1 Introduction: from Imperial History to Global History

Shigeru Akita

I

The main aim of this book is to update the debate on British imperialism by relating it to new developments in the history of globalization, as well as by looking at Western historiography from a comparative, Eastern perspective.

Within this overarching theme, the central concern of the essays in this volume is the study of power in international relations, and one of the key concepts of the book is 'informal' or 'invisible empire'. Informal empire attracted attention after the publication of Gallagher and Robinson's famous article 'The Imperialism of Free Trade' in 1953.¹ British imperial historians continue to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the concept² as the recent Oxford History of the British Empire bears witness.³ Informal empire is essential for the analysis of British influence in areas such as Latin America, the Middle East and China. Recently, in an attempt to take the debate on British imperialism beyond the confines of formal/informal debate, Tony Hopkins has distinguished between two forms of power in the international system and made use of the concepts of 'structural power' and 'relational power', as a means of interpreting the British presence in Latin America, especially in Argentina in the nineteenth century. 'Structural power' allows its possessors to determine, or at least exert, a predominant influence, and to lay down the general rules of the game governing international relations and it was fundamentally a manifestation of the core values and policy priorities of the British liberal state, with its preference for free trade, low taxation and sound money.

In this book, we use the term 'global history' in the context of the formation and development of a capitalist world-economy. As Patrick O'Brien has pointed out, 'comparisons and connections are the dominant styles of global history'.⁶ In other words, an important aspect of global history is the history of the formation of mutual interdepen­dence or interconnectedness between the various regions or areas in the world under the framework of a capitalist world-economy. The progress of globalization has promoted the formation of interconnected economic linkages beyond national borders at various levels of transna­tional movements including exchanges of goods, peoples, money, technology and information. In this historical context, British imperial history can now be seen as a bridge to global history. Cain and Hopkins suggest, in the last chapter of their second edition of British Imperialism 1688-2000, that imperialism and empires can be viewed as globalizing forces.⁷ Through the study of the process and progress of globalization, we can better interpret modern world history not only from com­parative perspectives, but also from the perspective of the formation of relational history within a capitalist world-economy.⁸ The chapters in Part I of this study take a predominantly metropolitan view of the glob­alizing forces unleashed by British imperialism; those in Part II focus on the international order of East Asia that was partly shaped by Britain's influence but which kept a relatively unique 'autonomous' status in a capitalist world-economy.

The progress of globalization has been promoted and accelerated by the presence of hegemonic states in a capitalist world-economy, espe­cially by the primacy of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, the 'Pax Britannica', and the predominance of the United States in the twentieth century, the 'Pax Americana'.⁹ A hegemonic state provides 'public goods' for the international system as a whole. These inter­national public goods include 'peace, safe access to international water­ways, international laws for the protection of property rights, an open regime for foreign trade, and an international monetary system'.¹⁰ As O'Brien has observed over the nineteenth century, 'trade promoted and was in turn sustained by movements of capital, migrations of labour and transfers of technology and information around the world on an unprecedented scale and at ever increasing speeds. Political impedi­ments to international flows of exports, imports, money, credit capital, labour, technology and information diminished sharply during the liberal international order that prevailed between 1846 and 1914'.¹¹ In this book, we evaluate the role played by Great Britain in a capitalist world-economy and its implications for international relations.

II

The starting point for any discussion of the British Empire and British imperialism is now British Imperialism, 1688-2000, by Cain and Hopkins. This study attracted very considerable attention both in the press when first published in 1993, and subsequently, in a wide-ranging and now long- running scholarly debate. Cain and Hopkins's concept of 'gentlemanly capitalism' became a key term in Will Hutton's best-selling book, The State We're In.¹² It featured prominently in Philip Augar's well-publicized study, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism,¹³ and it has been adopted and criti­cized by specialists of British history and Area Studies alike.

Essentially, the current debate concerns the process of modern eco­nomic development in Britain and the causes of British imperial expan­sion. Cain and Hopkins offered a metropolitan perspective on British imperialism that raised three large and still unresolved questions. First, is their assessment of the predominantly gentlemanly forces within Britain driving imperial expansion persuasive? Secondly, have they attached sufficient weight to influences outside Britain that were, to varying degrees, beyond British control? Thirdly, are they correct in arguing, against conventional wisdom, that 1914 was not a turning point that marked the decline of Britain's power and influence? This book covers these three questions about the Cain-Hopkins interpre­tation from the perspective of external relations.

The first question prompts us to investigate the definition of 'the gentlemanly elite', the character of the British state and the role of finan­cial and service sectors in the British economy. These topics have already been addressed in Dumett's volume, but this did not deal with the for­mative period of gentlemanly capitalism in the late eighteenth century or in the last stage of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Cain and Hopkins referred to both periods only briefly¹⁶ and some questions still remain.

Our second question raised by Cain and Hopkins is concerned with the linkages between British imperial expansion and globalization. All chapters deal with this second question to some degree. For example, Chapter 2 treats an early phase of globalization and its limits, and Chapter 3 is particularly concerned to weigh up the relation between domestic imperial impulses and international constraints on British overseas expansion. Chapters 4 and 6 present local examples of these international constraints in the cases of the Partition of Africa and the scramble for spheres of influence in China at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. These two chapters are concerned with the height of 'modern' or 'imperial globalization', as defined by Cain and Hopkins.¹⁷

The second question is also closely related to another key concept used by Cain and Hopkins, that is, 'informal' or 'invisible empire'. As mentioned in Chapter 3, there are common grounds and differences between Gallagher and Robinson and Cain and Hopkins on this issue. Gallagher and Robinson have directed their attention to the manufac­turing interests and trade policies as a driving force behind the expan­sion of British interests overseas, whereas Cain and Hopkins have concentrated their analysis on the roles of the financial and service sectors, or the City of London. But both pairs of scholars agreed that the growing influence of Great Britain was based on powerful economic sectors at home, whether manufacturing or finance. Chapter 4 offers an exploration of the concept of informal empire in the South African context.

The term 'informal empire' was mainly applied to areas and regions of the non-European developing countries, as the original definition of the term assumed the unequal political and economic status of these countries. However, the overseas influence of Great Britain ranged far beyond the confines of formal and informal empires, due to the global network of the City of London and the financial and service sectors in a capitalist world-economy. In the context of British imperial history as shown in Chapter 6, China used to be regarded as a typical example of informal empire in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, after the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, Japan was treated as an ally of Great Britain rather than as part of the British informal empire.¹⁸ Nevertheless even in the 1930s, the United Kingdom continued to exert financial influence upon Japan and the colonies of other Great Powers through the establishment of the sterling area, by setting 'the rules of the game' for international finance in East Asia. At that time, as we will see in Chapters 8 and 10, the Chinese Nationalist Government strengthened its political authority, and partly manipulated the balance of power in East Asia as a newly emerging nation-state. Thus debates continue about the validity of applying the concept of informal empire to China. Jürgen Osterhammel favours analyzing the dynamic interactions between the British govern­ment, the Nationalist Government of China and her 'bureaucratic cap­italism', as well as the evolution of a Japanese informal empire in East Asia, by using a more sophisticated version of informality.¹⁹ But perhaps the best way to consider these interactions is to use the new concepts of 'structural power' and 'relational power', which incorporate these kinds of autonomous activities by the non-European countries, and allows us to understand the extent to which the United Kingdom exerted her influence upon international relations.

The third question has been relatively neglected by Cain and Hopkins's critics, most of whom concentrate on nineteenth-century imperialism. However, a large part of British Imperialism 1688-2000 is concerned with post-1914 and the authors insist that, in relative terms, Britain's power and influence did not undergo severe decline until just before the Second World War. The British Empire also had something of a renaissance, though under American auspices, for a while after 1945. Chapters 3 and 5 deal with important aspects of Britain's twentieth­century imperial history and test some of the claims made in British Imperialism 1688-2000. Moreover, Cain and Hopkins's description of Britain's continued economic influence in the interwar years, including their emphasis on the importance of the sterling bloc in the 1930s, suggests important linkages between imperial history and the process of globalization in the twentieth century. Most of the chapters of Part II in this book, especially Chapter 9, present separate answers to this ques­tion from Asian perspectives. We will later refer to some more specific points of the arguments of each chapter in section IV.

Next we look briefly at the new historiography in Asian economic history in order to understand the connection between British metropolitan and Asian and Japanese perspectives.

III

Until recently, 'most of the literature on Asian economic history has been written within the intellectual framework of the Western impact versus each region's response to it, and the element of intra-regional economic intercourse in Asia has not been properly assessed in a wider comparative perspective'.²⁰ Recent scholarship, led by Japanese economic historians, has offered a new perspective on Asian economic history. It enables us to look at individual Asian countries in the context of an integrated Asian regional economy, and to construct the framework of an evolving relation between the British Empire and the Asian regional economy, within a capitalist world-economy. It is worth mentioning here the works of three distinguished Japanese scholars, Takeshi Hamashita, Heita Kawakatsu and Kaoru Sugihara, who share a common critical viewpoint towards Eurocentric or Western-oriented historiography. Hamashita has insisted on the importance of the development of a Chinese-centred world-system and its resilience based upon the tributary trade system. He also has emphasized the importance of silver-currency circulation and the active roles of Asian merchants' networks for the promotion of intra-Asian trade.²¹ Kawakatsu has pointed to two different paths of development followed by the Western European and Japanese cotton textile industries, and revealed the coexistence of coarse Asian cotton goods with fine cottons from Manchester.²² Nevertheless, the arguments of Hamashita and Kawakatsu are oriented towards the identification of indigenous roots of Asian regional economies, and have not been able to incorporate the global linkages or the development of a capitalist world-economy.

In contrast with these two scholars, Sugihara has revealed the form­ation and development of intra-Asian trade from the late nineteenth century to the early 1940s, by using multinational archives of trade statistics. The uniqueness of his research is to offer two key insights into the pattern of modern Asian economic development, that is, the emergence of 'cotton-centred economic linkages' on the supply side, and the effects of 'final demand linkage' on the demand side. At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, a unique chain of linkages was formed between Indian raw cotton, cotton yarn exports to China from British India and Japan, the production of cotton piece-goods in China based on imported yarns, and a peculiar pattern of consumption of Asian cotton goods. These linkages depended on the development of cotton industries in Japan and British India, and Japanese imports of Indian raw cotton. Meanwhile, Southeast Asian countries, such as Burma, the Straits Settlements, and the Dutch East Indies, specialized in the production and export of primary products to European countries. In return, they earned hard currency, sterling, and imported cheap consumer goods from Japan or British India. Sugihara sees that industrialization in Japan and British India was not only generated through the 'cotton-centred' linkage, but was promoted by the rise in income as a result of the growth of exports of primary products to the West, and calls this the 'final demand linkage effect'.²³ Both sets of connections contributed greatly to the promotion of industrialization-based trade under the umbrella of the 'Pax Britannica'. In this context, Sugihara's work links with imperial and international history and he stresses the vital importance of the 'Western Impact' for the development of intra-Asian trade.

In order to connect the Asian or Japanese historiography with that in the West, one can here point to a mutual connection or interdepen­dence of economic interests between the 'structural power' of Great Britain and the peripheral East Asian countries. We can detect several kinds of 'complementarity' from the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. For example, complementarity evolved between rapid Japanese indus­trialization and increased British exports of capital goods.²⁴ The decline of British cotton goods export to Japan was traded off against the growth of Japanese demand for capital goods, especially for British­made cotton textile machinery. Also, in 1904-05 the Japanese govern­ment issued five Russo-Japanese war loans on the London and New York money markets, by using the international networks of merchant banks. Some British banks, such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and Parr's Bank, brought loan issues on the London capital market and floated them in conjunction with Baring Brothers and Ernest Cassel. Total foreign war loan issues amounted to £107,000,000, out of which London absorbed £42,500,000. Similarly, during the period 1900-13, Japan's large capital imports accounted for over 20 per cent of total for­eign government loan issues in London.²⁵ This close Anglo-Japanese financial relationship and Japanese dependence upon the City of London is another aspect of Anglo-Japanese complementarity in eco­nomic relations.

This complementarity between British financial power and East Asian economic development is an important theme of Part II of this book. It remained an important element in Anglo-Japanese economic interaction until the late 1930s. Similar relationships can be recognized in the l930s, after the restoration of China's tariff autonomy, between Chinese indus­trialization and British financial interests. In regard to the economic interaction between the UK and East Asia, Chapters 8, 9 and 10 present a new interpretation of the international order of Asia up to the 1930s.²⁶ In that decade, the Chinese currency reform of 1935 was the central focus of economic interaction. After the success of the currency reform, the new Chinese dollar was stabilized against sterling and the US dollar, and was de facto linked with sterling. Stabilization of currency promoted the development of Chinese industrial production and the export of consumer goods which accrued under the protectionist policies pursued by the Nationalist Government.²⁷ Thus the rise of economic nationalism in China was achieved by taking advantage of the international order of Asia and the financial influence or the 'structural power' of Great Britain. In British India, economic development, also centred on cotton goods, was helped by the rise of tariff protection after the acquisition of 'fiscal autonomy' in 1919. As long as British financial interests were protected by the high fixed exchange rate of the Indian rupee at 1s 6d, the Government of India allowed Indian industries to grow and export their products to Asian countries.²⁸

We can clearly understand these unique developments by reference to the Cain-Hopkins thesis that the core of British economic interests had shifted from manufacturing to finance and services, the main economic base of gentlemanly capitalism. This kind of complementarity, which in effect encouraged industrialization in East Asia, represents a special relationship, especially in the non-European worlds. It implies not rivalry or competition but co-operation or alignment as long as individual national interests are in concert with each other. The co­existence between British economic interests and East Asian indus­trialization added to the 'structural power' of Great Britain, and strengthened the status of the City of London as an international centre of high-finance.²⁹ The future task is to compare this nexus of con­nection with other networks of trade and finance, for example, the African networks in order to reveal the successes and failures in early industrialization.

IV

The book is divided into two parts. Part I deals with the metropolitan basis of British imperialism and the issues raised in section II above. In Chapter 2, Huw Bowen discusses the making of a global British Empire in the eighteenth century which is vital for an understanding of the British-centred globalization or the 'Pax Britannica' of the nineteenth century. Bowen illuminates two important factors for the formation of a global empire in Asia as well as in North America.³⁰ He refers to recent studies of cultural and material aspects of imperialism in the United States. These factors have been concerned with the links between gentlemanly capitalists at home and overseas actors, such as the North American elite and the East India Company. Bowen's important contribution to the Cain-Hopkins debate is to identify the emergence of an 'international British elite or transoceanic imperial elite' in North America and Bengal through the 'anglicization' of overseas high society. In the case of Bengal, powerful private interests, supported by a strong state, played an important role in spreading British influence in Asia, and their activities were closely connected with 'country' or intra-Asian trade. In this context, Bowen's arguments are connected with Part II of this book, which exposes the impulses from the periphery behind the formation of a global British Empire and its relationship to the metropolis.

In Chapter 2, John Darwin reconsiders British power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a global context, and explores the mutual relationship between globalism and British imperialism, or the link between imperial history and global history. First, he recognizes the com­mon ground between the Cain-Hopkins and Gallagher-Robinson theses, especially the notion of informal influence. In considering British power in the global context, he assumes that there were two basic constraints on British power from the world economy and geopolitics. The first is that 'as an open global system, the British empire was acutely sensitive to the pressures and prospects of the international economy'. The second is that 'the world-wide span of British imperialism made it vulnerable to political change' in East Asia and the Euro-Atlantic world as well as in the empire. He proposes the three 'long swings' of the world economy as the chronological matrix for the rise and fall of the British Empire: the approach (1830s-70s), formation (1880s-1920s), and crisis (1930s-40s). From his viewpoint of constraints under global circumstances, 'there was no mid-Victorian “global hegemony”'; and 'globalism set in after 1870', when 'the economic inter-dependence of regions and markets reached a critical stage creating for the first time a “world economy"'. He reveals the limits of British power projection in international relations through the coexistence between an empire of trade and an empire of rule. In this sense, as he stresses, 'the full implications of that protean concept, the “imperialism of free trade" have yet to be worked out',³¹ even after the publication of the Cain-Hopkins thesis.³²

In Chapter 4, Ian Phimister offers a revisionist account of that classic case study of late nineteenth-century imperialism: the Partition of Africa. He examines Cain and Hopkins's interpretation of the scramble for Africa, and criticizes two aspects of their arguments. First, Phimister points to a global dimension of the partition of Africa in the context of the transformation of international relations which witnessed the rise of Germany and the United States. He stresses the importance of international rivalries among European Powers for the acceleration of the partition in tropical Africa. Phimister's second argument concerns the relationship between economic imperialism, informal empire and territorial empire. Focusing on British expansion in Southern Africa, he presents a new interpretation of the Selborne Memorandum of 1896, and insists that the success of financial imperialism and informal empire in the South African Republic threatened British governmental plans for uniting South Africa. His conclusion is that the South African crisis revealed a conflict between two arms of gentlemanly capitalism, one led by the City of London and the other in government.

In Chapter 5, Gerold Krozewski is concerned with later stages of British imperialism between 1945 and the early 1960s, giving particular prominence to international finance. Krozewski provides a critical assessment of the applicability of gentlemanly capitalism to the post- 1945 period, and criticizes the 'continuity theory' of Cain and Hopkins. He suggests that the transformation of British society and the British state before and after the Second World War, especially the changing role of the state and the coming of welfarism, reduced the influence of the gentlemanly elite. He then argues that the changing structure and constraints of international relations after 1945, especially the emer­gence of liberal multilateralism in a new international economic order dominated by the United States, exerted a strong influence on Britain's international position and policies. Briefly stated, his argument is that the social and economic conditions, both within Britain and in the wider world, that nurtured gentlemanly capitalism no longer existed after 1945. Krozewski also refers to 'complementarity' as a systemic component of international relations and outlines how regional economies interconnected with each other. This point is closely related to the arguments in Part II and is explored in more detail in Chapters 8 and 10. His analysis, which draws on his recently published book on British international economic policy and the colonies,³³ emphasizes the importance of the 'structural domestic and international context' of the post-1945 period, and he prefers to analyze 'Empire' as a 'system' rather than as a set of bilateral relationships between the metropole and colonies.

Part II links international and general themes to East Asia - a huge area that felt the British presence and influence but largely escaped for­mal imperial control. This section of the book not only explores the extent of, and limits to, British influence, but also demonstrates the unique status of East Asia in global history and underlines the auton­omy of its own dynamics in creating a globalized order. Furthermore, Part II reconsiders the meaning of 'informal empire' in East Asia from an Asian perspective.

In Chapter 6, Niels Petersson looks at European imperial rivalry and the concept of informal empire in China before the First World War. He reveals the specific circumstances under which gentlemanly capitalism exerted an influence on China, and offers 'an international or trans­national history of empire' by using archival evidence from Britain, France and Germany. Petersson illuminates the favourable international and peripheral context of 1905-11 in which Britain pursued foreign- financed railway construction in China. This specific but only brief period is regarded as the height of gentlemanly imperialism in China, and he represents its peculiar character as 'co-operative financial imperi­alism', a phrase he takes from Jürgen Osterhammel.³⁴ Petersson also identifies a three-level structure for the analysis of co-operative financial imperialism: at metropolitan, international and peripheral levels. In the shaping of global history, the interconnectedness between the second and the third levels is seen as essential, and 'British policy within the framework of co-operative financial imperialism was distinguished from that of other powers by the conscious pursuit of “structural power”'.³⁵

In Chapter 7, Shunhong Zhang presents a Chinese view of British imperialism and decolonization from the perspective of scholarship that is beginning to engage with Western historiography while still emerging from its Marxist inheritance. Zhang, a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, appraises the Cain-Hopkins thesis as an explanation of British expansion overseas from a metropolitan perspec­tive. However, he primarily offers three criticisms of their interpretation. The first is that they underestimate the role of British industrial capital­ism in China. The second, like Petersson, again points to the changing balance between all three factors which determined the power of 'imperi­alism'; the core, the periphery and the international power structure. His third criticism addresses the treatment and interpretation of decoloniza­tion, where he emphasizes the role of the Soviet Union. Based on his own research on the disintegration of colonial empires,³⁶ Zhang presents us with a more rigid definition of decolonization. He emphasizes the roles of national liberation movements and indigenous nationalism in accelerat­ing decolonization, and plays down financial causes.

In Chapter 8, Naoto Kagotani and Shigeru Akita use recent research by Japanese historians to reconsider the nature and formation of the 'International Order of Asia' in the 1930s, and emphasize the impor­tance of indigenous forces in creating it. First, we present a framework and viewpoint for analyzing the Asian international order in the 1930s. We explore the formation of economic interdependence and comple­mentary relationships in Asia at the metropolitan-peripheral as well as inter-regional levels, the historical significance of Asian industrializa­tion in the 1930s, and the 'openness' of the sterling area and the imperi­alistic international order of Asia. We then analyze British perceptions of Japanese economic development in the 1930s, as an ideal case of eco­nomic 'complementarity', by referring to the British Commercial Reports on Japan written by the Commercial Counsellor, Sir George Sansom. Finally we consider Japanese 'cotton-textile diplomacy' with British India and the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the 1930s. We con­clude that Japan's ability to import huge quantities of primary products from the British Empire was indispensable for colonial debt servicing, and that there was a clear complementarity between European financial interests and Japanese exports to the Asian markets which stimulated the networks of Asian merchants.

In Chapter 9, Yoichi Kibata reconsiders the influence of Great Britain in East Asia in the 1930s to test the proposition that Britain remained an assertive, global power in the inter-war years. Kibata, who is one of the editors of the Anglo-Japanese History Project,³⁷ combines an analy­sis of British policy in China and Japan, and relocates the Cain-Hopkins thesis in the context of the changing nature of the British Empire, especially in East Asia. He examines British attitudes to Japan from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and reveals the continuity of Britain's accommodating attitude to Japanese diplomacy and the formation of Britain's appeasement policy towards Japan in the mid-1930s. He argues that the British Government pursued coexistence with Japan in China for the purpose of containing rising Chinese nationalism and prolonging the imperialist world order in East Asia. British appeasement policy reflected the contemporary sense of weakness in the 'official mind' and the changing nature of Britain's status in international relations. Kibata's article is also concerned with the political significance and the validity of the concept of British 'informal empire' in China.

In Chapter 10, Kaoru Sugihara reveals the interconnectedness between the City of London as the chief source of international capital and Asian industrialization in the twentieth century, and develops an argument that relates the trajectory of British imperialism with the global diffusion of industrialization in the development of a capitalist world-economy. First, Sugihara points to the formation of 'comple­mentarity' or a particular kind of 'division of labour' between the City of London and East Asia's industrialization over the first half of the twentieth century. The City benefited from the growth of 'intra-Asian trade'³⁸ and the industrialization of Asian countries. He also analyzes the 'link' of Japan in 1932 and China in 1935 with the sterling area and the extension of sterling's influence outside the British Empire in the 1930s. Sugihara then broadens his arguments to cover their impli­cations for global history. He explores the new international division of labour between the United States and other Asian countries under the Cold War regime, and its similarity to the former relationship between the City of London and East Asian countries. He observes that 'the peculiar relationship, identified as the Cain and Hopkins perspec­tive, has arguably survived the hegemonic shift, and has remained a central device for the development of the capitalist world economy to this day'.³⁹ The role of the financial and service sectors is generalized as a vital facilitator of technological transfer and the global diffusion of industrialization in the context of global history.

V

At the end of the book, Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins respond fully to every chapter and show that they are looking ahead as well as reflecting on their earlier work. They make it clear, as do the other chapters in this volume, that imperial history is a lively subject and one that is taking new directions. It is also a subject for the twenty-first century and not, as many commentators have supposed, one that is or should be con­fined to the age of great empires alone. Empires did much to shape the form of globalization that characterized the world order before our own, post-colonial age.

As noted at the outset, the main aim of this book is to renew the debate on British imperialism and the British Empire by combining Western and Asian historiography, and to construct a new 'global history' for the understanding of globalization. Globalization is now becoming a new and important field in historical studies. 'Global history' attracts atten­tion not only from historians but also from social scientists. Tony Hopkins has shown a keen interest in the history of globalization,⁴⁰ and Cain and Hopkins have added a new chapter, 'Afterword: Empires and Globalization' to their second edition of British Imperialism, 1688-2000. For their part, Japanese historians have also taken a strong interest in world history since the 1960s, and they have written several series of world history from a global perspective.⁴¹ Thus academic discussions on globalization have begun on both sides of the globe. By learning more about the imperial element in the history of globalization, we can come to a better understanding of what is truly novel about the process of glob­alization in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Notes

1 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, 'The Imperialism of Free Trade', Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol. VI (1953).

2 W.R. Louis, Imperialism: the Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (London and New York, 1976).

3 Editor-in-Chief, W. Roger Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford, 1998-99), especially Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century and Vol. V: Historiography.

4 A.G. Hopkins, 'Informal Empire in Argentina: an Alternative View', Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994), pp. 469-84; PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, 'Afterword: the theory and practice of British imperialism', in Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: the New Debate on Empire (London and New York, 1999), pp. 204-6.

5 Susan Strange, States and Markets (London, 1988), ch. 2.

6 Patrick K. O'Brien, 'The State Status and Future of Universal History', an Essay submitted for Major Theme 1A, 'Perspective on Global History, Concepts and Methodology' for the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Oslo, 6-13 August 2000, p. 16.

Patrick O'Brien is the Convenor of the Programme in Global History, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

7 PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (2nd Edition, Harlow and New York, 2001).

Minoru Kawakita, 'Kindai-Sekai Sisutemu-ron wo megutte' [On the 'Modern World-System'], Senshu-Daigaku Shakai-Kagaku Kenkyusho Geppou [Monthly Report of the Institute of Social Sciences, Senshu University, Tokyo], No. 287 (1987).

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London and New York, 1994); Takeshi Matsuda and Shigeru Akita (eds), Hegemoni-Kokka to Sekai Sisutemu [The Hegemonic States and the World System] (Tokyo: Yamakawa-Shuppan, 2002).

Patrick K. O'Brien, 'The Pax Britannica and the International Order 1688-1914', Shigeru Akita and Takeshi Matsuda (eds), Looking Back at the 20th Century: the Role of Hegemonic State and the Transformation of the Modern World-System (Proceedings of the Global History Workshop Osaka, 1999, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, 2000), pp. 44-5.

O'Brien, 'The State Status and Future of Universal History', p. 8.

Will Hutton, The State We're In (London, 1994).

Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism (London, 2000).

Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: the New Debate on Empire (London and New York, 1999).

Cain and Hopkins, op. cit., 'Forward: the Continuing Debate on Empire'. Ibid., chs 2 and 26.

Cain and Hopkins, op. cit., 'Afterword: Empires and Globalization', pp. 668-77.

Ian H. Nish, The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: the Diplomacy of Two Island Empires 1894-1907 (London, 1966).

See C.M. Turnbull, 'Formal and Informal Empire in East Asia', in Robin W Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. V, Historiography (Oxford, 1999) and Jürgen Osterhammel, 'China', in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV, The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999).

Kaoru Sugihara, Ajia-kan Boeki no Keisei to Kozo [Patterns and Development of Intra-Asian Trade] (Kyoto: Mineruva-Shobo, 1996), Introduction, pp. 1-2. Takeshi Hamashita, Kindai Chugoku no Kokusaiteki Keiki: Choko Boeki Shisutemu to Kindai Ajia [International Factors Affecting Modern China: Tributary Trade System and Modern Asia] (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1990); Takeshi Hamashita, Choko Shisutemu to Kindai Ajia [Tributary Trade System and Modern Asia] (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1997).

Heita Kawakatsu, 'International Competition in Cotton Goods in the Late Nineteenth Century: Britain versus East Asia', in W. Fisher, R.M. McInnis and J. Schneider (eds), The Emergence of a World Economy, 1500-1914, Beiträge zur Wirtschafts und Sozialgeschichte, Band 33-2 (Wiesbaden, 1986); A.J.H. Latham and Heita Kawakatsu (eds), Japanese Industrialization and Asian Economy (London and New York, 1994).

Sugihara, op. cit., ch. 1; Kaoru Sugihara, 'Japan as an Engine of the Asian International Economy, c. 1880-1936', Japan Forum, 2(1) (1990).

Shigeru Akita, '“Gentlemanly Capitalism”, intra-Asian Trade and Japanese Industrialization at the Turn of the Last Century', Japan Forum, 8(1) (1996), pp. 51-65.

Toshio Suzuki, Japanese Government Loan Issues on the London Capital Market 1870-1913 (London, 1994), pp. 1-3, 83-4.

See also, Shigeru Akita and Naoto Kagotani (eds), 1930 nendai no Ajia Kokusai Chitujo [International Order of Asia in the 1930s] (Hiroshima: Keisui-sha, 2001).

Toru Kubo, Senkan-ki Chugoku Jiritsu eno Mosaku: Kanzei-Tsuka Seisaku to Keizai Hatten [China's Quest for Sovereignty in the Inter-war Period: Tariff Policy and Economic Development] (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1999).

B.R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj 1914-1947: the Economics of Decolonization in India (London, 1979); B.R. Tomlinson, The New Cambridge History of India, III-3, The Economy of Modern India, 1860-1970 (Cambridge, 1993), chs. 3 and 4.

Shigeru Akita, Igirisu-Teikoku to Ajia Kokusai Chitujo [The British Empire and International Order of Asia] (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2002).

H.V. Bowen, 'British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756-1783', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26 (1998), pp. 1-27.

Ch. 3, p. 60.

See also, John Darwin, 'Imperialism and the Victorians: the Dynamics of Territorial Expansion', English Historical Review, Vol. CXII, No. 447 (1997), pp. 614-42.

Gerold Krozewski, Money and the End of Empire: British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947-58 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001 (now Palgrave Macmillan)).

J. Osterhammel, China und die Weltgesellschaft. Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in unsere Zeit (Munich, 1989), p. 223; J. Osterhammel, 'Britain and China, 1842-1914', in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999).

Ch. 6, p. 116.

Shunhong Zhang, et al., Da Ying Diguo De Wajie [The Collapse of the British Empire] (Beijing: China Social Science Documentation Publishing House, 1997).

Ian Nish and Yoichi Kibata (eds), The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600-2000, Vol. 2, The Political-Diplomatic Dimension, 1930-2000 (Basingstoke and London, 2000).

Kaoru Sugihara, Ajia-kan Boeki no Keisei to Kozo [Patterns and Development of Intra-Asian Trade].

Ch. 10, p. 197.

A.G. Hopkins, 'Back to the Future: from National History to Imperial History', Past and Present, No. 164 (1999); A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002).

Rekishigaku Kenkyukai [The Historical Science Society of Japan] (ed.), Kouza Sekaishi [Lectures in Modern World History], 12 vols, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1996-97); Sekai no Rekishi [A History of the World], 30 vols (Tokyo: Chuokoron-Shinsha, 1998-99); Iwanami-Kouza Sekairekishi [Iwanami Series in World History], 29 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1998-2000).