In Praise of Empires

The worst news I’ve heard about the COVID-19 pandemic was that it took the life of Deepak Lal, one of the wisest men I’ve known. Aged eighty, he was living in London and already suffering from a slow-acting cancer when the coronavirus proved too much for him. He died on April 30.

Several of Lal’s obituarists called him a “development economist” because that was how he made his name in the 1980s when he wrote a number of pungent criticisms of the socialist economic policies that until then had kept most of the Third World in poverty. In the last two or three decades of his life, however, he became one of the world’s great economic historians, which is his true legacy.

Keith Windschuttle’s  column appears in every Quadrant.
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Part of his wisdom was to recognise that, while economics was an important driver of both national and world histories, it was not alone. To understand the real history of any people, their political, cultural and religious…