everything I’m trying to do in Imperial Measurement, I would not have written Imperial Measurement in the first place. I would simply have posted a link to that study.

Prof Lester disputes my claim that the cost of colonialism outweighed the benefits for Britain. His reasoning:

“[T]he archives of colonial governance show that the balance between costs of conquest, subordination and rule were constantly, carefully, weighed up against the benefits to Britons at home and overseas.”

In other words: Prof Lester thinks that we should let colonialist governments mark their own homework. Colonialism must have been good economics, because at the time, the governments responsible for it said it was. And we should simply take their word for it. Sorry, but with that approach, you are never going to identify a single failed government project. It would be like judging the Iraq War on the basis of government records which show Tony Blair and George Bush saying it was a terrific idea.

Another one of Prof Lester’s complaints is that “The report does not cover the post 1830s period” – I would refer him to Chapter 4, which is literally called “The British Empire after 1850”.

With all that out of the way, let’s get to my main beef with Prof Lester.

As I make clear in the book, the Williams Thesis, like many ideas, comes in stronger and weaker versions. Nowadays, it has really become a “Williams spectrum” rather than one single thesis.

The authors of the aforementioned book Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution represent a weaker version of the Williams Thesis, because they qualify their argument by saying:

“We do not argue that slavery caused the industrial revolution. Neither do we suggest that slavery was necessary for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain. […] What we do say is that the role of slavery in the process of industrialization […] has been generally underestimated by historians”.

On the other hand, Prof Kehinde Andrews, who says that “The west’s wealth is based on slavery“, is one of those representing a stronger version.

Imperial Measurement is clearly mostly aimed at the stronger versions. I don’t really buy the weak versions either, but they don’t keep me awake at night. If only the weakest versions of the Williams Thesis existed, I would not have bothered to write Imperial Measurement.

Now, if I understand Prof Lester’s position correctly, he also subscribes to a low-fat version of the Williams Thesis. If I understand his position correctly, he believes that the contribution of imperialism and slavery to Britain’s wealth is more than small, but less than gigantic.

If that were my position, here’s what I would do:

Like Prof Lester, I would heavily critique publications like Imperial Measurement, which claim that the contribution of colonialism and slavery to Britain’s wealth was around zero. But unlike Prof Lester, I would also distance myself from the more extreme versions of the Williams Thesis, i.e. from those who push the thesis beyond anything that could be justified by historical data. If I believed in a “Williams Thesis Lite”, I would not want people to underestimate the impact of colonialism and slavery on Britain’s wealth – but, crucially, I would not want them to exaggerate it either. (And in the current cultural climate: which, do you think, is more likely?)

Prof Lester, however, simply pretends that extreme interpretations of the Williams Thesis don’t exist, and accuses me of “creat[ing] a “woke” straw man to combat”.

It is very obviously not a straw man. You can so easily find dozens, if not hundreds of articles like “The west’s wealth is based on slavery” in papers like the Guardian. I have never seen a straw man who is such a hyper-prolific writer!

Nor are the people making that claim just random fringe voices. They represent the mainstream, fashionable opinion on the subject. These voices are the very reason why the legacy of colonialism has become such a big topic again in recent years. They are the reason why Prof Lester and I are having this debate in the pages of the Times, rather than on an obscure history blog with twelve readers.

I have an inkling what may explain Prof Lester’s strange reluctance to criticise the more extreme interpretations of the Williams Thesis, or to even acknowledge its existence. Like me, Prof Lester is an active Twitter keyboard warrior, and on that platform, I have only ever seen him playing to the gallery. I have only ever seen him expressing the sort of crowd-pleasing opinions that he knows will go down well on that platform.

If it’s Twitter applause you’re after – of course you are never going to criticise woke, anti-capitalist falsehoods. Because these are invariably popular on Twitter, and you would get some pushback for criticising them. If you want to score Twitter points, you need to go after a hated target, such as “Tufton Street”.

And so, Prof Lester engages in what Scott Alexander calls “isolated demands for rigour“, i.e. only demanding rigour from one side of the argument, while letting the other side get away with anything.

Or maybe I’m wrong. In which case, I’m looking forward to his next article “Against trendy woke nonsense. The Williams Thesis is correct, but we need to stop overusing it”.