Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire by Lance E Davis

Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire by Lance E Davis

Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism: how large was the flow of finance to the empire? How great were the profits on empire investment? What were the social costs of maintaining the empire? Who received the profits, and who bore the costs? The authors show that colonial finance did not dominate British capital markets; returns from empire investment were not high in comparison to earnings in the domestic and foreign sectors; there is no evidence of continued exploitative profits; and empire profits were earned at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. They depict British imperialism as a mechanism to effect an income transfer from the tax-paying middle class to the elites in which the ownership of imperial enterprise was heavily concentrated, with some slight net transfer to the colonies in the process.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521118385
ISBN 10	0521118387
Title	Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire
Author	Lance E Davis
Series	Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Modern History
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2009-08-20
Number of pages	408
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.