The Vikings of the Victorian Age?

A dispatch from the 'secretive' Mont Pelerin Society

At the 2024 General Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in New Delhi, the IEA’s Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy, Kristian Niemietz, gave a presentation on his recent publication “Imperial Measurement: A cost–benefit analysis of Western colonialism”. The article below is based on his presentation.

I will start by saying a few words about what motivated me to write Imperial Measurement.  

I am not a historian, and I am certainly not an expert on the history of the British Empire, or indeed any empire. Until four and a half years ago, I did not even have much interest in the subject.

But then, in the spring of 2020, BLM-mania broke out. The Black Lives Matter movement suddenly seemed ubiquitous, and culturally hegemonic. They really dominated the national agenda, and while the movement itself now seems to be largely defunct, the ideology they represent is firmly embedded in most major institutions.

Not everyone is happy about that, though. BLM’s cultural dominance has since triggered a backlash, leading to a full-blown culture war.

In the liberal think tank sphere, we had – and still have – some internal disagreements about how we should react to this situation. Some believed that we should focus on our core area, which is economics, and leave the culture war to the culture warriors. Others saw woke ideology as a threat to liberal values in the sphere of civil liberties, just as socialism is in the economic sphere.

My own position is simpler that. I believe that we do not have to make that choice. It is simply not true that we have the culture war on one side, and the economics on the other side. There is a huge area of overlap.

It is a common misunderstanding that woke progressivism arose, because the progressive Left has lost interest in economics. That identity politics has replaced the traditional Marxist focus on social class, defined in material terms. But nobody who listens to what woke culture warriors are actually saying could possibly think that. They have not lost interest in economics at all. Or rather: they may not be interested in economics if “economics” means the Bank of England’s latest inflation forecasts, or the latest fiscal projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility. But they are very explicitly anti-capitalist, and opposition to an economic system is… well, it’s economics.

They obsess about what we may deem non-economic ones, but the point is that they don’t see them as non-economic issues. They see them as problems caused by capitalism. Because they see every problem as a problem caused by capitalism.

This starts with a negative origin story of capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution.

What caused the Industrial Revolution? Why did some countries grow rich, while others did not, or not until much later?