In the old days, along with such colonial powers as France, Spain, Holland and Germany, England indulged in what you might call unenlightened self-interest. The prevailing practice was to gut their colonies in Asia and Africa of all the natural resources they could get their hands on while the folks who mined the coal, picked the crops, and dug for the diamonds, lived in abject squalor. It may not have been nice, it may have been selfish and even brutal, but it made perfect sense. When some English noble stoked his fire, he probably never gave a second thought to...