Kemi Badenoch: UK’s wealth isn’t from white privilege and colonialism

36 comments

1. Do these people get a bonus for throwing terms like ‘white privilege’ into their inane nonsensical rants?

   And as we all know, British colonialism was just for larks, obviously…

2. She gets paid for how many culture war buzzwords she can include in her statements and speeches. 

3. Well, some of it is from colonialism. I don’t see the point in denying it unless you’re sucking up to people who don’t understand nuance.

   I think you could make a better argument that it’s not especially useful to revisit that when discussing how to deal with economic inequality now.

4. By some calculations we extracted the equivalent of $45 trillion dollars from India in the few hundred years we colonised it, I can’t even imagine the sum we extracted from the empire as a whole. Anyone that says our relative wealth and position on the world stage isnt related to the defining feature of 400 years of our recent history is utterly delusional.

   https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/independence-day-how-the-british-pulled-off-a-45-trillion-heist-in-india/articleshow/102746097.cms

5. The Iranians have had plenty of empires.

   So has the Chinese. And the Mexicans. Peruvians had one. Italians had two, though the last one sucked. Japanere empire, Mongol empires, Song empires, Spanish empires, Greek empires, Swedish Empires, Russland empires.

   Did any of these empires industrialize? No. But the British did.

   The British Empire, without question, exploited the periphery to strengthen the core. Enormous wealth was extracted from unwilling, helpless people, and sent towards London.

   Yet many have done this. Only in Britain did it lead to industrialization. 

   Slavery and exploitation was a significant part of the British Empire. If having an exploitative empire in its history is why Britian is rich today, then why are not everyone wealthy? They had empires to.

   The answer of course, is that British wealth comes from industrialization. That story is intimately tied to slavery, but in no way does slavery constitute the whole story. There are many other parts.

6. What wealth? The country seems to have been broke since the end of the Second World War.

7. So sick of this MP. She is my local MP and does nothing for her constituents. Sad thing is I can’t see her being voted out.

8. Wait until they hear about what the Assyrians did … Ohhh boy 

9. It absolutely is. You can’t just pretend the British Empire never happened.

10. There is no stronger argument for something than Kemi claiming it to be so. Doesn’t mean I agree or disagree.

11. How would you build wealth from “white privivledge” inside a white society? Are we still trading Indian spices?

12. If it didn’t then we can remove the colonialist nature of the economy, law and politics without any issues or resistance. First is to get rid of inheritance which shames our glorious capitalist meritocracy. 

13. No, it’s from absolutely raping and pillaging the population through the highest tax burden on the working class in FOREVER

14. Our leading ‘progressive’ newspaper reminds us again that it was captured after daring to report on Snowden. 

15. If we ever get invaded by strawmen we should just send Kemi Badenoch to fight them off.  

    Only absolute fringe voices will claim all British wealth was from “white privilege(??)” and colonialism. 

16. All I can say is if the polling is correct and the good people of Saffron Walden don’t eject Badenoch from her seat at the next general election, they too have a lot to answer for.

17. Anyday now Pickmi Badenoch will lecture about how the Koh I Noor diamond was actually found on a beach in Scarborough…

18. This is going to noodle some peoples brains… You do not have to be white, to have white privilege. I have black skin, and I have white privelige.

19. Whole lot of people arguing that colonialism didn’t enrich the colonizers. Okay thats enough revisionism for one day

20. The successor state to the largest empire the world has ever seen didn’t get its wealth from colonialism.

    Right…

21. If I may; while I don’t agree with all Kemi’s statements, I do think she has made a fair point here – at least, when you consider there are plenty of people out there who seem to believe that every last penny of Britain’s wealth derived from the empire, and that we’d essentially still be living in caves without it.

    However, it’s important to realise that the economic gains from slavery and Empire are more complex than many on both sides of this debate assume. I’ll summarise as best as I can here, and post sources at the end!

    – For example, slavery peaked at 5% of Britain’s GDP in the late 18th century. While some of the profit from slavery undoubtedly went into industrialisation and infrastructure (such as dockyards), much more of it went into buying grand estates and political titles for slave owners and their heirs. This idea that slavery was the “Magic bullet” that spurred industrialisation is spurious at best; even a recent book ‘Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution’ by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson does not state that slavery caused Britain’s industrial take-off. That slavery and Empire played a role is unquestionable; but that it was the most important engine of British wealth is dubious.

    – As Sathnam Sanghera notes in ‘Empireland’, even at the height of Empire, Britain traded more (and by a significant margin) with states outside the Empire than those within it; according to Bernard Porter in ‘The Lions Share’, the UK traded more with Belgium in the 1880s than with all of Africa. Many of the tropical African colonies seized in the 1890s were unprofitable, and remained so for a great deal of Imperial history. It’s a common misunderstanding that the Empire was built and maintained purely for economic reasons; many colonies were seized simply to stop someone else having them, and maintained only for matters of national prestige in an increasingly competitive late 19th century world.

    – The “47 trillion from India” figure is often used; however, again as Sathnam notes in ‘Empireland’, many economists question the figure, for legitimate reasons. Where India *was* undoubtedly useful economically was allowing Britain to maintain a balance of trade against other European powers: but India’s importance here had largely declined by the 1930s, by which time she did as much, if not more, trade with other nations as she did with Britain.

    – Britain was already a fairly wealthy country before the empire began; if memory serves, while India had a much larger GDP than Britain, GDP *per capita* was much closer pre colonisation, as at the time raw GDP was largely tied to population size, not necessarily individual wealth. If India’s GDP declined during the 19th and 20th centuries, this is partly because other countries GDP (Germany, the USA, Japan) exploded at the same time, cutting India’s dhare

    There are countless other examples, but these are the ones I can recall at the moment!

    None of this is to say Britain made *no* wealth from the Empire – but Kemi is right that to say Britain was *built* on wealth from the Empire is misleading at best. There’s a telling statistic, again from Empireland, that shows how one northern railway inherited around 10-15% of it’s initial investment fund from slavery related sources – which means the vast bulk of the money given did not come from slavery. While you can pinpoint specific examples of colonial money (some great estates, certain banks and investment firms), to say that’s representative of the entire country is too far.

    Sources:

    – The Lion’s Share (Bernard Porter)
    – Empireland (Sathnam Sanghera)
    – John Darwin (Unfinished Empire)
    – Black & British (David Olusoga, who makes the point that many African colonies weren’t profitable, but that wasn’t really the point of them)
    – The Economic History of Colonialism (Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy)

22. It’s sure as sh1t not from anything her or the tories have done.

23. What dross. It seems pretty daft to suggest that the wholesale plunder by the British Empire of what we now call the developing world didn’t contribute to this country’s current wealth. Maybe the good, temperate weather we have is also a factor, but to dismiss the colonial history seems pretty dumb. Our politicians are cartoonish.

24. Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Like most countries and states in history. The headlines make this sound like a black and white thing where we either stole everything and would be knuckle dragging savages if we didn’t steal from the virtuous better peoples of the earth or people that deny we didn’t go around the world taking the juiciest things for ourselves. Clearly we benefited from colonialism however we still would have been somewhat wealthy (but less influential) as we were, and are still, smart and pioneering, a few missteps notwithstanding.

25. If anything the royal family hold wealth from colonialism, not the state.

26. ….well, not all of it no. A lot is from tax avoidance.

27. It’s a pity this is the headline because she actually said some interesting things, chiefly that telling poorer nations that the only reason rich countries are that way is due to exploitation and conquest may not be a good way to encourage healthy growth.

28. To be honest. Why does it matter? To try and open this Pandora’s box of recent generations paying back for the issues of historic generations would be such a big nightmare it just isn’t going to happen.

29. Imagine being such a fucking moron that you don’t understand being the biggest empire ever impacted the country’s future.

30. White privilege and colonialism are just Marxist talking points, they are completely irrelevant and can be easily dismissed as progressive propaganda designed to bring on a western cultural revolution!

31. Nope some of it’s from fucking over the working classes too.

32. ‘Moldova’s poverty isn’t from white privi… wait what?’

33. The country was basically bankrupt after the world wars. The current economic standing is definitely not based off colonial activity. All we’ve done since the world wars is pass off colonies.

34. Some of it certainly but I don’t see being white feeding into the creation of the mills, the steam engine and the first Industrial Revolution.

    Plenty of white people were exploited too

35. If it wasn’t for Britain the rest of the world would still be stuck in a feudal agrarian society at best, or in the stone age, at worst.

    It’s the opposite of what it’s being told, the industrial revolution began in England and exported everywhere, led to an unprecedented economic growth and an unprecedented increse of quality of life and lifespan.

36. North sea oil extraction began in the 1800s. And that accelerated in the 1970s after the oil crisis which closed the coal mines and created the financial Service industry. Everything else is accidental.

    Colonialism didn’t discover oil or finance its extraction. It began by a son of a Scottish carpenter who went to night school to learn chemistry. The same guy discovered a method to rust proof ships.