Uncommon Wealth: Kojo Koram on Britain and the aftermath of Empire
Featured Speakers
Kojo Koram
This event will start *just after* 7PM, and the livestream will appear in the box just above.
‘BRILLIANTLY ARRANGED AND RICH WITH FRESH INSIGHTS, UNCOMMON WEALTH REMINDS US HOW THE FORGOTTEN STORIES OF EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION CONTINUE TO IMPACT OUR DAILY LIVES IN BRITAIN – AND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD – UP TO TODAY’ - AKALA
Just over three years since his last visit to discuss The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line, Kojo Koram is BACK at Lighthouse with a new book!
Dr Koram joins us for an Edinburgh launch of Uncommon Wealth, a blistering uncovering of the scandal of Britain’s disastrous treatment of independent countries after empire, showing how the decisions of decades past are contributing to the forces that are breaking Britain today.
Through the book he traces the tale of how after the end of the British empire an interconnected group of well-heeled British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers offshored their capital, seized assets and saddled debt in former ‘dependencies’.
This enabled horrific inequality across the globe as ruthless capitalists profited and ordinary people across Britain’s former territories in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were trapped in poverty. However, the reinforcement of capitalist power across the world also ricocheted back home. Now it has left many Britons wondering where their own sovereignty and prosperity has gone…
As Koram will illustrate, decolonisation was not just a trendy buzzword. It was one of the great global changes of the past hundred years, yet Britain – the protagonist in the whole, messy drama – has forgotten it was ever even there.
