Cutting the British Empire Down to Size | History Today

Cutting the British Empire Down to Size | History Today: Cost was the other convenience. Britain’s commercial expansion, and the formal imperialism that rode on the back of it, were on the whole cheap. Free trade was more than merely a commercial policy. It was tied in to a whole economic ideology, called ‘political economy’ then – ‘free marketism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ today – one tenet of which was that enterprise worked best if it was not taxed. Anything that required tax revenues was therefore discouraged. That is partly why the British army was relatively skimpy and why colonies could not be allowed to become a direct burden on the British Treasury. They had to be ‘self-sufficient’: their revenues, even for their defence, raised locally.