Commerce As Politics: The Two Centuries of Struggle for Basotho Economic Independence

1. For this context, see Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 2. See Alan Lester, Deny and Disavow: Distancing the British Empire in the Culture Wars (London: SunRise, 2022). 3. Shillington’s excellent and concise Cecil Rhodes: The Man Behind the Statues (Bath: Brown Dog Books, 2021) has been revised in light of these developments and the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in Cape Town and Oxford. 4. See, for example, the remark by the UK equalities minister on how we should be teaching the empire’s ‘positive features’. Zaina Alibhai, ‘Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch Says British Empire Achieved “Good Things” throughout Its Rule’, Independent, 21 March 2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-britishempire-colonialism-b2040002.html, accessed 10/04/2022.