Colonial Administration

In 1931, the British Protectorate of Basutoland — a landlocked territory in southern Africa, population approximately 570,000 — raised £125,665 in Native Tax. Its colonial administration cost more than that to run. The colony ran a fiscal deficit that the British Treasury quietly subsidized. This is not an anomaly. It is an exhibit in the cost-benefit analysis of empire — one of many peripheral territories that never appeared in the rhetoric of imperial profit but appeared every year in the accounts.

Analyzing how industrial technology and racialized ideologies enabled Britain to systematize and justify its global imperial dominance.