Britain Lost an Empire. The City of London Kept the Accounts.

Three of the world's top corporate tax havens are British territories. Here's how an empire turned into an accounting system.

In 1945 Britain still ruled a vast empire. Within a generation most of it was gone. India in 1947. Ghana in 1957. Kenya in 1963. Flags came down, governors went home, and new countries took their seats at the United Nations.

That is the story most of us learned. It's true. It leaves something out.

The territory went. Some of the financial plumbing stayed, and in places it grew. A handful of small places that remained under the Crown became some of the biggest financial centers on earth. And by the account of the people who rank tax havens for a living, the network they form runs back to one square mile: the City of London.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of public record. Here is what the record says.

The islands that stayed British

Britain still has two kinds of small territory with their own tax systems.

Crown Dependencies: Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. They are not part of the United Kingdom. The Crown is responsible for them.

British Overseas Territories: among them the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Bermuda.

The Tax Justice Network, a campaign group that publishes the Corporate Tax Haven Index, puts the relationship plainly. In these Overseas Territories, it says, "the UK government has full powers to impose or veto lawmaking," and "power to appoint key government officials rests with the British Crown."

Keep that sentence in mind.

What the rankings say

The Corporate Tax Haven Index ranks jurisdictions by how much they help multinational companies shift profit away from the places where they actually do business.

In the 2021 edition, the top three were:

1. The British Virgin Islands
2. The Cayman Islands
3. Bermuda

All three are British Overseas Territories. Jersey, a Crown Dependency, came eighth.

The index's October 2024 update changed nothing at the top. The same three British territories held the top three places, in the same order. Jersey held eighth. The network says the three leaders earned the worst possible score, 100 out of 100, on all 18 of its indicators. In its December 2025 update, the British Virgin Islands still ranks first.

The network also put a size on it. In 2024 it said the UK and its network of territories accounted for a third (33%) of the corporate tax abuse risks the index measures, up from 31% in 2021. It calls that network the "UK spider's web" and describes it as a web of tax havens "centred around the City of London."

The fair caveats

Two things belong right next to those numbers.

First, the network's own warning: a high rank "does not necessarily mean a jurisdiction's corporate tax laws are more aggressive." The score combines how permissive the rules are with how much multinational money actually flows through. Big rank, big volume.

Second, this is an advocacy group's index, not a government finding. The territories dispute it. In 2024 the UK Foreign Office answered the ranking by saying it is working with the territories "to increase transparency, including through publicly accessible registers of company beneficial ownership."

"The burden of proof rests on evidence. Where evidence runs out, the argument stops." — The Veil of the Square Mile

What is not in dispute: a few small British territories host a huge share of the world's corporate financial activity for their size, and London sits at the center of the web that links them.

Money learned to live offshore first

The territories were not the first offshore move. One of the first was the Eurodollar.

A Eurodollar is a US dollar deposited in a bank outside the United States. The name has nothing to do with the euro, which came decades later. Those deposits sat outside the US government's direct control and under different rules, including, for years, America's caps on the interest banks could pay.

There are several origin stories. One of them runs straight through London. In the Cold War, after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Soviet Union feared the United States might freeze its dollars. So it moved some of them to the Moscow Narodny Bank, a London-registered bank it owned. On 28 February 1957, the story goes, $800,000 moved, making the Soviet Union one of the early depositors in what became the Eurodollar market.

City of London banks, Midland Bank among them, played a major role in holding the deposits. By the end of the 1960s the Eurodollar market was put at $70 billion. By the mid-1980s, by one account, there were more Eurodollars than dollars.

A Cold War rival, keeping American dollars in a British bank, because London's rules suited it. Remember that when someone tells you finance follows flags.

Why an empire would choose this

The Veil of the Square Mile argues that this was not an accident of decline. Flags and governors are expensive and easy to see. A registered office and a set of books are neither. The book puts it in one line:

"Empire without colonies, extraction without the bill for occupation."

You don't have to accept every step of that argument to see the pattern. The places that kept their ties to the Crown are, by the index's measure, among the most important corporate tax havens on earth. And the City of London sits in the middle of the web that connects them.

What this isn't

It isn't a story about a secret cabal. Nothing here is hidden. The rankings are public. The constitutional arrangements are public. The Eurodollar history is in standard reference works.

That is the point the book keeps coming back to. The system doesn't survive because nobody can see it. It survives because it looks ordinary: a few islands, some banks, a lot of paperwork.

The full story, from the City's medieval charters to the offshore era, is in The Veil of the Square Mile. It is one reading of the record. Check it against the sources.

"This is one reconstruction. Test it."

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Read the book: The Veil of the Square Mile is out now in softcover, hardcover and ebook, and as an audiobook on ElevenReader.

Sources: Tax Justice Network, Corporate Tax Haven Index update press release, 1 October 2024; Tax Justice Network, Corporate Tax Haven Index 2021 press release, 9 March 2021; Corporate Tax Haven Index country profile, British Virgin Islands (December 2025 update); Wikipedia, "Eurodollar" (citing Goodman, Paper Money, 1982, and Schenk, "The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London," 1998). Full links below.