Uncommon Wealth

A challenge to a nation living in the shadow of empire: reckon with your imperial past, or it will come back to bite you . . . Stirring, rigorous and readable

Grace Blakeley

Compelling and masterful . . . Perfectly timed for a moment when more are recognizing that the past is not past, the legacies of empire are profound, and another world is possible

Samuel Moyn, Yale University

Brilliant, illuminating, often surprising and shocking, Kojo Koram's careful and sensitive telling of the stories that so many of us do not know is a masterpiece

Danny Dorling, University of Oxford

An ambitious blend of history, memoir and current affairs - Koram's superb and combative account shows how Britain's near-past can explain its present predicament. A fascinating account of the British Empire written with an exciting blend of passion and scholarship

David Dabydeen

Uncommon Wealth brilliantly exposes the imperial origins of much of Britain's contemporary crisis. Koram shows how the empire ordered overseas a structure of law, property, economic institutions and citizenship, which came home

Professor Richard Drayton, KCL

By carefully dissecting the economic legacy of the British Empire, Koram has exposed some troubling home truths about the causes and effects of the very unequal world in which we live. A fascinating history, Koram's unique perspective sheds new light on an old problem

Robert Verkaik

A superb and vivid account of the ideas, laws and economic instruments that bind contemporary Britain to its long colonial history

Will Davies, Professor of Political Economy, Goldsmiths

Fantastic. Koram clearly and informatively details the links between the economic dependency imposed on Britain's former colonies after decolonisation and the crisis that 'Global Britain' now finds itself facing

Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists

A tour de force by one of the most brilliant young thinkers writing in Britain today . . . Urgent and relevant

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What If Latin America Ruled the World?

A bold and brazen account of the economic afterlives of the British Empire

Imaobong Umoren, LSE

A superb account of how Britain's present crisis is intimately intertwined with its imperial past . . . Empire shapes all our lives - whether we acknowledge it or not

Katrina Forrester, Harvard University

With lucidity, clarity and global sweep, Koram diagnoses the predicament of today's Britain . . . A vital read

Sujit Sivasundaram, author of Waves Across the South, Winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2021

A clear-eyed assessment of some of the British Empire's least acknowledged legacies - offshoring, outsourcing, the unchecked sovereignty of corporations - which are now reverberating back on Britain and shredding the social fabric of British life. In the Covid era, this is essential reading

Christienna Fryar

Explores the ricocheting effects of colonialism in Britain, tracing the role of empire - and its disintegration - in the rise of contemporary austerity, inequality, poverty, brutality, corruption, and the cartoon sovereignty of Brexit

New Statesman

Uncommon Wealth makes a very powerful argument that today's privatization, outsourcing, and offshoring of finance to tax havens is a boomeranging back to the United Kingdom of policies first imposed on post-colonial nations

David Edgerton

Rigorous, urgent and brilliantly written. This book lays bare the human cost - then and now - of Britain's colonial economic history and demands that we never forget it

Vicky Spratt