[Richard Turpin]

(09-03-2018 09:51 AM)BaatumMania Wrote:  

Well take the profitability claims with a grain of salt. I'm almost certain both the British Empire and French Empire were net losses.

Why? They both had to build huge battleship fleets (and later carriers) and never mind station garrisons throughout their Empires. These were things that often took 5% - 40% of their GDP.

How many wheel barrows of bananas and coconuts do you need to just pay for 1 battleship artillery shell. 100?

Not sure about France but the lifestyle in Britain for a long time was really garbage. It's why so many British people emigrated to USA, Australia and Canada. Lifestyle in Britain greatly improved after the 1950s when decolonization meant Britain could now afford a welfare state.

Yeah, I remember reading this in Niall Ferguson's book 'Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World'. He regularly emphasised how costly having such a huge unwieldy empire was for Britain, how in the end it was costing more to run than it was giving back. He asserts that one of the main reasons for the incredibly quick and unexpectedly peaceful transition from 'colony to independence' for many countries was simply because Britain couldn't wait to wash its hands of them and cut loose.

I must say, that as a Brit, I've often said to friends how I find it hard to credit how little in the way of tangible benefits we have considering we had the biggest empire in history right up until the 1920's. By 'we' I mean working class people in the north of the country. Maybe London and the south benefited but I've traced my family history and we and everyone else were poor as fuck throughout the time of the Empire. I'm guessing that as usual all the immense profits were skimmed off the top by the elite. But it's a different perspective from the 'Brits ruled the world' idea; the normal everyday folk ruled fuck-all and had fuck-all.

EDIT: Perhaps you could argue that we got the NHS (National Health Service) and Welfare State out of it? Maybe. But even if true, neither the NHS nor the Welfare State are going to prove to be long-lasting legacies in my view, it's all about to collapse already after just a few decades.