The Scholarly Business of Corporations and Slavery: Political Fault Lines of the Economic History of Empire

Abstract

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.¹

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery squarely at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. From the early modern era, European monopoly-chartered companies combined political, military, and economic power.² In Britain, monarchs chartered companies; members of Parliament sat on their boards; wealth and loot turned company men into titled peers partnering in government; company trade in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including the slave trade, was entangled with and dependent on diplomatic, military, and political pursuits. Eighteenth-century liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public.

But the sway of liberal theory itself is such that influential historians today, looking at these companies anachronistically through its lens of distinguishable private and public sectors, have at times struggled to grasp their fusion of political and economic functions well into the modern era.³ Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated (2023) is the latest in a series of books on corporations’ role in empire implying the British government was not responsible for British imperialism. A similar liberal habit of mind underwrites Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's hedging in Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (2023) about slavery's role in Britain's economic prosperity and the British state's function in that relationship, despite substantial clarity on these questions in the scholarship they cite. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought so thoroughly suffuse and structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't a sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner that reinforces liberal myths about historical evolution.

Key recent works that have helped restore questions of economic history to the study of the British Empire have done so at the expense of our understanding of the role of cultural and state power, obscuring the wider societal investment in and commitment to empire in a moment of urgent political demand, and practical need, for accountability for slavery and empire. They do so despite long-established evidence of Britain's debts to slavery and empire, much of it assembled by brown and Black scholars approaching these subjects from experience, or an inheritance, of anti-colonial and anti-racial struggle. Leading historians’ portrayal of such work as peripheral to mainstream scholarship has distorted their narration of both the history and historiography of empire and slavery.

This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of economic development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect radical critiques advanced by minoritized scholars help extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to the idea that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery—the backlash against demands for reparations that are based on well-established evidence of British profit from empire. This essay places Stern's and Berg and Hudson's books in conversation with the political attacks on work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past. It illustrates how the framing of such books eases downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.

The Company and the State

In 2006, Nick Robins, a London-based investor and historian, published The Corporation That Changed the World, a “popular history” positioned as the “first-ever book to expose the truth about the [East India] Company's social record.” Robins carefully described the rapaciousness of the East India Company (EIC), explicitly to counter historians’ usual “focus on the actions of states and individuals, on politics and culture, rather than on corporations.”⁴ He drew this specious distinction between the Company and the state to urge greater “corporate accountability” in his own time, development of means of preventing “merchants and entrepreneurs” from undermining “the public interest.” Well-intentioned as Robins's book was, it entirely missed the foundational partnership between the state and the Company and the anachronistic nature of concepts like “public interest.” By focusing on the Company as distinct from the British state and society, Robins proved unable to explain why the British government persisted in ruling India after Company rule ended in 1858. This post-1858 Raj was the “product of the Company's failure,” he concludes simply, quoting Marx's line that the Company's directors “commenced by buying sovereignty and … ended by selling it.” But why would the state buy it? Robins's conclusions may make good sense for twenty-first-century concerns about corporate power, but he imagines evolving entities like “the state” and “the corporation” to have static meanings and forms. Observing that the American and British governments flouted international law by invading Iraq in 2003, Robins nevertheless argues that the state has been “tamed through democracy and law,” and so it is time for democratic check on corporations.⁵ He closes by offering ideas for greater state regulation of corporations. By all means, let's have more corporate regulation, but not on the grounds that corporations have historically been distinct from governments.

In 2019, William Dalrymple's The Anarchy burst onto the literary scene, with its gripping account of the EIC's territorial expansion in the eighteenth century.⁶ The much-praised book again appealed to present-day concerns about corporate power, as the story of “the most extraordinary corporate takeover in history.” But Dalrymple's focus on the Company's villainy occludes the British state and British society's complicity in its activities.⁷ The Company's conquest of India was not driven by corporate greed alone. Wider cultural values and perspectives shaped its activities and legitimized them in the eyes of the British elite, who correctly understood the Company as an arm of the state, charged with pursuing British national interests. By setting his sights so tightly on the EIC as the agent of empire, Dalrymple, too, cornered himself into arguing that the end of Company rule in 1858 alleviated the harms of colonialism: “Alerted to the dangers posed by corporate greed and incompetence, [the British state] successfully tamed history's most voracious corporation” by taking over its Indian possessions. But, as we know, Indians continued to resist British rule after 1858, because racism, exploitation, violence, and extraction were not merely corporate liabilities. Moreover, the British state continued to rely on companies for colonial rule after 1858, as recounted in Steven Press's Rogue Empires (2017) and more recently in Stern's Empire, Incorporated.⁸

Together, Robins's and Dalrymple's books, both aimed at popular audiences, deepened the sense of a distinction between the (evil) EIC and the (at worst negligent) British state and society. More perplexingly, Stern, whose landmark first book clearly established the Company's nature as a “company-state,” promotes a similar false distinction in his 2023 crossover book aimed at a wider audience. Despite its own evidence, Empire, Incorporated's framing elides the hybrid properties of the “company-state” so persuasively laid out in Stern's first book. The EIC was just one, exceptionally powerful, exemplar of a much wider modality of corporate colonialism, explains Stern. Company-states abroad “thrived” in a vast “ecosystem” of corporations that made up British public and civic life, “trade, land, and settlement, transportation and public works, financial services and resource extraction, military and predation, philanthropy and philosophy, education and proselytization,” encompassing “churches, charities, universities, learned societies, towns, and even colonies.” As in his earlier book, Stern recognizes the way the corporation blurred the line between public and private, at home as much as abroad. Yet in 2023 he concludes that the corporation was “the cornerstone of a British empire never fully owned or operated by Britain as such.”⁹

But what was “Britain,” if not the “broad constituencies” of stakeholders in corporate colonialism that Stern names: “employees, sailors, soldiers, settlers, tenants, suppliers, consumers, laborers, commercial partners, creditors, and, from the Treasury to the Admiralty, the various agents and agencies of the British state that came to rely on companies for their commercial, martial, and financial power.” If such vast sections of British society and government were invested in corporations, in what way can we speak of the empire as not having been “owned or operated by Britain”? The book repeatedly highlights the tactical value of corporations to the British state as a means of expanding and governing colonial territories, including “limited moral liability” for violence committed far away. The “British Empire proper,” governed directly by state agencies, was built by “absorbing and assimilating” such corporations. Yet, Stern frames the book as one that clears “Britain” of responsibility for empire. His object is a “history of empire that does not see like a state.”¹⁰ But having recognized the alien form of the state in earlier times—composed of partnerships among various corporations—he nevertheless takes the importance of corporations as a sign of a lack of state involvement.

In fact, there was no other state body that could take on many of these activities: the corporations were those state bodies and saw themselves as such. From the sixteenth century, those who set up corporations for colonial ventures—who were often also involved in shaping policies—did so on the explicit understanding that the Crown did not have the bandwidth to do so itself but would benefit from the revenue, taxes, and diplomatic gain accrued. This was how early modern British governance worked. The eighteenth-century state was not the Crown; it was the Crown plus its corporate partners, including the Royal Mint, the Bank of England, and major contractors and financiers (between which the financial and political elite provided the social glue).¹¹ The corporate state was an organic collection of interactive institutions, communities, and social networks (including the Crown) with varying degrees of autonomy. The Bank of England and trading companies assumed a managerial role akin to fiscal departments of government. It took time for companies like the EIC to become integrated with the state's emerging administrative machinery.

Stern himself explains the contemporary reasoning behind this: legal philosophers like Hugo Grotius believed that in the world beyond Christendom, which remained in a state of nature, “public bodies and private companies” were “in the same category.”¹² The corporation was the extension and analog of the state abroad, where individuals acting without such organization would merely extend the state of nature. The corporation allowed the reproduction of a society abroad. In the nineteenth century, Edward Gibbon Wakefield similarly envisioned the colonization of the South Pacific as a kind of nation-building business, for which the company was the fittest vehicle, not least for the way it leaned on government support while relieving the government of financial and political responsibility. Stern explains this intentional outsourcing of empire but does not allow it to impinge on the book's framing.¹³ Instead, he concludes that Wakefield believed colonization was “best done outside the state” and that companies and charitable societies agreed that “colonial expansion was no business for government.”¹⁴ But his own research shows that contemporaries believed that delegating authority with a charter had “for ages been a leading principle of the British government,” as the nineteenth-century historian George Grote put it.¹⁵ They believed that corporations and charitable societies were the right vehicles for government to engage in colonization.

Empire, Incorporated also shows that contemporaries often saw pursuit of private and national wealth as compatible objectives. The seventeenth-century EIC director Thomas Mun saw the fact that “Widows, Orphans, Lawyers, Gentlemen and others” could invest in the Company as proof that it was “far more public than even an unregulated trade.” Centuries later, in 1896, Edward Dicey affirmed that the British public cared little about the British South Africa Company's profits so long as it acted in “the interests of the British public.”¹⁶ Stern's repeated reinscription of a binary of public and private (asserting, for instance, that Britons’ “overseas enterprise in 1660 … remained in private hands”) produces a cognitive dissonance with these contemporary views. He doubles down on the distinction between Britain's and the companies’ empire in discussing the nineteenth-century firms that furnished imperial communication and transportation infrastructure. “It might be said that ‘Britain’ owned nearly two-thirds of the global telegraphic network,” he writes, but “only three percent of it belonged to or was administered directly by British or colonial authorities.”¹⁷ What is this “Britain” in scare-quotes? The book had shown repeatedly by this point how public the companies and their work were, at a time when the state itself represented only a fraction of the public. More people had access to company shares than to a share (vote) in the government.

Certainly, confusion persisted about corporations’ independence and sovereignty vis-à-vis the Crown, but this was a question of law not Britishness. Stern reads the decrease in royal direction (but continued royal patronage) of the Hudson's Bay Company as a sign of its evolution into an “independent corporation,” even as he describes its accountability to an emerging government bureaucracy whose formation was “permeated by” corporation members. Clearly, this was less about independence than the seventeenth-century shift towards the legislature taking the lead in governance. As Stern himself explains, many members of Parliament were “adventurers in major companies” and relied on their leaders’ advocacy.¹⁸

Relations between the EIC and other offices of state were likewise continually evolving. The Company was not on its own rogue mission unrelated to the interests of some otherwise unitary body called “the state.” The inexact match between its military interests and those of British policymakers should be read as intra-governmental differences of priorities, not evidence of corporations functioning independently of the state. The British state, such as it existed institutionally, was not univocal and could not control Company men on the spot, but disunity is not evidence of a lack of involvement. The relationship was circular: companies took on the national debt Britain accrued from wars of colonial conquest, and when corporations encountered troubles, they knew they could turn to the formal institutions of state for help. Again and again the government bailed them out, investing in their survival financially and militarily all the way up to the Falklands War (where Stern ends his book) because they were understood to serve public interests, Britain's interests.

Figures like Edmund Burke staked out a contrarian position in disputing the EIC's identity with the nation, even as “more and more Britons were now literally invested in Indian empire.”¹⁹ Burke, Adam Smith, and other eighteenth-century critics demanded greater administrative clarity. They questioned the wisdom of Britain's reliance on corporations for imperial administration, not whether the companies were doing imperial administration for Britain. The result was greater parliamentary oversight, greater integration of the EIC into an emerging formation we can call “the state.” Even then, Henry Dundas, the head of the new Board of Control supervising the Company, worried that formal government takeover of Company territories risked jeopardizing “British sovereignty in India.”²⁰ However distinct the Company was from “the state,” its rule in India was absolutely understood as British. This was emphatically an empire owned by Britain. Besides asserting regulatory powers over the Company, the British state, understood in its narrow institutional sense, began to evolve new spaces, such as the Colonial and Foreign offices, that could exercise “direct imperial authority.”²¹ The Company, meanwhile, evolved into a governing body uninvolved in trade.

In short, reliance on companies was pragmatic, a means of extending (and affirming) state power before the existence of what we now recognize as formal state bureaucracies. Indeed, it inspired the invention of such structures. That many still sought charters to govern in new places after 1858 shows that contemporaries recognized this as a technique for expanding the empire that Britain owned. Sir George Goldie of Royal Niger Company fame understood the company as a necessary mechanism for colonial expansion, as it was able to take risks and maneuver politically in a way that the formal government, preoccupied with its dignity, could not. Joint-stock banks, too, connected “urban, national, and provincial and colonial jurisdictions,” serving commercial as well as moral, religious, and national ends in the “character of public institutions,” the banker G. M. Bell avowed in 1840.²² How then can we claim that the empire was not owned by Britain?

Such scholarship, abstracting corporate colonialism from wider investments, helps erode awareness of global structures of economic and political colonialism.²³ The insistence on separating “Britain” from some other agency that was the actual culprit behind empire may be the result of a well-meant effort at scholarly novelty, but it has enormous ethical stakes that should have priority in guiding how scholars frame their works. Clearly, Stern's book resonates with a significant portion of the profession: Empire, Incorporated won the 2024 North American Conference on British Studies’ Stansky Prize and was shortlisted for the John Ben Snow Prize. But without an eye on real-life humans and real-life questions, such as reparations, that lie in the balance, historians who are fully aware of the exploitative and extractive nature of colonialism and the blurry line between private and public power, risk, in their zeal for making and rewarding an original scholarly argument, overstating the innocence of the British state and elites.

The problem is partly the ineradicable influence of liberal political economic theory and its social-scientific categories, despite efforts to historicize such theory. Take, for example, Mircea Raianu's excellent study of the Tata Corporation. Tata (2021) deftly holds together the blurriness of corporate and state sovereignty. However, through innate commitments to an inherited Western template of “History,” it falls into the historicist trap of exoticizing Indian history in a manner that keeps its story of blended corporate and state power from threatening the normative notions about corporations that, for instance, mar understanding of an entity like the EIC. Against the grain of the story it tells, the book succumbs to an old habit of measuring Indian history against a presumed Western default and finding it lacking. The Tatas’ longevity, compared to their Western analogs, the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, leads Raianu to conclude from the outset that the process of “creative destruction” that Joseph Schumpeter tells us drives the history of capitalism “stalled in India.”²⁴ Raianu might have seen the Indian experience as evidence that Schumpeter's theory is not universal, or that creative destruction in the West depended in some way on continuities elsewhere.²⁵ But the reflexive framing is that South Asia's historical development fails to meet normative standards set by Western powers whose policies ensured that South Asia's historical development could not but be different from the template they claimed to offer.

Dipesh Chakrabarty long ago described how Western historical models, Marxist and liberal, cannot but see the history of most of the world in terms of “lack”—the lack of the right social classes to fulfill the right political roles to make the appropriate historical transitions to lead to the correct telos.²⁶ Our habits of historical thought were shaped by the history of empire, defining “progress” in terms that justified British subjugation of Africans, Indians, and others.²⁷ This is why, Chakrabarty explains, it is difficult to think with historicism to understand change in non-European parts of the world. Its assumptions about a universal path to modernity inevitably lead us to conclude that capitalist transition in other parts of the world has been incomplete or lacking. Thus, Raianu writes that India's “Industrial Revolution” was “more modest and limited in scope than its British counterpart but all the more impressive for the constraints it had to overcome.” Underlying this charitable comparison is the idea of a universal process of industrialization that creates the possibility for comparison across national spaces, though abundant questioning of such universality within the new history of capitalism should have prevented its automatic invocation. Helpfully noting the Indian case's challenge to the “long-standing Eurocentric” Weberian assumption that capitalism was born in interior rather than coastal cities, Raianu then dilutes the challenge by explaining that while Indian Parsis fulfilled functions analogous to those of European Jews, “they were not yet ready to make the full leap from commerce to the rational organization of production Weber regarded as fundamental to modern capitalism.”²⁸ Again—a failure to make the right transitions to the right telos, so common in non-white parts of the world. Why still invoke Max Weber as a guide to what ought to have happened in each place, even while embracing a more critical view of what has been fundamental to capitalism?²⁹

Just after explaining the nineteenth-century anti-colonial thinker Dadabhai Naoroji's drain theory of British colonialism and quoting his observation that “India is being bled,” Raianu describes India's princely states (areas the British ruled indirectly through indigenous rulers) as situated in the “less economically developed interior.”³⁰ In fact, many princely states were more prosperous (as Naoroji knew). Such misconceptions help extend the myth that the British developed the parts of India they ruled (rather than bleeding them, as Naoroji said). Moreover, the poverty of some princely states was often a product of their political subordination to the British. Vestigial attachment to an idealized, liberal narrative of Western history as a normative template in scholarship on the empire causes even well-meaning scholars to overlook some of the ethical implications of their claims.

Causality and the Industrial Revolution

Neglecting work critical of such narratives of history abets attachment to them in ways that further undermine understanding of empire's legacies. In their important new book on slavery and capitalism, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, while eagerly claiming to rescue the marginalized work of one Black scholar, Eric Williams, draw a veil around scholarship that has long taken that work seriously and kept it relevant. With an eye on the reparations question, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution synthesizes a vast array of scholarship proving that slave ownership significantly shaped British and Caribbean society, culture, and economy. But its self-styling as a work that redeems “most historians’” long neglect of slavery's role in the industrial revolution renders invisible some of the work it depends upon. Moreover, its investments in liberal theories of universal historical and economic progress undercut the primary argument about slavery's “crucial” role in the industrial revolution.³¹

The book's acknowledgments express the authors’ debts to Joseph Inikori and those who kept “the role of slavery in British economic development alive over many decades when mainstream economic history marginalized its importance.”³² But the main text itself does not acknowledge Inikori outside footnoted citations, instead positioning itself as a revival of Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), as if others have not kept these ideas and facts alive. The authors write that the history of plantation innovation “does not figure in accounts of the industrial revolution,” as if Inikori's and Sidney Mintz's work does not exist or count as work on the industrial revolution.³³ The book's frequent invocations of the errors of other historians omit citations—we never learn who the culprits are.³⁴ Nor do we get a sense of where Berg and Hudson see themselves—two of the most influential historians of the industrial revolution in recent decades—in the pattern of neglect, as they resort to passive voice: awareness of slavery's role in the British economy “got lost,” “was … sidelined or forgotten.” The closest they come to clarifying who lost it is a line about “imperial and abolitionist historians of the 1940s” who “marginalized Williams’ work” for two decades. But what happened after the 1960s? If marginalization persisted, what part did Berg and Hudson play in it? A footnote acknowledges the hand of “institutionalized racism … in dismissing the role of Africans in Britain's industrial revolution.”³⁵ But in the text itself Berg and Hudson emphasize the lack of data—an astonishing excuse coming from two scholars who did so much to push back on the fetishization of data in understanding the industrial revolution.³⁶ One wonders, then, how Williams was able to get so much right without data? If the data proves Williams's and other Black and brown thinkers’ claims right, was the problem a lack of data or an inability to take non-white scholars seriously?³⁷

Besides data, Berg and Hudson explain our new ability to grasp slavery's role in the industrial revolution as the result of “new histories of consumption, global history and capitalism” that have changed “our historical questions and perspectives.”³⁸ The “our” here is jarring. Many scholars, including Williams and Inikori, didn't need these trends to perceive slavery's importance to the industrial revolution. Indeed, arguments about the “historical co-constitution of plantation slavery and industrial capitalism” hearken back to “a rich tradition of Black radical thought,” as Aaron Jakes and Ahmad Shokr explained in 2017, a tradition including Williams, but also W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney—scholars who also played a key role in “combatting institutionalized white supremacy in American academia.”³⁹

This work has been folded into studies of empire and capitalism too long to justify Berg and Hudson's use of “our.” To take a few examples at random: in 2013, even while proudly describing insurance as “typical of the thinking and action that made Europe great,” Peter Borscheid was clear about sugar refiners’ role in pioneering its techniques and sugar's role as “an efficient catalyst for industrial growth in England.”⁴⁰ Chris Otter's 2020 book confidently explains that the sugar trade “stimulated” British industries and port development, citing Williams and a 1973 book by Richard Sheridan.⁴¹ Tehila Sasson's 2024 book assuredly states that sugar was the basis of Britain's global economic prominence through the early twentieth century, citing John Southgate's 1984 book, Commonwealth Sugar Agreement.⁴²

Indeed, anyone familiar with the concept of the “triangular trade” (the flow of British manufactures and British-carried Asian goods to West Africa and the Caribbean, and of slave-produced raw materials powering industrialization from the New World to Britain) will not be surprised that slavery was central to the industrial revolution. As Jonathan Robins's recent book on palm oil affirms, “Textbook accounts often link palm oil with cotton machinery to highlight continuities in Africa's ties to Atlantic capitalism before and after abolition.”⁴³ Yet, Berg and Hudson insist that “Historians rarely consider how significant re-export trade to Africa was in expanding Britain's Asian and European trade.” More confusingly, they acknowledge that the trade they are describing is “often referred to simplistically as a triangular trade,” urging only that we view it instead as “diamond-shaped” for the way it integrated Indian and Atlantic Oceans—which, again, anyone aware of British re-exports of Asian goods knows. Certainly, slavery has been marginalized in “the mainstream story of Britain's past,”⁴⁴ and recent efforts to integrate it is triggering backlash. But slavery's role in the industrial revolution has long been established.

Having cited new paradigm-shifting trends as the reason for “our” ability to now grasp slavery's role in the industrial revolution, Berg and Hudson nevertheless claim that “Most current historical debate on meeting Britain's food needs” ignores “colonial groceries.”⁴⁵ Again, the careless historians go unnamed, while the footnotes cite a robust literature on colonial groceries (even while omitting the crucial work of Otter, Erika Rappaport, Andrew Liu, and others).⁴⁶ Berg and Hudson's own invocation of the familiar phrase “ghost acres” (dating to Kenneth Pomeranz's landmark 2000 book) further confuses the claim about historians’ ignorance of colonial groceries.⁴⁷ Such uncited claims about the failures of “most historians” recur, even as this synthetic work draws on a vast literature going back decades to make its points. Who are the “economic historians” who have “largely denied connections between economic development and slavery”?⁴⁸ It's all to the good that two doyennes of the history of the industrial revolution have determined to make emphatically clear that slavery was crucial to the industrial revolution, but franker acknowledgment of which segments of the academy have ignored this truth, and why, would have done greater justice to the many scholars who have long understood and preserved this knowledge.⁴⁹

Berg and Hudson's berating of the blindness of “most historians” is even more confounding given their refusal to state the implications of their work unequivocally. The book opens with a disclaimer: “We do not argue that slavery caused the industrial revolution” or that it was “necessary for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain.” This disclaimer, which might preemptively appease readers allergic to such notions, does a disservice to the book's findings and purpose. It is at odds with the book's unflinching endorsement of Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy's concept of “racial capitalism,” according to which capitalism has been racial since the start of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas.⁵⁰ Berg and Hudson do not explain how we should square their disclaimer with their invocations of eighteenth-century observations about the slave trade's “central importance” to British prosperity and view of enslaved plantation labor as “a necessary part of technological modernization.” What should we make of nineteenth-century Britons’ belief that “cash crops … could only be produced by slave labour”?⁵¹ Berg and Hudson's disavowal of a causal relationship is difficult to reconcile with their descriptions throughout the book of slavery's critical role in the development of phenomena as varied and pivotal as accounting, mass consumption, the economic history of Scotland, and more.

Indeed, they often appear to be arguing precisely that slavery caused the industrial revolution: “The slave trade and slave-based British colonies together accounted for most of Britain's Atlantic textile exports.” Britain's textile revolutions “would not have occurred without” Atlantic raw materials that encouraged innovation. Nineteenth-century British industry “relied on” products from the empire “extracted with racially based coerced labour.” Materials from the Americas “formed the basis of new processing and manufacturing industries.” The book's last page proclaims, “Slavery was one of the sparks that set the industrial revolution alight.”⁵² This causal statement leaves space for other causal factors but is incompatible with the book's framing denial of a causal relationship between slavery and the industrial revolution.

Mark Harvey and Nicholas Draper have articulated the problem with the question Berg and Hudson's opening disclaimer presumes to answer: “Whether or not slavery was necessary to the British industrial revolution is asking the wrong question, particularly when invoking the kind of explanatory ‘necessity’ yielded by natural science experimental methods or by playing with imaginary counterfactuals.” We need rather to explain the variety of historical capitalism “that actually developed.” Harvey and Draper observe that despite the authors’ denial of a “necessary” connection between slavery and the industrial revolution, “the whole book argues exactly that.”⁵³ Indeed, Berg and Hudson's book emphatically shows that slavery caused the variety of historical capitalism that developed. Yet, Harvey and Draper stop short of questioning Berg and Hudson's disclaimer of slavery's causal relationship to the industrial revolution. Rather, they expand it to affirm that “no one” argues that “slavery caused the industrial revolution.” Even Williams, who “has been represented as arguing that slavery caused the Industrial Revolution,” insisted that the triangular trade was not “solely and entirely responsible for the economic development.”⁵⁴ The journalist Will Hutton, who sees Berg and Hudson as placing “slavery at the heart” of industrialization, similarly expands their disclaimer to say that “No one argues that slavery caused the Industrial Revolution, least of all Berg and Hudson.”⁵⁵

These blanket statements mistake the commonsensical limits on historical causal statements for the absence of any causal relationship. In acknowledging that England's internal market and the ploughing-in of industrial profits to generate further capital and expansion also mattered in the industrial revolution, Williams recognized that slavery, on its own did not cause the industrial revolution. But his arguments that profits from slavery were invested in industry, that West Africa and the Caribbean provided markets for British manufactures, and that British industries emerged to process tropical produce, absolutely recognized slavery's causal role in the industrial revolution that unfolded.⁵⁶

It is worth recalling here historians’ function: we help humans make cognitive sense of existence by giving the vicissitudes of time the structure of a narrative—an account of a series of events that explains how they came to be, some causal explanation. A genealogical relationship between a later and earlier event, which we can perceive only retrospectively, is not “causal” in the sense of being linked by the laws of history.⁵⁷ Despite the illusions of colonial-era, including liberal, models of history, there are no such laws. Prior events do not predestine later events. History is a contingent process. So, there is a necessary artifice in what historians do. History is at once social-scientific and humanistic (the source of its richness and power): it insists on an empirical foundation from which it can weave imaginative truth.⁵⁸ Our decisions on how we write history ultimately represent a moral choice.⁵⁹ Recognizing that national rivalries drove the First World War does not imply that nothing else caused it; nor does our recognition of other factors compel the disavowal that national rivalries did not cause the First World War. Such declarations in work on slavery's relationship to industrialization emerge from a perceived need for protection against the political consequences of a causal claim, at the cost of scholarly clarity.

They are also rooted in a lingering vision of history as governed by laws. Berg and Hudson remain committed to a Whiggish model of historical progress inherited from the colonial era—the idea of industrial revolution as a necessary phase in a universal trajectory of economic progress, one that might have happened even without slavery. For them, there are universal features of “an effective financial system” that is “the foundation for economic growth.” They acknowledge slavery's importance to launching such institutions in Britain (resurrecting Britain's specialness as the first industrial nation), but the presumption is that such a system ought to exist in every place and might emerge with or without slavery. Thus are they able to describe the horrors that enabled the British industrial revolution, including impoverishment of the Caribbean, without questioning its overall benefit to “the wider economy.” They affirm the Caribbean's importance to “the British economy through to the 1840s” as if the “British economy” existed as a coherent material and conceptual object in this time. Their faith in the liberal narrative of progress allows them to assemble a more inclusive picture of the creation of the “great natural history collections that underpinned … Europe's knowledge of the natural world” by acknowledging plantations’ contributions to them, without disturbing this touchstone of triumphalist accounts of the West.⁶⁰ Enslaved and indigenous peoples “assisted” British explorers and collectors, they explain, without considering the loss of great indigenous knowledge cultures.⁶¹

Berg and Hudson thus remain wedded to a vision of history in which slavery was a regrettable evil in a story of inevitable progress—one that might be justly compensated with reparations today, but whose fruit remains nonetheless universally sweet. Their chapter on “slavery after slavery”—on the “racially based coerced labour” and colonial resource extraction that continued to drive European and American industrialism even after abolition—does not make them question their ideas of economic growth.⁶² Nor does the environmental destruction caused by this history, which they acknowledge at the end of the book as a “recurrent and present feature of global capitalism.”⁶³

Berg and Hudson, despite their dramatic effort to endorse the historical importance of slavery to British economic growth, ultimately fail to stand up unambiguously for that truth, and also undermine the importance of colonialism in Asia to Britain's industrial revolution. Berg has made enormous earlier contributions to understanding of this story,⁶⁴ and this new book's descriptions of the “co-dependent” relationship between the rise of sugar and tea consumption and wide investment of slave trade wealth in mass-produced British substitutes for Asian imports, testify to the inseparability of the dynamics of slavery and colonialism. Yet, the authors insist on ranking these forces: the slave trade, they argue, had a “greater impact” in spreading wealth “than did Asian trading,” which, they claim, was “essentially a London-based import trade” whose “nabob wealth” went more into country houses than industry—an argument that ignores the EIC's massive consumption of industrial goods (woolens, firearms, copper goods, etc.) and critical stimulus to shipbuilding and shipyards.⁶⁵ They add that the Atlantic trade created institutions, laws, and practices that helped revolutionize finance in a way that the Company did not; joint stock organization and finance mattered to British economic development “in the same way” as the Caribbean only from the early nineteenth century.⁶⁶ But, as Stern's Empire, Incorporated shows, these worlds were closely linked, in terms of financial innovations, from the start. Williams recognized that profits from slavery and the East Indies were reinvested in British industry.⁶⁷ Indeed, Berg and Hudson's own call for recognizing the diamond-shaped nature of the triangular trade confirms that these universes overlapped. The futility of hierarchizing these colonized regions is evident in their confusing use of parentheses to claim that Asian imports were not as important in shaping European tastes and culture as colonial groceries from the Americas, “especially tobacco and sugar … coffee, cacao and tea (from Asia).”⁶⁸

There's no need to pick one realm as having had more impact than the other. Slavery was integral to wider colonial dynamics. Near the end, in discussing the political influence of West and East India interests, but “particularly the former,” Berg and Hudson observe in a footnote that the historiography often separates these arenas, though many families had interests in both⁶⁹—seemingly unaware of their own artificial separation of them. At the end of the day, their insistence that Asia mattered less or mattered only later to the industrial revolution deepens the book's contradiction with its opening denial that slavery caused the industrial revolution.

Besides a false distinction between slavery and colonialism, Berg and Hudson's account suffers from the untenable distinguishing of public and private sectors that vitiates Stern's work, albeit more inconsistently. This too is partly the result of their peculiar mode of historiographical engagement (omitting citation of those they criticize and overstating scholars’ ignorance of slavery's role in industrialization). In line with their determination to entirely prioritize slavery's role in the industrial revolution (without calling it “causal”), the book initially suggests that the British state and its wars were not important in the industrial revolution. The authors claim inaccurately that most wars from 1660–1815 were fought “entirely at sea and … involved trading rights and colonial possessions in the Atlantic.” In fact, South Asia was an important arena of many wars, which also took place on land and included rebellions within Britain. They emphasize the West Indies as “the major single dynamic source of British imports before the nineteenth century,” though acknowledging that the state, aware of their economic importance, intervened to stabilize their economies and was important to the development of financial services, as the national debt ballooned by the end of the Napoleonic Wars.⁷⁰ But they steer clear of claiming that the context of war shaped the industrial revolution—an argument they are clearly not keen to make or acknowledge.

Thus, scientific technological innovations, such as Boulton and Watt's steam engine, appear on plantations without acknowledgement of the government agencies and military contracts that enabled them. The metallurgical industrialists Ambrose Crowley and Abraham Darby's connections to the slave trade and plantations appear without mention of their related government contracting work. We hear of the “transformative” transatlantic demand on the wool industry but no indication of how we should think of this vis-à-vis existing scholarship on the transformative military demand for wool (on which more below). The Atlantic market for guns is stressed without explanation of its fit alongside gunmakers’ mass production for the state. It remains a mystery how the context of war mattered, if it wasn't an important stimulant of coal, copper, and iron manufacturing. If eighteenth-century Birmingham was a supplier of “light metalwares, muskets and some ironworkers,”⁷¹ what drove its emergence as such a place?

Again, the historical evidence bubbles up against implicit liberal presumptions about distinctly private agencies. The book is peppered with references to state contracts enabling and driving the slave trade and trade in slave-produced goods: Navy contracts for rum and sailcloth; “state-sponsored expansion of the linen industry”; “munitions and navy contracts” stimulating Scottish ironworks; government contracts for slaves to build West Indies fortifications and harbors; Navy and state markets for gunmakers, metalworkers, and copper and iron masters. But Berg and Hudson refrain from recognizing these diverse instances of contracts stimulating industry as evidence of a cumulative pattern—even while acknowledging at one point that the cost of defending the Atlantic empire was “largely offset” by its stimulus to the economy “in the demand for munitions, ships, ships’ provisions and uniforms.”⁷² In her 2019 review of my Empire of Guns, Berg made clear her skepticism of the argument that military contracts helped drive Britain's industrial revolution (including state agencies’ support for the slave trade's stimulus to industry), insisting, in line with liberal theory, that the costs of war outweighed any stimulus to industry.⁷³ Her and Hudson's new book starts out in line with this position.

Near the end of the book, however, Berg and Hudson imply that war was crucial to the industrial revolution, declaring that “the state played a key role” in the slave trade and plantations by chartering corporations, naval policing, and protecting gains from warfare. Britain gained as much as it did from slavery because of its “military and protectionist successes.” The final pages belatedly state that Britain's slave-based colonialism was founded on militarism, in which “central states and colonial governments played a major role.” The authors add that “West India and East India interests … wielded power through formal and informal political positions in local and central governments and in the interests of public and private finance.” They thus describe the very “alliance of sovereign and capitalist power” in corporations and “legal and military support given to powerful groups of private traders” at the heart of Stern's early work and Empire of Guns. The Atlantic trading system the book describes is revealed to be a “state-sponsored economic and political project” based on complicated partnerships between the state, Parliament, provincial and colonial interests, and “private contractors.”⁷⁴

This closing pivot is essential to the work that Berg and Hudson hope the book will do in the world. Acknowledging the state's historical role in the slave trade (and thus in the industrial revolution) is crucial to clinching the case for reparations. For, if the slave trade was entirely the fault of private businessmen, there's no basis for the British government to have any role in restorative justice today. Yet, the state's role in the industrial revolution feels tacked on, a pivot rather than an extension of a coherent line of analysis based on consistent grasp of empire's entanglement of state and private agencies. At one point, the authors acknowledge the difficulty of separating merchants’ investments in the slave trade from their interests in other businesses (as I argued about separating investments in the arms trade from others). This is the essential point: businesses were interrelated and shaped by aggressive colonial pursuits, including the slave trade. Just as colonialism mattered alongside slavery, we don't have to choose between “private” and “public” sources of industrial demand—they were interrelated and entangled: wars were partly fought to protect and expand Britain's role in the slave trade. War and slavery and Asian imports helped drive industrialism. The first, militarism, is what connects the latter two, the flow of firearms enabling the flow of groceries and textiles. Berg and Hudson's mercurial understanding of this dynamic, abetted by inadequate engagement with prior scholarship, has had important consequences for the way their book has been used in political debate.

Compensating for Colonialism

What compensation for slavery and colonialism might look like, practically speaking, is bound up with how we tell the story of empire. If it's about monetary compensation, the typical assumption is that we need a figure for the damage done. In 2015, the Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor's viral Oxford Union speech renewed discussion on reparations, while the Rhodes Must Fall movement galvanized wider examination of empire's legacies. Tharoor called for “symbolic reparation of one pound a year” to India for two hundred years; the point was “atonement,” not “cash.” This was partly because, as he explained in his 2016 book, computations of what was due, such as Minhaz Merchant's figure of $3 trillion, were too high to ever be practically repaid.⁷⁵ Meanwhile, the Indian economist Utsa Patnaik revisited the question of the British “drain” of wealth from India. Using tax and trade data, she calculated in 2018 that Britain drained £9.2 trillion (or, in 2018, $45 trillion) from 1765 to 1938.⁷⁶ This work further invigorated popular discussion, as climate crisis raised the practical stakes of reparations.

Patnaik explains how the EIC used taxes collected from Indians to pay for the goods it bought from Indians to sell elsewhere at a profit that allowed Britain to purchase the foreign iron and timber that fueled industrialization.⁷⁷ After the Company's 1858 demise, the Crown's “Council Bills” system for paying Indian producers continued to expropriate Indian wealth. India's trade surplus with the rest of the world registered as a deficit in national accounts as Britain appropriated India's export income. India had to borrow from Britain to finance imports, putting the entire population in debt to their colonial masters, which further strengthened Britain's hand. Indian taxes also funded “Home Charges” that largely subsidized British military campaigns. The wealth Britain acquired funded British expansion and industrialization of colonies of white settlement. The $45 trillion figure does not include debts Britain imposed on India and the billions of Allied wartime spending that was charged to Indian revenues and was the context for the 1943 Bengal famine costing three million lives. Scholarly historians, including myself, have cited Patnaik's figure—not necessarily as the measure of British expropriation of wealth but as a measure of a long-recognized dynamic of expropriation.⁷⁸

One would expect scholarly contestation of this figure and its calculation, but its emergence in the era of popular movements demanding redress for the imperial past led to political questioning of the very idea that colonialism had been expropriatory and that this claim was well-established.⁷⁹ In 2022, the LSE economic historian Tirthankar Roy obligingly took on the task of challenging Patnaik's work for the History Reclaimed Project, a group of scholars (of varying expertise) opposed to critical views of Britain's imperial past.⁸⁰ Roy's response is a travesty of scholarly analysis. First, he incorrectly claims that the idea of an Indian drain died after K. N. Chaudhuri rejected it in 1968. Though their motivations differ, this denial of the endurance of the drain theory recalls Berg and Hudson's erasure of long scholarly awareness of Britain's debts to slavery. There has always been serious and influential pushback against claims that British industrial capitalism was unrelated to empire and slavery. Like slavery's role in the industrial revolution, the idea that colonialism drained colonies’ wealth was alive and well long after 1968. It was integral to underdevelopment and dependency theories of colonialism that were influential in political science and economics courses even in my undergraduate days in the 1990s. The rise of postcolonial studies after Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) ensured that the history of Western exploitation of the “East” remained the accepted factual foundation of much humanistic work. In 1985, the politician Ken Livingstone, as leader of the Greater London Council, stated as a matter of fact that the city's immense wealth was “largely built upon the fortunes made in the colonial trade in sugar, tobacco, tea, cocoa, coffee, gold and other minerals and oil. Some part of these fortunes trickled down into the homes of Londoners as a whole.”⁸¹ Among economists, Amartya Sen's Nobel-prize winning work on famines and development was built in these decades on the understanding that colonialism drained Indian wealth. To be sure, the end of the Cold War marginalized Leftist interpretations of economic history, but even mainstream economic historians, such as Peter Cain, David Fieldhouse, and Patrick O'Brien (who contributed to the 1999 Oxford History of the British Empire) understood that empire drove British development.⁸² Against the backdrop of continued American interventions abroad, studies of neocolonialism kept awareness of exploitative economic relations current. In 2000, Pomeranz's The Great Divergence shook the foundations of complacent arguments about Western prosperity's rootedness in unique qualities of religion, culture, and institutions, pointing instead to the role of natural resources and the “ghost acreage” acquired through slavery and colonialism. All this is why Nick Robins's 2006 book referred to the drain as a generally accepted theory, even if estimates of the actual sum remained a matter of debate.⁸³

The drain theory died, Roy further claims, because it was “unverifiable”—as Patnaik's figure remains “untestable.” The drain is unverifiable, however, only to those who ignore the evidence of Britons and Indians in the colonial era itself who tell us again and again that colonialism was exploitative and extractive. It is as evident in the rise of the “nabobs” as it is in the displacement of Indian artisanal cotton with British manufactured cloth, in British officials’ open testimony of their desire to deindustrialize India, and Indian demand for policy change to allow industrialization.⁸⁴ In 1840, the British official Montgomery Martin estimated that Britain's drain of Indian wealth between 1803 and 1833 was £724 million, noting that such “a drain even on England would soon impoverish her.”⁸⁵ Another, George Wingate, wrote that the “tribute paid to Great Britain is by far the most objectionable feature in our existing policy. Taxes spent in the country from which they are raised are totally different in their effects from taxes raised in one country and spent in another.”⁸⁶ Indian rebels of 1857 cited economic exploitation as a motivation. At the close of the nineteenth century, British writers, including the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, bewailed Britain's hand in the enslavement and starvation of masses around the world.⁸⁷ Roy, criticizing Indian “nationalists’” arguments, imagines Indians to have been engaged in a two-hundred-year-long misunderstanding of their exploited state.⁸⁸

Patnaik framed her essay as a “revisiting” of the drain not because the existing literature fails to recognize colonial economic exploitation but because it has not attended to the actual “transfers,” their sheer scale, and the specific mechanisms through which they were effected. She acknowledges the “rich discussion dealing with transfers … taking place” since Naoroji initiated it in the nineteenth century, her footnote enfolding a lengthy historiography continuing into the twenty-first century. Her purpose is to express the drain concept “in terms of modern macroeconomic theory.” She (in contrast to Raianu) uses empirical findings to remind us of the fallacies of macroeconomic thought that continue to appear in textbooks, such as Ricardo's assumption that “all countries produce all goods,” when in fact, northern European countries could not produce crops like cane sugar, coffee, tea, opium, indigo, and cotton and did not produce goods that “larger colonized countries voluntarily wished to import in any substantial way.”⁸⁹

Presuming to test Patnaik's “untestable” claim, Roy disputes British drain of Indian wealth in the eighteenth century. For, he argues, the EIC ruled “only Eastern India” from 1765–1772—as if formal rule is a prerequisite for economic exploitation and expropriation. He adds that, as Company rule was shared with the “local Nawab,” responsibility for any “misdeed” was “shared.” Indian collaboration does not, however, mean colonialism ceased to be colonialism; it shows us how colonial power worked on the ground. Even the financial benefits some Indian elites accrued do not undermine the reality of British-instigated general economic exploitation, especially as financial and political favors often came at the expense of much more—substantive political control, cultural autonomy, security, and more.

Roy recognizes that British profits from Company officers’ export of Bengali textiles that they had paid for with Bengal's tax revenues was “wasted money” to Indians but asserts that drain theorists exaggerate “the significance of this ‘tribute’.” Even granting this assertion, this argument about the first seven years of British rule in eastern India doesn't disprove others’ arguments about two centuries of British rule. An initially insignificant tribute might have increased.⁹⁰ Roy adds that the Company lost interest in trade from the 1770s, investing its revenue in wars and governing India—without considering that expenditure of their taxes on wars serving Company interests might have represented a loss to Indians. Company officials exaggerated revenue, Roy contends, less than a fifth of which went to trade, falling to zero before 1783—though it's unclear how these claims disprove a drain of Indian wealth. Lower-than-expected revenue was, in fact, the result of famine caused by the Company's dramatic changes to revenue-setting and land tenure; and little could be spent on trade if war and loot were depleting revenues.⁹¹

Roy then contests the drain by protesting that “artisans were paid,” forgetting that the problem lies in the funds they were paid from: not the customer's own coffers, but money collected locally after military subjugation. He insists, “only the profit repatriated was a drain, if we are willing to believe that the artisans could find other work”—an “unverifiable” condition. But it is well known that artisans were coerced to sell to the Company precisely because they would otherwise have sold to other customers.⁹² Estimating “repatriated profit” at “five percent of investment” (without explanation), Roy concludes that only .08 percent of Bengal's income was transferred over a decade, implying average annual transfers of £28,000 “when the income of India was nearly 150 million pounds.” This figure is a mystery, as national accounts for “India” in this period did not exist. Roy uses less than a decade of estimated revenue from Bengal to dismiss the scale of revenues over the entire period of British rule across the subcontinent.

The British continued to pay for Indian goods with Indian taxes after the Company's demise, according to Patnaik. Foreign importers bought Indian goods by depositing money in Britain in exchange for a Council Bill that they could send to an exporter in India by post or telegraph. The exporter cashed the bills in rupees from the Indian Treasury, i.e. from Indian taxes. Many merchant exporters were British and contributed to the transfer of Indian wealth by keeping large commissions after paying off the Indian producer. What makes this system, which Roy deems a “standard system for the remittance of money,” a racket is the absence of a mechanism for clearing accounts between the British and Indian treasuries. Rather than argue that the British Treasury did clear accounts (by, say, transferring funds received on its account to the Indian Treasury or accounting for them against [legitimate] Indian debts), Roy merely assures that the exporter later paid tax on the income he received from Indian taxes—as if this were a point of controversy. He further counters that the money might also come from notes or reserves (though Patnaik mentions this), failing to grasp that such payments, tending to diminish income value, would work only if, as Patnaik explains, “payment was … via a complete and equivalent expansion of money supply against forex earnings at the going exchange rate, as would happen in a sovereign country.”⁹³ The bottom line, literally, is that wealth was not coming into India when Indian goods went out of India—as is typically assumed with foreign trade. The money Indian producers received in payment came from within India, either through funny money or their own tax payments.

On the final question of India's heavy foreign indebtedness as a source of drain, Roy asserts that colonial India was simply an “open economy” that benefited from borrowing liberally abroad, without considering that—as 1920s anti-colonialists calling for debt repudiation recognized—the loans it took funded British military and infrastructure expenses and extravagant interest payments on previous debt accrued for similar ends. Nor does he reflect on how global political structures shaped interest rates (and commissions), making loans excessively expensive for polities that resisted colonial rule. The global capitalist system centered on London viewed non-white, non-Christian societies unguided by European hands as high-risk investments.

In the end, Roy challenges the assumption that money sent to Britain would otherwise have been invested in India by pointing to investment policies in Indian princely states as a real-life counterfactual—as if policies and developments in those areas were not also shaped by the context of British rule. Arguably, the more important inter-Indian comparison is that eastern parts of India, where the British ruled the longest, as Roy so insists, were “the poorest to-day,” as Jawaharlal Nehru observed in 1946.⁹⁴

Roy's brief polemic does not do justice to the many and sophisticated arguments and types of evidence that Patnaik marshals in an essay that demands serious engagement from economic historians. His denial of colonialism's extractive power results, again, from uncritically superimposing inherited social-science categories on a distinct historical reality. In his 2022 economic history of India, he acknowledges that the EIC produced “greater inequality” in Indian society, while holding that the “colonial state had neither the will nor the money to make a significant difference to peasants and labourers.”⁹⁵ Beyond the obvious factual objection that colonialism massively affected peasants and laborers, changing their relationship and rights to land and coercing labor for the production of indigo, opium, and other commodities (on all of which there is a vast literature),⁹⁶ the idea that the colonial state lacked the will or money to make a difference to “peasants and labourers” reads as though the problem was simply one of neglect of these universal, pre-existing social classes. But it was colonial processes of deskilling, deindustrialization, displacement, and expropriation that turned artisans, communal farmers, and pastoral peoples into “peasants and labourers” in the first place. It's not just that poorer subjects didn't gain much, or that they were exploited, but that so many subjects became poor and landless and thus vulnerable to exploitation and neglect. That's what the inequality is about.⁹⁷

In 2021, Patnaik (together with the economist Prabhat Patnaik) revised her estimate of the drain upward to $1.925 trillion for 1765 to 1900 cumulated to Indian independence in 1947, and $64.82 trillion cumulated to 2020—as “minimal estimates” that were not a “full measure” of accounts. Significantly, a footnote identifies Chaudhari as a writer who had wrongly applied standard macroeconomic theory to understand “a colonized economy subject to such a drain.”⁹⁸

Also in 2021, the UK-based economist Prabir Bhattacharya, framing his work as a contribution to the “divergence debate,” argued that British rule of India played a major role in European economic and political strength.⁹⁹ The drain of Indian wealth, by increasing capital supply in Britain, made capital-intensive, labor-saving innovations more likely there, fueling the industrial revolution. Bhattacharya summarized the history of plunder from the eighteenth century, including the EIC's use of taxes to buy Indian goods, and provided seven different estimates of the drain (from C. J. Hamilton's in 1919 to J. Cuenca Esteban's in 2007) that allowed Britain to liquidate foreign debt and generate surplus for foreign investment. Rapidly increasing returns on these investments helped stabilize the British regime and support raw material imports at a level that could maintain domestic employment. Obtaining many Indian imports essentially for free, Britain became a country of high savings. Citing Inikori, Bhattacharya affirms trade's importance to British shipping, banking, and insurance.¹⁰⁰ India's trade deficit with Britain was offset by surpluses with the rest of the world, particularly opium exports to China. Bhattacharya sketches the Asian side of the picture Berg and Hudson allude to, including the role of tea. Opium revenue serviced the EIC's war debts as it expanded. Control of India anchored the use of Indian indentured labor on plantations around the empire, development of colonies of white settlement, and massive investment in infrastructural projects in places like Argentina and the USA, all to Britain's economic benefit. Like Patnaik, Bhattacharya highlights how much British rule in India contributed to the prosperity of the world's wealthy industrial nations and their collective debt to India.

In 2022, the University of Sussex sociologist Gurminder Bhambra cited Patnaik in assessing the role of colonial taxes in funding Britain's welfare state.¹⁰¹ As Bhambra notes, literature on the welfare state (like literature on the industrial revolution) ignores colonialism's role in the “national project” of redistribution. The problem, again, is the hold of inherited social science categories, despite our awareness of their artificiality. “The asymmetry … is reproduced within mainstream social science every time the nation-state is taken as the unit of analysis and not the wider empire, or imperial state,” Bhambra concludes, calling for “a better social science … to find more expansive and generous solutions” to our problems, including “justice through material reparations.”¹⁰²

The exact figure is not as important as the overall picture in such work. Indeed, the very point of Patnaik's astronomical figure—often lost in the debate—is precisely that suggestions that Britain should return the money it drained from India are impractical. Britain cannot. Rather, her priority is that conversations about reparations begin with “the real history” of imperialism's role in industrial capitalism. Once that is understood, a different path opens up: because “the entire industrializing world throve on the drain,” it makes sense for “the industrial nations as a whole to repay the transfers.” This is “practicable.”¹⁰³ Essentially, transfers that may be practically and ethically required to address climate change are also historically justified. Patnaik also insists that Britain “morally owes reparations for the 3 million civilians who died in the Bengal famine,” while recognizing that “Nothing can compensate for that loss of lives.”¹⁰⁴ This gets us back to Tharoor's idea of atonement; Patnaik's point is that no amount of money can actually redeem the losses of the colonial era. The British scholar Jason Hickel, summarizing her work, likewise concludes that “the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated”—we can't know the counterfactual India in which wealth would have been invested differently over these centuries. Practicalities aside, the first priority, Hickel echoes, is simply to get the story straight.¹⁰⁵

Patnaik offered her figure as an estimate not of reparations due but of what has been lost, as a foundation for any conversation about reparations. Accounts will never be closed; the damage has been too sweeping and profound—bringing us to existential crisis in the form of climate change. But despite her emphasis on the figure's rhetorical function, critics get hung up on the figure itself. Even a British journalist as persuaded of Britain's imperial legacies as Sathnam Sanghera argues in The Guardian that “colossal numbers” like Patnaik's “stop being useful” and reveal the Left's inclination “to excess when it comes to imperial history,” mirroring the Right's.¹⁰⁶ In fact, they are not a mark of excess but of an effort at expressing a reckoning of historical tragedy in the quantitative language that our times fetishize. Patnaik's essay, which Sanghera links to, is not a political treatise, but a scholarly work published by an academic press. Politically motivated challenges to it have all but eroded awareness of this scholarly grounding. Sanghera's essay is based on his foreword to a new edited volume, The Truth about Empire (2024), responding to right-wing attacks on scholarly imperial history, but even this book, edited by Alan Lester, mistakenly attributes the $45 trillion figure to “the politician Shashi Tharoor,” citing Tharoor's book, which appeared well before Patnaik proposed the figure.¹⁰⁷

The stated goal of Patnaik's essay was to set the scholarly record straight—especially accounts of British economic history and macroeconomic theories that continue to elide colonialism—as a first-order problem that precedes questions of policy and politics. The problem that she and Tharoor allude to is that accounting quantitatively for the damages of colonialism has the effect of measuring colonialism in terms of its own value of material wealth, when in fact, as we know, and as her colossal sums actually imply, the damages were social, cultural, psychological, and political, as much as economic. The unfortunate side-effect of the dispute over the $45 trillion figure is the increased fixation on quantitative arguments—and an industrial vision of modernity. Even Patnaik cannot imagine alternative visions of Indian prosperity, arguing that without the drain India might have “imported technology to build up a modern industrial structure much earlier than Japan … The Indian railways could have been built several times over…”¹⁰⁸

Indeed, the “balance sheet” approach—using accounting methods to assess empire's economic effects—is deeply misguided, the product of colonial-era rhetorical efforts to obscure the harms of British imperialism by highlighting the “positive” impacts that justify the (much minimized) “negative” ones, even though the “positives” (typically, railways) are not clear positives and their enumeration rests on the racist presumption that brown and Black people would not have been able to progress on their own.¹⁰⁹ This accounting impulse underlies the urge to hierarchize the contributions of slavery and colonialism to British economic history in a manner that distracts from their entanglements and overlapping historiographies.¹¹⁰

Besides its logical fallacies, the category of “benefit” in this framework is narrowly defined in material terms that perpetuate the values of the colonial era. As we have seen with Indian collaborators, well-being is not only about finances. We can't say that because Britons benefited economically, empire was “good” for them. It may have benefited many financially but at major cultural, social, and moral cost, as contemporary observers like DuBois, Gandhi, and Fanon perceived. No one actually benefits from brutality and exploitation. We have always known this. That is the knowledge, the understanding of humanity, that was lost in the colonial era and that we must recover. We will never have the right data to make a totally accurate quantitative measure of the impact of slavery or of colonial economic exploitation in India and elsewhere. Nor is it possible or appropriate to express such phenomena in quantitative terms.¹¹¹ Not having the right data has not prevented the academy from acknowledging the exploitation of the English working classes (at least not since E. P. Thompson). Nor do we question the historical exploitation of women. As we have seen, the exploitation of brown and Black people was, for a time, also widely accepted on faith in a range of sources.

The Politics of Scholarship

Today, the certain knowledge that our present has been shaped by the colonial past is under political attack. But this attack is not new, either. It has been nurtured in the shadow of the powerful twentieth-century critiques of British colonialism that have anchored our awareness of its effects. After the Second World War, Jo Guldi has shown, globally influential ideas about land redistribution, grounded in a solid understanding of how British rule had transformed relations between land and classes (and engendered lethal famines), posed a formidable challenge to neoliberal policies that would put farmers in formerly colonized parts of the world in debt to wealthier countries.¹¹² Modernization theory, with its assumptions about “Western superiority,” prioritized growth; it was robustly contested by land redistribution theory, which drew on anti-colonial thought and tactics and prioritized dignity and justice.¹¹³ The global influence of Indian thought about rural reconstruction on agronomists and philanthropists is evident in Sasson's story of the rise of the British nonprofit sector.¹¹⁴ But modernization theory ultimately prevailed in a global political context that was still structured by colonial ambition. In the mid-1950s, India's second Five-Year-Plan shrank agriculture's share of the budget in favor of industry.¹¹⁵ Discounting the effects of colonialism and seeking to ward off the threat of neocolonialism, India's leaders made industrial “catch-up” their goal. The 1950s also saw the foundation of London's Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a neoliberal thinktank dedicated to countering ideas about land redistribution, publishing pseudo-academic work based on selective use of data.¹¹⁶ This institute remains at the center of right-wing efforts to deny the realities of the colonial past. In May 2024, Conservative Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch cited a new booklet Imperial Measurement by the IEA's head of political economy, Kristian Niemietz, to fortify her defenses of the imperial past.¹¹⁷ This booklet claims, again, as if wide and deep scholarship on the topic does not exist, that slavery and colonialism did not drive British economic growth.¹¹⁸ Badenoch referenced it to deny the justice of demands for reparations and hold up the “West” as the template for “developing nations” seeking to become rich.

As Lester notes, the booklet's launch and Badenoch's speech, along with Conservative press coverage, were remarkably “synchronised.”¹¹⁹ The existence of works like Niemietz's, with their aura of scholarly authority (including the pseudo-objectivity of “cost-benefit” analysis¹²⁰), despite the author's lack of expertise in the topic at hand, create exhausting amounts of work for actual experts. These “scholarly” sources require a response, though they only exist because of their willful ignorance of evidence and arguments that already exist to disprove them. Niemietz's booklet is undeserving of serious scholarly engagement but nevertheless demands engagement because of the political impact generated by its pseudo-academic style. I want to focus on a key takeaway that Lester does not address in his masterful analysis of Niemietz's cherry-picked and outdated evidence and that has become rhetorically central to representations of the booklet: the claim that the slave trade was “no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming.”¹²¹ As serious students of British economic history know, the prosperity of brewing and sheep farming was itself very much bound up with slavery and colonialism. The brewing industry was significantly sustained by mass demand from the Army and Navy for their ever-larger forces in the period's ever-larger wars. That's partly why the brewing industry became an important site of excise tax collection for the British fiscal-military state.¹²² The sheep industry was likewise boosted by military demand for wool uniforms and trading companies’ demand for woolen exports. Woolen drapers were among the first major military contractors. Their provision of credit to regimental colonels made them early war financiers, many evolving into bankers from this work.¹²³ This is why the wool industry was powerful enough to successfully lobby for protection from cotton textile imports, making West Africa and other markets critical to the survival of the British cotton industry for much of the eighteenth century. And, of course, the wars that the wool and brewing industries thrived on and enabled, expanded and preserved the empire and British dominance of the slave trade. Niemietz paints a quaint picture of sheep and ale industries flourishing independently of war and slavery, evidently due entirely to cutely insatiable British appetites for blankets and beer.

I also want to push back on Lester's concession to Niemietz that the data for assessing empire's economic impact is “patchy” and that debates can thus “never be resolved satisfactorily.” Again, fixation on the need for figures to “satisfactorily” resolve a debate depicted as otherwise unresolvable results from a refusal to understand the past on its own terms, a failure to understand our categories of economic measurement—trade, capital investment—as categories of theory, not descriptions of timelessly real objects. We know enough, we have enough testimony from people who were alive at the time, to know which way wealth flowed. We know, partly from the database of slavery's legacies, how many of today's elites in Britain are traceable to the slave-holding families of the past.¹²⁴ It is established, as Ken Livingstone recognized it to be in the 1980s. If, as Lester too acknowledges, not all of colonialism's impact can be measured in “quantitative, monetary terms,”¹²⁵ why must we forever defer making conclusions out of lack of data that cannot have existed?

Berg and Hudson's book appeared just in time to get caught up in this debate. Attentively quoting its opening disclaimer, Niemietz still objects to its case for slavery's “major contribution” to British industrialism. Responding to Niemietz's attack on the idea that colonialism and slavery are “the very foundations” of the wealth of Britain and the Western world, Lester argues, again, that no one has said this. Now we see the utility of Berg and Hudson's framing sleight of hand: it allows Lester to accuse the likes of Niemietz of a “straw man” argument, despite the actual thrust of the scholarship their book synthesizes.¹²⁶ Their diffident framing leaves Niemietz little to criticize apart from arguing that they do not sufficiently acknowledge the costs of British military activity—the very criticism Berg made of Empire of Guns and that the new book fails to coherently redress beyond a brief assertion that the defense costs of the Atlantic empire were offset by their stimulus to the economy.

Niemietz is also able to challenge Lester's affirmation of a “scholarly consensus” on slavery and colonialism's contribution to “Britain's economic success”¹²⁷ by pointing to Berg and Hudson's claim that theirs “is not the mainstream view in their field,” their framing of their book “as a heterodox challenge … not … confirmation of … ‘scholarly consensus’.”¹²⁸ This is the danger, and the cost, of Berg and Hudson's vague allusions to the failures of “most historians,” and their pretense at reviving an otherwise forgotten Williams thesis, when others have long since kept it alive. That the empire and slavery profoundly shaped Britain is, in fact, a mainstream view is evident in Hutton's description of the IEA position as a “risible recasting of history”: “If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions … helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution … think again,” he writes with dripping sarcasm in The Guardian. “The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA.”¹²⁹

Efforts to preemptively defang deniers of empire's economic benefits to Britain by understating the thesis in a manner at odds with the evidence is a disservice to the past, to the struggles of those who fought for freedom, and to the scholarship that has shown clearly that, through multiple mechanisms, colonialism and slavery were absolutely essential to the emergence of the industrial revolution and massive financial prosperity in Britain—however unequally its fruits were shared within British society. This is precisely the pattern of scholarly erasure that Bhambra, Patnaik, Bhattacharya, and Inikori and Williams challenge. To his credit, in listing the serious and numerous omissions of historiography and historical fact from Niemietz's “balance sheet,” Lester invokes the work of Patnaik, Bhambra, and Bhattacharya. But his argument that the “second British empire” was different from the one that Nietmietz's sources (Adam Smith and Richard Cobden) saw in their lifetimes is at odds with those scholars’ findings. Patnaik and Bhattacharya see nineteenth-century extraction as very much rooted in earlier dynamics. Lester himself describes this literature as related to the “Great Divergence” in the eighteenth century. His fair-minded proclivity to yield ground to Niemietz thus leads him to understate the clarity of these scholars’ analysis of exploitation extending from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in ever-evolving ways.

This pattern of excessive modesty allows Niemietz to distinguish Berg and Hudson's work, with its conciliatory disavowal of a causal and necessary relationship between slavery and Britain's industrial revolution, from “stronger versions” of the “Williams Thesis” that are his real target.¹³⁰ Thus does Berg and Hudson's framing undermine the work of scholars unafraid of acknowledging long-understood truths about slavery's and empire's role in British economic prosperity. In imagining that a “non-imperialist Britain” might have enjoyed the gains from the empire while avoiding its costs,¹³¹ Niemietz shares Berg and Hudson's investment in a kind of counterfactual history that sees industrial revolution as something that might exist outside of the actual historical context in which it came to pass. He calls on Lester, who accused him of strawman argument, to explicitly distance himself from those who push the Williams Thesis “beyond anything that could be justified by historical data”¹³²—presumably those who don't shy from naming slavery's causal role in actual existing industrial capitalism. Leaving aside the racial divide in this scholarship, the prima facie refusal to take such arguments seriously, their proleptic delegitimization, is clear.

Influential scholars’ overly modest framing of the relationships between British prosperity and imperialism and slavery helps create space for politically motivated denialism of the facts of imperial history by the likes of History Reclaimed, the IEA, and Conservative politicians uninterested in making new history. The logical flaws in the framing of well-meant books by authors like Nick Robins, Dalrymple, and Stern similarly make it easier for such forces to gaslight other scholars and the public about the continuities between government and corporate colonialism and Britain's collective debts to the imperial past. Thus the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to three economists who, despite what we know about the role of colonialism and slavery in Western prosperity, explain the “Great Divergence” with a stale ideological argument about liberal “institutions,” ignoring the insights of the historical scholarship they cite in pretending that seventeenth-century Barbados's slave society was not tied to England's property-based society.¹³³ Through such honors, academic stagnation has profound political effects, the costs of which are borne by those already shouldering the burdens of the iniquitous past.¹³⁴

The fact is that slavery and imperialism, with their relations of exploitation and extraction, made the British economy what it was in the modern period. This has long been the consensus among scholars who study the British economy without reifying its national shape. Historians must be more circumspect in using social categories (state, nation, economy, etc.) inherited from the colonial context in which the discipline took shape. These normative categories are often not helpful descriptors even in our time (enabling us, for instance, to tolerate the “military-industrial complex” as an excisable perversion in an otherwise healthily separated economy and state); they are certainly not accurate descriptors of social and political life in earlier times. Still, they remain the foundational concepts of our social sciences, where they are perpetuated as universal social and political ideals. It is time to heed the research on the historical making of these concepts,¹³⁵ and consciously think more anthropologically about the past, as a place with its own social concepts that ours don't neatly map onto. Publishers, editors, and reviewers also need to do a better job spotting inconsistencies and contradictions within texts. Even in a book criticizing the persistence of colonial-era stadial frameworks, such as developed/developing/underdeveloped, for dividing humanity, the historian Stefanos Geroulanos resorts to the phrase “the developing world.”¹³⁶ If the historians who are denaturalizing these categories keep using them, what is the hope for change in the real world?

These habits are partly the product of an automatic way of writing—what George Orwell diagnosed in 1945 as unthinking reliance on “ready-made phrases”: “When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.”¹³⁷ Colonialism captured our imaginations, programming our minds to think in terms of its categories; even as we unlearn its paradigms, our effort to reclaim different ways of being in the world is hampered by writing and framing either shaped by subconscious reflexes or suffering from intense lack of self-awareness.

Historians must also understand the costs of overstating the novelty of their findings given the collective nature of scholarship. Even Geroulanos's well-meant effort to narrate colonial abuses of the study of prehistory suffers from confusions that might easily have been averted by careful engagement with previous scholarship.¹³⁸ Berg and Hudson's exaggeration of the absence of arguments about slavery's impact on the industrial revolution after the 1960s, and Roy's denial of the currency of the drain theory after the 1960s, serve opposing political ends, but both empower right-wing political crusaders to paint arguments about Britain's debts to slavery and colonialism as fringy rather than as long-established by anti-colonial activists and generations of scholars.

What of the question of reparations? Governments have long compensated citizens for loss of property and life, including, infamously, slave-owners after abolition.¹³⁹ Whatever the past debts of colonizers to the colonized, dealing with planetary crisis today requires understanding that our survival depends on one another.¹⁴⁰ This means thinking in terms of collective human needs—if this requires wealth redistribution, so be it, and it needn't wait on an accurate measure of the original “drain” that is any case beyond quantitative capture. The climate crisis is here because of the same practices that led to unequal wealth accumulation. The ethics of most faiths operate from the understanding that we lose our humanity when we allow fellow humans to suffer undeservedly. Recovering such values is the very definition of decolonization and moving past the history of empire.

The seeming objectivity (but actual conceit) of a tough-love approach to the past—abstaining from adjudicating what happened until, at last, sufficient data appear (even despite what colonial interventions in our own lifetimes, from Vietnam to Gaza, show us racially minded, ideologically motivated, liberally armed humans are capable of, following on that past)—results in possibly clever but fundamentally un-humanistic history, an unloving and therefore aimless scholarship without compassion towards past sufferings and their ongoing legacies. It enables chronic denialism. By all means, as we debate the how and why of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, let's debate how and why the regions known as “the West” became dominant through exploitation and oppression of other regions of the world, but not whether this happened.

Will we ever get the story straight? After two decades of reviewing historical scholarship marked by stubborn attachment to a colonial-era mindset—in which even scholars reviving Eric Williams's work deride the notion that slavery caused the industrial revolution, in which the role of colonialism in today's global inequalities is taken as unproven and unprovable, in which the work of Black and brown scholars continues to be peripheralized—I hope, for now, to apply my time and analytical capacities toward more productive endeavors.