Political Economy

How a 16th-century reform movement gave birth to the empire's most powerful and paradoxical machine: its legal system.

Analyzing the welfare economics of defense programs, questioning whether systems like the F-35 serve public interests or concentrated private benefits.

A two-part series on the political economy of coffee in Rwanda and how its collapse contributed to the 1994 genocide.

Four posts. One accounting problem. The British Empire, examined through its own fiscal records, parliamentary debates, and the most rigorous academic cost-benefit study ever conducted of it, resolves into a recognizable structure: a system whose costs were socialized across a broad population and whose gains concentrated in a narrow connected class. This is not a moral verdict. It is a structural description. And it explains more about how colonial economies worked — and how their successors work — than any amount of rhetoric about civilizational mission.

In 1986, two American economic historians published the most rigorous quantitative study of British imperial finance ever attempted. Their conclusion was precise, remarkable, and largely ignored: imperial investment produced lower returns than domestic investment. The British middle-class taxpayer subsidized the empire's defense, effectively transferring wealth to a narrow class of investors who held imperial securities. Empire, they found, was not profitable for Britain — it was profitable for a particular Britain.

On February 19, 1906, a printed schedule was laid before the House of Commons. It listed, line by line, every payment India made to Britain in the financial year 1904–05: £19,463,757 in total. Interest on debt. Military pensions. Army effective charges. Store purchases. The document was not secret. It was published every year. It was the architecture of extraction, open to inspection, and largely uninspected.

For most of the nineteenth century, British politicians debated whether empire paid. The question was never cleanly resolved. This series applies cost-benefit analysis to the imperial project — not as a moral verdict, but as a fiscal one. Who bore the costs? Who captured the gains? The ledgers have answers that the speeches avoided.

On the evening of June 12, 1879, Mr. Smollett rose in the House of Commons and read aloud a table that nobody wanted to hear. India's fiscal deficit over the previous seven years had reached £34.5 million. The empire, he argued, had been living beyond its income. The speeches that followed were long, brilliant, and ultimately inconsequential. This series begins where they left off.

This post examines the two most common non-economic explanations for why poor countries stay poor: corruption and culture. It evaluates the empirical relationship between corruption and growth, asks why culturally identical countries at different levels of development exhibit different behavioral patterns, and traces the historical use of cultural argument as post-hoc justification for development outcomes.

This post examines the macroeconomic policy prescriptions applied to developing countries through IMF conditionality, evaluating the empirical relationship between inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and economic growth across the historical record. It draws on the cases of Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Argentina to assess whether the standard orthodoxy of very low inflation and balanced budgets produces the outcomes its proponents claim.