An Improvement Mentality with Anton Howes

It's as rich , if not richer , than what I'm used to in the UK . I've visited , you know , lots of Europe and the US and so on , but where so many things have been had diverged and where so many things seem to be significantly better , there's public transport . The bullet trains are genuinely mind-bogglingly incredible .

They're so smooth , they're so quick , the transportation is so effective . And then the toilets . I mean , the toilet's issue is a lot of factors . One is the technology itself . There's all this kind of extra thought that's gone into improving the experience of sitting on a toilet heated seats , all these kind of buttons and nozzles .

They're significantly more hygienic , it seems . But then there's also the fact that they're kept clean by the people who use them , which I think there's a kind of cultural element to the technology as well where .

I'm used to really grotty public toilets in Europe and literally on the flight back when we were coming home , we'd transferred in Frankfurt and had to use them in Frankfurt and I was like , oh , I can't believe . I stepped back in time by getting off in Germany , you know , in terms of the quality of experience , and it was literally everywhere we went .

You could go to a central station in the largest city in the world , tokyo , one of the busiest times and it would be basically spotless . I mean , this is like Star Trek levels of seeming ahead . And I think what really bothers me about it and it does bother me it's not just that I'm really impressed .

I'm like , oh , I wish I had that I could enjoy that at home , and not just in my own home but walking around in Britain or in Europe or anywhere else that wherever I go , I can rely on the fact that public toilets would be pleasant , because it is a part of people's lives that is quite kind of significant enough putting in a way when it's not going to

be like that . And the thing that bothers me is I've seen it myself . Okay , the first public railways are invented in Britain . The steam locomotive is invented in Britain . We build all of the first railways and yet Japan is light years ahead when it comes to its bullet trains .

We can't even build one high speed train between Birmingham and London , it turns out , because it's taking well over a decade already of planning , probably won't open for years and years and be massively over budget . It's not even going to be that fast . And when it comes to toilet , I was thinking exactly the same .

Thomas Crapper from where we get the word crap literally is an English guy . There's Alexander coming , who between them they're responsible for the S bend and the U bend , who really really crucial elements to the history of the toilet . Get to Japan and they're just miles ahead already . I think there's something bothers me there .

Maybe I'm being a bit damn it , but sometimes it feels as though Britain has kind of lost its edge , where it used to be the place where all these improvements were coming from and where improvements would at least be applied immediately from other countries as well , and it's kind of lost that lead .

It's sort of become complacent and sat back a bit and allowed other countries to take the lead and , quite shockingly , take the lead as well . I think that's the bit that really bugs me .

And I'm always very stunned then that these improvement mentality of the frizzy youth often actually comes from Japan and not from more dynamic society like UK or even the US , for example , or even the Western Europe . What do you think can account for that very stark difference in structure ?

But I mean , maybe one way to think of this is that there is in the Japanese tradition , it seems you have your craft and then you get better and better at your craft over the course of your life , not necessarily trying to beat everyone else or be the best , but just a kind of idea of perfection or strive towards some idea of perfection in everything that you

do , having that kind of care . I'll give you an example actually , of a really kind of striking thing that I noticed on an escalator .

Go and have an escalator in a mall and they have these huge malls above train stations in Kyoto and there was a guy properly cleaning the escalator handrail , the ones that are kind of these rubbery things that are constantly going around and not just cleaning it . I mean it was like watching a ballet .

He was sort of leaning and it's quite an old guy , probably in his 60s or 70s , leaning , kind of getting it perfectly right in terms of where the sponge was placed as this thing kept on going and there's that kind of attitude to whatever it is that you're doing , you can be the best version of that thing , rather than kind of thinking of certain tasks as just

being menial and not taking pride in them .

And I suspect that in many ways that's resulted in lots of quality of life improvements , filtering out into almost surprising areas of the kind of experience of living in Japan in a way that you maybe don't get in other countries , where the focus is on what is the kind of highest status and all the thing that's going to make me the most money and let's put

all about energy into those rather than trying to think about all these other things . I think most people kind of think well , who cares ? You know who cares how clean my escalator is exactly if there's a bit of dirt , whatever I should be thinking about and make the big butts elsewhere .

The fact that Japan does it the other way around , saying whatever it is I'm doing , this is what I care about . That's maybe where the difference is , and it's widespread as well . I feel like I'm psychoanalyzing a whole culture , which is not a good thing to do , but it's just a kind of impressions based hypothesis , I suppose .

Everyone's a member of one of a few WhatsApp groups or so on , where it's just private chats with friends .

And those private chats sometimes have much larger power than we realize in terms of sharing and inculcating ideas and letting them kind of simmer or get refined in a sort of more private space before they kind of end up having a sort of public face put to them .

I mean , maybe we should be suspicious in a way , but I don't think it's something that we can stamp out . There's probably value to things being first honed in private before they become public . I mean , just look at Twitter .

Sometimes you want to tell people to log off and stop sharing every kind of thought in their heads as though it's with a private group of people when actually it's with the world , and I think there's value sometimes in having a bit of a sense check with your friends before you start sharing things more broadly .

And that had a very dramatic effect on the West Indies colonies . So we're calling them Caribbean countries now and I'm curious if this is a good example if there are examples , this is a good one of how the free trade sentiment actually was quite destructive for the colonies at a period of time .

I mean you can see it in ways right , because part of the debate that emerged about imperial preference later on was that the imperial system was set up explicitly so to favor British manufacturers and then imperial primary resource production , hence why you'd end up with sugar cane being grown in the Caribbean but then sugar processing and refining happening in Britain

and the idea there being that anything that kind of smacked of manufacturers in the rest of the colonies would be stamped out as much as possible and it forced a lot of other countries to only have primary sectors . Now that happens naturally as well when you have very ultra competitive manufacturers .

You see this in countries that Britain doesn't conquer , where cheap cotton exports like the I guess the Chinese made or Vietnamese made t-shirts of the 19th century are British made cotton exports .

They're flooding the market really , really cheap and that's causing all of the weavers in the Ottoman Empire , for example in Egypt , to put down their looms and go into other stuff because there's just no point competing with that . And it makes agriculture , again primary production or mining , often of oars and minerals and so on , to be much more productive .

And there is an argument there that this deindustrialization , as it's often referred to in the economic history literature could have had a kind of long term impact on those economies in terms of their abilities to develop . I think there's a lot of facets to that debate . There is a case to be made for a kind of free trade .

Well as you say , the stability of the free trade can in some ways be damaging onto particular interests or to particular countries that are affected by competition . But then there's the kind of corollary of it that sometimes you kind of think well , as in this case , is it the fact that the Sugar Duty Act would have stimulated manufacturers in the Caribbean ?

We can imagine that being counterfactual as well as a result of that , even though that would be very painful to the people who were running and working on the sugar plantations at the time . But again , I don't really know much about that case . I'm just sort of thinking aloud through the various implications that could be there .

I think the bigger thing to take note of , though , in the 19th century , is that , regardless of what's going on with government imposed tariffs and duties and policies , is the sheer impact of transportation technology improvement , I think , massively overwhelms nearly any impact of tariffs the ability to send in bulk goods that would never have been transported between

continents . The ability to send meat from Australia because of refrigeration , as well as steam ships or steam boats .

The ability to send grain in bulk from the new world to the old world , and not just as a kind of when it's very expensive , but in general that has huge impacts on loads of economies and does seemingly kind of result in this reorientation of a lot of the world .

Where people are suddenly specializing in certain things and I think this is the big problem with when we talk about trade is that in theory , it's great for every country to specialize in a few goods , maybe even one good . When you do that , put yourself at risk of market forces changing . Actually , this is kind of what happened .

If everyone suddenly switches from sugarcane to beet sugar , as they did in France , for example , you're kind of screwed by the new competition because you only produce sugar but you don't produce anything else . So having some level of diversification in the economy is maybe where the free trade is an interesting case or argument I think to be had there .

I actually think essentially the end of imperial press conference was not a big of a shock , I think , as the British at the time obviously in favor of the imperial press was making , because when the emancipation slaves happened they didn't actually move the economy in a way to compensate the lack of free labor now into actually having the mechanization he mentioned ,

for example . So they were actually just relying upon the fact that they could get the imperial press conference because at the same time Cuba , brazil were still using slave labor but they were also moving towards the more mechanization aspects of sugar production . And then another thing you mentioned the reputation thing .

I think that is actually very understudied in the Caribbean , in the sense of it was because of refrigeration that we actually were able to diversify into other products like banana , other fruits you can't get the banana for the federation to Europe .

The whole industry was created because of international refrigeration , shipping and that is one of the many ways that technology and transportation farm really changed the way how some Caribbean economies work .

And of course , the biggest change now although I don't think we tend to think about it this way as an innovation system is airplanes , because our entire tourism product is rest entirely on airplanes , and without airplanes having proper commercial flights the entire Caribbean will probably be kind of wet into a wasteland and it's a thing people don't think enough about

essentially .

So , yeah , you're right , without the kind of innovations in freight in particular , I don't think you can transport fruit like that over very , very long distances , like even pineapples , which are pretty robust , right , Pineapples . They have this nice exterior .

You can find paintings from this late 17th and 18th centuries of people presenting pineapples to kings , because it's such a rare thing , such an exotic fruit .

Pretty much any stream you could find in Europe by about 1700 is being exploited , either for transportation , if possible , and if not for transportation , then you've got loads and loads of kind of diversions of that flow to go and feed water wheels .

And one of the really striking things about what then happens is that you have this extremely ancient technology used since Roman times Water wheels are incredibly ancient , they're known all the world over and then they work out how to massively improve them .

First of all , john Smeaton , english civil engineer , does a bunch of experiments , and the kinds of experiments we like this could literally have been done at any point , all the way back to Roman times , if not earlier , and maybe the Greeks did it and they forgot that all those writings didn't survive , or something like that .

He works out that it's much more efficient to have overshot wheels where the water is falling into the wheel , into kind of enclosed buckets on the wheel and then gravity is doing the work .

Rather than using undershot wheels , where the water is flowing under the wheel , it's hitting the paddles , the boards of the wheel and pushing so through impulsion , because you're losing so much energy from the smacking of the water against the board versus just using the gravity of the water falling . So he goes all over .

Britain basically converts any wheel he can find into either overshot or , if there isn't a high enough fall of the water in terms of the stream , creating what are called breast shot wheels , where again you're using gravity but you're not necessarily able to have the water flowing high enough to be on the actual top of the wheel .

So it's sort of hitting the wheel around somewhere in the middle and that results in quite a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of all of these existing water powers , mills and factories . I mean , everything essentially could be done by the mid 18th century with water , that rotary motion .

And then , taking things even a step further , you get a whole bunch of French engineers and English engineers but mostly French engineers working out that they can use turbines instead of using vertical wheels . You could have horizontal wheels .

Think of how a propeller works effectively , but you can use turbines or you can have wheels in which the water is entering the wheel and then exiting it , but it's still spinning the thing , and that that's even more efficient than some of the old ways in which things had always been done .

And so all of the pre existing industrial technology , industrial processes that has already kind of been built but had been so inefficient , not really using the water to its full potential , like there are quite dramatic improvements well into the period when steam engines are becoming common , and I think there's a case to be made here for the fact that you can

imagine a scenario in which coal isn't a thing . You can imagine a scenario in which water power is still the main thing being used , where a particular country that has that configuration can still get pretty rich but can still see quite a lot of living standards .

Improvement can still see quite a lot of expansion of industry and tertiary sectors on top of that as well , before you start to reach the limits of where steam power would have been necessary .

And I would actually go a step further than that , which is that you can even imagine using water power to leapfrog certain technologies and generate electricity and do all these other things .

If you've ever played the games civilization or even like any kind of real time strategy game like Age of Empires or something like that , there is always tech trees and you have to follow the tech trees one by one and you've got to unlock the wheelbarrow before you unlock the horse mill , before you unlock this next thing .

That's just not the way that things actually work . There are a lot of cases where you don't actually need these prior technologies to unlock , so to speak , the subsequent ones . I'm not saying that if this were the case in Britain that it would be as rich today as it is , and it may be substantially less so .

All that living standards would be not quite there , but the general trajectory of the improvement . I can still imagine being there . I don't think that there's anything about the fact that Britain had coal that led to other people improving things in a kind of general manner .

They're not that many people think of it like the consumer funnel used in marketing . There's a lot of people of that proportion . People very few ever come into contact with another invader . Of that proportion even fewer ever think who I could do that to .

Of that proportion even fewer Not only I could do that to , but then actually start thinking about , you know , actively coming up with plans , coming up with improvements . Of that proportion even fewer ever may have any success with it at all for various reasons .

They get distracted , they have the resources , something else happens in their life , they're too busy with their other jobs , they can't devote time to improving things .

And then , of that proportion even fewer have actually come up with something that's going to push the needle in a way and then of that proportion even fewer going to be commercially successful right , going to be inspirations to others , which kind of feeds back to the original bit .

So the number of inventors is pretty small and I think this is just generally the case throughout all the history is that when you have that many inventors and there are so many things that you can be working on , the fact that a lot of the time they just won't be much progress or they won't be much improvement along loads of those , in a way , this is kind

of still the case and there is loads of low hanging fruit . Coming back to Japanese toilets , clearly most of Europe , america and so on could have significantly nicer toilets , but it doesn't . And maybe there's also some economic factors and blah , blah , blah . You can kind of invent lots of just so stories .

To explain that ultimately is that there haven't been enough inventors who want to focus on that particular problem and trying to spread the use of better technology why can't economists explain the modern world ?

and I'm curious why you think that could be the case .

But I agree that when you look at the kind of fundamental thing that the great factor she calls it , when you look at the fundamental thing that we're so interested in , which is the fact that across all industries , pretty much across all metrics , at around the same time Maybe a few decades here , a few decades there , but around the same time everything starts

improving all at once . And that is very difficult to explain with reference to just certain prices being the way they are or certain factors being cheaper than others . And I mean economics as a field isn't really kitted out .

I think to explain those things or investigate the causes of those things , I think personally you have to really dig into the details of the technology involved , of the inventions . What are the inspirations for the inventors ? What ideas do they have ?

So I agree with her general premise that the thing that must be having an impact here is ideas based , and what those ideas are is a different matter . And actually we disagree when it comes to certain aspects of what's important or even kind of this idea that it's an idea at all . It has to be something intellectual , it has to be something of the mind .

Physical factors , I agree , I don't get us even most of the way there in terms of explaining the sheer level of improvement and in a way , I think this is worth stating as well is that when we try to get our heads around the scale of the change in the past few hundred years , we use things like GDP per capita and they're pretty good at , kind of giving us

a sense of the famous hockey stick rafts . But even they , I think , massively , radically underestimate the kind of sheer scale of the change . For a start , we use real GDP per capita , we try to cap for inflation .

But the problem with even that is that even today , when we try to measure these things , it's not like televisions are in the consumption basket of a person living in 1700 or 1650 or 1500 . Right , that thing can't have gotten cheaper or more expensive it just didn't exist at the time .

We rebase inflation all the time , or we rebase the basket of goods that we use to measure inflation all the time by adding all these new technologies or even assuming quality improvements that are then just not picked up by the figures at all .

So even if , let's say , we looked at the price of a cup of coffee between 1650 and today , I would say that the quality of the cup of coffee is going to be almost unimaginably different . What that coffee tasted like in 1650 , god only knows .

I mean it could be absolutely disgusting by modern standards , or completely different , almost unrecognizable , potentially Same with tea . We're used to tea bags where you have loose actual leaves .

If you imported tea in the 1750s or 1800 , it would have come as a block , like a compressed block , that you'd have then got a knife and scratched it off into the boiled water . The taste of that is just going to be totally different . So many qualitative changes it doesn't quite capture the full scale of the change .

This is something where , time after time after time , it doesn't seem to me as though you can explain a lot of those changes , or even the appearance of particular inventions , with reference to general physical , market based factors , where market based factors are important is possibly in the success of particular inventions .

So , commercially , did this thing spread very rapidly or only slowly ? But in terms of the actual invention of it , someone coming up with the idea of trying to implement it very often they're kind of swimming out into a stormy weather . They've timed this horribly , in the same way that a lot of inventors today .

Sometimes they're ahead of their time , sometimes they're behind their time . A lot of the time people aren't inventing things the most opportune moment .

So she thinks if you give people legal liberty to do things that's one part of the story and if you give them social permission the dignity that she calls it to do things if you lift the rock off the grass , I think is the analogy she uses then the grass will be able to grow , which kind of implies that everybody can do this kind of thing .

Well , everybody does do this thing . Actually , maybe that's the difference there . I agree that everyone can do this kind of thing , but she thinks everyone does do this thing as long as you give merchants dignity and you give them liberty . Then you're just going to get this explosion of improvement .

And I disagree with that , because I think there are plenty of commercial societies that we can think of throughout history where merchants do have dignity and they do have liberty , where you don't necessarily see invention or you don't necessarily see improvement because of the sheer rarity of inventors .

So I don't think that the dignity and dignity are actually that important .

If anything , I think it's the other way around is that you have a bunch of inventors who seize upon particular opportunities in England in particular , where things weren't actually that great for them to begin with and they actively create the conditions for further improvement or for the next generation of inventors to have a better time of it or an easier time of

it than they do . My story , I guess , is less about the kind of take the rock off the grass , but more that the grass itself is occasional . Grass seeds are able to push the rock out of the way itself , and I think that's quite an important distinction . There A lot of my story is about inventors .

Although they're rare , once they start to get together , once they start to organize , they can have a pretty big impact . But this is something that actually has to be done by every generation of inventors . They kind of have to create the conditions for the next generation as well , and it's a kind of active ongoing process to encourage innovation anywhere

.

That has been the basis of a dramatic , dramatic , impactful school of thought when it comes to reparations in Caribbean . It seems to me and to many economists that work on this topic that the Erick William thesis really doesn't hold the water that people wish it had held or had held .

That again , in academia people know the arguments , but in just society , even going to college in the Caribbean , you are just taught that reparations is the correct thing to do , based on economics , based on , of course , the history of the historians .

When back , of course , erick Williams , it's a kind of joke or half-joke that William's book was probably one of the original things that the Caribbean political economy , because it really put the countries on a very weird political path . This topic is not much outside correction . It's a different story , of course , why that is not outside correction .

But I'm curious what do you think about this topic in general , of the idea of the capitalism and slavery being so coherent together . I might assume what you think , but what are your thoughts on that ?

So I'm going to , in a sense , kind of cop out a little bit by reserving judgment based on the new evidence they've come up with and I'm going to present on this .

But in general , the William's thesis I mean , this is a very old thesis , as well as his 1940s I think , or maybe 1950s , at a push In 1943 or so I think You're going to be hard pushed to find any work that's written that long ago that really stands up to scrutiny today , given so much extra work has been done on it . Now .

There are obviously a few aspects the William's thesis . One of it is that slavery builds the British Empire , builds British wealth . There's another aspect to it which is about the abolitionist movement and kind of saying it wasn't a moral crusade , it was all based on economics .

Interestingly , that latter argument seems to have been one that has sort of disappeared because it doesn't really make sense economically right . The sugar trade was actually still pretty profitable . They were doing absolutely fine from the slave trade . There was no reason that the sugar lobby wouldn't have wanted to continue importing slaves .

That's actually kind of very restricting and interesting thing . I've certainly been very interested in the origins of abolitionism , because it's actually a kind of a wild idea . It really sort of comes out of nowhere . It's historically unprecedented .

People talk about there being prior abolitionist movements but as far as I can tell they're not actually abolitionists in the sense of let's get rid of the entire institution of slavery . They're usually more about let's not have these particular people .

I like being slaves and there's a big distinction there as a universalistic principle versus a kind of more particular principle , and you see this , for example , with a lot of Maroon communities in the Caribbean is that very often they take slaves themselves .

They want themselves to be free , obviously , but the idea that slavery itself is inherently bad is , I think , a bit more out there and I think develops over the course of the 1770s , 80s , 90s , all over the different places and thanks to different people .

Again , this is sort of ideas change that I've been drawn towards because it seems to be so impactful as the kind of something where economics I don't think explains it . So that's kind of one aspect . I'll kind of let's put that to one side .

But in terms of slavery and capitalism , capitalism , to be honest , I know I've taught a course that was called capitalism for and against , which is a lot of fun because it challenges a lot of people's assumptions . But capitalism is not a word that I like to use for the simple reason that I don't really know what it means .

People use it to mean very different things . It's very politically charged . If it just means concentrations of investment to do something , then who cares ?

I mean , this is something that's been done since forever , this idea that there's a whole system that's all about investment and it's all about creation of or kind of pooling of investment to do larger and larger projects .

It's interesting that this kind of is automatically seen as a bad thing , and that obviously has its own political heritage as well , but I don't think there's anything inherently bad about that , and even if we were to say that's the case , the state's doing it I don't think it's any different to the private enterprise doing it either .

There's been plenty of examples of societies where the state has essentially forced people to save and then use those savings to do big projects . They look at the Soviet Union , look at certain East Asian economies as they were developing over the course of 20th century . Is that capitalism ? I don't know . I mean , I don't really know what this word really means .

To come to the example of slavery , I think personally part of the problem is that we focus so much on the 18th century when it comes to explaining Britain's success in terms of its economic performance , without actually looking at what had already happened by 1700 .

You start to see a real step change in involvement in colonial and especially Atlantic ventures in general in the late 17th century . What's striking to me , though , is that Britain is already kind of looking kind of peculiar by 1700 or even by 1650 . I don't think you can explain that with slavery .

What you could say and I think this is where elements of the Williams thesis may be still holds some water is that for Britain to become as rich as it did at the scale that it did , that obviously slavery was a part of that . Obviously it was .

I mean , slavery-based investments or plantation-based investments did fund a lot of things , and that money , that investment , all the returns from that , were used for other aspects of the economy as well . I guess the thing economists like to say where economic historians want to point out is well , okay , what's the cap actual ? What does it look like absent that ?

And it's not clear how large an impact that has on the economy . I think some estimates will say 6% , some will say 13% . Okay , Britain was 13% poorer by 1800 . Obviously there's a case there that slavery may impact economically .

But I guess the question when it comes to causes of the industrial vision or cause of the great factors , was it the reason for the trajectory change ? I guess there's two elements there . Was it the reason for the trajectory change ? To which I would say practically almost certainly not .

Does it affect the levels at certain benchmark years , let's say in 1700 , 1800 and 1900 ? Well , yeah , almost certainly it does as well , because it's a part of the economy . It has a wider impact too , and that's where I almost feel like in this debate people are often talking past each other .

Historians like to say well , obviously , slavery happened and Britain was very involved , extremely involved . Obviously it has an impact on the economy . But what economic historians a lot of the time , especially those who pushed back against the William Seas , have said is well , was it necessary ?

I think this definition of the word necessary , or understanding of it is , I think , the thing that causes all of the strife around this question , Not to mention the fact that it's a highly politicized question . I don't know if I hope that kind of makes sense in terms of my answer there .

Well , as I said , it's a very difficult topic to address , but that , I think would be my main answer is that I don't think it really affects the trajectory or the overall trajectory . Does slavery have an impact on any of the inventions of the early 17th century ? I don't think so . Does it have an impact on some of the ones in the 18th century ?

Then you can imagine quite a lot of British investment ends up going into British colonies while everyone else is fighting , and so you end up with a situation where capital , by pursuing the highest returns , which in Britain were getting pretty slim , is going to go into Indian railways and Australian mines and Caribbean whatever they're producing , I guess ports .

Later on it's going to be airfields and all this other stuff . And hotels and hotels and for tourism . You can imagine that being a lot more aggressive than it was .

Because what happens in World War One is that London ceases to be the financial centre of the world and it moves I mean literally within just a few years to New York , to the extent that Britain becomes a massive debtor to the United States , having literally , just a few years before , being the creditor to pretty much the entire world .

And that financial shift , I think , is quite striking . And then the other aspect being that to get to your counterfactual right I'm almost trying to reverse engineer how we get to the empire still being around . So that sort of happens .

You essentially can't have a massive war in which various parts of the empire have to contribute so much to defend Britain or to defend British interests in Europe . And so not entering World War One is , I think , where you end up with a case where there aren't as vocal or successful independence movements all over the empire .

So maybe you end up with something that's a bit more like what happens with Australia and Canada perhaps , but even then I mean , they contributed quite a lot in terms of World War One and then in World War Two as well . So you perhaps even have something that's slightly less of an independence than they have today .

It's a difficult counterfactual that one , but that's the only scenario . I can see where that happens . But I don't know how the rest of the 20th century plays out .

If Britain doesn't enter World War One there's going to be a lot of differences as a result of that , I don't think there's anything particular about empire that makes colonies more successful than elsewhere , though I guess that was maybe an implication of your question .

But given the trajectory of things in about 1910 , it seems as though a lot more freedom has been given to colonies in order for them to self-manage . It seems as though a lot more economic deal is shifting less towards the kind of imperial preference system and more towards maybe a kind of free trade . I was kind of going back and forth in that period .

I think the main channel is investment , and it's British investors being much more comfortable investing in other parts of the empire .

So the Caribbean countries they're about 10 years in my time actually created a federation similar to Australia in some ways that would have been a large colony still in the empire and that was because at the time people in the Caribbean rightfully thought that small countries like the Caribbean once cannot exist as independent states because it's too fragile .

So it's come together as one country . So there's one prime minister , one government under the Queen Tanger . Lead up to that it was this biggest thing around people in that literary Thai-ling , really contemporary documents , and people were very much in favor of it , especially all the intellectuals and so on .

But when it was actually happening and it went into forest in 48 , there was a lot of political squabbles happening and Jamaica pulled out , then Trinidad pulled out , then it kind of poofed only four years . But the rationale that they had , I think , is still correct where you cannot exist as separate countries , it has to be with one large empire-type state .

And as you can see now in the Caribbean and Chet data , the Caribbean countries that remain colonies of the UK effectively , like Camarilla , bvi , bermuda and so on , actually all have better metrics than Barbada , the same thing and so on .

So I do wonder actually if just being part of that one thing , even just having the ability to migrate , having a vincencio passport , you can't go anywhere . You're going anywhere in the UK . It's very hard to even leave a small rock in the ocean .

Simple things like an exchange and so on , those kind of ideas shifting as you , having professors from London come into your school , even those simple things , I think would actually be a bigger benefit . And we can kind of see the counterfactual play out . In view they have the overseas territories in the Caribbean . That's kind of my view on that .

, I guess . The question then and you know much more about Caribbean history than I do . The question then is why did Jamaica split off ? Is there something in Dodgers that's going on there where it was almost never going to happen ? Because of just the nature of how Jamaica differed from the other countries within that union .

We call it these days about how the finances of Jamaica will have to support all the other countries . It's essentially almost like an early Brexit in many ways and that really caused a lot of problems that then , when Jamaica went out , china went out . But , funny thing , there's a thing called the organization Eastern Caribbean States , the OECS .

We say the eight Caribbean countries , the very small ones Eastern Caribbean , that have like a semi union . It's a semi union , you can travel between the others , we're easily so on . That actually is the remnant of the Federation . Those are the ones that were in it . They kind of never really left it but they have separate governments but lots of coronation .

Essentially that's the remnant of that . But the big ones Jamaica , katrina and Barbada they pulled out in various ways and the popular to go back towards a much more federated state never really happened again in history . That's a very strange thing to me , but it was really a political thing .

I thought if that had been on as planned there'd be one Caribbean and I suspect also there'd be a lot more Canada-Caribbean interaction at the time , because obviously colonial empire was much more coherent in those days and that could have had a very dramatic impact on how the British empire actually did trade in Northern America similarly as well .

But that's counterfactual . It didn't happen .

The new history of the Caribbean isn't actually written yet and when a lot of the writing on Caribbean econ history , political history kind of began , just kind of post-independence people in the intellectual class were very left-wing socialists , marxist leaning . So you see a lot of the tinge of that when you go into the conversation .

It's not particularly productive but there's so much there that historians could look at if they had interest .

That's really interesting . Oh , that'd be . I mean , that's really fascinating . I guess even with that union though it's coming so late on For my Canada factual we have to go back to the 1910s and work out what happens if it works out slightly differently , I mean .

The other thing to note there , though , I guess is also Canada is maybe a good example where Canada really comes together in terms of the provinces and becomes kind of a more cohesive political unit as a result of , effectively , invasion from Irish Republicans crossing the American border and invading Canada .

Even though it's tiny little battles that scarcely could be called battles today , that seems to be one of the things that actually helps congeal those provinces into a single nation and it's kind of seen as being the beginning of Canada's not its independence movement , but it's kind of coherent .

Had you seen that during that union , maybe things would have been Mexican invasion or something of the Caribbean that would have brought them all together in a way that you can't really see on the punch .

They wanted a more separated power structure while still having confederation . I don't know why they chose that . That would be very interesting for people to tell me . But also it's one of the things where there's a famous line from a Caribbean author , george Lamin . You may have know of him and he said the idea of the Caribbean was created in London .

What he meant by that was because , again , there was so lack of transportation , technology and so on in the Caribbean . The first time is his 1930s or so . He met so often during that was in London at school , because that's kind of where those things happen .

It had been kind of making this point several times in random people London during 1920s , 1930s and 1940s . The Freddie Caribbean is odd because every single Prime Minister the Caribbean has had an independence , obviously by the LSE are offered those two schools , every single one . And they all met , they all chatted . Even Pierre Trudeau in Canada was there .

Lee Kuan Yew was there at the same time that London of 1940s or 30s has such a dramatic impact on the world in the British Empire and I don't think many people write about that kind of time period , especially from a colonial perspective , of what being there was in that time period , given that every single independent leader in the British Empire was there at

the same time and they actually had chats called . There are some fragments I've come across where it actually had its colonial student union type thing happening . So it's very dynamic time happening . What happened ?

That they wanted to go back and become independent because it was the older ones that were pushed in the Federation but it was the younger ones that were in college in the 40s that are pushing the independence .

There's a sort of awareness that , yes , denmark had a few , had managed to colonize a few islands , but I guess they're not as well known . The Baltics do do that and this is my favorite one the Duchy of Courland , which is in modern Western Latvia , courland , semigalia .

I think the Duke of Courland Semigalia tried to in fact deep start creating colonies in Africa . I think , if I remember rightly , also attempts one in the Caribbean as well . In the course of the 17th century , when you think of colonial nations , you obviously think of Britain and France and Spain and Portugal . Those are your classic four .

And then you think , well , maybe Germany . In the 19th century , in Belgium they tried to get in on the act . But the fact that the Baltics are doing similar is , I think , very , very striking . It's a good question as to why they're not as successful . I think partly it's location . Obviously they don't have that direct access to the Atlantic .

Denmark in a sense does control the interchange between the Baltic and the Atlantic , though , so you can expect it having a bit of an impact . I think part of the problem is probably also just going to be internal wars . There's a lot of reconfiguration of what's going on with Scandinavia .

They're heavily affected by the 30 years war and then the Great Northern War in the mid 17th and then the 18th centuries . There's the rise of Russia , which starts to kind of impact on them . Russia , interestingly , is not often thought of as being a colonial nation , but very much is , but it's a land colonized nation .

If you look at maps of Russia , it's one that's expanding into Siberia , all the way to the Pacific , and then and this is the other thing people don't realize is that Alaska was colonized by Russia . It even has forts in what is now Hawaii , like Russian built forts , and all the way down the coast of what's now California .

Every country was kind of expanding , expanding , expanding to try and hold on , to get more territory , I guess . In terms of successes , I think it is . Those problems , though , is that they don't really have the resources . They're often strategically distracted . If you're France , you're basically Europe's superpower .

You're absolutely gigantic population wise , until the 19th century . Other countries start to kind of catch up , partly because of the fertility decline in France . If you're Britain , it makes sense after the 1550s to focus on anything that's to do with the sea , because you've lost your land borders .

England loses its land border with Scotland because they're under the same crown . The English lose Calais , which means they cease to have a land border with France . If you look at the countries that have colonies Portugal and the Netherlands have them , but they end up being again .

They suffer from the problem of having to focus resources into their own land borders . There's the threat of France , the threat of Spain . If you're Spain , you're having to worry about France and then the British Empire kind of impinging all your territory .

If you're Denmark and Sweden , you're kind of going to get pushed out by the bigger players , especially if they have much larger navies . They have a lot more investment going . The thing to remember is the Baltics are pretty poor countries . Sweden and Denmark have wealth . They're still very highly agrarian countries .

It's only in the 17th century that Sweden starts to lean heavily into metallurgy . It starts being one of the major iron producers for Europe , especially for even places like England . There's not the huge pressures that you have in those other countries that are closer to the Atlantic .

Are there anything particularly interesting to tell me about the Royal Society of Arts and West Indies ?

. The Journal of the Society of Arts , or what from 1908 became the Royal Society of Arts , is full of the information about what was going on throughout the British Empire and then later throughout the Commonwealth in the 20th century . This is up until about the 1970s .

It had a program in the late 19th century that continues on for quite a while into the 20th century , devoted to discussing what's going on in the empire .

It's literally like that is the surface , but if you're in London , you go along to find out what's going on in the empire , by which I mean what are the cultures like , what is the economy like , what are the demographic trends .

If you want to find out statistical information about it , you would go along to the RSA for an evening lecture and find out what's really interesting .

Actually and maybe this speaks to what you were talking about , with all of these independence leaders being in London at the same time is very often the contributors to the discussion , all of which is recorded in the journals , are named and actually says what their comments were .

You'll have the paper and then you can actually read what the Q&A was afterwards , and then people standing up and saying , oh , by the way , I can tell you about what it's like back there because I'm from there . There are quite a few . I noticed some of the leaders of the Pan-African movement were present at these discussions .

It's discussion of what's going on on the Gold Coast or it's like mining industry in South Africa . There's a lot of contribution from locals who happen to be in London , often for education or often for other jobs at the time . It's probably a rich resource . You can find all of the back issues on JSTOR . They're rich resource .

Just to find out more about what was being discussed .

And I find quite striking also is that I mean there's a longer association with empire and colonies that the Society of Arts had , in part because there was a colonies and trade section even from the mid-18th century which was all about them thinking how can we promote industries in the colonies or how can we promote new trade routes , how can we promote new things

that could be grown there ? Sometimes with the connection to slavery , especially very early on by the 1780s and 90s . Actually the abolitionist movement is pretty strong within the Society . Wilbur Force , famous William Wilbur Force , is the vice president of the Society .

It seems as though there's a change in emphasis and as in the Society at that time , in the early 19th centuries , was a direct democracy , so whoever was turning up , whoever the members were , whatever opinions they had and discussed and thought were important , that's what viewed the Society as a whole had . It was basically the sum of its parts .

In the 19th century , though , that differs and it becomes much more of a kind of lecture-based society and exhibition-based society , where it's about presenting things and discussing them .

So I think there is a lot to learn from it and it's something , as you say , a throwaway line that I touch upon in the book , but hopefully as an invitation to other scholars to look into the Society of Arts , as this rich resource of information that kind of seemed to be mined , if you will , as to what was going on not just in Britain but also the rest

of the British Empire .