Online conference: Imperial inequalities: states, empires, taxation and reparations

Event description

Co-organised with Gurminder K Bhambra, University of Sussex and Julia McClure, University of Glasgow and based on a forthcoming volume Imperial Inequalities: Taxation and Welfare across European Empires

Download the programme

Watch the conference:

Colonial histories remind us, time and again, that the poverty of what comes to be understood as the global south and the wealth of the global north are intrinsically connected. That is, the very same historical processes that generated the wealth of European countries are the ones that made other places poor. During the phases of imperialism from the sixteenth century onwards, European countries extracted revenues and resources through formal and informal channels and spent this money often on domestic welfare and infrastructure. The precise value of the ‘colonial subsidy’ to European states and their citizens is incalculable or, at least, no attempt has been made at the global level to attempt to calculate it.

During the age of European global empires, European countries imposed tax regimes both nationally and across their imperial hinterlands that have also contributed to the establishment of trends of inequality that continue through to today. Taxation is not only a fiscal tool for revenue extraction but a political concept whereby extraction of taxes has legitimacy in return for belonging within a political community and sharing the benefits of this; in the 1760s ‘no taxation without representation´ became the slogan of the American Revolution. But the relationships between taxation and belonging within political communities across European empires was always unequal. The different returns of taxation to both national and imperial subjects and the performative provision of welfare by empires has created deep inequalities that exist to the present day. An examination of the contemporary legacies of these processes is necessary for understanding how tax is organised, and avoided, in global context.

This conference will bring together leading academics to present new research highlighting the linkages between empires, nation states, taxation, welfare, and resource extraction, and the resulting inequalities in polities and welfare systems experienced as a consequence of this mass extraction. The conference will further explore where society and institutions can go from here to begin to address the centuries of damage and to investigate how reparations could begin to go some way to addressing inequalities; highlighting new research in reparations policy and look at what role tax policy and ideas of citizenship can play in making reparations for historical and continuing injustices. Further we will hear from leading experts working in the field of reparations to discuss necessary policy changes and action needed to gain political momentum and move reparations policy up the international agenda.

This event will explore the following themes:

• To what extent has the European project of public expenditure on welfare been made possible by imperial extraction?
• What role has taxation and welfare played in creating imperial inequalities? Do these challenge any pre-established theories about pathways to global inequality?
• What role has been played by promoting dependent territories as ‘tax havens’, in the more recent period of extraction, and how has this damaged those territories as well as others?
• How do tax laws, which can themselves be understood as having imperial legacies, continue to shape inequality trends?
• What sort of reparations could conceivably address the scale of damage created from imperial extraction, and how can taxes be collected and redistributed to begin to mitigate the economic damage created?
• How can we move reparations policy up the international political agenda and gain political momentum to move reparations forward?

Speakers