(A version of this article was published in the Daily Telegraph on 20/2/2026)
The Old Republican Palace in Khartoum has been destroyed in Sudan’s civil wars
Reports from Sudan that the authorities in Khartoum are seeking British financial help to rebuild a palace on the Nile shattered by the civil wars there (Daily Telegraph, 16 February) raise again the controversial issue of the costs and benefits of the British empire.
Today’s activist historians would have us believe that Britain extracted vast amounts from her empire, money that should now be repaid to Britain’s former colonies. Yet the rotting Old Republican Palace, first erected in the 1830s and then rebuilt by the British in 1899 after the Battle of Omdurman (in which Churchill took part) reminds us only of the costs of empire.
In 1885, the rebellion of the Mahdi in Sudan cost the infamous General Gordon his life, cut down on the terrace of the Palace. That cost the prime minister, William Gladstone, his popularity for supposedly failing to support Gordon. Known before as the GOM (‘Grand Old Man’) he became instead the MOG (‘Murderer of Gordon’). It also cost his Liberal government its coherence and direction, blown off-course by this and other colonial conflicts.
General Gordon’s Last Stand (George William Joy, 1893. Leeds Art Gallery)
It was Disraeli who in 1852, long before these events, described our colonies as ‘millstones round our necks’. Most Victorian statesmen agreed with him. Far from the pantomime image of glorious, reckless Victorian expansion into all the corners of the globe, from the 1820s it was standard British policy to avoid, if at all possible, planting the flag and annexing territory. We sought a ‘free trade empire’, based on commerce rather than conquest, that encouraged improvement and progress in the territories with which we traded, including an end to the slave trade and slavery across Africa and Asia.
The storied ‘age of imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century when annexation was more common was a reaction to the growing competition of other would-be European empires, threatening our strategic position and dominance in overseas markets. We needed control of Egypt, Sudan and other parts of East Africa to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India.
All this had a price. Though colonial defence was often based on native troops and local taxes, it was also a drain on the Treasury in London. From Adam Smith, writing at the end of the eighteenth century onwards, economists and historians have long argued that to have built strong trading relationships around the globe would have been more lucrative (and less politically onerous) than planting the flag and assuming responsibility for millions of colonised people. In any case, throughout the three centuries of the British empire, our trade and loans to Europe, the American colonies, and then the United States, were much more significant than strictly imperial commerce.
Some Britons made fabulous imperial fortunes, of course, among them East India Company merchants, plantation owners in the Caribbean, and City bankers. The figure of the Nabob home from India, living in great style and able to build an eastern palace in the English countryside, as at Sezincote in Gloucestershire, was a late eighteenth-century stereotype. But much of this wealth was consumed where it was made, in the colonies themselves, and the cost of imperial defence was a constant burden.
Sezincote House, Gloucestershire
Recent analysis suggests that British taxes could have been cut by almost a quarter without an empire to administer and defend. It’s estimated that the cost of imperial defence by the 1920s, at over a third of tax receipts, far outweighed the economic returns of empire, and diverted resources better spent on home defence and alleviating the inter-war economic slump.
Britain’s economic decline in the twentieth century was largely the result of fighting two world wars in defence of democracy. Those conflicts also entailed the extra cost of defending the empire from invasion and occupation, stretching Britain’s resources and finances to the limit. Without the empire, Britain might well be stronger economically today, though it can also be argued that without Canadian pilots, Indian soldiers, and Australian sailors those allied victories would have been less likely.
Activists claim that the great profits of slavery in the British empire provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution: thus Britain’s economic dominance was built on the backs of slaves. But historians and economists, among them the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joel Mokyr, have long shown this to be a myth. The West Indian slave economy counted for only about 2.5% of GDP overall until slavery’s abolition in the 1830s. Its key product, sugar, made a smaller contribution to the British economy than domestic raw materials like wool, or wood, or leather – or even beer. The fact that Britain had the most productive agriculture in Europe, generating wealth for landholders and also ensuring that we could feed a growing urban population, was of far greater importance than sugar and rum to British industrialisation.
If the government decides to pay towards rebuilding the Palace in Khartoum for a second time, let it do so in recognition of the many beneficial legacies of the British empire: the buildings erected, the bridges built, the waterways and railways constructed, and the social progress imparted through schools, hospitals, and civic order. We should not give funds because it’s said that we made great profits from empire – because we didn’t.
