Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm your host, Eleanor Penny.

Where does the wealth in the welfare state come from? Standard accounts of the Atley Miracle,

which in 1945 secured a social safety net for the workers of Britain. Look at the archipelago

in isolation from the question of empire. Academic Geminda K. Bambera contends that this is a

fundamental flaw in the stories we tell about how the nation state was formed through warfare,

welfare, taxation and colonial plunder. Bambera is the professor of post-colonial and decolonial

studies in the Department of International Relations and the Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange

in the School of Global Studies, both at the University of Sussex. Her latest title is Colonialism

and Modern Social Theory. This week she joins me to talk about the history of Britain as an imperial

state with a national project at its heart and how reparations might point us all towards a brighter

future. Geminda, hello, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, it's real pleasure to be here.

So in your work you reassess the standard accounts of taxation and welfare that are claimed to be

central to the construction of the nation. I'd like to kick off by asking you about what

those standard accounts are. What are the stories that we are usually told about the relationship

between tax, welfare and the construction of the nation state? So the contemporary arguments

for taxation really came about in the context of the world wars and there was this sense that the

population had sacrificed so much during this period that there ought to be some return to them

for that sacrifice. And so after the First World War you had welfare economists trying to figure

out how much the rich could be taxed so that it wouldn't necessarily affect them so much,

but when that taxation was distributed it would raise the levels of people who were otherwise

living in poverty and so on. And so there were these arguments that were being made at that time,

but it was really about how the money coming in could be divided. But what wasn't recognized at

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