Thread by @nicktolhurst

One of the enduring myths of the last few years is that “before we joined Europe we traded more with the commonwealth & empire.”

It’s amazing how embedded this myth has become to the point that even some remainers believed it.

But it’s utterly wrong.

For the last 200 years Britain’s biggest trading partner has been Europe - not the empire and not, later, the commonwealth.

This makes sense both from geography as well as comparable industrial development reasons.

However there was a time in history when this wasn’t the case…

The time when UK traded more with empire than Europe was during the “trilateral trade” era - when Britain exported manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to America, then agricultural goods back to UK.

Of course this was not free trade” but “coercion trade”.

& coercive trade is…

Coercive trade is

1. State directed trade (ie forcing Africa to take UK goods
2. Slave trade (forced labour)
3. State conquest (colonies in Africa & America

The “nostalgia for free trade” has nothing to with empire.

It’s nostalgia for a time when Britain could force others.

Indeed Britain’s greatest growth accompanied trade with other SIMILAR countries not during empire but post World War II.

Trade that didn’t just build big Georgian mansions but reached into the working classes and improved their lives.

That’s why we joined the EEC, not to…

…we didn’t join the EEC because we wanted to trade with Europe, we joined because we already were and wanted more, easier trade.

Not building an economic model on ideas of 18th century Jamaican rum imports.

Brits oft confuse empire as “one rolling development” but it isn’t.

There was a “coercive” empire.
Then the later imperial pomp era.

By the time british empire reached 1920s it may have been strategically important and a point of much national trade pride..but economically…

By the 1920s it’s not even clear the country was benefiting much from the empire apart from as a “gilded stage” for modest wealth public school boys to exercise dreams of empire. But for 90% of UK population it did little for them.

Which of course brings us to Brexit…

The upper middle class demographic miss empire far more than the rich and far more than the poor.
It enabled minor public school boys to act like courtiers.
The British working class had lives comparable to the European poor. But our upper middle class were “superior” to theirs.

But this superiority rather than being earned was a leftover of the 1st coercive empire.
In other words it’s a “legacy benefit” with a declining future - it had NOTHING to do with imperial free trade.
But as slavery is out of fashion they’ve convinced themselves its “free trade.”

That’s why Brexit isn’t really nostalgia - it’s actually more “false memory”.

It’s convincing a population that didn’t benefit from the empire..that the enormous growth they enjoyed trading with Europe never happened.

It’s a 1920s upper middle class dream.

/ends

ADD 1

Difficult to put stats on all this in one place - but worth looking at this to give you an idea.

In 1900 at the very height of "Britain's imperial pomp" - trade with European countries made up 40% of total. The rest of Empire - less than a third.

Its the empire of myth.

So when someone tells you they want "to go back to trading with the commonwealth" ask them "which back" they mean...

...because it didnt really exist as they think...outside of the slave trade era.