Q&A with Kojo Koram
Q&A with Kojo Koram
"For many young Britons especially, there is now not much payoff for buying into the old imperial myth."
Throughout the Orwell Festival we’re sharing new writing and exclusive insights from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists. The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists, released last month, highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. To see the lists, visit our website here.
Our next interview is with Kojo Koram, Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law (University of London) and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022.
Uncommon Wealth traces the tale of how, after the end of the British empire, an interconnected group of British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers enabled ‘horrific inequality across the globe’ by offshoring their capital, seizing assets and saddling ‘dependencies’ with debt, while ordinary people across Britain’s former territories were trapped in poverty.
Join Kojo Koram for a discussion of his book and the issues it raises with Grace Blakeley, economics and politics commentator, columnist, journalist and author at this Orwell Festival this Monday, 27th June at UCL, London, 7pm BST.
Uncommon Wealth traces a huge, ongoing process, which is still unevenly understood. Where did you start? Did you have a particular reader in mind?
I started from the standpoint of the contemporary moment, with the current push to decolonise curriculums, art galleries, public spaces, universities, the proms etc. I wanted to return to the original moment of decolonisation - the transformation from a world of empires into a world of newly sovereign states in the mid twentieth century and look at the impact that it had on our political, economic and legal systems in the UK. I think the readers I had in mind were people who might dismiss all this talk of empire as just about race or identity and think it doesn’t affect their material conditions today.
I don’t think I realised this until I finished the book, but I think part of it was speaking to the kind of standard Northern, ‘red wall’ community (where I grew up) to show how conversations about inequality and empire are connected, not at odds in the way the media want to portray them.
What makes the UK economy different (to the rest of the world)? What did Margaret Thatcher change?
The UK plays a unique role in the history of global capitalism due to the emergence of capitalism coinciding and being driven by Britain growing into the largest empire in human history. Despite the relative decline of Britain in economic terms over the twentieth century much of global capitalism still runs through Britain’s networks - the City of London, London’s commercial courts, Britain’s overseas offshore centres. Of course, there are other factors in global inequality, but we can’t overlook the ongoing significance of the things like the English common law, which the legal scholar Katharina Pistor artfully describes as the ‘code of capitalism’. The legal institutions that best protect wealth still reside under UK jurisdiction - which is why we are still the favourite place for oligarchs from Russia, China, Nigeria etc to hide their money.
Thatcher was special in being the first post-empire Prime Minister not just to recognise that Britain’s imperial legacy was still driving inequality at home and abroad but to actively celebrate and accelerate that fact.
As a writer and an academic you work at the intersection of 'law, culture, and the humanities'. Have straightforwardly historical approaches failed to grasp the true story of decolonisation? Why?
I think by just looking at empire through the single disciplinary lens of history you can lose how it continues to inform economic and legal structures today. Why do we not learn about empire when talking about the offshore world in economic classes, especially as many of the leading global offshore centres are hangovers from the British empire? As a law lecturer, the idea that you can regularly complete a qualifying law degree in this country and never hear the word empire mentioned once is a complete embarrassment. Many of the cases we read took place when this country was an imperial jurisdiction, not a national one. You will read precedent setting cases that are from Australia, Canada or India, and you are just supposed to gloss over the reason why you might be reading them in an English law school classroom.
Britain's imperial 'forgetfulness' has been going on a long time. Do you see much hope of it ending?
Yes, I think so. I think there was a material benefit to forgetting about empire for most people in the past. Thinking about empire just meant recognising how Britain had extracted wealth from the rest of the globe. However, now those same systems of wealth extraction are leaving working Britons poorer year after year, there is more interest in looking at how this country was actually put together and structured. People are more open to decolonisation talk not because of ‘woke brainwashing’ but because their material conditions are changing. As they say, ‘it is hard to believe something that your pay cheque relies on you not believing’. Well, for many young Britons especially, there is now not much payoff for buying into the old imperial myth.
Can the UK learn from other country's efforts to confront their past? Are there particular challenges that come in the aftermath of empire?
I wouldn’t say any country has fully confronted its imperial legacy yet, but other countries have at least made some gestures towards reparative justice. The colonial genocide committed against the Herero and Nama ethnic groups by the German empire was recently recognised by the German government, alongside with a commitment to pay the descendants of the genocide $1.3 billion. Similarly, the Canadian government agreed to pay $2 billion of reparations to the survivors of the Indian Residential Schools that took thousands of indigenous children away from their families. In the UK, to even mention the word reparations in relation to colonial crimes is to render you tantamount to a Satan worshipper!
If you've enjoyed Uncommon Wealth what should you read next?
Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists is crucial for understanding how capitalism responded to the threat of decolonisation and Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire beautifully retells the tragic tale of what happened to the newly independent countries. Both of them are must-reads.
