If you’ve ever visited the home of a cricket enthusiast, a so-called badger in cricket-lingo, you may have noticed a set of yellow books on their bookshelves. These books are short and thick with faded spines. But despite their unassuming nature, these collections often form the crown jewels of one’s library. Those in the know will instantly recognise that I refer to Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacks.
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacks, more commonly referred to as Wisdens, are an annual cricketing publication. The first Wisden was published in 1864 and has continued uninterrupted ever since. Founded by English cricketer John Wisden, a 5ft 4ins fast bowler nicknamed The Little Wonder, the publication started as a competition to Fred Lillywhite’s The Guide to Cricketers. You may recognise the name Lillywhite; I first read it in a P. G. Wodehouse where Bertie Wooster spoke of having purchased a single all-purpose golf club from the Lillywhite’s sporting goods store. Such a store still exists today in Piccadilly but you can probably tell from the image below that it no longer reflects its rich heritage.
Lillywhite’s in Piccadilly, London
The cover of a Wisden remains its most iconic feature. Since the 75th edition in 1938, the publication has carried a bright yellow cover displaying the famous woodcut of two cricketers by Eric Ravilious. This woodcut was abandoned in 2003 in favour of photograph of a famous cricketer, that year a picture of Michael Vaughan. The woodcut returned, however, in 2013 to mark the 150th anniversary of the almanack.
The contents of a Wisden range from records to commentary on games. Editions even occasionally contain dialogue on new laws of the game. And by no means does Wisden discriminate against any form of the sport; within the same yellow cover one will find scores of international tests held at Lord’s and English schoolboy games held on dodgy wickets.
One might expect Wisden to have suffered a similar fate to phone books; ESPN Cricinfo is a much more accessible and effective source for cricketing statistics. Yet that hasn’t been the case. Wisden’s are today an unbelievably popular collectors item. The desire to maintain a full collection guarantee sales every April when the preceding years edition is published; each new edition of Wisden still sells around 35,000 copies. The earliest copies of Wisden, which were originally sold at a shilling per piece, now fetch thousands of pounds at auction. A full set is today worth over £100,000.
E. W. Swanton’s 1939 Wisden
The most famous single copy of Wisden is a 1939 edition which belonged to distinguished cricket writer, E. W. Swanton. Swanton had it with him when he was taken prisoner by the Japanese when wounded in the Battle of Singapore. The copy proved so popular with the other prisoners of war that it had to be reserved in advance like a library book, and could be borrowed for no more than 12 hours. It was stamped “not subversive” by the guards and was so heavily handled that two prisoners rebound it using rice paste as glue. Today the book resides in the museum at Lord’s. Swanton later went on to describe his experience of playing cricket with makeshift equipment and under conditions of extreme privation and the constant threat of brutality in an article, Cricket under the Japs, for the 1946 edition of Wisden.
It is hard to think of something that embodies the spirit of English cricket more than Wisdens and the pursuit of collecting them. Not only does it capture the history of cricket, but given the enduring nature of the publication and the global reach of the game, Wisdens capture much more. The story of Swanton’s 1939 copy exemplifies the visceral nature of Wisden collecting, a hobby that many will find difficult to understand. I hope this post inspires you to try and find and flick through a Wisden at some point – an interesting scorecard or witty piece of commentary is sure to brighten any cricket enthusiasts day…
My undergraduate dissertation had the ever catchy title An Investigation into the Effects of Passive Investing on Equity Market Efficiency. I won’t bore you with the results; I certainly won’t bore you with the methods by which I went about getting them.1 Instead, I thought it may be interesting to think about the applications of efficient market theory to non-financial markets.
I had the idea of writing this post when scrolling through Bridge of Highs, an anonymous online submissions page for Johnians where they can share thoughts on a variety of topics. This may range from complaints about rent prices to discussions about classist ent themes (as was the case for an après-ski themed ent). A few recent posts complained about how busy the John’s bar has become on a Friday with a sudden influx of guests from other colleges – a phenomenon which has inspired a campaign coined Jexit. A rather witty comment by a friend wrote “Bar is good on Friday? I’m bringing all of my friends next week”. The comment, deservingly in my opinion, received 20 likes. Although I can appreciate how funny this comment is, my first thought was that this was a brilliant case of how markets deal with information. Unfortunately I didn’t attend the subsequent Friday bar to see how the information was incorporated into market outcomes but I suspect it improved efficiency.
Fama, who won the 2013 Nobel prize in Economics
If all this jargon about markets, information and efficiency is confusing, let me explain. In 1970, Eugene Fama, who many consider to be the world’s most influential finance professor, published a paper on efficient capital markets. The paper defines an efficient market as one in which “prices at any time fully reflect all available information”. Consider the stock price of Apple for example. If some information becomes available that the new iPhone is incredibly popular, market participants (in this context, equities traders) will buy the Apple stock. The price of the stock will thereby rise and then new information about the new iPhone’s popularity is now incorporated into the price. The price, therefore, captures all sorts of information about Apple and its stock. Eugene Fama essentially formalised this idea and provided ways of testing for it in capital markets like stock markets, bond markets and derivatives markets. But Fama’s idea doesn’t have to be restricted to such contexts, it can even be applied to the market for cheap booze at St John’s College bar on a Friday night as I alluded to in my exposition.
Fama focussed on prices being a signal for information. In asset markets, changes in demand and supply are almost instantaneously incorporated into prices. This is especially the case for liquid assets with lots of trading volumes, like the case of the Apple stock. However, this isn’t the case for many market. For example, the price of a double G&T at John’s bar has been £4.50 for as long as I can remember – this won’t change on a certain day just because the bar is especially busy. Therefore, focussing on prices in such a market is inappropriate; we must find another measure of efficiency.
I can think of lots of information signals in markets beyond prices: boards displaying the number of available parking spots at a car park, signs estimating the queuing time for a ride at Disney Land and even the Google feature that states how busy a certain venue is at a certain time. In the absence of (flexible) prices, the market has devised its own way of passing information to buyers. But how do we build in the idea of efficiency?
Well classical market efficiency is about how prices adjust to reflect available information. Maybe in such contexts with fixed prices, we may consider how supply and demand adjust (in the absence of a price adjustments) to incorporate new information. Will Google displaying that a certain coffee shop is very busy at a certain time deter customers from going when it’s busy? It probably will, and those who are more averse to long queues and busy spaces are more likely to be deterred than others, thereby improving welfare in the market.
Rosslyn, London Wall, a very popular coffeeshop in the City
We live in an increasingly information driven world and there has been a recent drive for information to be disseminated to and utilised by the masses. Think about the rising popularity if Polymarket, a cryptocurrency based prediction market that values the incorporation of market participants beliefs into placing odds on events. More widely, think about the current actions of Elon Musk with DOGE, arguing for more transparency over government spending. A recent project by my favourite political magazine, the Spectator Project against Frivolous Funding (or SPAFF) attempts to do the same thing for Britain. Efficient market theory probably remains the most developed framework for thinking about information and I suspect its applications extend beyond just the financial markets.
For those interested, my dissertation is available here. ↩︎
“The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
You may recognise this passage from George Orwell’s 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant. The essay, despite being only 3000 words in length, is one of the English writer’s most enduring works, ranking behind cultural icons Animal Farm and 1984. It encapsulates Orwell’s mental state during his time as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s. Alongside novel Burmese Days (1934) and essay A Hanging (1931), Orwell provides an almost full picture of British existence under Empire. I find the last sentence of the above passage particularly pertinent. In the context of Shooting an Elephant it refers to the loss of individual agency for those embroiled in the imperial machine. Today, it applies on a national scale, with colonial legacy having significant influence over life in the Britain.
Orwell (back row, third from left) during police training in Mandalay, Burma
The prevailing view amongst those my age, especially those with origins from former British colonies (like myself), is that empire was an outright bad thing. In many instances, this is a result of a complete obliviousness to the facts. However, more often than not it is a result of the contrived interpretation of the facts to fit a preconceived viewpoint. Take for instance, the second longest uninterrupted cricket series in the world, The Battle of the Blues. The match has taken place annually since 1879 between two British founded schools in Sri Lanka, Royal College and St Thomas’ College. To a cricket lover whose family was educated at the former establishment, this can be no bad thing. To others it as a product of an education system designed to serve the colonial administration and a local upper class that would facilitate the British rule of Ceylon. Some would go as far as to argue that colonials forced cricket on Sri Lankans to teach them British Victorian virtues – an absolutely absurd interpretation of the facts. Similarly lopsided interpretations are made on the British established legal system, political institutions and infrastructure. In reality, to quote Oxford professor, Nigel Biggar, “if there is a debit column to the imperial ledger there is also a credit one.”
The Battle of the Blues a.k.a The Royal-Thomian Encounter
Ultimately, weighing the costs and benefits of colonialism is a futile task. Even if such an analysis were to conclude that British colonialism has been detrimental to the development of former colonies (as it might for say Belgian rule in Congo), this would be orthogonal to the case for dispelling sentiments of colonial guilt. My viewpoint is a utilitarian one; colonial guilt harms ex-colonisers and ex-colonies. It does so by creating a divided society at home whilst perpetuating feelings of victimhood overseas – a lose-lose scenario.
British children today grow up being taught that Britain is a nation built on a bed of imperial sin. Take the drive to “decolonise the curriculum” which is pushing for history syllabuses to take a “critical view” on Britain’s imperial past. Instead, it serves as a veiled attempt to promote an ideological narrative that portrays empire as unequivocally bad; it is in no way interested in exposing children to a scholarly exploration of its complexities. I don’t think those pushing for reform would be too pleased if a child were to submit an essay touting the benefits of empire.
And it doesn’t stop with history curriculums; throughout other parts of life in Britain there are attempts to foster feelings of colonial guilt. Take, for example, the BBC’s attempt to omit Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia! from the Last Night at the Proms in 2020 due to their associations with colonialism and slavery. This was essentially an attack on British patriotism given the cultural importance of the songs. Thankfully, due to backlash from prom-goers this decision was overturned.1 In this instance those expressing their grievances were likely quite elderly – something I can tell you from my significant experience of attending Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. I fear that the same may not be the case 50 years down the line when those who have experienced a “decolonised” education are of typical promming age. Instead, we can expect the tearing down of statues and ripping up of paintings, as was the case for a painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity last March.
The Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall
Colonial guilt not only burdens former imperial nations but also promotes a sense of victimhood that hinders the progress of former colonies. By fixating on the historical underdevelopment caused by colonialism, these nations risk neglecting contemporary challenges, such as poor governance, that are within their power to resolve. Instead ex-colonies will be eager to, and feel empowered to, push for reparations. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that a simple transfer of a dollar amount (however large) from Britain will not improve living standards permanently in these nations; long-term economic growth is a much more complex story. One thing that may be able to achieve growth in these nations is investment, especially from foreign investors based in western economies such as Britain. However, such investment may invoke memories of colonialism. Instead, ex-colonies will accept investment from China whose intentions are almost purely extractive, take their debt-trap diplomacy through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which aims to expand the superpowers global geopolitical influence.
You may struggle to see how these feeling abroad may be linked to colonial guilt at home. Well consider the recent news that Lord Hermer, Britain’s attorney general, advised Caribbean nations seeking reparations for slavey in 2013. Elsewhere in his past, Hermer has described “almost every element” of the British Empire as racist whilst arguing that children should be made to learn about its “legacy of violence”. In 2013, Lord Hermer helped force the Conservative government to pay out £19.9 million in reparations to Kenyans seeking damages for abuses under British rule between 1952 and 1962. The Caribbean officials, who he advised in 2013, are set to visit London this year in search of up to £18 trillion (yes, trillion) in reparations.2 Having individuals like Hermer high up in government communicates to former colonies that we are open to discuss our colonial past, thereby enabling their victimhood.
Just as Orwell was a puppet of expectations and pressures beyond his control, Britain today risks being ensnared by the weight of its imperial past. A nation in which Brits are ashamed to be British is detrimental to the economic and social health of the nation. We need individuals to want to make Britain a better place, trust and value the communities they are a part of and be thankful for the opportunities that the nation affords us. Colonial guilt opposes these forces and it does so at the detriment of Britain’s former colonies who should stop picking apart the past.3 Instead they must focus on the future in order to develop. It is clear that there are no winners from sentiments of colonial guilt, the self-administered shackles of which must be removed immediately.
I was particularly happy about this since I attended the 2021 Last Night with my friends and proceed to belt out the lyrics to both iconic songs. ↩︎
The UK’s GDP in 2024 was just over £2.5 trillion. I would love to see the Excel on how the £18 trillion number is derived. ↩︎
If this language sounds familiar, it is stolen from Rishi Sunak who, in 2023, said “to unpick our history is not the right way forward”. ↩︎
PS: Throughout this post I have emphasised the importance of considering both sides of the argument. Therefore, I attach here a very entertaining Oxford Union debate speech by Shashi Tharoorin favour of reparations.
laisseth-faire 