Empire by other means.

The most successful trick of the post-1960 order is the suggestion that decolonisation finished the job. It did not. It changed the uniform. The mechanisms that move wealth, labour and risk from the formerly colonised world to the formerly colonising world are larger, faster and more efficient than anything Leopold II or the East India Company ever ran. They simply no longer require a flag.

I. The migrant as raw material

A Filipino nurse, a Bangladeshi construction worker in the Gulf, a Mexican fruit-picker in California, a Senegalese delivery rider in Paris, an Indian software engineer on an H-1B, an Iranian post-doc in a German lab: these are not unrelated stories. They are nodes of a single global labour market in which the rich economies import value at a price they could never legally pay their own citizens. The carer who wipes the British pensioner's mouth was trained on a Ghanaian or Kerala state budget. The infrastructure of Western comfort runs on bodies the West did not pay to raise.

II. The talented worker as colonial subject

To be a "skilled migrant" in a Western country in 2026 is to discover, often by accident, that the social contract is conditional. The grateful immigrant who keeps their head down, accepts the lower salary band, lets the less-qualified colleague get credit, and never asks why their PhD supervisor's accent is mocked but theirs is "charming" — that immigrant is welcome. The one who behaves like a peer is not. Promotion stops. Visa renewal slows. The phrase "cultural fit" appears in the file.

This is not anecdote. It is now repeatedly measured. Identical CVs with non-European names receive between 30% and 50% fewer callbacks in audit studies across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. The system does not have to be conscious to be consistent.

III. Refugees as a category, not as people

The refugee system, written by the same powers that produce most of the refugees, performs a strange double act: humanitarian language at the front desk, electrified fences at the perimeter. A Ukrainian fleeing a Russian invasion is, correctly, met with warmth, hotel rooms, work permits, and tearful headlines. A Syrian, an Afghan, a Sudanese, a Yemeni or a Palestinian fleeing comparable or worse violence — frequently violence the West helped engineer — is met with detention, deportation flights to third countries, and front pages discussing whether they will threaten the national culture. The difference is not need. The difference is race.

IV. The dictators the West quietly prefers

Western foreign policy has a long and continuous habit of preferring a manageable dictator to an unmanageable democracy. Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Lumumba in Congo in 1961. Allende in Chile in 1973. Aristide in Haiti in 1991 and 2004. Morsi in Egypt in 2013. Across the Gulf, the post-2011 Western embrace of the Saudi and Emirati monarchies has tightened, not loosened, as those states have grown more repressive. Egypt under Sisi receives more U.S. military aid than almost any other country on earth, while running one of the largest political-prisoner systems in the world. The pattern is so consistent that "democracy promotion" as a foreign-policy term has become, for most people who live outside the West, an in-joke.

V. The architecture of permanent debt

The IMF and World Bank, formally founded to stabilise the global economy, have spent the last fifty years acting as bailiffs. "Structural adjustment" — the condition attached to most emergency lending in the 1980s and 1990s — required developing countries to cut public health, sack teachers, devalue currencies, privatise water, and open their markets to imports. The results, in measured outcomes, were a generation of lost growth, collapsing literacy, and child mortality reversals across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The countries that refused — and were able to — recovered faster. The "advice" was not advice.

Most of the African continent is paying more annually in external debt service than it spends on health. The original loans were often issued to military regimes the Western powers had themselves installed. The interest now lands on schoolchildren.

VI. The new extractions

Cobalt for the European electric car is mined by Congolese children. Lithium for the American smartphone is pumped from Bolivian salt flats. The fast-fashion shirt that falls apart after three washes was sewn in Dhaka for thirteen cents an hour. The shrimp on the Norwegian plate was peeled by an enslaved Burmese fisherman in the Gulf of Thailand. The labour of the formerly colonised world is, today, the input cost of almost every consumer good the West buys cheaply.

VII. The kafala system: legal bondage in the Gulf

An estimated 24 million migrant workers from South Asia and East Africa live, today, under the kafala (sponsorship) system across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. Their immigration status is owned by their employer. A worker who quits — or whose employer refuses to release them — instantly becomes illegal. Passports are routinely confiscated. Wages are routinely withheld. The Guardian and Amnesty have documented thousands of deaths of workers building the stadiums of the 2022 World Cup and the towers of NEOM; cause of death is most often recorded, by Gulf authorities, as 'natural causes'.

The Gulf monarchies are not formally Western, but the architecture is underwritten by Western law firms, Western consultancies, Western banks that finance the construction, and Western governments that protect the regimes diplomatically in exchange for arms contracts. Kafala is the Atlantic slave trade with electronic timesheets and a marketing department.

VIII. Chocolate, cobalt and the conflict mineral

Three quarters of the world's cocoa is produced in West Africa, primarily by smallholders in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. The farmer earns roughly 6% of the value of the finished bar; the brand owner (Nestlé, Mondelēz, Mars, Ferrero) and retailer take the rest. Roughly 1.5 million West African children work in cocoa, many in conditions the U.S. Department of Labor classifies as the worst forms of child labour. The industry has missed every voluntary pledge it has made since 2001 to eliminate this.

Coltan and cobalt from eastern Congo finance the militias that have killed an estimated six million people since 1996 — the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, and one most Western consumers cannot name. The metal ends up in the capacitors of every mobile phone, every laptop, every electric vehicle on the planet. Apple, Intel and Tesla settled lawsuits over Congolese child mining in 2021 by promising to do better. The promise is renewed annually.

IX. The medical guinea pig

Pfizer's 1996 trovafloxacin trial on Nigerian children during a meningitis outbreak killed eleven and disabled dozens; the company settled with the families for $75 million in 2009 after a decade of refusal. Hundreds of HIV-drug trials were run on Africans throughout the 1990s and 2000s under protocols that would have been illegal on Western patients. Argentina, India and South Africa have hosted thousands of industry-sponsored trials on populations who, if anything goes wrong, cannot afford the drug they were used to develop.

The Tuskegee study (1932–1972), in which the U.S. Public Health Service withheld syphilis treatment from 400 Black sharecroppers to observe the disease's course, ended only in living memory. Its successors are still being run, on Brown bodies, in Mumbai and Lagos and Buenos Aires, for the European and American market.

X. The tax-haven empire

The largest tax havens on earth are nearly all British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies — the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man — plus a handful of European micro-states and U.S.-linked jurisdictions (Delaware, South Dakota). The Tax Justice Network estimates that roughly $7–10 trillion of private wealth, and another $1.5 trillion of corporate profits annually, is parked offshore. African governments alone lose an estimated $90 billion per year to illicit financial flows routed through this network — more than the entire continent receives in foreign aid.

The colonial structure here is exact: the formerly colonised generate the value, the formerly colonising power maintains the legal jurisdiction that allows the value to disappear, and the financial-services industry in London, New York and Zurich takes the management fee. The tropics still hold the wealth; only now it is in numbered accounts rather than warehouses.