The Best Thing That Could Ever Happen

Thanks to the lasting influence of Great Britain's colonial adventures, much of the third-world isn't as bad as Haiti.

It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. From the seventeenth century until America became the world’s hegemon, England undertook what Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden,” and sought to civilize the world. Where the British stayed, they largely succeeded. Today, the success of Great Britain’s colonization efforts is, arguably, the only reason that civilization exists at all, anywhere, in the 21st century.

Beginning in the middle part of the 20th century, however, the self-loathing left undertook the Herculean task of retconning the great legacy of British colonialism. The did this by pointing out that the British were white while ignoring that they were civilized.

Today, merely observing that somebody is white is sufficient to prove his guilt in any matter involving racial performance disparities - like, for example, the level of civilization a country has attained.

But it wasn’t always that way. Back then (in the early/middle twentieth century), self-immolation by white leftists was avante garde among the types of people who use phrases like avante garde. It was new and edgy. Signaling your virtue by preaching white guilt felt gooooood. And British colonialism was an easy target. Today, you are living in the wreckage of this intellectual temper tantrum.

At the same time, though, the leftists insisted that British paternalism actually impeded the civilizational advancement of the empire’s third-world people. This was always nonsense, though it took time for it to be obvious.

At any rate, much of this amazing history is retold in Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire - a short but enthralling page turner about combat, adventure, and idealism in service of the Union Jack’s civilizing mission. I recommend it.

Theory Meets Reality

Today, those same leftists simply ignore what appears intuitively obvious: former British colonies that obtained their independence too soon are shithole countries. But, intuition can be misleading, so I put mine to the test.

Great Britain’s colonies included Australia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, Egypt, Ghana (the Gold Coast), Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and, of course, these United States of America, among many other smaller nations.

Using publicly available information, I created the chart below showing the number of years each of these countries was a British colony together with its current per capita GDP (2022).

I then used the above information to determine the “correlation coefficient” between “Years as Colony” and “Per Capita GDP.” This is just a fancy statistical way of saying “is the length of time that a country was a British colony a good predictor of its GDP?”

Drum roll please. The correlation co-efficient was 0.67! This is considered on the cusp of “very strong” in the study of politics and economics. Rarely do you find correlation this high unless the predictor variable (years as a colony) at least partially causes the response variable (per capita GDP). If you’re interested, my math is at the bottom of this article.

In other words, the longer the British colonized a country, the more prosperous it is today.

Of course, I’m using per capita GDP as a loose proxy for the level of “civilization,” though I recognize that I could use other factors or a combination of them - crime rate, infant mortality, median GDP, etc. And, there’s no doubt I’ve oversimplified this issue.

That said, if we were to “complicate it,” my intuition is that the case for Britain’s civilizing influence would be strengthened. But you get the point: Nobody’s in any hurry to move to Sierra Leone, after all.

The Immiseration of the Third World

Sadly for the people of the third world, the great legacy of British colonialism ended abruptly when its most belligerent former colony - the United States of America - came under the spell of utopian leftist thinking. This began with the progressive era. By World War II, FDR was browbeating Winston Churchill to abandon Britain’s remaining colonial empire on the silly premise that all of its colonies were prepared for self-governance.

Most were not, particularly those in Africa. The left hated and still hates this fact. But they were undeterred.

A mere two decades later, the British empire was no more - the 1950s and 1960s alone saw at least 13 colonies gain their “independence.” Most of those countries were the nation-state equivalent of children and, like children, unprepared for independence. Today they continue to pay the price in poverty, disease, crime, infant mortality, corruption, you name it. In other words, all the hallmarks of leftist social policy.

Of course, despite the astronomical suffering wrought by leftist policies, the era of reality denial continues to the present day. Perhaps I’ll perform a similar analysis on American cities controlled by Democratic mayors.

In sum, a simple empirical analysis confirms an intuitively obvious fact: the best thing that could ever happen to any country is for it to have been colonized by the British. For a very, very long time.

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[The math is below — keep scrolling.]

If you enjoyed this article, please like it, share it, restack it, or talk about it in the comments. I appreciate every gesture.

- TJ

My work: