Mahatma Gandhi delivered a trenchant assessment of the British Empire in 1928. “The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains,” he wrote. Gandhi would lead India to freedom by 1947. But writing at a time when he was still surrounded by the squalid spectacle of imperial exploitation, he imagined a future when Britain’s destitute subjects sought, upon their liberation from foreign rule, to mimic the hoggish habits of their colonial overlords. If the masses of Asia “took to similar economic exploitation” as the West, he warned, “it would strip the world bare like locusts.” [Source]
