According to the 2014 Heritage index, the six most economically free nations are Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Canada.
Question: Is it a coincidence that five of the six are former British colonies?
Follow-up questions:
* If not a coincidence, what did the British do in their colonies to enable this legacy of economic freedom? Institute the rule of law? An education system? Empirical philosophy?
* Are there a significant number of former British colonies that are economically unfree?
* On balance, how do the former colonies of other nations fare in the index — i.e., those of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and so on?
If it’s not a coincidence, may the sun never set on this legacy of British culture.
[Source: The map of the extent of the British Empire in 1866 is from Wikipedia.]
I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though the idea of economic liberalism was a growing sapling still considerably overgrown with the privilege of the British mercantile system.
A commentator noted that in contrast to the American Iraq fiasco, effectively turning the nation into a warring gang ravaged ghetto, the British in Hong Kong provided security, courts and little else, allowing the economy to flourish propelled by private initiative.
The British perpetrated a lot of crap in the Middle East and elsewhere yet prided themselves on their good relations with the Muslim world. Unlike the Americans they made it their business to learn its cultural nuances.
I recently had an interesting conversation with a young Indian man with heavy accent visiting from the old country. We talked about England and its colonial past: me a touch apologetically acknowledging I was born in London. He responded with vigor: he said India had always been swept by waves of conquest e.g. Alexander, Arabs, Mongols, Mughals, etc., “but of all of them, the British gave us the most in return.” In ‘Why I Am Not a Muslim’ Ibn Warraq notes that during their early expansion by some estimates the Arabs slaughtered more Hindus overrunning the Sindh province (now part of Pakistan) than the Nazis did Jews in the Holocaust. Eventually they tired of it and members of its ulema (scholarly class) issued a fatwa declaring Hinduism “part of the book.” He contrasted this with the British who manifested intense curiosity about the culture, British scholars lovingly detailing, cataloguing and illustrating every aspect of it in huge tomes. A dark skinned Pakistani friend of Goanese lineage remarked, “say what you want about the British but I wouldn’t have wanted to live in my country before they came. They gave us law and order.” By which I assume he meant its parliamentary and judicial institutions.
But Ludwig von Mises offers a perspective that must not be forgotten:
The marvelous achievements of the British administration in India were overshadowed by the vain arrogance and stupid race pride of the white man. Asia is in open revolt against the gentlemen for whom socially there was but little difference between a dog and a native. . . . But it is at the same time the manifest failure of the greatest experiment in benevolent absolutism ever put to work.
– Omnipotent Government, p. 98
In ‘Behind Iranian Lines’ John Simpson relates that after the Shah of Iran was deposed, Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards expunged every vestige and remnant of their foreign rulers. Street signs with British names were torn down with a vengeance.
But they made an exception. On the western side of Tehran University lies a short street called Kuche Porofesor Brown: Professor Brown Street. The name appears on an old marble plaque, and also on a less attractive modern plate installed after the Revolution of 1979. The dedication of this little street to a distinguished, but long dead, English scholar had received the approval of the revolutionary authorities. Professor Edward Granville Browne had spent a year among the Persians when Persia was at its weakest under British influence. A gentle, pleasant man who never returned to Persia after leaving it in 1888 he continued to study its literature all his life and wrote powerfully in support of its efforts to win greater constitutional freedom despite the strong opposition of the British government.
Even it’s Shi’a scholars supported the democratizing Persian constitutional reform movement of 1905. But it was derailed by continuing British and Russian interference in the region which caused the reforms to be seen as ineffectual.