books ......

I am not for a moment going to pretend that there was a chorus of angst at the thought of this blog ending - but I did hear from a couple of folks... and I am not sure that they were being completely sarcastic.

One in particular suggested that since I was always passing him books to read - that I might want to post links to some recent "reads" for those like me whose tastes lean towards history / politics or to some epic craptacular book involving special ops troops or a darn good "whacking".......

In that light - I invite you (one of my 7 readers) to take a look at a couple of rather fantastic books by Niall Ferguson - now a professor at Yale who writes these fascinating economic histories.

The first - EMPIRE - is an analysis of the effects of the British Empire. He asks candidly if the empire was overall a force for good or ill in the world and what its lasting impact has been on the current global balance both militarily, politically and economically. His convincing argument is that while NO empire is by definition universally benificent, that never the less the overall impact of Britain's overseas empire was largely positive.

Ferguson points to the significant benefit that has come to those who are now part of the Commonwealth - in particualr the rule of law and a tendency towards largely stable parliamentary democracies and federal systems. Interestingly, his economic analsysis demonstrates that investment and "profit" from the empire largely went in the direction of the imperial possessions (colonies having become something of a bad word) not the "mother country"..... England's investments IN the new world, India etc were substancially greater than the direct economic benefit at home.

A crucial section of the book looks for example at the tax rates within Great Britain, and the costs of Empire bourn by those tax payers, versus the security benefits and the real tax levels in the colonies. The supposedly "crippling" levels of taxation in the American colonies was actually significantly smaller than the tax levies of the voters in England itself!

The link to Amazon is at the right - I really recommend this one.....

A quick review and link to the follow up book Collosus will be posted in the next day or so.