Empire is a State Building Venture

But these objectives are mistaken. Democracy cannot be easily transplanted and ranks far behind the economic liberty and the rule of law in the scale of values. Westernisation only produces cultural resentment in turn. Empire ought only to have a much narrower and clearer objective, the promotion of an international liberal economic order. Even an empire in the service of this cause will require a generosity from the United States that does not seem anywhere on the horizon. The one area where the US needs to be unilateralist is in giving economic concessions to the rest of the world. Rather than insisting on reciprocity, the US should simply open up its markets. Over time, these measures will help strengthen a global economic order. If the US does not do it, we will alas have to await a power of the future to do it. China and India are the two obvious candidates.

Lal has defended liberal economics with an admirable verve and cogency, particularly when it was unfashionable to do so. But this foray into world history on a grand scale often borders on moral presumptuousness, historical naivete and political oddity. For one thing, the repeated claim that empire is beneficial for the colonies rests on an unfalsifiable counterfactual. Lal seems to think that the British Liberal Empire was an engine of economic growth. But he seems to conveniently forget that the British Empire was neither liberal in his sense of the term nor beneficial. I cannot imagine what prompts Lal to characterise an empire that had all kinds of differential tariffs, the most bizarre and exploitative taxes like those on salt as “liberal”.

And the relevant comparison in claiming that empire was beneficial ought not to rest on the fallacy of comparing growth rates after empire with growth rates before it (a comparison that anyway does not substantiate Lal’s argument as much as he thinks it does). The relevant question is whether alternative modes of globalisation, like diffusion of technology and emulation would have achieved better or worse results during the same period. The book often has sweeping and interesting judgments, like the fact that the UN is dead and the IMF should be killed of. But its core politics is self contradictory. It wants to defend a minimal state, but does not remark on the fact that imperialism leads to the most extraordinary expansion of domestic state power, and imperiling of liberties as the experience of every empire has shown.

Liberals should guard against the pathologies of power, not be allured by the machismo of empire.