I have been taking my sweet time writing this review and talking about this book. A few things are to blame. Mostly my feelings of I won’t do it justice and this modern age disease called “busy-ness” and “adulting”. I'm here now. Trust me…this will be worth the wait. I definitely think everybody who can read and buy this book SHOULD and MUST. When I started reading it I was so in awe of how gem-dropping and jaw-dropping it was that I went and looked around for the author and I can neither confirm or deny that I had a little crush. See now…sapio-sexuals will get it. Anyway…such a freaking well written book. No lie. You know I wouldn’t gas anything up for nothing. And given what is happening in Africa, in the world over, the politics of the day, the spiritual cusp we are on the edge of…this book will greatly contribute to the conversations of Africa unity, African wealth, Reparations, what the Kenyan president called changing how business is done in the world…this book is a big YES to all of that and more. The timing couldn’t be more perfect and I believe I have a duty(other than my love for reading) to share the lessons in this book. They do say if you wanna hide something, put it in a book. Here is the low-down. An explosive introduction, a steamy 6 chapters and a mic-drop conclusion. This is the story of an interconnected group of well-heeled British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers who offshored their capital, seized foreign assets and saddled debt on Britain’s former “dependencies”. Enabling horrific inequality across the globe, these ruthless capitalists profited as ordinary people in Britain’s former territories in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were trapped in poverty. The book talks a great deal about the boomerang, how the reinforcement of this capitalist power throughout the world has ricocheted back to their own home…unnoticed…until now.
Disclaimer~my non-fiction book recaps can be lengthy depending on the width and breadth of the book in question. I’m here to help you read more...yes?
Seeing the boomerang
We are given a heady introduction. Goodness! The book "Uncommon Wealth" delves into the material aftermath of the British Empire over the last century, examining its impact not only on the UK but also on former colonies such as Ghana, India, Singapore, and Jamaica etc. Instead of presenting a linear history of progress, the book adopts a non-traditional approach by bending time back and forth, exploring different scenes from the breakdown of the British Empire and how its legacy continues to shape the world today. The metaphor of a boomerang symbolises how the consequences of empire's decline are now affecting the developed world, particularly in terms of wealth and economics. The point he emphasises the most is that the whole world at the moment is a petri-dish. Nothing is happening in isolation, nothing is as a result of chance. Africa was pillaged…mentally, emotionally, socially…but his key focus is on all of Britain’s(and larger Europe since the shoe fits) financial pillage of ALL it’s colonies whether in Africa or not and the boomerang effects and consequences till today. He talks about how our refusal to reckon with it all, even after the death of Queen Elizabeth, is a ticking time bomb.
“The current crisis is not something that has arisen over the past few years. For the past century, the ground has been shifting under all our feet. But by pathologically avoiding one of the major events of this era, the ending of empire, we have been overlooking essential questions about the machinery of how the world works”
“Decolonisation means confronting many of the forces that are driving inequality and insecurity in the world today, both in Britain and abroad”
“The boomerang will provide a moving metaphor across the chapters to trace how the consequences of the dying days of empire are now blowing back across the developed world”
The State
You know how you dangle a carrot with a stick in front of a donkey to get it moving…that’s how I think of how Europe handled “decolonisation”. I quote that because I believe that colonisation never really ended, even though now it feels like Africa is awakening to the nonsense. The first chapter starts with the failed attempt of the British West African colonies to demand self-government after World War I. It examines the importance of sovereignty and how it has ebbed and flowed throughout history, leading to the present-day dominance of multinational commercial corporations. The chapter sheds light on how these corporations have become omnipotent and how their influence is intertwined with the legacy of the British East India Company. Basically, we will give you this democracy and self-government you want…but you still have to privilege the private lawyer who; through penning contracts, property deeds and wills of inheritance, can turn an object into an asset, the inanimate into income, possession into capital. The creation of the state catalysed the private lawyer into an alchemist who can turn property into wealth. Kwame Nkurumah, the first leader of the first country in Africa to gain independence Ghana, came to realise after leading the continent in the process of “decolonisation”, he, like many others of his generation, would be forced to wrestle with the realisation of how much the power of empire lay not in the hands of sovereignty but within the private realm of capitalism — in property deeds, contracts and trusts.
'“Statehood was to be the salvation; sovereignty would open the door for a new Africa to emerge”
“So much of empire was produced not by marauding army generals or fanatical missionaries but by those most unglamorous of people, the private lawyers, sitting in dusty basement offices across British Empire and connecting its wealth across borders. If poets are called the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared, then lawyers are the unacknowledged “wealth creators”
“Taking sovereignty back from Westminster only opened up new points of conflict: this time with the multinational corporations to whom Britain had always outsourced much of the imperial project”
The Company
By this point I was mad! Given that I work in finance, I always knew this…but to have it so brutally laid out…I spent a whole day reading this chapter and doing nothing else. Everything was being laid on thick….from Ghana to India to Jamaica to Iran! Chapter 2 delves into the conflict between the British Empire and the Indian independence movement. It explores how this conflict shaped the emergence of multinational commercial corporations in all colonies and their immense power in today's world. The rise of these corporations and their global reach is attributed to the outcome of the struggle for control between Britain and India. That lose was like a domino effect. What I got out of all that conflict to control the most profitable companies that were taking out the most from Africa, India, Caribbean and Asia; without the benefits being seen by the citizens as per the granting of the state rights; was eye-opening. Power does not simply live within state houses, national flags and stirring constitutions, but also within the rights of property, in tightly drafted contracts and in corporate boardrooms. We never really got our continent back. The boomerang clincher that the Europeans didn’t plan for and anticipate was…if multinational companies were going to continue to extract wealth from the lands of the former colonies, then many of the people who live there would, unsurprisingly, decide to follow the money.
“Now the UK is itself facing substantial threats of investor-state disputes from multinational corporations who are concerned about the economic fallout from Brexit. The nomadic nature of today’s multinationals tear apart an already fragile connective tissue between wealth accumulation and social responsibility”
“Through an affinity with corporate capitalism, successive British governments worked to contain the power of sovereign autonomy at exactly the moment it was spreading around the world through decolonisation”
“For multinational corporations to spread themselves freely across the world in the twentieth century, the mechanisms to facilitate the movement of their capital across borders would also need to be assured”
The Border
People are now following the money…because we have already established things don’t work in a linear way. You can’t pick and choose “what elements of empire you will accept to affect the grand scheme of things”. The Border explores the complexities and tensions surrounding immigration policies and trade relations post-Brexit. It examines Britain's response to India's independence and the transition from a world of empires to a world of nations. It explores how the British implemented unprecedented levels of border control for people while advocating for a world of 'no borders' for the movement of money. The chapter uncovers the dual nature of border policies and their role in shaping modern-day migration and economic systems. Being someone who doesn’t think so much about migrating from Africa because Africa is lit, this chapter really opened my eyes to “the politics of England and Europe” that never gets to us because it’s dissemination is controlled by the mainstream media and what we are fed by that mechanik has to always be to the benefit of colonial powers.
“At a time when most people would expect to be enjoying the fruits of their long lives, grandparents from the British Caribbean community suddenly had to face being told that they were not welcome in the only country they had ever known, and would be sent back to places they often hadn't seen since they were barely old enough to walk. The same forces that created the Windrush scandal had also devastated the Caribbean islands from which the victims had arrived decades earlier. While Powell and the anti-migrant politics he inspired promoted an amnesia about Britain’s historical relationship with the Caribbean, it would be there that the struggle of much of his economic vision would play out. As the sixties moved into the seventies, Kingston, Jamaica, the very place where passengers had boarded the Empire Windrush to change the complexion of post-war Britain, became the new battleground for competing visions of what the world after empire would look like”
The Debt
As all this is happening…there is world war 1 and 2 that people have also come from Which in its own way has also contributing to the movement of people…and resources. Can’t have one without the other. And ideas as well…the whole world is awakening to capitalism and freedom essentially. The story of Jamaica is so important in understanding the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank as well as the concept of “3rd World” Frankly it’s insane. Chapter 4 delves into Jamaica's efforts to lead a Third World economic revolution in the 1970s, which was undermined by sovereign debt and loan-restructuring agreements that were encouraged by the western powers in the name of selling “development as the gateway to being free and self sufficient”. The chapter highlights the impact of economic policies on post-colonial nations and their ongoing struggles with debt and financial instability. It sheds light on how the Third World debt crisis, which originated in the 1970s, was a precursor to the 2008 financial crisis and reveals the power that sovereign debt carries. The debt crisis forced developing countries, including Jamaica, to turn to international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank for assistance, leading to structural adjustment programs that had significant consequences for their economies and societies’ debt repayment struggles and financial instability. I will definitely do a financial insights on the sovereign debt saddling Africa because this chapter was A LOT and ALL AT ONCE. I felt so gaslit by reality after reading this chapter and had a serious case of stockholm syndrome because I live in a country where this problem is only more rampant and in your face by the day. Understanding debt also leads you down a dark rabbit hole of the tax connection, which Kojo introduces brilliantly in this chapter through explaining how certain colonies chose not to be emancipated from mental slavery(haha) and instead became the little summer houses for Britain’s elite to stash up their wealth(not income)…ill begotten mostly from Africa. Understanding contemporary political and economic trends is not possible without understanding how the fall of empire led to the rise of the “offshore” world in what was once called the British West Indies.
“The power of debt is almost transcendent - by just invoking its name, you can get people not only to agree to things that they would not normally agree to but you can even get them to see it as not just a necessity but also a welcome opportunity for purification and renewal”
“Rather than being a world away, life in West Africa was, in fact, over-saturated with the trinkets of Western modernity. Of course, the presence of Western consumer goods in places like Ghana is actually symbolic of the country's poverty, but a poverty that functions very differently from the vision of mud huts and open wells that my teachers had in their minds”
“To see overwhelming evidence of this dynamic, go to Accra's industrial area. In the shadow of the city's shiny international hotels and commercial towers lies an area called Asbogbloshie - a sprawling wasteland where e-waste from around the world, including Europe and North America, is dumped and burned, creating an apocalyptic landscape of toxic fumes and discarded electronics”
The Tax
Moving to the British West Indies and colonies like Cayman Islands, Chapter 5 explores the role of British overseas territories in driving the global proliferation of the offshore economy since the end of the empire. The chapter delves into the mechanisms and consequences of offshore tax havens and their significance in today's global economic landscape. It uncovers how the Cayman Islands, following the upheaval of Bahamian independence, established itself as a leading example of a new type of state - the modern form of an offshore financial centre, which doesn't seek to run away from the law but instead runs towards the law and learns how to use it to legally contribute to financial offshoring. If you’ve ever worked for the big 4 consulting firms, you know deeply this reality. It’s not just brain drain but financial drain. Africans need to wake up to the reality of this system. This all out of whack system that needs to be dismantled from the root. The only problem is that British politics seem to be moving in the opposite direction. As the British state becomes more explicit about the active role it takes in propping up a floundering free market, the language of the culture war has become an increasingly essential distraction from an unequal, hyper-financialized economic model with roots stretching back to the days of empire.
“The UK's history has played a pivotal role in the current architecture of multinational capitalism, and any reform of the global system will eventually require a reckoning with this legacy. A British government looking to confront the material aspects could close tax loopholes in its overseas territories, restrict offshore ownership of UK state assets, abolish the non-domicile rule, or tax capital flows to and from tax havens”
“London no longer had to be the 'workshop of the world’; it could become the conductor of global capitalism, directing and distributing wealth worldwide, helping the rich keep their money out of reach of the covetous hands of those less fortunate”
“The growth of the Eurodollar market in London was aided by the structure of English common law. As opposed to the legal systems on the European continent, which seek to specify what is permitted, English common law focuses on establishing what is prohibited, implicitly permitting anything else”
The City
The book brings everything together in the last chapter which examines Singapore's economic path after gaining independence from the British Empire and explores the concept of a "Singapore-on-Thames" economic model and its implications for shaping Britain's economic future. Singapore emerged as a model global city, celebrated for its financialized model of growth, and is often hailed as the exception that proves liberal theories of development…the child that made it. However, the chapter reveals that Singapore's alignment with financial services was not due to certain populations or races being more suited to capitalism but rather a result of necessity for survival…something that the founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew talks about in his biography From third world to first. The idea of "necessity for survival" in the context of Singapore's economic path refers to the city-state's strategic choice to become a global financial center due to its lack of abundant natural resources and small territorial size. Singapore had to depend on global trade and investment to thrive in the competitive global economy. It invested in education, infrastructure, and technology to attract foreign investments and talent. The same investments whose source we clearly can follow through history. And there is a scandal there that is part of the mess that is hyper-financialisation of the world and the collapse of one of the biggest banks in Britain. Singapore's choice was a pragmatic response to its unique challenges and not a cultural advantage. A choice that is heavily sold to us as the way of the future and which fails to acknowledge the heavily controlled nature of Singapore's society and economy. Singapore's success as a global financial center comes at the cost of significant state intervention and limitations on political dissent on citizens…again with the aim of protecting the wealth owners, the companies etc. I always like to say that adopting this model anywhere…even in Britain… would require a departure from democratic principles and an embrace of a highly controlled and authoritarian approach. It is essential to consider the trade-offs and sacrifices before emulating Singapore's economic path. As it stands, London is one of the most unequal cities in the world and has become a two track-city, dividing those whose entrenched wealth increases with spiralling asset values from those struggling every month to make ends meet.
“For Singapore, becoming a global city is not merely an aspiration, it is a pre-requisite for our survival ... Closing our doors will turn us into an island of no consequence!” - Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng
“The city-state is pushed forward as evidence that the system works, there is no great legacy of empire that still hangs over former colonies; if they would simply follow Britain's example then it is possible to move through the stages of history”
“The only parts of the city-state they want to boomerang back to the old motherland are the draconian legal system and highly financialised economy”
Conclusion
All the big problems with “the way the world is structured financially” that have been brought up in this book are with us today. They are not of a bygone era. Inequality, insecurity and social unrest are the order of this divided world. I really loved this book and the call to action at the end. Using the covid pandemic as a general example, Kojo Koram exposes the deep-rooted inequalities in our society and the consequences of prioritizing capital over human well being. The book also highlights the rise of cronyism and corporate power which has further exacerbated these problems. He urges us to embrace an alternative vision for the future, one that addresses the aftermath of empire and challenges the dominance of global capitalism. As we face global challenges like climate change and pandemics, it is crucial to adopt an international perspective and forge a different relationship with the planet for our survival. He offered some great conversation worthy suggestions:
international interventions in the use of overseas territories as offshore economies and secrecy jurisdictions
tightening laws on foreign trade disputes in London’s commercial court
encourage greater debt restructuring or cancellation policies
campaign for a global minimum wage
reform Britain’s /Europe’s role in the global financial system by making this essential reading in schools
“Even in countries like Britain that sit at the heart of the global capitalist system, the pandemic reminded us just how different the interests of capital had become from the interests of people”
“This corporatisation of all aspects of public life, with more and more control going to big companies, is not just the failing of a few amoral politicians or opportunistic entrepreneurs - there is a longer history of the power of the state being mutated by capital across the world which is informing our current age of cronyism”
To pretend that empire. is all about identity politics is to protect it’s economic legacy of a few winners and far more losers. Conversations around empire are stifled, in my eyes, not because of a fear that they create division, but because they have the potential to unify public anger, and in so doing redirect it away from the usual suspects-the poor, the vulnerable, racial minorities and those who appear different at first glance. People are well aware of the entrenched divisions that mark our society in terms of income, wealth and opportunities. We need to dismantle the protective casing inside which the global financial system was placed to protect it from popular democracy after decolonisation. And we must dare to imagine a world where the security of human life is valued above the securities traded by creditors across the globe.
10/10 would HIGHLY recommend!
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