The continuity thesis: some critical observations

With regard to the nineteenth century, the authors have closely inte­grated their analysis of domestic socioeconomic transformations with that of changes in British policy and structural changes in Britain's global relations.

The argument about the genesis of 'gentlemanly capitalist' imperialism in the nineteenth century derives its strength precisely from the discus­sion of the sociological dimension, namely connections and inter­actions between civil society and the state at a time of important shifts in state formation and the emergence of nation states - discussed in diverse intellectual contexts from Gramsci to Weber and Schumpeter.²² It is illuminating, moreover, how the peculiar polity and state shaped Britain's foreign relations, even if some critics have expressed doubts about the precise links established between British society, the state and policy. As studies of the comparative sociology of the state have amply demonstrated, individual societies gave rise to specific forms of states and institutions.²³ These factors, in turn, influenced a country's external relations.

Nonetheless, one could argue that the study's strength of an analysis of social change in Britain in the late nineteenth century, proves to be its weakness with regard to the twentieth century.

Simply put, the suggested link between British society, the state and external relations appears as a projection into later periods based on a historical argument about the late nineteenth century. The argument takes insufficiently into account that these main constituent elements have all undergone considerable change since. Therefore, I would argue that the continuity thesis is relevant to the period of empire after 1945 only insofar as it is synonymous with the role of the financial sector in the British polity and the long-lasting legacy of British institutions, which took shape in the late nineteenth century. However, I would also argue that this is, strictly speaking, not a continuity of 'gentlemanly capitalism' as a social formation but rather shows a certain relevance of relations it has shaped. Otherwise, one would have to assume that 'gentlemanly imperialism' could accommodate generically different relationships in different periods, which would turn the concept into a mere synonym of financial relationships, divesting it of its original meaning.

Three related methodological points are worthwhile discussing with regard to the historical evidence on the empire after 1945 when assessing the applicability of the Cain and Hopkins argument. First, it is regret­table that the structural analysis of the British polity is rather under­developed.

Even if one accepts that a 'gentlemanly elite' was still strong in the rank and file of the civil service and among members of government in the mid-1940s and 1950s, these actors operated in a different context from that in the late nineteenth century, and politicians were confronted with a much more broadly based electorate. States had become more elaborate and diversified constructions as had the inter­national state system, and the link between British society and the state had become considerably transformed since the nineteenth century. The state designed by, or at least aspired to by Labour leaders in the late 1940s, such as Attlee, Bevin, Dalton and Cripps (to some extent influ­enced by Harold Laski) had little to do with the state of Britain's free trading 'gentlemanly capitalists', - except for the undeniable but also obvious fact that it inherited Britain's global economic connections from the latter's legacy. Labour's management of the empire became associated with welfarism effectively giving rise to a version of 'socialist imperialism'. The British state and empire were seen as part of a protec­tionist international order where economic planning and controls were tailored to the needs of the nascent welfare state.

Besides, the prominent imperialist politicians in the Labour party were distinctly 'ungentlemanly' - and rather closer to that Radical imper­ial reformer of yesteryear, Joseph Chamberlain.²⁵ A comparison with Chamberlain is made in the study but rather too rapidly fused with the 'gentlemanly imperialism' theme.²⁶ Many influential Labour leaders, though not Ernest Bevin,²⁷ may well have come from relatively pros­perous social backgrounds, which may well show who made it into the British political elite and who did not, irrespective of a particular party affiliation; but (even if they originated from the elite related to the financial and service sectors) one could hardly argue that their state­management of the empire was prompted by their affinity to City inter­ests rather than an opportunity sought to support welfarism driven by the necessity to remedy balance of payments imbalances.

Under the Conservative governments of the 1950s the principles of a liberal British state and liberal multilateralism became dominant. But this is hardly evidence of the continuity of 'gentlemanly capitalism' as a social formation, be it in its impact on the state (and policy) or on the City of London (and policy). Cain and Hopkins's assessment of the period appears to be somewhat trapped by their concept of 'gentle­manly capitalism'. The move forward into the post-imperial age looks (almost literally) like a move backward into a golden age. This argument is tempting from the viewpoint of an analysis of the psychological make-up and the motivations of civil servants. A certain imagery was pervasive among policymakers, who occasionally compared the ster­ling area to an English gentleman's club, which implied a similarity of interest and purpose of its members as well as an informal co-ordination of policies under British leadership. It is indicative, for example, how Britain rationalized sterling area arrangements and the approach towards central banking on the periphery as a line of defence for the pound.

But, one does not need to endorse the state's immunity from civil society to observe that changes in state organization and institutions in their historical context played a mediating role between civil society and policy in the twentieth century and particularly after 1945 rather than society per se being the driving force behind policy. Cain and Hopkins would need to bring 'the state back in' not because their argu­ment advances a causation which relates politics to society (the original target of advocates of the so-called relative autonomy of the state), but because their causation overemphasizes and also oversimplifies the role of agency, and because they attribute too much explanatory power to their historical conception.²⁸

In this connection, it is imperative to point out that the realms of the British state, City of London, sterling area and sterling empire, though obviously related, also need to be kept distinct as entities of analysis to enhance our understanding of the specific nature of Britain's imperial and external economic relations and policies during the period. This point can be made, for example, with regard to the relevance of polit­ical control in the empire. For the City of London, a control relationship in the existing empire did not matter. However, it mattered for the state and the management of the sterling area until the point when policy­makers realized (tentatively from about 1956 and definitely after Suez) that a redefinition of north-south relationships in general was in the making.²⁹ Incidentally, this is also the reason why the second continu­ity thesis of British Imperialism needs to be qualified. Policymakers did dream of a reinvigorated British cosmopolitanism based on sterling after 1960, but precisely for this reason they did not aim to revitalize the old empire in an informal way. Attempts at informal influence in the 1960s were defensive.³⁰ British policy towards the pivots of the discriminatory sterling area, Malaya and West Africa, was shaped in a different global context before and after the juncture of 1957-60, though some rela­tionships with these regions took until the late 1960s to reflect this change.

In explaining British imperial policy, an argument focusing on the institutional dimension does have its place.³¹ The specific nature of the British state and institutions had an impact on imperial and exter­nal economic policy. The institutional and technocratic legacy influ­enced British policy and implied a general continuity in terms of policy predilections, for example, when it came to prioritizing the empire or Europe, or a cosmopolitan or domestic orientation in sterling policy. Indeed, technocrats from the Treasury and the Bank of England had considerable influence on policy, occupying a prominent position in the policy process as representatives of their respective institutions in interdepartmental committees. In the economic realm of policymaking, politicians and even government ministers were often not sufficiently informed, knowledgeable, or involved, given the sheer quantity of tasks at hand, to supervise or influence important decisions beyond the overall approach to policy. In external economic relations, moreover, exogen­ous factors imposed themselves too frequently to secure a coherent course of policy. So, discriminatory policies towards the empire derived as much from the influence of technocrats as from politicians, even under the Labour government, though the former saw discriminatory sterling area management as a temporary measure in contrast to many Labour politicians. One could perhaps say that the technocrats' ambi­tion was to assist in making the politician's dreams for British recovery come true. It is also a fact that policymakers did hanker after Britain's past glory and attempted to emulate principles of past policy, though their perception was not always accurate.

Nonetheless, interpreting British policy against the background of the institutional bias of the British state is not the same as suggesting that a 'gentlemanly capitalist' social stratum impelled external economic policy. Nor is it, of necessity, the same as attributing an important place to the influence of the City of London in external economic policy. These are necessary areas of analysis for arguments about British external relations (and factors often neglected by imperial historians), but they need to be kept analytically distinct, and alone they are insufficient to explain policy in a specific historical period. Cain and Hopkins's argument on British imperialism enriches our understanding of how the British polity evolved in a certain way and why financial relations became so important for the British polity. However, the legacy of past relationships, per se, does not amount to an explanation of policy. There was a rationale of state management related to, but also distinct from, the City which is not distinguished clearly enough in the study's account and conceptual­ization. While the City certainly influenced the state's leverage, the state's management of external economic relations was different in nature from simply representing City interests, which were hardly homogenous anyway. It would be misleading to interpret the management of the British state's external and imperial economic relations as the aggregate response to the cumulation of individual entrepreneurial pressure groups, financial or other. This is especially true for the post-1945 empire (unlike in the case of France, for example), though the investigation of British business in the empire is of course of interest in its own right and was an important influence in specific regions.³² Otherwise, the focus on government policy, rather than entrepreneurial pressure, in the summary account of the period accurately reflects the structural peculiarities of British imperial relations at the time as well as the well-known divide between Parliamentary interest groups and government in the British policy process.³³

The specific structural international context within which policy was formulated would also need to be more carefully analyzed. The intricate debates between and among representatives of the political elite, the civil service and the City of London were importantly influ­enced by this setting. The sterling crises of the 1940s and 1950s needed to be tackled one way or another, all the more so, given Labour's welfare objectives. Here, the state evidently mattered as a factor in its own right separate from the influences of social forces or economic doctrine. The Macmillan government's move towards commercial and financial liberalization in the late 1950s, in part, reflects the constraints of Britain's financial sector, which circum­vented government policy if it suited its interests, as the emergence of the Eurodollar market before de jure convertibility shows. But Macmillan's failure to extricate Britain from established sterling relationships is also evidence of the fact that sterling's role in the international economy was an inescapable structural constraining factor for the British state, as the international context, namely Europe and the United States, forced itself on the policy agenda whether policymakers liked it or not.³⁴

On the whole, the study's conception of empire is attuned to 'gen­tlemanly capitalist' impulses, which may also account for the fact that British policy is portrayed as having been successful rather than sub­ject to constraints. In my view, it is difficult to see how one could rec­oncile an interpretation of British policy during the period with claims of the continuity thesis of 'gentlemanly imperialism', except in an extremely loose, and therefore in explanatory terms weak fashion. Nonetheless, even if the general account offered in British Imperialism cannot do full justice to the systemic dimension, the study rightly emphasizes the empire as a system (which policy aimed to influence). Regional case studies of late colonialism and some general studies of decolonization often assume that British policy operated 'bilaterally'. This is implausible, even in such obviously central cases as India, and was clearly not the case in the framework of the discriminatory ster­ling area.

Finally, I should mention a point which is particularly evident from the perspective of the post-1945 empire but applies to the Cain and Hopkins thesis as a whole. My critique of the way in which the authors conceive of the state in connection with policy is also rele­vant to the definition of imperialism employed in their study. As mentioned earlier, theirs is not an abstract theoretical argument about imperialism. Imperialism is studied as a historical phe­nomenon in a specific country, Britain, and tested in case studies on the periphery. Conceptually, British Imperialism relies on an argument about metropolitan impulses to illuminate overseas expansion. The 'imperialistic' nature of this expansion is then defined as the infringement of the sovereignty of states on the periphery which thus becomes part of the overall argument.³⁵ Therefore, while the state in Britain is neglected in the analysis of the twentieth century, the state re-emerges as the very measuring device which makes Britain's for­eign relations 'imperialistic'. This definition of imperialism accom­modates a broad spectrum of relationships, from British influence exerted on like-minded social formations, such as in Argentina, to direct colonial rule. It should, however, be noted that, although, according to this conception, metropolitan impulses are testable in case studies, the basic assumptions of 'gentlemanly capitalism' (being about the transformation of British society) are only testable in Britain. These impulses need not, of necessity, be reflected in indi­vidual overseas territories. A critique from a regional standpoint taking Cain and Hopkins to task for not being able to identify 'gen­tlemanly capitalists' in some part of the empire at a given point in time would do little damage. To falsify their argument, one would need to show that expansionist impulses mediated through a system of co-ordinated relations were irrelevant to policy in a particular region.

Nonetheless, the authors' definition of the 'imperialistic' nature of expansion is based on a somewhat static concept of the state on the periphery. The argument fails to take into account that notions of state sovereignty are fluid. Moreover, states existed in a variety of forms at the time of colonial expansion and were, in part, a colonial construction. Colonial states changed not least in response to local social and polit­ical constraints. Besides, it is difficult to determine what infringement of sovereignty precisely means. The authors' argument about imperialism is not defined in terms of a control relation, and therefore insufficiently supported by an argument about structural change on the periphery and in the international context. In an accessory publication on Argentina published after the first edition of British Imperialism Hopkins has shifted the argument towards a definition of control influenced by a concept of structural power in international relations introduced by Susan Strange and similar to Platt's usage of imperialism. However, the foreword to the one-volume edition of Cain and Hopkins's study does not follow up this argument.³⁶