This volume examines the unequal politics of economic governance across European empires and the ongoing legacies of such histories. It focuses on processes of colonial taxation and, primarily, national welfare to examine the ways in which today’s global inequalities are the result of such connected histories.

Preface: Fiscal democracy and the legacy of empire – Quinn SlobodianAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Imperial Inequalities – Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure Part I: Institutional and fiscal issues1 The great gage: Mortgaging Ireland to finance an empire – David Brown 2 The cost of thrift: The politics of ‘financial autonomy’ in the French colonial empire, 1900–14 – Madeline Woker3 Madagascar and French imperial mercantilism: Foreign trade and domestic crises, 1895–1914 – Samuel F. Sanchez4 The right to sovereign seizure? Taxation, valuation, and the Imperial British East Africa Company – Emma Park5 Internal inequalities: Taxpayers, taxation, and expenditure in Sierra Leone, c. 1890s to 1937 – Laura ChanningPart II: Taxation and welfare6 Taxation, welfare, and inequalities in the Spanish imperial state – Julia McClure7 Political economies of welfare of the Spanish Empire: Tax and charity for the Hospital de los Naturales of Potosí – Camille Sallé8 Poverty, health, and imperial wealth in early modern Scotland – Andrew Mackillop9 Compromise and adaptation in colonial taxation: Political-economic governance and inequality in Indonesia – Maarten Manse 10 Imperial revenue and national welfare: The case of Britain – Gurminder K. Bhambra Part III: Post-colonial legacies11 Making investor states: Haitian foreign debt and neocolonial economic governance in nineteenth-century France – Alexia Yates 12 The lure of the welfare state following decolonisation in Kenya – Lyla Latif 13 From capitation taxes to tax havens: British fiscal policies in a colonial island world – Gregory Rawlings14 Imperial extraction and ‘tax havens’ – Alex Cobham15 The Crown Agents and the CDC Group: Imperial extraction and development’s ‘private sector turn’ – Paul Robert GilbertAfterword: Imperialism and global inequalities – Heloise WeberIndex

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. The idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities. This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée.