Among sections of the woke cultural elite, it has become an article of faith that Britain grew rich on the basis of ill-gotten gains, namely, though colonial plunder and imperialist exploitation.
In this perspective, much of the country’s wealth is illegitimate, and should be seen a source of national shame rather than pride.
It is something to make amends for, through reparations and public apologies, rather something to be celebrated and built upon.
Trade and Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch got herself in hot water the other week when she disputed this fashionable idea, leading to howls of outrage in the Guardian and on social media.
This idea is at the core of woke ideology, which has spread far and wide across the country in recent years.
Four years ago, when a group of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, this was not an act of random vandalism.
It was an expression of the above-mentioned ideology, as the organisers made very clear. But while government figures condemned this specific act, the practice of altering cityscapes in line with current ideological fashions quickly caught on.
In the meantime, dozens of monuments, street names and buildings have been altered to reflect the preoccupations of woke progressives.
Few other groups have the power to force their obsessions on the whole country in such a way.
But is this view of modern British history actually correct? Is it true that Britain owes large proportions of its present-day wealth to colonial plunder?
This is the question I am exploring in my new book Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).
The short answer is no. The numbers simply do not stack up.
The profits earned through colonial trade were simply not big enough to explain more than a minor share of the expansion of Britain’s industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that is before we subtract the cost of colonial administration and a bloated military.
The British Empire made some people extremely wealthy, but it did little, if anything, to enrich the country as a whole. Britain’s Industrial Revolution was mostly homegrown.
As so often, fashionable woke narratives collapse under scrutiny. Unfortunately, though, this does not make them go away.
