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Revenue figures for the late 19th c. show that more than half of Britain's domestic budget was derived from money extracted from the colonies (36% from India, 20% from others). All the roads, parks, public buildings, the welfare state... all of it was funded by the colonies.
Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that commonwealth immigrants don't "deserve" free access to the NHS, or recourse to public funds. #BritishHistoryMatters

Source: essay by Gurminder Bhambra in routledge.com/Austere-Histor…
Development economists believe that the success of high-income nations has to do with "good governance" and strong institutions and stable markets... it's all a fairy tale. In most cases the development of high-income nations was enabled, in large part, by plunder.
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Jason Hickel
@jasonhickel
In the face of the Black Lives Matter protests, some detractors are insisting that we celebrate the British government for abolishing slavery. Here's why that is ridiculous:
1) It was actually the Haitians that first abolished slavery, in 1804. Britain didn't get around to it until *three decades later*, and then only reluctantly, under sustained pressure from slave revolts and radical social movements (to whom the real credit belongs).
2) The Abolition Act of 1833 was not progressive but rather explicitly racist, declaring that enslaved persons were not humans but property, that therefore abolition amounted to expropriation, and that slave owners must therefore be compensated for their loss.
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Jason Hickel
@jasonhickel
The economic fallout from COVID-19 is generating a huge crisis of overaccumulation, and no one is talking about it.

The US and UK governments are effectively handing money to rich people, making inequality worse. But that excess capital has few options for profitable returns...
Where will it go? A few likely possibilities:

1) It will pile into assets, which are presently in any case being massively boosted by the government printers. The effect will be a huge increase in house prices, similar to what happened after 2008.
2) How do you keep returns on capital rising while the economy is shrinking or stagnant? Suck existing money from the public and the poor. The bailout does this, and so too will the rise in asset prices.
Read 7 tweets
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Jason Hickel
@jasonhickel
Novel diseases like covid-19 are being trigged in large part by industrial encroachment into forests and other natural ecosystems. We can see this happening in the data on material extraction. Check this out:
Here is the material consumption of the global economy, including everything from biomass to mining, all of which represents extraction from nature. We blew past the sustainable boundary for extraction in 1999, and it has been accelerating since (so much for "green growth").
Much of this recent rise has been driven by China, which is where a number of zoonoses have originated in consequence. But the story is much more complicated than it seems...
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