Elements for an alternative perspective

In relation to the points raised so far in this essay one can attempt to broaden the perspective towards sketching a historical conceptualization of the period, thus shifting the explanation away from 'gentlemanly' impulses.

The key problems which have to be addressed are what characterized Britain's external and imperial economic relationships and distinguished them from other cases, what defined complementarities between Britain and other regions of the world, within and outside the empire, and what were the shifts that occurred in these complementarities. As a further step it could be explored where and how centres of power protected, retained or even gained manoeuvrability, or carved out niches of political control as an alternative to, or in support of structural power. This might be one conceivable perspective of integrating different regional research initiatives and, if cautiously employed, also different explanatory approaches. The historical experience of Britain and the empire after 1945 prompts a number of tentative observations in these areas.

In the early postwar years, Britain's relative structural power (to continue adapting Susan Strange's conceptual framework) vis-à-vis the United States was limited. This was one reason for the antagonism over Britain's endorsement of liberal multilateralism. The peculiar setting of the needs of reconstruction and British welfare objectives, the prominence of commodities in international trade, and specific conditions in the colonies in terms of resources, social relations of production and political structures, conferred an indispensable role in terms of direct political control to the empire and colonial states in the discriminatory management of the sterling area.³⁷ Britain's state-led discriminatory management was facilitated by various political constellations, namely US concurrence with discriminatory policies in order to keep the international economy afloat, given the imbalances between the dollar and sterling areas in the international economy.

At the same time, the 'old' independent Commonwealth was still an important outlet for British investment. In the late 1950s, however, one observes a trend towards economic redeployment in investment and trade in an increasingly competitive liberal international economy, the more stringent prioritization of British policy along these lines, and perhaps a radical shift away from a long-standing nationally organized management of external economic relations prevalent since the mid-nineteenth century.³⁸ As is well known, the period was specific from the international relations perspective, given the gradual move towards freer trade and capital flows and a shift away from commodity trade towards inter-industrial trade. Alongside these changes, regional shifts occurred between the war period and the early 1960s, first in the priorities of Britain's discriminatory sterling relations from the independent towards the dependent sterling area and from India to Africa and Southeast Asia, and subsequently, in the liberalizing international economy, within the sterling area towards the Middle East, and outside it, towards Europe and North America.

One could employ complementarity³⁹ in a systemic conception of international relations as a simple analytical tool to sketch out how regional economic settings interconnected or conflicted with each other. Complementary relationships were inherently unstable and difficult to influence by policymakers. For reasons related to the specific conditions of the period, the hitherto rather marginal colonial empire in Africa and Asia (except India) was for a brief period complementary within, and one essential pillar of a discriminatory trade-cum-financial triangle in support of Britain's balance of payments. Meanwhile, the 'old' Commonwealth merely remained a supplementary realm for Britain, while complementary relationships with Britain decreased in importance. Australia boosted its industrialization not least due to the benefits it derived from the sterling area's dollar pooling, eventually focusing on a closer association with US and East Asian markets.

In other areas, peripheral development objectives meant a move towards protectionism. Both ultimately led to important changes in trade flows away from traditional sterling area patterns, and these changes and perceived trends also prompted new policy approaches in the late 1950s, for example with regard to aid arrangements and the access to loans.⁴⁰

Complementarity had an important political dimension related to structural and formal control. As pointed out, political control mattered in the state-planned discriminatory sterling management allowing colonial import and export policies to be shaped to meet the contingencies of the British balance of payments, thereby supporting Britain's recovery - even if the feasibility of control was as often as not a matter of coincidence rather than design. In the international context, political control in the colonies was primarily a counterpoise against the undermining of the sterling system by the United States, but intended to lend support to Britain's external economic relations elsewhere too. For example, with regard to Anglo-Japanese relations in the early 1950s, economic planning in British colonies was tuned to the level of Japanese sterling balances, cutting colonial textile imports from Japan when necessary, or increasing them and negotiating their availability for sterling.⁴¹ Nonetheless, not only could formal control not be maintained in the long run, it was also hardly worth maintaining, given shifts in complementarity. Under liberal multilateralism formal control mattered less and structural power proved to be the determining factor in international relations, which, one could argue, also triggered a transformation in Britain's political relationships with the empire.

Further insight might be gained by broadening the view towards a comparison with other European empires. Polities are indeed peculiar, as the British case shows, but the underlying question here is the role of the impact on imperial relations and policies of the social order at the expense of that of the state and international structural context in a specific historical period.

In some cases, there were important similarities between colonial empires in terms of the relationships between the centre and periphery and in policy designs. Balance of payments constraints existed in other empires too, and the British example of running a currency area prompted some imitation elsewhere, as it had done in the 1930s. For example, the Portuguese escudo zone, in a way similar to the dependent sterling area, was designed to support the centre's balance of payments.⁴² As for the franc zone, motivations are less clear and the actual policies were rather different from the British. One is inclined to attribute the zone's establishment to the privileged access of particular business elites to the state during a modernization drive, which however was typical for the period between the mid-1950s and 1960s.⁴³ Yet, other imperial powers had rather less to rely on than Britain in terms of commodities and also different priorities; after all, none had to manage a currency of international exchange. Differences between empires may well also have been due to the fact that Britain was better able to resort to a discriminatory management in the sterling area and operated under different constraints, given its structural position in the world economy, rather than being exclusively attributable to any specific political, social or institutional legacies.

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Source: Akita Shigeru. Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.,2002. — 279 p.. 2002

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