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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:55
The Truth About Empire - and Western Colonialism!
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Here to dispel a few of the misconceptions to do with European colonialism.
Why is this important?
Well, of course, European colonialism has been cited by about 12 billion people on the internet and in the media as the cause of most of the world's ills and the reason why Europe must spend the rest of its existence groveling, apologizing, beating itself with politically corrupt social justice warrior whips.
And apologizing for all of the railways it built.
Anyway, and of course it's why the refugees from the Middle East are supposed to have to get in, because it's blowback, you see, because Europe raved the world for hundreds of years and now it's blowback.
Let's go to some of the facts.
There are two sources or two reasons why you have lies about colonialism.
The first, of course, is that the local rulers really didn't like the fact that the European rulers took over.
So, of course, right, the local power structures, local principalities, the local mandarins, the local people in charge really didn't like that the Europeans came along and so they fomented a lot of negative views, of course, of Colonialism on the world.
After the end of colonialism, things generally went for the worse for these countries.
I mean, Uganda saw the rise of Idi Amin, who's killed between a hundred and five hundred thousand people.
There was the partition between Pakistan and India after the end of British rule in the late 1940s, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed when the Boers took over and instituted apartheid in South Africa.
I've got the truth about South Africa if you want to check it out.
The average life expectancy of the blacks in South Africa was about 36 years old.
When they left, it was in the mid-60s.
Sorry, when apartheid ended, it was in the mid-60s, and then it dropped by nine years under ANC rule.
So there's a lot of people like the rulers who were displaced by the Europeans, didn't like it, and fomented a lot of negative views of this European colonialism, number one.
Number two, the rulers who took over after the Europeans left, Generally screwed things up quite a bit and therefore wanted to blame everything on the legacy of colonialism.
You know, like you see dysfunction within the black community in America still blamed upon the legacy of slavery more than 150 years ago.
So when there's a mess a lot of people like to blame others and that's part of it.
The third part, I guess there are three, the third part of course Is that the leftists and the communists in general hate anything to do with free trade and as I'm going to make the case colonialism had a lot to do with free trade and was very successful and raised the standards of living in many of the countries and the communists hated this and generally of course the leftists who rule academia and to some degree the media have huge incentives to point out all of the negatives of colonialism.
It's sort of a weird thing.
This may upset you, but I think it's a basic fact.
Your ancestors may have been conquered.
They may have been conquered.
It's not always the case, but generally it's the case that your ancestors got conquered because they sucked.
Because they were terrible at what they did.
There were, of course, more advanced civilizations that have marched across the world from place to place and from time to time.
Those more advanced civilizations generally have better weaponry, better organization, better armies, more goods, more services, more gold, more resources, and they generally beat the local population.
Because the local population generally sucks.
And I'll get to my ancestors where this happened as well, but I just really want you to understand this, because this is something that has really been lost.
It doesn't mean that everyone who conquers everyone is great, and everyone who gets conquered is bad.
You know, that was Roman Carthage.
But there is a general pattern that the more industrialized, the more free, the more advanced civilizations come across the native civilizations in various places, and they generally maybe try to integrate them, try to work with them, but in general they end up winning.
And the better team in sports is often the one that wins.
And that is something that is important to remember.
So, just to give you an example.
So, I have Irish and German and British roots.
And let's just talk about England, right?
So, England was populated to some degree by the Celts and other people and so on.
We'll just talk about the Celts for the moment.
Now, the Celts sucked.
They were terrible.
Yeah, they had some ironworks and they made nice pottery and some jewelry and, you know, Stonehenge and all that sort of stuff.
But in general, they sucked.
They sucked at math.
They sucked at writing.
They didn't even have a written language, to my knowledge.
So they had only an oral history, which is basically just endless propaganda.
But enough about public school.
They sucked!
They were terrible.
They had no concept of building Big buildings, right?
It's like the blacks in Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, right?
When the Europeans got there, they hadn't invented the wheel, they had no written language, and they'd never built a two-story building.
They sucked!
Your ancestors sucked, my ancestors sucked in general.
And I'm, for one, enormously thrilled and happy that the Romans came and built some roads, and built some nice houses, and brought peace, order, and law, and better administration, My ancestors were so retarded that they thought they could take on the incredibly tight-knit phalanxes of the well-trained Roman army by painting themselves blue.
By painting themselves blue!
It's so mad!
It's like my ancestors, if they'd known about nuclear war, they would have imagined that the only people to survive a nuclear holocaust would be... well, the only things to survive a nuclear holocaust would be A. cockroaches and B. the Blue Man Group.
This is how insane they- Ah!
I'm blue!
Look!
I'm invulnerable!
Because blue is like armor!
They were retarded!
And they got taken over by a more advanced civilization.
To some degree, like it or not, that's how civilization spreads.
Generally, I don't think that if Cicero had come and performed his magical oratory in front of the scratching-their-arse, Queen Bodicea-worshipping, wheel-chariot Mad Max Swords on the wheels, riding Picts.
I don't think if he'd come and given them all of their wonderful oratory, they would have said, oh, I think that's lovely.
Perhaps it would be excellent if we developed a written language and some rule of law.
And they sucked.
They sucked.
And so they were conquered, right?
A lot of times advanced civilizations run into other advanced civilizations.
They kind of trade and so on.
But when your civilization sucks, in other words, when it really doesn't have any civilization to it, it's going to get taken over.
And it happened to my ancestors.
Maybe it happened to your ancestors.
And if your ancestors sucked, they probably lost.
And some good things happened out of that.
Now, of course, we all sympathize with the underdog ever since our selected leftists began taking over the general media.
But, um, you know, I'm not, I'm not averse to cheering for the winning team.
You know, I mean, my background, as I said, uh, is, um, uh, Irish, German and, uh, uh, and British.
And when the Germans were, sorry, when the Romans were doing their good thing, when they had vigor and confidence in their civilization and they weren't completely corrupted by, uh, the welfare state and the military industrial complex and, uh, sorry, wait, America?
No, we were talking about Rome.
That's a topic for another time, perhaps.
When the Romans didn't suck, then they went around conquering people and they bought roads and plumbing and sanitation and better health care and the rule of law and less corruption and free trade and free travel and they got rid of the local parasitical warlords and The Thuggies in India, which was just the highway bandits who would just stab people for copper coins, they were gotten rid of by the British.
And the local customs that were brutal and horrible were often gotten rid of, right?
So there was a custom in India before the British came along called Suthi, which is where if you died, You would get burned and then your wife, like your body would be burned in a funeral pyre and your wife was supposed to throw herself on that and burn to death with you.
Just lovely stuff.
Not really a Hallmark card for that.
Now that you're burned, perhaps you'd like to not read this.
And so, I don't know, maybe they got two-for-one offers for funeral urns for ashes, I don't know.
But it was pretty brutal, pretty horrible, and it was done away with, as were a lot of brutal practices done away with by the Romans, by the British, by a lot of other people.
Cannibalism, somewhat opposed by the European empires and so on.
So, generally, your ancestors sucked, and when they stopped sucking, they generally went and conquered other people, right?
So, the Romans didn't suck for a while, the Italians didn't suck for a while, a couple hundred years, and then, for a variety of reasons, they turned to the welfare warfare state, just like another empire we can talk about.
And then their population got lazy and entitled and resentful and they had to raise taxes to pay for all the welfare state which in Rome and the Roman in Italy drove people out of the cities because you can't really collect taxes from the countryside at least back in the day.
Knock, knock, knock.
Who's there?
Somebody with a sword who doesn't want to pay his taxes.
Oh look, the pigs have a brain to eat.
And so When the Romans had to raise taxes, drove people out of the cities, which meant they couldn't conscript their young men as soldiers, and so they had to pay a bunch of barbarians to be their military.
They had to buy a bunch of mercenaries.
Blackwater.
And then what happened was they continued to have to raise more taxes, which drove more young people out of the cities, which meant they had to pay more money to their barbarians.
And then they eventually ran out of money to pay their soldiers with.
And then the soldiers came to take the money, sacked Rome, and dropped its population from a couple of mil down to 17,000.
in a couple of years, and that was it for the Roman Empire.
And so Rome didn't suck for a while, and imposed a fair amount of peace and order and trade on the world, and then it began to doth increaseth in the suckiness, and then the barbarians who sucked less came and conquered Rome, and then you got the Dark Ages, and then the Europeans and then the barbarians who sucked less came and conquered Rome, and then you got the Dark Ages, and then the Europeans began to suck a little bit less, and the Europeans then kind of hit a pinnacle after the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution of not-suckingness, and went and imposed that
so badly they got involved in two world wars, the international order collapsed, The former colonies were set free where they began to ally themselves with Moscow and Communism and destroy themselves almost to a tee with the exception of a few countries like India that managed to pull themselves out of that quagmire by abandoning the socialist policies of Nehru in the 1990s and began to recover and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So, let's go into some of the details.
But just remember!
Your ancestors lost because they sucked.
My ancestors lost because they sucked.
So let's try not to suck.
That's really the whole point of this channel.
Use reason and evidence to not suck.
And then you won't get conquered.
But enough about the migrant crisis in Europe.
So, let's go into India.
So, India, of course, was ruled for about 200 years by the British.
And, again, all European colonialism was not the same.
There's lots of studies that show that the British common law system was much more beneficial to the colonial recipients than the French system and German systems and so on.
So, you can't just say European colonialism like that.
It talks about everything, but just particularly, in this case, talk about India and England.
Yeah, okay, there was corruption, there was some greed, there were some cruel reprisals against opponents, but an Indian scholar named Dr. Lalviani says, quote, it is important to note that there is a substantial list on the credit side of that.
He says, the credit side of British imperialism includes railways, roads, canals, mines, sewers, plantations, and the establishment of English law and language.
Of course, English language allows you to do business around the world and partake of the great British-speaking libertarian and literary traditions.
In fact, there's a lower caste group in India that's actually put up a shrine to the goddess they call English.
So great cities including Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras were built, and some of the finest universities and museums in India were founded.
The first definitive atlas of India was drawn, and there were great social reforms such as the abdication of Thugi, violent highway robbers, the banning of the custom of suti, as I mentioned, the burning of widows on the husband's funeral pyre, and female infanticide, strongly discouraged by the British.
Perhaps the most innovative of all was the bringing together of several different states into one unified India.
That's important, too.
Of course, India was just a bunch of warring principalities before the British came and united it.
The Indian army was formed.
Its top officers were trained in new military academies modeled on Sandhurst.
And of course, at the heart of India's development in the 19th and early 20th century was the expansion of the rail network.
It was originally built to secure the colonial hold, but it's still prosperous.
So within 25 years, 10,000 miles of track were laid joining distant parts of the nation.
By independence, 136,000 bridges had been constructed.
And that's important.
I mean, imagine what it's like building railways in India.
Oh, if you've ever been bad in a past life, you get resurrected to build railways in India because it's savagely hot, there's bugs as big as biplanes.
Oh, and by the way, the entire Pacific Ocean seems to dump itself regularly on the continent through the monsoon season.
So, not quite as comfortable as building Thomas the Tank engine railways in Sheffield.
Today, the Indian Railways is the world's largest employer, with 1.6 million workers on the payroll.
By the mid-19th century, as a result of British rule, India had a postal system.
The spread of the English language, of course, allows communication between people from different backgrounds, and the arts were thriving.
This is not exactly Sholtenitsin's Gulag Apicalago.
Wildlife and ancient buildings, such as the Taj Mahal, were protected under British rule.
They also set up the first parks to protect rhinoceroses and tigress.
By 1914, the Indian mining industry, which was built from nothing by the British, was producing nearly 60 million tons of coal a year.
Health and life expectancy both improved dramatically, particularly because malaria was tackled and vaccination against smallpox was introduced.
Dr. Lalvani adds, quote, the 200 year window of British governance was perhaps the only period in a thousand years of Indian history to date when the minorities and people of different religions felt more secure and less discriminated against with a notable absence of killings, conflicts and persecutions.
Now, after The independence, the first British Prime Minister, Prime Minister Nehru, ran the country along socialist lines.
Hey, central planning, let's align ourselves with the Soviet Union.
And India thus missed out on the post-war economic boom.
It took decades for the nation to reverse that trend.
Millions of people doomed to live in poverty as the result of the socialist policies of that.
And, uh, boy, you know, taxes.
We can only dream of taxes under British rule in India.
The land tax burden fell from about 10% of net output in the 1850s to 5% by 1930.
5% taxation!
I'd pay more than that to buy a goddamn candy bar in Canada.
People complained that, of course, there were famines in India, but they were primarily environmental in origin.
And after 1900, the problem was alleviated by integrating the Indian market into the world market for food.
And there was a terrible famine in Bengal in 1943, but that was generally because the improvements introduced under British rule collapsed because of the strain imposed by the empire during World War II.
So, what else did British rule do?
Well, it increased the importance of trade from about 1 or 2% of national income in the mid-19th century to about 20% by 1913.
So, international trade opened up considerably.
If you compare that with another major Asian empire, which is China, that remained under Asian political control, India fared very well under British rule.
The Chinese economy during the time of British rule, and the particularly later part, shrank.
Of course, there was some informal European imperialism and so on, but you're going to be ruled by someone.
You know, it's not like it was glorious freedom and anarchy without the British.
You probably would have, in India, ended up being ruled by the Mughals, turned Muslim, with all of the joys that entails.
So you're going to be ruled by someone, and if you're going to be ruled by someone, it's good to be ruled by the British.
The British oversaw the spread of good government.
They have Western education, modern medicine, and the rule of law.
And they did a lot of charity, famine relief, massive immigration projects, most notably in the Punjab.
This was at the time when the British put the irrigation in.
That was the largest irrigation project in the world.
And again, perhaps the most priceless asset of all was English itself, uniting India and allowing it to do business.
around the world and that is uh... quite uh... quite fantastic now of course the communists went in and started stirring up the natives you know one of the things that's quite true is that until and this is not my theory this is the open purpose of communism was to rile up uh... those under western rule uh... rile up minorities in america rile up minorities uh... wherever they could find them and turn them against the free market system uh... and uh... you know they did a very a very good job because uh... victorians lost their vigor when ten million got killed
So let's look at some of the numbers.
So this is 1891 to 1938.
A percentage increase in selected Indian economic indicators.
So real value of exports in this time period, a little over 40 years, went up 26%.
Real national income per capita went up 29%.
Real value of imports went up 32%.
The population increased 36%.
You know what population didn't increase?
It was Jews under the Nazis.
Bit of a decline there.
And that's sort of important.
The population increased 36%.
Real national income Went up 80% in the last 40 odd years of British rule.
The area of cultivated land increased 84%.
The railway mileage per capita increased 116 miles.
Acreage irrigated went up 137%.
Sorry, railway mileage per capita went up 116%.
Factory employment went up 448%.
Real value of bank deposits increased 531%.
per capita went up 116%.
Factory employment went up 448%, real value of bank deposits increased 531%, and coal production went up 1,318%.
Now this was fairly common in British rule around the world.
The British felt, they called it at the time, the white man's burden, later to be reversed and turned into a pretty bad Harry Belafonte movie.
But the British endeavored to introduce the institutions and the ways of thinking that they regarded as essential to becoming wealthy.
So free trade, free migration and infrastructure improvements and investments of course, balanced budgets, gold currency, the gold Gold-backed currency, the rule of law, and an administration that could not be bought.
And it is even admitted within India the degree to which British rulers, the British administrators, there are only about a thousand to run the entire continent, they were pretty incorruptible.
And that's quite remarkable.
So, let's just compare... I mean, I'm going to make the case at the end that the real imperialism has been what is euphemistically called foreign aid, which is basically taking money from the poor people of rich countries, giving it to the rich people in poor countries so that they can buy weapons to further oppress their...
Citizens, right?
And so the real imperialism has been the leftist focus on foreign aid rather than foreign trade.
But let's look at some of the comparisons.
In 1997, only about 5% of the world's stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20% or less.
of the US, right?
This is important, right?
Countries around the world who have a fifth or less of US per capita GDP, they only get 5% of the world's capital investment, which is kind of what you need to raise worker productivity, which is the essence and basis of economic improvements.
So less than 5% of the world's capital is invested in poor countries in 1913.
That figure was 25%.
Five times more money was being invested in poor countries in 1913 than more recently in the 90s.
And that's partly because, of course, the rule of law has fallen apart.
The share of developing countries in total international liabilities, or debt, which is good, right, that's the good kind of debt, was 11% in 1995, compared with 47% in 1938.
So before the Second World War, there was much more investment in the Third World.
So before the Second World War, there was much more investment in the Third World.
Even in 1900, as opposed to 11% now, it was 33%.
And that's really good.
The existence of a formal empire really helped encourage investors to put their money in less developed economies.
You don't want to put your money in an economy with some local warlord who's just going to shoot your people and sell your gold and use it to buy weapons with which to shoot more people.
Between 1884 and 1914, the returns on a sample of imperial investments—doesn't that sound like it should come with that ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba—the Death Star Destroyer of imperial investments—were somewhat lower than returns on roughly comparable domestic investments.
So that's a technical way of basically, you know, I used to be an entrepreneur in the software field and ran a green company or helped co-run a green company and we got a lot of investment from people who were willing to accept a lower return on their investment because they wanted to help The environment.
And this happens quite a bit.
Green investments sometimes pay less, but you get that feel-good feeling of helping out the environment.
Unless, of course, it's got anything to do with President Obama and his focus on investment.
But that's a topic for another time.
So the British wanted to invest in the developing world because the white man's burden was considered to be to bring civilization to the world as a whole.
And so they did invest even though they got a lower return because it was considered to be a good and virtuous thing to do.
Again, not exactly the Nazis and the Jews.
Now, around 1846, studies show that Britain could have actually withdrawn from the Empire with almost no blowback and reaped what was called a decolonization dividend of a 25% tax cut.
A 25% tax cut.
But they stayed, and that's because they felt it was the mission, you know, again, you can argue that, but the motives were in many ways quite positive, and it cost.
England and the British taxpayers quite a bit.
But, you know, it's the old thing.
Maybe you can afford a gas burning car.
Maybe you feel that a Prius is better for the environment.
So you'll pay more for a Prius because virtue.
And this is important.
So, influential paper that got published in 95.
Well, this is something really, really fundamental to understand.
One of the principal reasons for the widening international inequality, particularly in the 70s and the 80s, was protectionism in less developed economies.
Yes, I'm talking to you, Donald Trump.
Protectionism, of course, is raising tariffs against goods coming into the country in order to basically get votes from domestic workers and donations from domestic corporations, right?
So you've got some sweater manufacturer that can't compete with someone overseas.
It's easier to bribe a politician to raise a tariff wall against foreign sweaters than it is to upgrade and improve your efficiency.
So, protectionism after the fall of the British Empire, and we'll get to the degree of protectionism in the British Empire, which was virtually zero, well, when the formerly colonial countries achieved independence, they jacked up their trade barriers.
And this, of course, was similar to the jacking up of trade barriers that occurred in the 1930s among the US and the European powers, which was an attempt to deal with the central Banking created and fiat currency created Great Depression.
They jacked up their protections, barriers against each other.
And as Bastiat noted hundreds of years ago, when trade stops flowing across borders, soldiers will start flowing across borders.
So the best way to avoid war with another country is to embed your economy in So in the 1970s and 1980s, the gap between third and first world incomes began to widen largely because of protectionism in the socialist-run Newly liberated economies.
In the words of the researchers, quote, open economies tend to converge on the developed economies, but closed economies do not.
Do you understand that?
So think of this as a bunch of columns that are separated, right?
A bunch of columns that are separated.
You can pour different amounts of water.
One can be low and high and medium, but as long as they're separated, they can remain unequal.
Right?
But if you put holes in the bottom, they will tend to even out.
And the holes are free trade.
And that's what's important.
So, the open economies, which were definitely part of the British Empire, and to some degree part of the other empires as well, French and Dutch, and to a small degree, Germany.
Germany, of course, never had any empires or any colonial presence in the Middle East.
So why they have to take migrants now as a result of European imperialism is only because apparently all white people are the same.
So the open economies, those who had free trade in the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, grew at 4.49% per year.
That's huge!
That is a huge amount of growth.
We can only dream of such growth these days.
So the open free trade colonial run economies grew at 4.49% per year.
That means that you double your income in 15 years.
15 years is all it takes to double your income when you've got a growth of 4.49% per year.
The closed countries, the closed economies, grew at 0.69% per year.
So the open economies, those with colonial-enforced free trade, grew much faster.
And those with closed economies and high tariffs grew much more slowly.
So the open economies doubled their income every 15 years.
The closed economies doubled their income every 100 years, assuming that there's no political interruptions or chaos or civil wars or decapitations or coups or God knows what, which never seems to happen for 100 years straight in any non-free society.
Would you rather live under British rule and have your income double every 15 years or would you rather be free and live under a poverty-grinding economy with local rulers where if you're as lucky as could never happen your income might double every hundred years?
You might want to eat your veggies and do some exercising because it's gonna take a while.
Now, in the previous era of globalization, and this is generally seen like the mid-19th century until the First World War, economic openness, all the stuff that leads to real growth, was imposed by colonial powers, principally, of course, Britain.
And they didn't impose it just on Asian and African colonies, but also on South America, and even, using some pretty aggressive gunboat diplomacy, Japan.
Oh!
Here's another thing that's important about European imperialism.
Do you think that the end of slavery was a good thing?
Thank you, white Western European imperialists and colonists!
Because the fact that England in particular had this amazing naval power, And had a very strong moral commitment to ending slavery, which began in the early part of the 19th century, reached its fruition in the first third of the 19th century.
The fact that they were willing to use their blood and treasure to oppose slavery, to board slave ships, to arrest slave owners, to free the slaves, and to buy off this moral crusade.
Do you like the fact that there's no slavery in the world today, which is an institution that existed in all places, under all races and cultures, everywhere across the world, from the beginning of time, Until, you know, that first bonobo thought maybe he could use a rock as a tool, until the 1830s throughout the empire.
If you like the end of slavery, then you've gotta love.
British colonialism.
I mean, you just have to.
I mean, you cannot if you want, but then you're just an idiot.
Sorry.
You don't get the end of slavery without British colonialism.
So if you think slavery is bad, thank yourself.
Some stuck-up white guy who can't dance.
So they imposed this all over the world.
And as a result, economies grew much better.
Now another general principle of economics is the more free the movement there is of labor, the more international income levels will tend to converge.
So we talked about those columns earlier with the water, different levels of water in it.
And at the bottom is capital, right?
Free trade and so on.
Goods, capital, and services, and people, right?
So if people can flow back and forth, international income levels will tend to converge and all rise together.
And that's very important as well.
The more free movement there is of labor, the more income levels will tend to converge.
Again, assuming free market.
Modern Europe is not part of that at all, for reasons we've talked about in the Death of the Euro presentation on this channel.
So one of the reasons why modern globalization, there was actually more globalization in the early part of the 20th century than there is in the early part of the 21st century.
One of the reasons that modern globalization is so associated with high levels of inequality is that there are unbelievable levels of restrictions on the free movement of labor from the less developed to the developed societies.
This of course is a great tragedy.
As I've argued in What pisses me off about the migrant crisis?
If you don't have a welfare state, you don't have a coercive redistributionist state, then you can, of course, welcome people to come to your land and everyone's happy.
The moment you get a welfare state, you have a problem in that you don't know who's coming to work and who's coming to leech off the taxpayer.
And so this is a huge problem.
Now, the history of the British Empire, well, the British actively promoted emigration to at least some of its colonies, and it did almost nothing to heed the movements of British people wherever they wanted to go.
And that's really, really important.
So there was a cross-country study of post-Second World War economic growth, and the researcher said that there were six significant variables most likely to influence a country's economic performance.
And by the way, some of these are my words, some of these are researchers' words, the links will all be below.
So, what do you need for economic growth?
Boom!
Bingo!
Bango!
Bongo!
Number one!
The provision of secondary and higher education.
I'm just telling you the facts.
Don't get mad.
Don't shoot the messenger.
This actually only holds true for men.
The research does not support the hypothesis that female education is good for economic growth.
Maybe it indirectly reduces fertility and so on.
Educate the men and you will do well.
Educate the women as far as economic growth goes and you're kind of wasting your money.
So the second thing you need is a provision of some kind of rational system, an effective system of health care.
This does not mean socialized medicine.
It doesn't mean a one-payer system.
It just means that the health care has to work.
There is a correlation between economic growth and life expectancy, which, you know, kind of what you'd expect.
More life expectancy is fewer children, fewer mouths to feed, and more accumulation of knowledge and wisdom from the old.
So, good healthcare.
And again, the British brought education, the British brought healthcare, vaccinations and against malaria.
The third was allowing for birth control.
Also very good for economic growth.
It's really tough to grow an economy when all of your capital is growing into feeding these squawking beaks of the young.
And so limiting the population growth is very important for being able to save the capital, to invest the capital, to improve the economy.
The fourth thing to grow your economy.
Avoid non-productive government expenditures since big government is bad for growth.
You know, all those bridges to nowhere and all of this crap that the government does is really bad.
The fifth way to grow is the enforcement of the rule of law.
Economies tend to grow when capital can be invested and a reasonable return into capital can be anticipated because Contracts are enforced, there's a rule of law, all that kind of good stuff.
So you've got to enforce the rule of law.
I mean, who's going to sign a 99-year contract if you don't even think the law will be enforced?
And who's going to sign a contract with anyone if the judges can just be bought out by the person with the most money?
Once you get corruption, you get economic decay and degradation.
But enough about South Africa.
The sixth was the avoidance of inflation above 10% per year.
And whether that's cause or effect, whether that's just a signal of the government inflating the money supply in order to buy boats, who knows, right?
Another researcher came up with another list.
Just wanted to point out the similarities and it's important to remember the relationship between British colonialism in particular and these lists.
Number one, secure rights of private property.
That encourages saving and investment.
You have to accumulate capital to grow your economy.
So you've got to secure the rights of personal liberty against both the abuses of tyranny and crime and corruption.
You have to enforce rights of contract.
You have to provide a stable government governed by publicly known rules.
You have to provide a responsive government.
One of the problems with foreign aid is the governments then are more responsive to Western politicians and douchebag rock stars in sunglasses than they are to their own local People, right?
Because their money comes from foreign aid rather than the taxes of their people.
So you have to have a government that's responsive to the people.
You have to provide honest government to grow your economy with no rents to favor and positions, right?
So you don't just buy your position and use it to shake people down.
You have to provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government.
You have to hold taxes down and you have to reduce the government's claim on the social surplus, right?
Whenever there's an excess, you don't just grab it.
Now the other thing too is that throughout the British Empire, to a large degree, there was a gold standard.
And the gold standard, for those who don't know, is that you can't just make up money out of thin air, right?
Like the quasi-private, mostly fascistic Federal Reserve in the United States could just create money by typing it into its own bank account.
Hey!
It's a good way to destabilize the country and the economy and in particular hit people the hardest who are the poorest and on fixed income by devaluing their currency.
A gold standard means you can't create money out of thin air because each dollar can be traded in for a certain amount of gold.
And so why were British investors willing to risk a huge amount of their money by savings by buying assets and securities way overseas?
I mean, doing business overseas is very complex and very difficult.
Well, reasonable answer is that the adoption of the gold standard by developing economies gave kind of like a better business bureau or good housekeeping seal of approval.
And they've shown that when governments went on to a gold standard, they They had to provide less interest because you've got an asset.
It's not just a piece of paper, Zimbabwe wallpaper, right?
So when governments went on the gold standard, you can always take your government bonds and trade them in for gold.
And when you went on to the gold standard, it reduced your bond price by about 40 basis points.
That's quite a bit.
And that means that the government has to pay less in terms of Interest or less money is flowing out and also it means that the government is restraining itself from printing money and destroying the economy.
Before 1914, membership of the gold standard was a great way of getting cheap loans as a member of the British Empire and that's very important as well.
Now, the British colonial administrators, at least some of these requirements for economic growth were among its defining characteristics.
Now British colonial rule was not democratic outside the dominions like Australia, New Zealand, and the American betrayal bastards, and Canada, and so on.
It was not democratic outside of the dominions.
But, so what?
When it comes to economic growth, democracy does not very much correlate with economic performance.
In fact, democracy, particularly when it breaks the bonds of any kind of rule of law or bill of rights or constitution, it just becomes a massive mob rule.
I mean, the late Roman Empire was very democratic and basically committed a slow, seppuku-laced democracide by buying votes for degrading the population both genetically and morally.
So, the rule of law, of course, key prerequisite for sustainable growth.
Not just any law.
Not just any law.
A recent survey of 49 countries concluded that common law countries have the strongest economic growth, French civil law countries the weakest.
Legal protections of investors.
And so shareholders and creditors were protected under British law, less so under the smoky, bacon-flavored, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys known as the French.
And so again, you want it to be ruled.
But again, not all All colonialism is the same.
From the 1840s until the 1930s, the British political elite and electorate remained wedded to the principle of laissez-faire.
Laissez-faire!
Laissez-nous faire!
Leave us be!
Famous cry of a French merchant when the French king kept saying, well, what can we do to help you?
It's just leave us alone!
Stop helping us!
And so, you know, If Pavarotti is singing and I'm on backup, I think he's going to turn around and say, please stop helping me.
Please stop helping me.
Please stop helping me sing.
And so they basically just said, let us alone.
And the British, you know, fought like crazy about this.
And they got rid of their protectionism around the Corn Laws and so on.
They really fought hard for laissez-faire.
I read, gosh, many years ago, I wrote a novel called Just Poor.
I did the research.
And there was a book written, I mean, it's kind of tough to parse because it's semi-Shakespearean language, called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic.
Boy, there wasn't so much keeping up with the Cardassians as it was raising the entire planet from slavery and servitude.
So, the British were really into laissez-faire, and certainly from the 1870s onwards, British tariffs were way lower than those of the Europeans.
Tariffs in the British Empire as a whole were kept low.
Now, you could argue, well, the Dominions had higher tariffs, but in the late 19th century, the Dominions won the right to set their own protective tariffs, leading to a long-established, particularly American tradition of protectionism.
So, if If the British had abandoned control over the colonies, higher tariffs would have been jacked up right away, because we saw that happen right after the British left.
Other forms of trade discrimination and so on.
It's not hypothetical, right?
Because the highly protectionist policies were adopted by the United States and India after they got their independence.
And there were tariff regimes that were adopted by the imperial rivals of Britain, France, Germany, and India after the late 1870s.
And these trade walls just went up, right?
And so what happens is, of course, you block up these holes at the bottom of the columns and the water stops evening out.
So if you just look at duties, taxes, duties on Primary products or manufacturers, right?
Raw materials or manufactured materials.
Britain was by far the least protectionist of the imperial powers.
In 1913, yes, you have to stop right before the war, average tariff rates on imported manufacturers were 13% in Germany, over 20% in France, 44% of the United States, 84% in Russia.
Let's just go over there.
This is tariffs on imported manufactured goods.
13% in Germany, over 20% in France, 44% in the United States, 84% in Russia.
Boy, it's too bad they couldn't have taxed those Bolsheviks and prevented them coming in.
In Britain, the tariffs were zero.
It matters what you believe.
This is why I keep promoting free trade, because I care about people keeping breath in their bodies.
From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, Britain acted as the world's banker and channeled massive amounts of British and other European savings overseas.
By 1914, total British assets overseas amounted to somewhere between 3.1 and 4.5 billion pounds.
Okay, that's just the price of a Kardashian wedding now, but back in the day, the British gross domestic product in 1914 was $2.5 billion.
Their overseas assets were between $3.1 and $4.5 billion.
That is a lot.
And those resources, they weren't foreign aid.
They were going out there actually working to help improve these countries.
Between 1865 and 1914, as much investment went to Africa, Asia, and Latin America from England, 29.6%, as stayed in the UK, about 31.8%.
So as much money was flowing overseas because of free trade, because of no protectionism, because of the free movement of labour, because of the rule of law, because of greater education in these countries, there was a huge amount of capital going overseas, almost as much as what stayed in the UK.
Now money invested in a de jure British colony, one that is directly ruled like India, or a de facto colony like Egypt, was more secure than money invested in an independent, albeit informally colonized country like Argentina.
So if you went to invest in a British colony, whether it was directly or indirectly ruled, directly India, indirectly Egypt, that money was more secure than some place like Argentina.
More than three quarters of all foreign capital invested in Sub-Saharan Africa was invested in British colonies.
And Britain didn't rule three quarters of Sub-Saharan Africa, so...
That is really, really important that the British rule in particular brought investment, brought new jobs, brought economic improvements and so on.
And this doesn't even count the amount of money that the government spent building sanitation and infrastructure and roads and so on.
You can watch Monty Python's great scene from the life of Brian.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Brought peace, aqueducts, wine, voting.
I don't know.
It's pretty funny.
You should, you should check it out.
So, British investment versus foreign aid.
Investment raises the standard of living of everyone, extends their lifespan and so on, and allows the population to grow in a more controlled manner, but foreign aid is just handing money over to dictators hoping that governments are going to be wise with their money, which endless amounts of economic research shows is the worst thing.
The bad in terms of Western intervention was not colonialism, it is the modern practice of foreign aid, not to mention arms sales.
So the results of Anglo-globalization and globalization were truly astounding.
So they combined free trade, open migration, unprecedented overseas investments, and this propelled huge parts of the British Empire to the forefront of world economic development.
In terms of the production of manufactured goods per head of population, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand ranked higher than Germany in 1913.
Australia!
Australia!
The land of criminals and sunburns!
And big knives, if I remember rightly.
I don't know.
I get all my information of Australia from Crocodile Dundee movies.
But anyway.
So, manufactured goods per head of the household was higher in Canada, Australia and New Zealand than even Germany in 1913.
Between 1820 and 1950, The Dominion economies were the fastest growing in the world.
Per capita GDP grew more rapidly in Canada than the United States between 1820 and 1913, and that was when the population was pitted in a horrible war against laser-wielding beavers.
So they had a huge amount to overcome.
And so, good job, eh?
And this is just absolutely important, just in In bringing about the free movement of capital and bringing technology and so on.
You know, in India as well, the British created an integrated Indian free market.
They unified weight measures and they unified the currency.
They abolished transit duties and introduced a legal framework which promoted private property rights and contract law more explicitly.
And they were relatively uncorruptible.
Now of course later on in the empire there was a lot of insurgents and that's because they were being armed and fed and led and had their resentment stoked by the communists and so on.
So yes, later on there was problems.
But this is sort of earlier on.
And in India again, between 1891 and 1938 the acreage under irrigation more than doubled.
These kinds of things are absolutely essential.
You know, kind of once you have them, you don't really notice them, but before you have them, it's really significant.
They deployed steamships on internal waterways and they built more than 40,000 miles of railway track, which is five times the amount of railways constructed in China in the same period.
And if I remember rightly, Chinese, not the worst engineers in the world, Google, and That is really, really important to understand.
We've got railways, ports, major irrigation systems, the telegraph, sanitation, medical care, universities, postal system, courts of law.
These are all assets that would almost certainly have never developed independent of British rule and have had a lasting impact on that.
This idea that the Europe of the British in particular just went in and pillaged all these countries is like, well, the countries were pretty desperately broke to begin with.
And British, you know, of course they took some stuff out, but they created a lot more than they took out.
And of course, you know, India had had several thousand years of Indian regime control.
And what happened?
The number of Indians in education increased sevenfold between 1881 and 1941.
And then, of course, the nationalists who came to power in 1947, when the Raj came to an end, they just went to this, what one Neo-Ferguson has called, a sub-Soviet state-led autarchy, whose achievement was to widen further the gap between Indian and British incomes, which reached its widest historic extent in 1973.
A simple calculation of the ratio of British per capita GDP to that of 41 former colonies is instructive.
Between 1960 and 1990, the gap between the British and their former subjects narrowed in just 14 out of 41 cases.
So, I don't know, people in Zimbabwe and South Africa and all, oh, it's a legacy of British rule!
The reality is that British rule was unbalanced, conducive to economic growth.
And tragically, most of the post-independence rulers have failed to improve upon it.
So, sorry this was such a quick sprint and a race through these facts, but I think it's just important to get some of the facts out to remind you that foreign aid is the real imperialism and needs to be ended.
Looking back upon this legacy of British rule in particular and saying that it was all about imperialism and death and predation and so on.
Look, there are tons of examples in history where there's massive amounts of theft and predation and destruction.
You can just look throughout history of the empire.
I mean, just Genghis Khan.
Apparently he'd hold up a hedgehog to rape if you can't find a woman.
I mean, he's just responsible for pretty much all Japanese pop groups these days genetically.
And if you ignore all of that, then what happens is, and look, this is really one of the challenges in history as a whole.
And I just want to close on this minor rant, which I take personally because I'm trying to do my own good in the world and receiving, let's just say, some flack for it.
But it's okay.
They only shoot you when you're over the target.
But why is it that so little good gets done in the world?
Why is it so hard to progress?
Because it's the hammer that, it's the nail that sticks up, gets hammered down, right?
It's the tall poppy that gets cut down.
It is the group that focuses most or the individuals who focus most on creating the most good who generally get most crapped upon by everyone else.
Because those of us who advance human society make everyone else feel bad and expose the predations and corruptions and evils of those who came before us.
And so, who gets blamed for slavery now?
Europeans!
It's insane!
Europeans, first of all, I mean particularly in the West, they only took 6% of the slave trade.
Secondly, they only bought slaves from Africans who had caught those slaves.
The blacks caught the slaves, took them to the coast, and sold them to the West.
A lot of Jews were involved in the slave trade, disproportionate to their population as a whole, but you don't hear a lot about that.
Of course, Westerners couldn't go into Africa to catch slaves because the average Westerner lasted less than a year in Africa because of bio-incompatibility with the intense horde of god-awful stuff that tends to grow in the African ecosystem that enjoys taking down human beings with great pleasure.
Think of things like AIDS.
Think of things like Ebola and all this kind of stuff.
You know, British had very little to do with the slave trade.
They treated their slaves a lot better than the slaves that went into the Muslim lands.
The male slaves were generally castrated, which is why there's not a big black population in Islam.
So, you know, British fought against it and the Western Europeans ended it, the white Western Christian Europeans ended it, and now who gets blamed for slavery?
Who is constantly having slavery thrown in the face?
Well, see, the moment you try and do something better, you are showing that you are sensitive to the suffering of others.
And then people go, the rest of the world goes, Oh, you're sensitive to the suffering of people of others.
Great.
You've got empathy.
So I'm now going to push and hit and hammer that giant empathy button to get resources out of you.
So being good in the world generally gets you a big giant laser target on your forehead and this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to be good in the world.
There was colonialism all throughout history, and most of it, if not all of it, was far more brutal than, in particular, British colonialism.
And now, who are the only people who are screamed at as colonial evil imperial powers?
Well, the British and the Europeans.
The Europeans may have deserved it a little bit more.
The British certainly deserve it much less than is imputed.
But that is why it takes so long for humanity to improve, because the people who go ahead, they don't get trophies in their graves.
All they get is arrows in their back.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedomain Radio.
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