Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.1

资本主义历史学家将垄断公司和奴隶制置于政治经济体系历史的核心，该体系长期以来一直被神话化为建立在自由市场之上。自由主义政治经济学理论以一个不受国家干预的私人经济领域为前提和要求，这将推动世界历史的进步，这在一定程度上是对公司长期影响力的反应，这些影响力打破了私人和公共之间的区别。自由主义社会科学思想的范畴现在已经如此彻底地构建了针对更广泛受众的历史写作，以至于学术评论不足以阻止它意外地、人为地将公共和私人分开，从而强化了关于历史进化的自由主义神话。本文展示了那些在国家和私人行为者之间提出站不住脚的区别，援引殖民时代发明的发展模式，忽视少数派学者的批评的作家习惯，如何将关于英国帝国主义和工业主义从根本上发展（而不是剥削和榨取）作用以及帝国主义经济利益的神话扩展到英国社会的一小部分。这些理论和史学假设扩大了出于政治动机的挑战的空间，这些挑战对英国从帝国和奴隶制中实现经济繁荣的既定知识。 本文将菲利普·斯特恩 （Philip Stern） 的《帝国公司》（Empire， Incorporated） 以及玛克辛·伯格 （Maxine Berg） 和帕特·哈德森 （Pat Hudson） 的《奴隶制、资本主义和工业革命》与学者（通常来自前殖民地区）的工作进行了对话，这些学者更果断地诊断了英国对帝国主义过去的债务，以说明这些书籍的框架如何在关于英国过去的辩论中缓和对帝国主义和奴隶制的经济影响的淡化。