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I came across a wonderful paragraph:
...the costs of overseas expansion [of the nascent British Empire] - or to be precise of the interest on the National Debt - were met by the impoverished majority at home. And who received that interest? The answer was a tiny elite of mainly southern bondholders, somewhere around 200,000 families, who had invested a part of their wealth in 'the Funds'.Sound familiar? In his 1953 book The Go Between, L P Hartley famously wrote "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there". Sometimes the past of Britain in the 1780s can seem startlingly similar to Britain in 2011 - less a foreign country and more a cracked and dirty mirror reflecting our modern world. The plans to sell off our forests, the planned reforms to our health service and welfare state. You have to ask yourself - who is paying and who is receiving the interest?
Quote from p46 of the Penguin paperback edition of Empire - How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson.
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