Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

Today's program is a little bit different. On the one hand, yes, it responds to something that we've

been thinking about and looking at for weeks now. And that's namely the passing of the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth on the 8th

of September of this year, and the enormous media attention that event, the funeral and so on,

have garnered, as well as the coming to power of her son Charles, the third, the new king of that country.

But it's different in the sense that I'm going to be looking at it, as you might imagine,

from a different perspective, as an event that marks in many, many ways, the end of the British Empire. As the longest reigning monarch

in British history, Elizabeth had the time up there on the throne to preside over momentous

closing chapters of that empire.

I want to talk about that, partly because it's real history that we ought to think about.

And like all history, it's right here with us right now.

Not because of Britain, but because the empire role that Britain

once played passed then to the United States, formerly part of that empire, and that the United

States is now facing the decline of its empire and therefore has a great deal to learn from thinking about the passing of that other one marked by Queen Elizabeth's death.

So let's talk a little bit about the economics of empire and of colonialism in particular.

It used to be said in the history books that the British were proud of saying, the time of

their empire, that, quote, the sun never sets on the British Empire,

meaning that as the earth turned and the sun went down in one place and up in another,

there was always in wherever the sun went up, a portion of the British Empire.

And that's really one of the great, remarkable things, historically speaking, about that

empire.

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