Imperial Inequalities

The Politics of Economic Governance Across European Empires

Author: Gurminder Bhambra and Julia McClure Series: Postcolonial International Studies

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This volume examines the unequal politics of economic governance across European empires and the ongoing legacies of such histories. It focuses on processes of colonial taxation and, primarily, national welfare to examine the ways in which today's global inequalities are the result of such connected histories.

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Summary

Description

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare.

In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe's global empires. The idea of 'imperial inequalities' provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities.

This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces.

Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue duree.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities.

About the Author

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.
Julia McClure is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.