11 The Peculiarities of British Capitalism: Imperialism and World Development1

Peter Cain and A.G. Hopkins

The response to British Imperialism since it was first published in two volumes in 1993 has greatly exceeded our expectations. The books were widely reviewed at the time, and the interpretation they put forward, based on the concept of gentlemanly capitalism, has been extensively discussed subsequently, not only in Britain but also elsewhere in Europe, in the United States and in Asia.

Two of the chapters examine the idea of gentlemanly capitalism itself. Bowen finds not only that it flourished in eighteenth-century Britain but also that it developed simultaneously in the American colonies before the Revolution. Krozewski accepts that gentlemanly capitalism was highly influential in the nineteenth century, but questions the validity of the concept for the period after the Second World War. Darwin bridges both these chapters by placing our interpretation of Britain's expansion overseas in the context of even broader inter­national developments between 1830 and 1960. Phimister reappraises our interpretation of the classic case of imperialist rivalries within this period by focusing on the 'scramble' for Africa. Five of the nine chap­ters are concerned with (and originate in) East Asia.

Between them, these nine essays provide fresh insight into the modern age of European imperialism, whether by offering new evidence or by extending current thinking. Each contribution merits careful attention in its own right. But the larger picture has also to be kept in mind; we shall offer some reflections on where the subject now stands at the end of the commentary that follows.

I

The chapters by Huw Bowen and Gerold Krozewski are the two most distant from each other in terms of chronology, but they have in com­mon the fact that they both deal with periods that we were obliged to present in a highly compressed fashion. What we hoped to do, in both cases, was to show how our interpretation might be applied, while rec­ognizing that we lacked sufficient space to unpack the argument and to engage with the detailed literature. We are therefore especially grateful to these contributors for pursuing our line of enquiry further than we did ourselves and for considering whether it stands the test of the detailed research that is now available.

Bowen's essay bears out our view that a gentlemanly capitalist elite emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. The definition of gen­tility shifted as the social composition of the elite changed, and there was a fierce debate (as there was in the nineteenth century too) between those who were eager to open the door to social mobility and those who were keen to keep it shut.

The extension of the gentlemanly elite overseas, as Bowen points out, helped to shape the concept of empire and ultimately provided it with a strong thread of unity. Ideas of empire that were diverse and shifting in the early eighteenth century⁶ were consolidated and pinned down during the era of war and revolution that ran from 1756 to 1815.⁷ The role of the state has long been considered to be central to these devel­opments. Eighteenth-century governments inherited and augmented a battery of legislation to regulate external trade and shipping, and they put in place a patronage system that was sufficiently large, visible and objectionable to arouse vociferous opposition in the 1770s and 1780s.

Without denying the significance of this revisionist view of the state, Bowen's analysis suggests that emphasis should also be placed on the role of informal influences and the unofficial mind of imperialism in the twin processes of nation-building at home and imperial expansion abroad. Eighteenth-century governments were less able than their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to translate inten­tions into results, especially where their writ had to be carried to distant lands overseas. Consequently, there was considerable scope for the 'unofficial mind' of imperialism to influence events during this period. The eighteenth-century state was also more permeable than its succes­sors: public and private interests joined hands through patronage and found expression in the emerging empire, most notably in the East India Company. The state was the executive arm, not of the bourgeoisie, but of the gentlemanly elite, which straddled public and private spheres with an ease born of long practice.

In making a case for the importance of private influences in creating an empire that was both imagined and highly material, Bowen directs our attention to questions that he himself was unable to pursue, though there is space to speculate on only two of these here. The first concerns the relationship between private interests and informal empire. Robinson and Gallagher used the term informal empire to draw attention to impulses towards imperialism that lay outside the formal, constitutional empire. Given this definition, there is no reason why, in principle, the phrase could not be applied to the eighteenth century. Contemporaries were undoubtedly aware of the possibility. In the late eighteenth century, Josiah Tucker anticipated the notion of 'free-trade imperialism' by arguing that it would be more cost-effective to control the thirteen colonies through trade and investment than through direct rule.¹⁰ In practice, however, historians of the eighteenth century have not followed this lead: the debate on informal empire, though voluminous, has been confined almost entirely to the nineteenth century. Aside from historiographical convention - a force not to be underestimated - it has been assumed that the conditions that made an informal empire possible were not present until Britain had passed through the industrial revolution and had achieved technological supremacy. At that point, her interests overseas could be promoted effectively through informal means by both governments and private interests: the formal empire, in Robinson and Gallagher's celebrated phrase, was merely the tip of the iceberg.¹¹

Assuming for the moment that eighteenth-century governments used mainly formal rather than informal means (though this claim is open to challenge), Bowen's argument raises the issue of whether there is scope for linking private interests with the expansion of informal influence and, possibly, the creation of informal empire.

Even if these speculations turn out to be fanciful, they have the residual merit of directing attention to a second question: the long­standing divide between the study of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and the appeal to 'long' centuries to fit an argument or to cover an uncertainty. The long eighteenth century typically begins in 1688 and terminates in 1815, but can be extended to the 1830s; the long nineteenth century always ends in 1914 but may have a starting point as early as the 1760s. Bowen's colonial gentlemen survived the upheavals of the late eighteenth century and prospered after 1815. If a break in continuity is to be found, it is probably in changes to the wider social formation of which they were a part, specifically the shift to free trade, the dismantling of Old Corruption, and the demise of the military-fiscal state. This process began in the 1820s, was hurried on in the 1830s and 40s, and was substantially achieved (even though it was still incomplete) by 1850. By this time, too, the concept of empire, which Bowen refers to, had undergone a parallel change. The English empire had become British, and any residual universalism that survived the French Wars had been harnessed to the cause of the nation state.¹² These developments reflected, in part, the creation from the late eighteenth century onwards of a truly British gentlemanly elite¹³ some of whose new wealth derived directly from the vigorous imperial expan­sion that accompanied the contest between Britain and France to become Europe's first superpower.

II

John Darwin's wide-ranging essay begins at this moment of transition, which he dates from the 1830s. We would amend his starting point by suggesting, as we have in commenting on Bowen's essay, that the whole period 1815-50 was one of protracted and painful transition between the Old Colonial System and the new era of free-trade imperialism.¹⁴ The transition was made possible eventually by railways, steamships, discoveries of gold, and spurts in both capital exports and emigration, as new possibilities for global economic growth were opened up. What Darwin appositely calls Britain's 'cocktail of social energies' gave her the means of benefiting from these developments to a greater extent than any other modernizing power in the nineteenth century. A potent ingredient in the cocktail was a transformed and revived gentlemanly capitalism. This initial comment is not intended to disturb Darwin's central argument, which does not depend on dating its starting point precisely. His main purpose is the much broader one of placing the British experience in the context of global history. Here, he offers a bold and valuable corrective to our 'island story', and one that the argument advanced in British Imperialism - if fully extended - undoubtedly requires.

We took the view that an understanding of Britain's overseas policy and presence called for a reappraisal of their domestic roots.¹⁵ International developments and their intersection with forces propelled by the nation state were of course important, but we could not see how, in the first instance at least, we could devise an argument that derived the latter from the former. This is not to deny that Britain was influenced by external developments that, at various times and in various places, were beyond her control. However, the difficulty with this viewpoint (as Darwin recognizes) is that it can easily make human agency dependent on outside forces that seem to have no concrete, observable origin. It can also appear to make the tail wag the dog.¹⁶ Critics can then complain that the interpretation is both determinist and improbable. The reality was that Britain was not a micro-state, but the world's superpower. As such, she played a formative role in shaping the global system that ran from the nineteenth century to the 1950s. It is certainly the case that the structure and balance of the international order began to change, visibly from the 1930s and rapidly after 1945, as it grew in scale and gathered more constituents. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to conclude, even at this late point in the history of empire, that Britain had ceased to contribute significantly to managing the system she had done so much to create. Even the end of empire, unwelcome though it was in some quarters, was partly a reflection of shifting interests in Britain herself, and was accompanied by a conscious reorientation of trade and politics towards the highly developed regions of the world - a trend that eventually led to the form of globalization we know today.

This reaffirmation of the position taken in British Imperialism is consistent in principle with Darwin's emphasis on the forces that constrained Britain's ambitions. One of our acknowledged difficulties lay in writing a history of and from the centre without appearing to ignore important new research on the colonized world. Since we were interested in causes rather than in consequences, we were able to limit the scope of our enquiries. Even so, we should have said much more about interactions between British and indigenous forces, as well as between Britain and her continental rivals, and we would have done so had we been able to face the task of writing an additional volume (or two). Darwin deftly indicates a number of areas where additional thought accompanied by matching space would at the very least have amplified our argument. One good example is the extent to which resistance among indigenous peoples restrained the extension of informal as well as formal empire in the nineteenth century. Another is the need to reintroduce France and Germany into the story of British expansion in the late nineteenth century, though in Darwin's view not as causes or symptoms of Britain's decline.

In making these observations, Darwin also notes some similarities between our own approach and that of Robinson and Gallagher, especially in agreeing that imperialism had informal as well as formal dimensions. In the end, however, Darwin's version of Britain's imperial trajectory is much closer to our own than it is to that of Robinson and Gallagher. He confirms our judgement that Britain's informal empire was expanding, not declining, in the period 1870-1914, and that when Britain emerged from the First World War she was still the greatest of the imperial powers and the only one whose economic reach was truly global. Darwin's interpretation of the period after 1914 is also broadly in line with our own. His reminder that Britain's position relative to other European great powers was enhanced as a result of the First World War chimes with the emphasis we placed on this point in British Imperialism.¹⁷ Like him, we too stress the fact that Britain's imperial fortunes enjoyed an Indian summer in the 1940s and 1950s.

On the other hand, our assessment of the interwar period differs from his in at least two important respects. We agree that the 1930s were a turning point in that they disrupted the open economy that had been so important to Britain's prosperity and discredited the liberal ideology that accompanied it. Fragile economies made stable polities weak and already weak polities unstable. Nonetheless, we would underline the importance of the period not only for rupturing free trade but for creating the begin­nings of structural economic change in overseas countries that were either within or dependent on the imperial system. These changes, including the coming of imperial preference and protection, were part of a subtle shift in the intricate financial and trading relations that linked Britain, the imperial periphery and some of her industrial rivals. They represent a vigorous and partly successful adaptation to the crisis of the times; their significance will become apparent in our discussion of the chapters by Sugihara and by Akita and Kagatoni.

We also have a different perspective on Britain's economic relations with the United States.¹⁸ Darwin's reference to an Anglo-American alliance in the 1920s draws attention to one aspiring line of thinking but understates the degree of alarm and potential antagonism that also motivated contemporary commentators and policy-makers. Britain regarded the USA as being a serious threat to her dominance of inter­national services. The interwar period saw intense rivalry between the two powers across the world, from Latin America to China, for control of airways and airwaves as well as of trade and investment opportun­ities. Moreover, there was a growing conviction among policy-makers in the United States that the British had to be pushed aside in the struggle for global economic supremacy.¹⁹ To speak of a 'collapse' of this alliance in the 1930s is therefore misleading. The picture Darwin paints of Britain's international position in the 1930s is a shade too gloomy. He forgets that the economic depression hit the United States much harder than Britain, whose rapid adaptation to the crisis raised the prospect of reclaiming ground lost to the USA between 1914 and 1929. It was only after 1936, when faced with a resurgent Germany, Italy and Japan, that despair began to set in and dependence on the United States soon

became a reality.²⁰ Even so, as Darwin notes, the business of empire, like the empire of business, survived the war. The imperial mandate was relaunched; a 'second colonial occupation' was undertaken. Britain was obliged to respond to international developments, but was not yet being driven before them.

III

Bowen and Darwin are at one in holding that imperialism was a sys­tematic and to that extent a coherent phenomenon. The contingent, the unforeseen and the accidental were all present but they do not explain a global process. Phimister's analysis of the partition of Africa takes the same view, though he also argues, as we did too in British Imperialism,²¹ that different explanations are required for different parts of the continent. Since our remarks on this chapter are rather more extensive than on others, we should make it clear that our intention is not to give priority to Phimister's contribution, valuable though it is, but to take the opportunity to enlarge on aspects of our treatment of the African case, which has attracted comments from other scholars too.²²

Phimister begins his assessment in Egypt, which was Gallagher and Robinson's starting point as well in Africa and the Victorians. The weight of research, in his judgement, favours the interpretation put forward in British Imperialism, though he mentions the dissenting opinion of Andrew Porter. It is perhaps worth noting that Porter's brief reference to Egypt was made in 1990 and referred not to British Imperialism, which was still being written, but to an article published in 1986. While the treatment of the Egyptian case in British Imperialism followed the inter­pretation advanced in our earlier work, we took the opportunity to strengthen the argument by drawing on new material - some published since 1986 and some already available but unjustly neglected.²³ The most recent assessments encourage us to believe that the account given in British Imperialism is well founded.²⁴ In particular, Samir Saul's authoritative study of the French sources, has confirmed the over­whelming significance of financial considerations in drawing Britain and France into Egypt.²⁵

Phimister is less satisfied with our treatment of tropical Africa. Nevertheless, his account of West Africa is fully in accord with our inter­pretation, which has been elaborated over many years and, broadly speaking, is in line with conclusions reached independently by other scholars.²⁶ The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a crisis of legitimate commerce: mercantile interests were deeply troubled by the squeeze on profits and by the rise, simultaneously, of new competi­tors, and there were growing fears that French expansionism would draw the region into a protectionist regime. In these circumstances, provincial merchant pressure groups, which had connections with both service and manufacturing sectors, were important in stimulating gov­ernment action. The argument advanced at this point was intended to carry forward, but also to be consistent with, the case put in our earlier work, where we drew attention to the difficulties experienced by Britain's manufactured exports at crucial points in the nineteenth cen­tury.²⁷ It is much harder to fathom the motives behind the partition of East Africa. The regional literature is more fragmentary than in the case of West Africa, and the lack of a comprehensive, modern study of the scramble for this part of the continent ensures that all approaches to the subject face formidable difficulties. Phimister suggests that British interests in the region were limited, but that private entrepreneurs (including Leopold II) were attracted by new opportunities that opened up in the 1870s. This development, he claims, stands in contrast to the situation on the West Coast, where large and long-established trading firms were running into serious problems stemming from the Great Depression (1873-96).

There is certainly a case for arguing, as we did in British Imperialism,²⁸ that speculative interest in East Africa grew following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the decision to appoint a Consul-General in Zanzibar in 1873, and the abolition of the external slave trade in the same year. However, it is not clear that these developments stand in contrast with those in West Africa, as Phimister claims. East Africa had its own problems in making the transition to legitimate commerce.²⁹ It is true that the prices of the two major exports, cloves and ivory, held up (broadly speaking) during the period of partition.³⁰ However, clove prices remained strong in the 1870s partly because the hurricane of 1872 devastated plantations on Zanzibar and cut output dramatically. Although export volumes picked up in the 1880s, it is by no means cer­tain that profitability revived too. Export values peaked in 1880 and did not recover till the 1890s; slave labour was no longer available as read­ily or as cheaply as it had been before 1873; many planters were heav­ily in debt. The price of ivory, the more important of the two leading exports, remained high, but the volume of exports dropped as the ivory frontier was hunted out. It is likely that profits were cut, too: the cost of collecting ivory mounted as the resource became scarce; protection costs rose as competition among ivory traders in the interior grew; transport costs increased as the distance between sources of supply and ports of shipment lengthened. Moreover, once the source of the River Congo was traced (in 1877), it became cheaper to transport ivory from central Africa to the west coast rather than by land to Zanzibar. It is no coincidence that King Leopold shifted his interest from the East Coast to the Congo at this time.

The new, speculative interest in East Africa noted by Phimister, and by ourselves,³¹ has therefore to be set against a background of transition on the mainland that may well be closer to the situation in West Africa than he allows. As economic difficulties translated into political action in West Africa, so the economic basis of the Sultan's position was being eroded even as Kirk, Britain's Consul-General in Zanzibar, was trying to build it up.³² Britain's informal empire on the East Coast was no more substantial than it was on the West Coast.³³ Other powers, principally France and Germany, were able to steal a march on the British and annex impressive stretches of territory. All the same, the value of their gains should not be exaggerated. The British held on to some of the most desirable parts of West Africa (notably the regions that became Nigeria and the Gold Coast) and took control of Kenya. French territory, on the other hand, contained a high proportion of the sahel and the Sahara, while Germany acquired the equally unpromising terrain that eventually became Tanzania.

Phimister's broader concern is that the interpretation of the partition of tropical Africa advanced in British Imperialism,³⁴ sits uncomfortably with our 'insistence...on the proactive part played even here by gentlemanly capitalism'. We think that this is a misreading of our argument. We nowhere claim or imply that gentlemanly capitalism was 'proactive' in this region, which the City found deeply unappeal­ing. The only direct reference we make in the case of West Africa is to the exceptional example of the United African Company's 'comple­ment of aristocrats and reputable financiers'.³⁵ In summarizing our findings on tropical Africa as a whole, we concluded that the Royal Niger Company and the Imperial British East Africa Company 'repre­sented gentlemanly capitalist interests in a dilute form'.³⁶ This is surely an uncontroversial claim and is consistent with what is known of the very limited part played by the City and finance generally in influenc­ing British policy in the region. This is not to deny the possibility that small doses of capital administered by chartered companies could have significant effects when applied to poor, 'new-start' territories.³⁷ Nevertheless, had we tried to force tropical Africa into the framework of gentlemanly capitalism we would have been accused of perpetrating a sizeable exaggeration. At the same time, we judged that we should guard against the alternative criticism, namely that tropical Africa dis­proves our thesis, by drawing attention to its low ranking on the scale of Britain's world-wide priorities and by underlining the overwhelming importance of Egypt and South Africa, where British interests were upheld and expanded. In assessing the outcome of the scramble, specialists on Africa, especially tropical Africa, need to keep the wider picture in view. Britain's substantial ties with the large, developing economies of the white empire, Latin America and India made it less necessary and indeed often counter-productive for her to compete unreservedly for risky areas, such as China, the Ottoman Empire and tropical Africa, where high costs were guaranteed, where the returns were problematic, and where destabilizing wars could easily break out. Our argument was never that gentlemanly capitalism provides the key to all doors, but that it offers considerable leverage in explaining the main trends of imperial expansion over the long term and in the most important cases.

Phimister takes a different tack with regard to South Africa, accusing us in this case of sounding too much like Robinson and Gallagher. He also makes the interesting claim that we sell the concept of gentlemanly capitalism short by failing to recognize an implicit contradiction between the South Africa that was developing as a result of economic change and that desired by the politicians. His central point is that Selborne's famous memorandum of 1896, which formed the main plank of British policy after the failure of the notorious Jameson Raid in the previous year, did not forecast that South Africa would fall under Afrikaner dominance if the Transvaal remained independent, as we and Robinson and Gallagher suggested. Rather, the memorandum was con­cerned with the emergence of a regime in the Transvaal dominated by white settlers who had been attracted to the gold fields and who, Selborne predicted, would shortly become ascendant in South Africa as a whole. Other scholars have seen this point,³⁸ but Phimister is the first to pursue it. He interprets this emerging settler capitalism as being a good example of informal imperialism driven by the City - an offshoot, that is to say, of gentlemanly capitalism. However, it was also a devel­opment that cut across the aims of British statesmen - another arm of gentlemanly capitalism - who wanted to unite South Africa under the British flag, as they had done in Canada, and feared that the settlers would steer a more independent course. Phimister's conclusion, there­fore, is that politics and economics were at war with each other in South Africa and that the former had to bring the latter to heel in the Anglo­Boer war of 1899-1902.

We accept Phimister's suggestive interpretation of the content of Selborne's memorandum, and we recognize, too, that capital and pol­itics could sometimes march in different directions in South Africa. Rothschild's loan to the Transvaal regime in 1892, for example, was intended to bring it under closer financial control. In practice, however, the loan allowed Kruger to finish the construction of a railway line that gave the Transvaal an outlet to the sea in Portuguese Mozambique and enhanced the republic's independence from Britain.³⁹ Phimister's argu­ment could also be bolstered by noting that a rising proportion of the white settlers in the Transvaal came from Germany, Scandinavia and Ireland, and were not natural allies in schemes hatched in London for uniting South Africa under the British flag and the Colonial Office.⁴⁰ The Colonial Office viewed this development as increasing the threat posed by German imperialism in South Africa;⁴¹ the Boers themselves came to be regarded as 'outriders of German expansionism'.⁴²

Even when these allowances have been made, however, it does not necessarily follow that what was unfolding in South Africa implied a fundamental antagonism between two arms of gentlemanly capitalism. Some senior figures in Britain wanted to see British settlers in control of the Transvaal. Others, however, were willing to accept the emergence in the Republic of either a mixed settler regime or a liberalized Afrikaner one. They assumed that this state would be the forerunner of a united South Africa that would be tied to Britain in the same loose but effect­ive way as the other fledgling Dominions, such as Canada and Australia. It is important to keep in mind the fact that the continued dependence of the Dominions on the City of London ensured that they remained part of Britain's financial empire long after the devolution of formal political control, and that their independence was heavily constrained as a result. Most Liberal statesmen and some prominent Conservatives (including Balfour)⁴³ thought that South Africa would follow this model; had they been in control of policy after 1895, it is possible that war might have been avoided.

The advent of Joseph Chamberlain as Colonial Secretary in 1895 and of Milner, the High Commissioner from 1897, moved policy in a differ­ent direction. Their overarching aim was to bring about a united white empire, if necessary under tariff protection. In their view, Britain would have to become 'Greater Britain' if it were to be strong enough to meet the challenge of the United States and Germany in the twentieth century.⁴⁴ The loosely jointed South African federation favoured by the Liberals would not have served this cause and might well have undermined it altogether. As Chamberlain put it in 1895: 'an entirely independent Republic, governed by or for the capitalists of the Rand, would be very much worse for British interests in the Transvaal itself and for British influence in South Africa'.⁴⁵ More assertive policies were needed if the imperial superstate was to be realized, and it was these that eventually ended in war in 18 99.⁴⁶ Thus it can be argued that there was a built-in antagonism between Chamberlain's strategy and the finance-led policy of informal empire that preceded it in South Africa and that it was generally much more representative of British attitudes to areas of white settlement. The South African statesman, Jan Christian Smuts, later held that British policy between 1895 and 1905 was an aberration, and in many ways he was right.⁴⁷ Chamberlain's agenda was unusual: it was driven by concerns about the future of British industry rather than guided by the usual gentlemanly norms. Indeed, it is even tempting to suggest that the South African war may be that rare event in British history, an example of 'industrial imperialism'.⁴⁸

However, if South Africa is placed in the context of Chamberlain's overall policy as Colonial Secretary after 1895, this judgement can be seen to be too extreme. Chamberlain wanted to use the apparatus of the state to develop the economic resources of the empire by means of 'con­structive imperialism'.⁴⁹ To achieve this aim he had to bring together a new coalition of interests, giving industry a more prominent place, but with the City and gentlemanly institutions like the Treasury and the Crown Agents incorporated within it.⁵⁰ Given Chamberlain's back­ground, it could be argued that such a coalition, had it materialized, would have been an expression of industrial imperialism: his famous speech to the City in 1904 certainly argued that the prosperity of finance depended upon the health of industry rather than the reverse.⁵¹ Alternatively, Chamberlain's strategy can be thought of as an attempt to forge a new partnership between the City, industry and the state, one that would reshape and re-energize, rather than replace, gentlemanly capitalist forces.

In whatever way Chamberlain's initiatives are interpreted, his policy was short-lived: his crusade for empire unity, like his proposals for imperial development, died in the election of 1906. The South African Union of 1910 was built on fairly traditional lines, with strong local self­government constrained by the invisible, but powerful, reins of finan­cial dependence. This outcome was closer to Selborne's vision than to Chamberlain's.⁵² Selborne's ideas are particularly interesting in this con­nection given the emphasis Phimister places on his thinking and the fact that, as High Commissioner in South Africa between 1906 and 1910, he was the key figure in bringing about the Union. As Under­Secretary at the Colonial Office in the late 1890s, Selborne went along with Chamberlain's views on colonial development, including support­ing tariff reform and imperial federation. However, Selborne had a more flexible attitude to South African union than either Chamberlain or Milner. The defeat of tariff reform in 1906 did not deflect him from pursuing the goal of a unified South Africa within a federated empire. To this end he was much more inclined to co-operate with the Afrikaners, whereas Chamberlain and Milner were obsessed with making South Africa ethnically British. Selborne also showed greater willingness to encourage local political autonomy. Moreover, his concern with creating a South African Union was directly related to the problem of establishing a credit-worthy political unit. Union under the British Crown would enable South Africa to raise funds in the City of London to build the infrastructure that, Selborne believed, was crucial to bringing Afrikaner, British and foreign communities together and to forging a strong state on the basis of successful economic development.

It seems to us, therefore, that Phimister's analysis of the content of Selborne's memorandum can support a conclusion that differs from the one he drew. Selborne recognized that there was work to be done in associating South Africa's settlers with the empire, but he did not believe that there was a fundamental incompatibility between the two. Above all, Selborne was far friendlier to the City than Chamberlain was, and he had a firm belief in its ability to spread capitalist development on a global scale. Since he was both 'a gentleman and a capitalist',⁵³ his conviction on this matter should cause no surprise. Moreover, Selborne's beliefs outlived Chamberlain's. Not for the first time, gentle­manly capitalism proved its staying power.

IV

Exactly when the gentlemanly capitalist elite ran out of stamina is the central concern of Krozewski's chapter, which carries the story forward to the concluding stages of empire. Krozewski is in sympathy with our emphasis on the centrality of financial considerations, and has himself made a major contribution to our understanding of this theme in relation to decolonization.⁵⁴ However, he is dissatisfied with other aspects of what he terms our 'continuity thesis' because he feels that we have projected a set of nineteenth-century relationships forward to the mid-twentieth century, when the structure of society and governments had changed markedly, without demonstrating that the gentlemanly capitalist elite (assuming that it existed after 1945) remained in charge of policy. By extension, he claims that we failed to offer an analysis of the British state in the period after the Second World War and that we underestimated the changing international context, which acted as an increasing constraint on policy-makers, whether gentlemen or not. This leads him to offer a further qualification of our 'continuity thesis' by arguing that after 1960 policy-makers had no interest in revitalizing 'the old empire in an informal way'.

We willingly accept that our argument for the period after 1945 was schematic; its purpose, as we explicitly stated, was 'less to prove a thesis than to show how it might be constructed'.⁵⁵ Krozewski's thoughts on how the period might be opened up by a more detailed analysis that improves on our own are therefore to be welcomed. However, it does not seem to us that this desirable enlargement of our thinking requires the abandonment either of our continuity thesis or of the notion of gentlemanly capitalism. Our main concern in carrying our inter­pretation into the twentieth century was to escape from the traditional historical divide which treated the period before 1914 as being one of imperial expansion and the period after 1918 as being one of decline. In our view, long-established priorities of international and imperial policy, held in place by a gentlemanly elite, survived the war, were applied to the changing conditions of the world slump, the Second World War, and the needs of postwar reconstruction, and achieved greater success during this period than historians have usually allowed.

Rubinstein's recent research provides systematic evidence to show that the gentlemanly elite was not eliminated after 1914, despite the ravages of war, and that it remained in robust health throughout the interwar period.⁵⁶ Gentlemanly values underwent a form of 'moral rearmament' in the 1920s in response to the twin threats of Bolshevism from abroad and heightened radicalism (symbolized by the General Strike of 1926) at home.⁵⁷ Indeed, the General Strike marked the end of the social solidarity induced by the wartime emergency: 'officers and gentlemen' were prominent among the volunteer strike-breakers who helped to defend property and privilege against the radical challenge. Prewar policy priorities were reaffirmed in the celebratory 'bonfire of controls' that followed the peace settlement, in the return to the gold standard, and in the hope that 'normal service' would shortly be resumed on a world-wide scale.

Unfortunately, Rubinstein's work, or its equivalent, has yet to be extended beyond 1939. Nevertheless, there is no clear, evidential basis for Krozewski's view that the gentlemanly elite had lost its place by 1945, even though the state had become larger and had acquired a stronger technocratic element. The claim appears to rest on the assump­tion that the war and allied social change overturned or submerged the prewar order. But the upper ranks of the Labour Government, which Krozewski refers to, contained more gentlemen than proletarians: for every Bevin there were several Attlees and Gaitskells. As is well known, too, the Labour Government willingly shouldered the burdens of empire, and gentlemen such as Creech Jones and Andrew Cohen masterminded its progressive imperial policies.⁵⁸ The continuity of the 'Treasury view' within Whitehall has been well documented, as has its resistance to Keynesianism even after 1945.⁵⁹ The enduring vitality of the gentlemanly complement in the City has also been affirmed.⁶⁰ Moreover, Labour's Chamberlainite imperialist policies were partly sub­verted in the 1950s by a more traditional cosmopolitanism in which the City had an increasingly important role.⁶¹ At the same time, the return to power of Conservative governments ensured the continuing prom­inence of the gentlemanly elite and created new opportunities for its patrician wing.⁶² The striking visibility and evident resilience of the aristocratic and gentlemanly order were subjects of popular discussion among contemporaries. The familiar term, 'the Establishment', was coined in the 1950s in a critique of the continuing hold of Oxbridge and City elites over British policies and ideas.⁶³

Accordingly, Krozewski's claim that our interpretation of the period after 1945 is little more than an inference from a historical legacy created in the nineteenth century seems to us to be an assertion that fails to do justice to the evidence, incomplete though it is.⁶⁴ We carried our argument forward because it became apparent in the course of our research that the gentlemanly order was sufficiently athletic to carry itself forward - in, through, and out of two world wars. Gentlemanly capitalism had an important part to play in government and the City throughout the 1950s. There is no compelling reason for separating it from policy-making or from what Krozewski calls 'the financial dimen­sion'. For these reasons, its history is also part of the history of the state that Krozewski rightly wishes to see written. In mounting this defence, we also recognize that our description of the gentlemanly elite after 1945 needs to be filled out considerably and that relations between the elite and other influential groups, especially in allied branches of big business, need further investigation.⁶⁵

Moreover, there is the important question, raised implicitly but not answered by Krozewski, of when and why the gentlemanly order withered away. The view sketched in British Imperialism still seems to us to point in the right direction.⁶⁶ Gentlemen were sufficiently recognizable in the 1960s and 70s by their dress, bearing, accent, and occupations to be objects of both emulation and satire. Thereafter, they steadily lost identity and visibility. Two events symbolize the change: the election in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher's 'new' Conservative government, which launched a sustained attack on the professions and public service, and the advent of 'Big Bang', which opened up the City in 1986. Standing behind these events were profound, underlying forces making for change: the creation of the welfare state, especially the widening of opportunities in higher education after 1945, the steady Americanization of the 'British way of life', structural shifts in the world economy, and of course the demise of empire itself. All continuities come to an end eventually. But the decline of the gentlemanly elite, like the fall of the empire, should not be proclaimed before its due time. The gentlemanly order survived, through successive transmutations, for as long as the condi­tions that nurtured it remained in place - and these were present through the twentieth century to the point where the long imperial story ended in decolonization.⁶⁷

Krozewski opens his discussion of the international aspects of our argument by questioning our definition of imperialism, particularly our failure to give sufficient emphasis to the role of the state in the twenti­eth century and the difficulty of measuring infringements of sovereignty. Our response to the first point, as argued above, is to say that we believe we have contributed, however modestly, to an understanding of the nature of the twentieth-century state by drawing attention to the continued vitality of the gentlemanly order and its important role in policy-making. As for the difficulty of devising an index to record degrees of effective subordination, we would agree that this is indeed a formidable task. All solutions are constrained by the inherently intractable nature of the problem. However, the attempt is still worth making because it obliges historians to think analytically about a subject that has often been treated far too loosely. Some measures of dependence, such as trade and capital flows, can be identi­fied quite precisely; others, such as cultural influences, cannot be recorded in quite the same way. But this does not mean that they can­not be recorded at all. The resulting assessment is then put forward for consideration in just the same way as that relating to any other large, complex historical issue. The difficulty of determining what is meant by imperialism is therefore no greater, at least in principle, than that of deciding the meaning of other weighty holistic terms, such as class, revolution or the state.

Krozewski goes on to make two points of substance regarding our treatment of the postwar colonial order. He qualifies what he calls our 'second continuity thesis' by denying that policy-makers aimed at revitalizing 'the old empire in an informal way' after 1960. This criticism appears to be aimed at the wrong target. In our view, the possibility of extending Britain's influence informally only surfaced late in the day because it was not until the mid-1950s that the formal decolonization of the empire, which had been repositioned and reinvigorated after the war and the loss of India, gained a prominent place on the agenda.⁶⁸ As it did so, however, a number of other devel­opments were also claiming attention. From the late 1950s, Britain turned increasingly to the European Community and to the developed world generally; plans were made for establishing Britain as a financial centre within the emerging Pax Americana; decolonization was hurried on. After 1960 Britain still hoped to retain influence in her former empire, but these broader developments made any attempt to recon­struct a full-blown informal empire quixotic as well as increasingly unnecessary. Krozewski's second observation calls for a comparative approach to the study of the European empires in the postwar era, prin­cipally to determine the relationship between social structures, the state and international (financial) policy - though of course the agenda could be greatly extended. On this subject there is no difference between us: we were sufficiently aware of our own insularity in British Imperialism to make the same appeal,⁶⁹ and we have recently readvertised both the need and the opportunities.⁷⁰ The study of empires should span even more frontiers than it does at present; Krozewski is a historian who is especially well-equipped to respond to his own challenge.

V

The remaining five chapters of the book focus on the Far East and pro­vide between them a fascinating insight into the workings of informal imperialism in the twentieth century. The essays on China deal with the British presence; those written from a Japanese perspective also show how Japan's informal influence in the region expanded in response to her own economic development, and how this, in turn, was related to the evolution of gentlemanly capitalism in Britain. In offering new evidence and new thinking, these essays point the way towards a comparative history of imperialism built on the merging of separate historiographical traditions - a wholly appropriate development, it might be thought, in an era of globalization.

Petersson's chapter on British policy towards China adds a new dimension to the study of a crucial period while also improving our understanding of the distinctive qualities of gentlemanly capitalism. As the most important foreign economic power in China, Britain had a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo. British China­watchers had been on the lookout for ways of opening China's econ­omy to the wider world since at least the Macartney mission of 1792-94, but they were wary of any initiative that might undermine the stability of China because they recognized how disastrously counter­productive it would be.⁷¹ At the turn of the century, they had good rea­son to fear that a combination of internal political weakness and foreign competition for access to China's resources, following the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, would end in partition. This outcome would have dealt a heavy blow to Britain's existing economic interests, which relied on the central government to service its foreign debt and on the free flow of trade through and between the widely scattered Treaty Ports. Partition, it was thought, would also retard the development, for at least a generation, of what most British observers regarded as being the great­est potential market in the world. The comparison with the Ottoman Empire, where a similar policy was adopted, is instructive; so, too, is the contrast with Africa, where political weakness manifested itself in a multiplicity of small polities that invited partition rather than pre- servation.⁷²

In these circumstances, the gentlemanly capitalist strategy was to promote a form of financial 'inter-imperialism'⁷³ by locking the great powers into a policy that would both produce economic growth and uphold China's political unity. Petersson is quite correct in believing that this policy had distinctive gentlemanly-capitalist attributes. It relied on the hegemony of the City in world finance - a hegemony that was actively supportive of gentlemanly capitalism itself. It also depended on notions of financial cosmopolitanism and free trade that underwrote the City's international position and were deeply etched into the psyche of the gentlemanly capitalist politicians who orches­trated British policy in China.⁷⁴ Britain's plan for world development envisaged that benefits would flow to all participants.⁷⁵ China would be transformed into a modern state and all foreign powers would gain through increased opportunities for trade. It is undoubtedly the case that Britain's model of global economic development was more inter­nationalist in its approach than that of any other major power. There was also a genuine streak of idealism in this plan for improving the world. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the City's dom­inance and the survival of the whole gentlemanly enterprise in Britain were dependent on maximizing world trade and international financial flows and on keeping the peace.⁷⁶ It is in this context that Petersson's stress on the pacifist inclinations of gentlemanly capitalism has to be understood: it had less to do with an unreflective adherence to Cobdenite cosmopolitanism than with a shrewd assessment of where Britain's interests lay.

Petersson's stimulating assessment of these themes enables us to underline two of the distinctive qualities of gentlemanly capitalism. In the first place, as our foregoing remarks imply, gentlemen did not always stand aside for others. Gentility was the product of privilege. It imposed a code of conduct that emphasized the concepts of duty and service but also endorsed aristocratic and military values. Gentlemen were expected to show a degree of muscular prowess and were entitled to act forcefully to protect the weak or to defend the national interest. Restraint was called for in China; assertiveness manifested itself in Africa. The second feature that Petersson emphasizes is the relationship between co-operative imperialism and the national interest. This is a fascinating theme that needs more thought than it has received so far. On the principle that capital knows no frontiers, investment groups based in different countries established connections that cut across national interests in the late nineteenth century. Evidently, this devel­opment may not be captured by standard accounts of the history of modern imperialism that are based on the expansion of any one coun­try. At the same time, as Petersson's subtle analysis reveals, the outlook of French and German financiers differed from that of the City, whether because governments that had different assumptions and priorities influenced them or because they adopted different lending policies. Above all, the French and German firms lacked the spacious world view of Britain's gentlemanly capitalists and the scale of operations that went with it.

In sharp contrast to Shunhong Zhang's judgement,⁷⁷ Petersson sees the Chinese case as being a prime example of gentlemanly capitalism at work. He refers to the period 1905-11 in particular as being the 'golden age' of gentlemanly capitalism in China. This was the time when rela­tions between the great powers were such as to encourage them to fall in with Britain's own plans for China, and when British finance was able to revert to its preferred strategy of informal expansion. Petersson has performed an important service in identifying subdivisions in a period that we were obliged to treat as an entity, and his argument that British policy was at its least encumbered between 1905 and 1911 is a persuasive one. On the other hand, the detailed knowledge that led him to this conclusion may also have foreshortened his view of Britain's long-run position in China.

It seems to us that there is still a great deal to be said for treating 1895 as being the key date for the application of Britain's China policy. It was only then that China, in the wake of defeat at the hands of Japan, became dependent on foreign capital and thus faced the possibility of becoming, like the Ottoman Empire, subservient to foreign creditors. It was then that Britain took the lead in organizing an international loan that gave the Chinese government the opportunity to pay off its mas­sive war indemnity. It was then, too, that other major powers acquired an interest in maintaining the existing imperial regime.⁷⁸ There is no doubt that China's instability in the late 1890s and early 1900s encour­aged policies to become more predatory. British policy-makers were obliged to participate, whether they liked it or not, to delineate spheres of interest for themselves and to fight for concessions for their nation­als. Nevertheless, the main aim of promoting the unity of China and of using joint-financing as a means of achieving it remained, and in the more benign atmosphere that accompanied the years from 1905 to 1911 it also flowered. Even so, Britain's success was not unqualified: international financial alliances were not easily forged, and the City's doubts about China's prospects sometimes slowed down progress markedly.⁷⁹

British policy undoubtedly ran into much greater difficulties after 1911 as a result of the collapse of the imperial regime and changes in European politics. Yet the British stuck to their task: the 'one China' pol­icy was resurrected through the Six-power Loan for the new regime in 1912. Petersson's account of this period can be amplified by noting that the policy ran into trouble in Britain itself, where it was assailed by a band of ungentlemanly capitalists, including some in the City who were excluded from the China loan market, which had fallen under the con­trol of the Foreign Office, the Hongkong and Shanghai bank and a small coterie of merchant bankers and their foreign correspondents. Britain's cosmopolitan policy was also attacked by provincial industrial groups who resented the fact that it encouraged competition among European merchants in China in the interests of maintaining a united front in matters of finance.⁸⁰ However, these groups were unable to disturb the priorities of British policy, which remained essentially unaltered after 1911. Although modified to fit changing circumstances, the strategy continued to be applied throughout the 1920s, if with less success than in its heyday before the First World War. It made considerable progress in the 1930s, too, until it was destroyed, this time beyond repair, by Japan's invasion of China in 1937.⁸¹

VI

Shunhong Zhang's contribution is especially interesting not only for its substantive comments but also for the insights it offers into the think­ing of a Chinese historian at a time when China appears finally to be 'opening up' to the outside world. At present, this process is more apparent in economic affairs than in political and intellectual spheres. As a national institution, the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, where Professor Shunhong is based, still has an important part to play in presenting the official view to the world. This may explain why Shunhong's starting point appears to be a rather basic and largely unre­constructed Marxism that is startling to scholars in the West (and prob­ably in Japan too), where this approach, even in its refined versions, has lost considerable ground in recent years. His boldness in dealing with Western views of imperialism is to be admired, even though it does not always fit well with the detailed literature. Nevertheless, Shunhong may be ahead of the game rather than behind it: the developing debate on globalization, spurred on by the recent attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, is now giving renewed prominence to the history of material developments and is shifting attention from the cultural pri­orities elevated by postmodernism. Exactly how Marxist approaches can be related to the twenty-first century is a matter that has still to be addressed satisfactorily, but it seems certain that they will need to be applied imaginatively to new circumstances and not simply carried for­ward and clamped on a changed world.

Shunhong opens his essay by objecting to our definition of imperial­ism. Much of what he has to say is valid, at least in principle, as a way of extending our discussion. However, as a criticism of what we set out to do, it is misplaced. Our definition, as we made clear, was tailored to our purpose, which was concerned with causes, not with consequences. Shunhong believes that 'the crucial nature of imperialism is that one nation oppresses, exploits and enslaves another'. This may be so, but this conception is concerned with the results of imperialism, and can­not be used to refute an interpretation that treats only its causes. His conclusion that we have 'whitewashed' imperialism is wholly unfounded: we explicitly stated that we were not going to deal with the morality or the effects of empire-building;⁸² accordingly, there is no basis for the inference that he has drawn. Moreover, Shunhong sets himself a series of unacknowledged difficulties in asserting that imperi­alism entailed fixed consequences. Aside from the well-known problems of defining exploitation, the record shows that the consequences of imperialism varied across space and through time. Marx himself held that capitalism was progressive as well as exploitative. It is unreasonable and unhistorical to suppose that the results of imperialism were identi­cal or even broadly similar in cases as far from one another as New Zealand and Nigeria. In their chapter in this volume, for example, Akita and Kagotani draw attention to the developmental consequences of Japanese rule in Korea without supposing that this outcome absolves Japan from charges of oppression. The weight of evidence is against Shunhong in the case of China too: recent research has indicated that the late nineteenth century, when foreign powers began the process of opening China up, saw the beginning of economic development on a significant scale.⁸³

Shunhong is on firmer ground in searching for weaknesses in our claims regarding the influence of gentlemanly capitalist interests. His main argument here is that we underestimated the importance of indus­try and the manufacturing lobby. However, as we have recently pointed out, it was never our purpose to deny the significance of the process of industrialization or to underplay the role of the manufacturing inter­est.⁸⁴ We ourselves drew attention, for example, to Palmerston's forceful policy in seeking to create markets for manufactured goods in the 1840s, though in our view this was a sign of the difficulties being experi­enced by British industry, not an indication of its effortless superiority.⁸⁵ What we claimed was that manufacturing interests failed to become the dominant force shaping British policy. Arguments to the contrary, though often asserted, have yet to be substantiated. Even Ward's careful restatement of the case for giving industrialization a more prominent role in the story of imperial expansion is based on the general proposi­tion that wealth derived from industrialization underpinned Britain's expansion overseas, and not on detailed studies of the manufacturing lobby in action.⁸⁶ The issue is an important one but it also draws the dis­cussion away from Shunhong's main concern with matters of agency and policy formulation.

On these subjects, Shunhong cites two principal examples in support of his position: Macartney's mission to China in 1792-94, and British loans to China at the close of the nineteenth century.⁸⁷ It is perfectly true, as Shunhong says, that Macartney was sent to China to promote British commercial interests.⁸⁸ However, this is not the same as saying that Macartney was acting as an agent for British manufacturing inter­ests.⁸⁹ Macartney's twin aims were to extend the privileges of the strug­gling East India Company, which was searching for new sources of rev­enue, and to generate additional ways of paying for imports of China tea.⁹⁰ The chief means of attaining these goals was by expanding India's exports to China. Macartney's mission failed but the incentive remained. It helped to draw the British further into India to promote exports of cotton goods and indigo from Awadh (Oudh),⁹¹ and it gen­erated an important clandestine export trade in opium, which was shipped from western India to China.⁹² If British manufactures could participate in the expansion of trade with China, then so much the bet­ter. But experience suggested that this was unlikely to happen on a sig­nificant scale, and experience proved to be a reliable guide: China was not opened up in the 1790s. When the East India Company's monopoly of trade with India was abolished in 1813, it was not because of pressure from British manufacturers;⁹³ indeed, British cotton textiles did not make sizeable inroads even into the Indian market, which was under British control, until the 1840s.

A century after Macartney's mission, when Britain again seemed on the brink of prising China open, the economic forces impelling overseas expansion had been transformed: foreign investment and invisible income had surged; the products of the industrial revolution had become established in many parts of the world. Shunhong makes the point that British industry, as well as British finance, gained from the limited opening of China at this time. Again, while this is true, it has also to be said that we did not attempt to argue a contrary case, though it is interesting to see that Britain, as a mature creditor, was also starting to lend money to finance sales of the products of other industrializing countries, including Germany, at this time. To this extent, there was the beginning of a conflict between the two interest groups. Nevertheless, our interpretation of the case of China did not depend on this point. Our argument was rather that finance was the more important of the two interests. China's economy was beginning to expand in the 1890s, but trade with Europe failed to take off.⁹⁴ Silk exports remained import­ant, but exports of tea withered under competition from India, and imports of opium declined as cultivation of the opium poppy spread in China itself. Exports of 'muck and truck' items grew, but not on a scale that was capable of raising purchasing power to the point where signifi­cant imports of manufactured consumer goods could be sustained.

In these circumstances, the best prospects for business expansion lay elsewhere: in government loans, and investment in railways, mining concessions, shipping, and property in the Treaty Ports. This emphasis is endorsed by Petersson's contribution to this volume, which argues that the period 1905-11 was the 'golden age' of gentlemanly imperial­ism in China.⁹⁵ As he also suggests, British investment in Chinese gov­ernment loans and in railway construction served both economic and political purposes. It gave the gentlemen of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, in particular, a position of influence in the formulation of British policy towards China during this period - one rarely aspired to and never achieved by British manufacturers.⁹⁶ As for the latter, we argued in British Imperialism that, after 1850, Britain's international eco­nomic policy evolved in such a way as to encourage foreign industrial­ization and to subject British manufacturing to severe competition at home. This argument is extended and amplified in the essays by Sugihara and by Akita and Kagatoni discussed below, and it provides an effective counter to Shunhong's claims about the importance of manu­facturing interests in policy.

Shunhong's final criticism of substance concerns the process of decol­onization after the Second World War. His basic argument is that our account is in error because it fails to give sufficient weight either to the liberating influence of the Soviet Union or to the rising force of nation­alism. Shunhong takes this position because his perspective on the end of empire does not include the perception that the imperial powers might have been willing to concede independence for reasons other than external pressure.

We have already acknowledged that our interpretation of the period after 1945 was deliberately schematic:⁹⁷ what we did was attenuated; what we omitted was considerable. A full account of decolonization would certainly be obliged to allocate considerable space to the emer­gence of the Soviet Union as a superpower and to its influence on colo­nial nationalist movements. Our focus was the narrower one of showing that gentlemanly interests had a continuing part to play in the final stages of empire. To the extent that we brought other great powers into this story, we did so by concentrating on Anglo-American relations because these had a more direct bearing on Britain's policies towards the empire and on her international financial aspirations. All the same, Shunhong's claim that 'the Soviet Union was the greatest international force which contributed to the collapse of colonial empires' is surely an exaggeration. It ignores the fact that colonial nationalists drew heavily on the ideology of the Free World in staking their claims for independ­ence, and it fails to recognize the extent to which the Soviet Union was itself perceived to be an expanding empire and not simply a benign, lib­erating force.

Shunhong complements his emphasis on the Soviet Union by suggest­ing that we also underestimated the strength of colonial nationalism. He seems puzzled by what he calls our 'inconsistency' in drawing attention to Britain's weakening grip on India and her changing economic interests there. However, the 'inconsistency' arises only because Shunhong's pre­suppositions do not allow him to accept that Britain's interests and British policy could respond to other influences. If this confining assumption is discarded, it becomes possible to see that both rising nationalism and changing interests were important in influencing the official mind. Moreover, Shunhong's interpretation ignores the fact that Britain had a well-established exit route from empire via the creation of dominion sta­tus, and that India herself was already moving towards self-government before the war. He fails to see, too, that the end of British rule in India was consistent with the repositioning of the empire elsewhere and that, dur­ing this 'second colonial occupation' resistance to British rule was dealt with firmly in places as far apart as Kenya and Malaya.

Shunhong concludes his discussion of the independence movements by dealing with the concept of neo-colonialism. His pre-formed view of imperialism obliges him to look for continuing subordination and oppression after the achievement of formal independence. Not surpris­ingly, he finds several examples. This outcome sits uneasily with his pre­vious argument: the colonial power had just lost its empire because it was overwhelmed by the forces of nationalism, but was then able, so it seems, to exert neo-colonialist control once independence has been granted. Shunhong's assessment misses the important fact that the British were increasingly keen to decolonize from the mid-1950s onwards. The world economy was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and Britain's priorities were changing with it.⁹⁸ Moreover, empire had never been synonymous with the interests of gentlemanly capitalism, which had ranged far outside it before the 1930s, and by the mid-1950s were again seeking a wider, cosmopolitan field of enterprise. The British undoubtedly made an effort to work with and to influence colonial nationalists where they had interests to pre­serve. But they did not always succeed⁹⁹ and their commitment to the endeavour faded as they formed new attachments elsewhere in the era of post-colonial globalization that was just beginning.

VII

Kaoru Sugihara's essay adds a striking new dimension to the discussion of British imperialism and its impact on world economic development. The argument he constructs builds on materials to be found in British Imperialism but takes the question of industrialization in 'late start' countries much further than we did. In doing so, he offers a perspective on the emergence of the world economy after 1870, and on Britain's part in creating it, that echoes Gilpin's characterization, published a generation ago, of Britain as a 'mature creditor'.¹⁰⁰ Our own interpret­ation of this theme was confined largely to Britain's relationship with the Dominions and India before 1939. Sugihara demonstrates that the same forces, transmitted by the City of London, were at work on a much wider scale and can provide important insights into the industrializa­tion of East Asia in particular.

Sugihara's main contention is that the open regime promoted by Britain encouraged the spread of modern industry on a world-wide scale and thus eventually undermined Britain's imperial power. Whatever Britain's original intentions, her international economic policy indir­ectly allowed her own economy to be shaped by the industrialization of others. As this is a proposition of great importance, it is worth spelling out the basis of the argument in some detail. Until 1930, British policy was based primarily on the maintenance of the gold standard and free trade. Her role as the primary supplier of international services, 'lender of last resort', and foreign investor facilitated the growth of manufac­turing industries elsewhere; her massive overseas investments created the need for recipients to repay their debts in sterling. These debts could be met, and sterling crises avoided, by exporting to the open British market. However, by allowing access to the British market in this way, free trade promoted manufacturing in debtor countries. It also limited Britain's bargaining power in international trade relations.¹⁰¹ She had no way of negotiating reductions in the tariffs of countries that hin­dered exports of her own manufactures, despite the fact that, poten­tially, she had considerable market power. It has recently been argued, for example, that Britain's share of world trade was high enough, even in 1913, to produce a net gain in income had she chosen to impose tar­iffs on imported manufactures.¹⁰² The free trade and foreign investment nexus also encouraged competitive industrialization in a more direct manner. Debtor nations could generate the sterling needed to meet their obligations not only by exporting commodities to Britain but also by excluding British goods from their markets by promoting import­substituting manufactures. Where Britain was able to impose 'free-trade imperialism', as in the Ottoman Empire down to the First World War and in China until the 1920s, this problem could be avoided. Where tar­iff autonomy remained or was recaptured, it could provide an impor­tant stimulus to industrialization, as in the case of Japan after she repu­diated the 'unequal treaties' in 1899.

British policy changed in the 1930s, when the gold standard was abandoned and sterling became a floating currency, to which numerous other currencies were pegged. The system of preferences agreed at Ottawa also replaced the free-trade regime. Nevertheless, Britain's global relationships remained fundamentally unchanged. Trade preferences helped debtors to find a niche in the British market, while their serious balance of payments problems in the 1930s encouraged further efforts to promote import-substituting manufactures. We drew attention to this process in the Dominions, India and Argentina, where preferences and quotas in the British market were supplemented by pegging cur­rencies to sterling at devalued exchange rates.¹⁰³ Sugihara shows that Japan did exactly the same with the yen after 1932, with the result that Japan effectively joined the sterling area. This connection helped to extend sterling's influence, but it also built up the industry that even­tually fed Japan's militarization and made it possible for her to over­whelm the British empire in East Asia after 1941. China's short burst of industrialization in the late 1930s was promoted in much the same way.¹⁰⁴

Sugihara recognizes how the open regime that exposed domestic industry to foreign competition also encouraged the growth of the ser­vice sector. As we emphasized in British Imperialism, this shift was fos­tered by the City of London and fuelled by its growing international business. The City became the most distinctive feature of Britain's eco­nomic development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen­turies, and its success underpinned the wealth and status of the gentlemanly elite.¹⁰⁵ Since the City depended on the growth of world trade and that growth depended on continuing industrialization in other parts of the world, Sugihara is right to say that the maintenance of gentlemanly capitalist structures in Britain into the twentieth cen­tury was a function of the evolving world economy.¹⁰⁶ Equally, he is correct to point out that the international economic system had room for only one finance-service complex to act as the midwife to world industrialization in this way. The reason for this, which perhaps he should have mentioned, is that income from international services was much smaller than that from goods at this time, and could only support one leading economy. It is worth observing in this connection that the dominance Britain had enjoyed in world exports of manufactures encouraged the openness and the global reach that made it easier for her to become the leading provider of international services.

Capitalizing on this opportunity, as Sugihara points out, required great experience and the generation of trust. The gentlemanly capitalist regime possessed these qualities in abundance, and it was this superior­ity that made it unique.¹⁰⁷ Since comparative advantage in finance and services is much more culture-specific than it is in manufacturing, Britain's supremacy in this sector - and the supremacy of the class that dominated it - lasted a great deal longer than its industrial leadership.

Much of Sugihara's argument reflects concerns expressed at the time by opponents of the economic priorities promoted by gentlemanly cap­italism. Hobson, whom Sugihara refers to on more than one occasion, believed that the stream of British investment flowing abroad would eventually lead to the industrialization of Asia and to the correspond­ing deindustrialization of Britain unless there was a massive shift in pur­chasing power to divert capital to the home market.¹⁰⁸ Joseph Chamberlain, as we have just seen, also worried that the City-led foreign investment regime, in conjunction with free trade, would result in the destruction of British industry. Since he equated industry with power, and power with the strength of the empire, he concluded that the outcome would be disastrous for Britain's place in the world in the twentieth century. His ill-fated tariff reform campaign was designed pre­cisely to counter this threat.¹⁰⁹ Britain's inability under the free-trade regime to negotiate with other industrializing nations infuriated the Tariff Reformers. In their view, unilateral free trade meant that, by manipulating their own tariffs, foreign countries could determine what Britain could and could not manufacture. Protection, therefore, was vital too if Britain was to shape her own economic destiny.¹¹⁰ It was also argued that the adoption of free trade in the wake of successful indus­trialization had been a disaster - the ultimate cause of all the subsequent changes that Sugihara outlines and Chamberlain deplored. Free trade, it was alleged, had turned the terms of trade against Britain and encour­aged overseas investment. Repayments of these investments in turn induced a horde of imports that undermined first agriculture and then industry. All the same, critics found it hard to deny that overseas invest­ment had also flooded Britain with a 'golden rain' of invisible payments that was one of the most dynamic elements in the prosperity of the City and of the service economy generally.¹¹¹

These commentators regarded the rise of the service sector as a sign of Britain's growing weakness. Sugihara, like Gilpin, seems to agree with their judgement. However, it is likely that the relatively small scale of Britain's resources and population would have made it impossible for her to retain her industrial dominance for long after 1850, whatever domestic or international economic policies she adopted. Moreover, Chamberlain's dream of overcoming Britain's inherent handicap of size by means of a united empire was unrealizable. In the circumstances, promoting a service economy in the context of global multilateralism was a reasonable option. The mix of finance, services, and industry was clearly strong enough to carry Britain through the First World War. Her contribution to the war effort was vital not only as a combatant but also as a financier of the anti-German coalition. When Britain's resources ran low, the United States stepped in to assist in 1917 as later on she did in 1941. One reason she did so, on both occasions, was that she favoured the open economy that Britain's system of free trade upheld.¹¹²

Sugihara occasionally comes close to the error of supposing that the City had both the political strength and the will to insist on free trade. In fact, free trade was entrenched because it attracted support from a very wide spectrum of interests, working class as well as propertied, and because the manufacturing sector was split over the issue before the late 1920s.¹¹³ Moreover, the City's support for free trade was never fanatical. The key issue for the City was the maintenance of exchange stability: it could live with mild protection (which was much preferred to high tax­ation), as the functioning of sterling under the protectionist-preferential regime of the 1930s shows. It is this regime that attracts the attention of Akita and Kagotani, whose detailed case study further extends Sugihara's insights into British policy during the 1930s.

Sugihara concludes by relating his version of the causes of the Japanese 'miracle' to the ambitious and illuminating thesis advanced recently by Pomeranz.¹¹⁴ Sugihara shows how the argument put for­ward in British Imperialism can inform the debate on the causes of Japan's industrialization; Pomeranz compares China and Europe in order to explain the first industrial revolution. Briefly put, Pomeranz suggests that Europe and China had reached comparable levels of devel­opment by the middle of the eighteenth century and that the 'great divergence' that followed can be attributed primarily to Europe's success in developing new sources of energy. This outcome was achieved partly by exploiting the region's own resources of coal and partly by coloniz­ing land in the New World, thus adding to its stock of foodstuffs. Segments of the argument are familiar: Braudel, among others, made a similar claim about the relative levels of development of parts of Asia and parts of Europe, while the idea that wealth from the New World fuelled the industrial revolution is one that goes back a long way, and in its modern guise is associated principally with Eric Williams.¹¹⁵ However, apart from the fact that Pomeranz has approached his task with impressive thoroughness and is also a sinologist who carries authority in that field, the novelty of his argument lies in the way he has attached it to the story of the rise of the Atlantic economy. Previous scholars argued either that profits derived from the new economy financed the industrial revolution, or that demand in the New World promoted Europe's manufactures. Pomeranz emphasizes instead the crucial contribution made by the Americas and the Caribbean to reliev­ing the strain on Europe's scarce supplies of land.

Enlightening though it is, the European end of the argument is vul­nerable on a number of counts. It is far from clear that the Malthusian aspect of the case will stand. As O'Brien has pointed out, Europe's self­sufficiency in foodstuffs extended into the nineteenth century, by which time the first industrial revolution was well under way.¹¹⁶ Moreover, Pomeranz is inclined to refer to Europe as an entity, whereas, of course, the industrial revolution occurred in England before it spread elsewhere. Pomeranz's composite is therefore not well-tailored to fit the problem he seeks to explain. This difficulty probably accounts for the frequent insertion of parentheses referring to England and to the anno­tation 'especially Britain', when the author wishes to establish a more general point relating to the whole of Europe.¹¹⁷ In effect, the European end of the argument rests largely on the English example, which Pomeranz has insufficient space to study in detail.

This is unfortunate because Pomeranz comes very near to recognizing the qualities of British 'exceptionalism', even if he ties them to a suspect argument about energy supplies. Throughout the book he emphasizes the distinctiveness of, and vital contribution made by, Europe's finan­cial institutions, armed trading companies, and overseas colonization, and the way they were nurtured by a 'system of competing, debt- financed states', and he makes it clear that England was the prime example of these developments.¹¹⁸ He then draws a contrast with China, where financial institutions were less advanced, and where the state had no incentive to promote overseas enterprise and consequently gave little backing to merchants engaged in foreign trade. However, having spread himself thinly over Europe, Pomeranz is unable to pursue the question of why England, standing as a virtual proxy for the contin­ent, developed these attributes. At one point he is even driven to adopt the argument of last resort, namely that Europe's advantages were a 'for­tunate freak'.¹¹⁹

All we would say at this point is that elements of the explanation that Pomeranz was reaching for are contained in British Imperialism, which unfortunately he did not cite. Had he referred to our argument (and bet­ter still agreed with it), he would have built a case rooted not in freak­ishness but in institutional developments since the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. He would also have been obliged to deal with the fact that, as Sugihara points out, our interpretation was not directed to explaining his problem, which was to find the causes of the industrial revolution. At that point he would have had two options. He could either have reformulated the problem so that the great divergence is seen to be characterized by financial as well as by industrial develop­ments, or he could have retained the original problem but traced the links between the financial and the industrial revolutions in the eight­eenth century. The forces represented by gentlemanly capitalism were dominant in the first option and prominent, if indirectly, in the second by financing the distribution of manufactures, by raising consumer pur­chasing power in the affluent Home Counties, and by promoting imports and re-exports of colonial products. Either way, the argument put forward in British Imperialism bears on the departure that Pomeranz sought to explain, just as in the different circumstances of the twenti­eth century it helps to understand the rise of manufacturing in some regions beyond Europe, as Sugihara demonstrates with reference to Japan.

VIII

The contributions by Akita and Kagotani and by Kibata take the debate about British imperialism in East Asia further by viewing the question from a Japanese perspective, which necessarily received very limited treatment in our work. Akita and Kagotani's essay is of particular inter­est as an attempt to extrapolate from our analysis of the Ottawa system and the emergence of the sterling area in the 1930s.¹²⁰ It is consistent with our interpretation, but it adds considerably both to what we said and to our understanding of the international economy at that time, and it has important implications for rethinking political relationships between Japan, China and the British Empire in a period of mounting international crisis.

We argued in British Imperialism that the imperial preference system initiated at Ottawa in 1932, and the associated trade agreements made with countries like Argentina, were concerned less with promoting the sale of British manufactured goods than with ensuring that Britain's debtors could continue to meet their sterling obligations and maintain healthy sterling balances in London.¹²¹ As the Ottawa system evolved, it became primarily a set of devices for ensuring the stability of the emerging sterling area and for keeping the sterling exchange rate steady against its main rival, the US dollar. We demonstrated that the chief outcome of the trade agreements was to enable the principal debtors to develop export surpluses, thus helping Britain to settle her own inter­national obligations and to avoid successive sterling crises. We also drew attention to the fact that the need to economize on sterling in the 1930s gave some debtors, like Australia, new incentives to concentrate on import-substituting manufactures.¹²² In other words, we claimed that the preferential system became a means of maintaining, in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s, the kind of financial and trade relationships that Britain had nurtured previously under the gold standard. Our dis­cussion was centred on the direct relationships between Britain and other members of the sterling area. Akita and Kagotani expand this theme by showing that the ties between imperial members of the ster­ling area and foreign countries such as Japan were critical to the func­tioning of the system as a whole. We gave a hint of this in our brief discussion of the triangular relations between Britain, Australia and Japan in the late 1930s,¹²³ but without being able to establish the fact that this example was part of an even larger web of trade networks on which Britain's financial stability rested.

Akita and Kagotani clearly show that Japan's trading links with parts of the sterling area within the British empire became increasingly important in the 1930s. As they observe, historians have usually assumed that economic relations between Britain and Japan were focused upon the struggle for markets on behalf of their cotton textile manufacturers, whose mutual antagonisms were very strong.¹²⁴ Some scholars claim that these conflicts were important elements in the com­plex mix of forces that led to the final breakdown of relations between the two powers.¹²⁵ Others argue that Japanese policy was driven almost entirely by military pressures in the face of the perceived weakness of the British Empire in Asia, and that no amount of economic co-oper­ation or appeasement would have prevented hostilities.¹²⁶ A third opin­ion emphasizes the tensions in Japanese policy between those who looked towards co-operation with Britain and the United States and those who saw aggression as the only solution to Japan's needs and aspirations.¹²⁷ The most detailed piece of new research on Anglo- Japanese trade negotiations in the 1930s is particularly interesting from our perspective because it shows that British governments did their best to rein in their militant manufacturers.¹²⁸ They made very few conces­sions to them, and their restraint was recognized and appreciated by their Japanese counterparts. Akita and Kagotani's analysis is wholly consistent with these recent findings. But it takes the debate further first by revealing more clearly than before the motives that lay behind each country's ability to be conciliatory on matters of trade, and secondly by shifting the focus of the discussion from trade to finance in ways that complement both our own work and that of Sugihara.¹²⁹

Their interpretation, based in part on Sir George Sansom's contempor­ary record, holds that a complex complementarity developed between Japan and the sterling bloc in the 1930s, even though competition between Britain and Japan in visible trade, especially textiles, became more intense. Japan's purchases of raw materials from countries within the empire, such as India, Malaya and Australia, played a vital part in generating the export surpluses that enabled them to service their exter­nal debts and helped Britain to maintain her sterling balances during the world economic depression. In return, Japan received generous provision for her cotton exports in empire markets like India, despite the protests of Lancashire manufacturers. This process was assisted by the fact that the Japanese yen was undervalued after 1932; looked at another way, the British deliberately held the rupee at levels that gave investors confi­dence that India's external debts would continue to be met in full. The result, as Akita and Kagotani point out, was that Japan's exports of cot­ton goods to India were higher in the mid-1930s than they had been in the late 1920s, despite the world slump and the protectionist restrictions associated with Ottawa. In this way, Britain gave a significant boost to Japan's industrial growth while also nurturing the new sterling area.

It is important at this juncture to keep in mind the connections between economics and politics. India had been granted tariff auton­omy in 1917 partly to ensure that revenue could be raised for payments that the Government of India had to make in London, and partly to persuade the Indian business class to co-operate with the Raj.¹³⁰ The Ottawa agreements and the trade negotiations with Japan were further extensions of a system that was intended not only to ease India's eco­nomic relations with Britain but also to pursue a collaborative policy with part of the middle class in India and thus weaken the radical nationalism of the Congress party. As Kagotani observes,¹³¹ Britain wanted to maintain a supply of cheap consumer goods from Japan to prop up living standards in India and contain popular unrest. Indeed, Japan might have received even more open-handed treatment in India had not the Conservative government needed support from Lancashire's MPs at moments when political relations between Britain and India became so controversial that they threatened to split the Party.¹³²

Looked at from the British perspective, it is clear that the original intention of the Ottawa agreements was to meet the world crisis by encouraging inter-imperial trade flows. Britain in particular wanted to see freer trade between empire countries, but the insistence of the Dominions and India on retaining protection meant that she had to make do with a system of mutual preferences. After that, the peculiar pressures exerted by Britain's position as a major international creditor, together with the traditional mind-set of British gentlemanly capitalists in the Treasury and other key areas of government, caused the agree­ments to evolve in a way that differed from the original intention. It was then that they became instruments facilitating the smooth oper­ation of the sterling area. One fascinating aspect of Akita and Kagotani's work is to show how quickly the Japanese government grasped the essential elements of the British position. Policy-makers in Tokyo real­ized that to do business with the British empire effectively, and to maxi­mize Japan's own interests, they needed to direct their efforts towards easing financial flows rather than towards promoting manufactured exports aggressively. They held to this policy, even though the interests of the manufacturing lobby in Japan sometimes stood in their way.

A further implication of Akita and Kagotani's work is to reveal how many segments of the multilateral trade network survived the crash of 1928-31 and were actively encouraged in the 1930s. Looking at the matter once more from a British perspective, we can say that the encouragement of multilateralism was a direct outcome of policy prior­ities favoured by gentlemanly capitalists.¹³³ Any system devoted to extending markets for Britain's manufactured exports would almost cer­tainly have restricted international trade flows much more, as Sansom recognized. In practice, by expanding the sterling system and cultivat­ing its relationships with other blocs, Britain tried to retain as much of the cosmopolitan world economy of the gold-standard era as was possi­ble in the circumstances of the 1930s - and for the same reasons. In dealing with this theme, Akita and Kagotani also note the strong simi­larity between the way the Dutch, as well as the British, approached trade negotiations with Japan. The similarity suggests that financial concerns outweighed industrial ones in the Netherlands as they did in Britain. If this was indeed the case, it provides grounds for supposing that comparisons between international economic policies of Britain and the Netherlands would be well worth considering. The Dutch empire, based essentially on Indonesia, was far more important to the economic and political development of the Netherlands in the nine­teenth century than has often been allowed; it has even been suggested that the Dutch produced a home-grown species of Britain's gentlemanly capitalist elite.¹³⁴ Whatever the outcome of this comparison, after it has been pursued into the twentieth century, it is clear from Akita and Kagotani's pioneering efforts that the idea that international economic relations in the 1930s were essentially about the creation of states of autarky is at best an oversimplification and at worst a misunderstand­ing. This much can be said with some confidence, even though the older stereotype still pervades much of the discussion of the subject, and even though additional work is needed to uncover just how intri­cate and interconnected the international economic system remained in the 1930s.

IX

Japan's invasion of China in 1937 is a key date in Akita and Kagotani's calendar of events; Kibata's elegant dissection of Anglo-Japanese rela­tions in the 1930s confirms its importance. We agree with Kibata that until then it was possible that Japan would finally come to terms, polit­ically and economically, with the British empire, despite her military build-up and aggressive stance towards China. After that date, military objectives overcame all others, and the war with China began a process of hostilities that led to the frontal attack on the British Empire in the Second World War.

If there was no inevitability about Japan's shift in policy from 1937, we can regard Britain's attempts to reach an accommodation with Japan as being more realistic than some historians are inclined to believe.¹³⁵ As Kibata notes, from the perspective of 1935-36 it was reasonable for Neville Chamberlain and his allies in the Treasury to suppose that there was an economic solution to the Japan-China problem and that the Japanese, as 'Orientals' themselves, could be valuable allies in Britain's drive to develop China. British business interests in China also began to favour the idea that Japan would galvanize China, thereby creating opportunities for Britain, too, while keeping the peace in the Far East.¹³⁶ In other words, the well known Leith-Ross mission, which Kibata sees as an example of gentlemanly capitalism, made some sense at the time. Admittedly, the mission was partly based on hubris. The chances of per­suading the Chinese to join the sterling area formally were always remote: China managed to stabilize its currency without aligning it either to the dollar or to sterling.¹³⁷ Yet Leith-Ross's mission helped to stabilize the currency and to set up an effective central bank. Moreover, as Kibata notes, to the extent that Britain's economic initiatives stimulated China's development, they moderated long-standing anti-British nation­alism. Indeed, the prospects for sustained growth in China, and for continued British enjoyment of some of its fruits, seemed very promis­ing immediately before the Japanese invasion.¹³⁸ However, there is no doubt that, despite Leith-Ross's attempt to placate the Japanese and even to involve them in the negotiations, his mission angered many observers in Tokyo who saw it as an attempt by Britain to dominate the Chinese market and to strengthen China against Japan.¹³⁹ Ambiguity was indeed present in Britain's policy towards China and Japan at this time, and it was not resolved until 1937, when a calculated decision was made, on the presumed balance of advantages, to support China.

Kibata's stress on the importance of industrial interests in backing British schemes for Chinese development is timely. We, too, drew atten­tion to the role of the industrial lobby¹⁴⁰ principally in relation to the interest shown by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister of the day, in the Leith-Ross mission. Kibata extends our comments by referring to Ramsey MacDonald's ideas for developing the China market and to the Barnby Mission of 1934, which was supported by the Federation of British Industries and had official blessing.¹⁴¹ Kibata's characterization of these initiatives as 'industrial imperialism' suggests a possible connection with Phimister's discussion of South Africa.¹⁴² In the same way, Neville Chamberlain's policy of bringing industrialists into the discussions about China prompts interesting parallels with his father's approach to imperialism. As we have seen, Joseph Chamberlain wanted to assemble a new coalition of economic interests in support of his imperial policy. It is difficult to know whether to label it, and Neville's policy towards China, as 'industrial imperialism' or to see one or both as a modification of the more traditional gentlemanly capitalist approach. What is clear, however, is that Neville Chamberlain's initia­tives, and the Leith-Ross mission itself, were both deplored by the Foreign Office, which feared that Britain's meddling in China's eco­nomic affairs would anger Japan and was likely to end in conflict.¹⁴³ A full assessment of this issue needs to bear in mind the fact that circum­stances had changed greatly since the turn of the century. The industri­alists of the 1890s were trying to sell textiles and railway equipment to China; those of the 1930s had formed transnational conglomerates and were beginning to invest in productive activities in China itself, often in association with indigenous entrepreneurs. The first group wanted to see China opened up and nationalists put down; the second were inter­ested in developing the hinterlands of the great ports, which meant working with the nationalists rather than against them.

One of the merits of Kibata's paper is its reminder of how Britain's policy towards Japan and China was affected by perceptions of what was happening in other parts of the empire, most notably in India. However, though Britain had its share of Cassandras, Kibata may have underestimated the degree of optimism about the future of the empire expressed by British commentators in the 1930s. In the context of British policy towards Asia, it is interesting to see that the pessimists tended to come from the more traditional arms of the gentlemanly cap­italist network - the Foreign Office and the upper ranks of the armed services - whereas the optimists were more likely to be found among the 'money men' and their allies - the City, emerging big business and the Treasury. Such contrasts should not be overdrawn: the Bank of England's records suggest that the Governor, Montagu Norman, was more sceptical about the outcome of Britain's financial initiatives in China than were either the Treasury or the City.¹⁴⁴ While both schools of thought were offering their different predictions of China's future, the British government tried to buy time, through appeasement, to enable Britain to rearm while still searching for a means of holding the international order, on which her economy was so dependent, in place. When Japan's invasion of China was followed by Hitler's strikes against first Czechoslovakia and then Poland, it became obvious that the future of the empire had come to depend upon the support of a republican, anti-colonial power: the United States.

X

Economic history and the history of political economy have lost favour in recent years. They have clearly failed to attract the same interest and enthusiasm as cultural history and the history of discourse in particular. However, the most obvious conclusion we draw from our reading of the contributions to this book is that the study of the economic dimension of the history of imperialism has great importance and vitality, and can still evoke research of the highest quality. The subject is far from being tired and dated, as its detractors have claimed.¹⁴⁵ It is also evident that, as in all good work, new questions are raised as old ones are answered: the essays in this volume suggest a host of research agendas yet to be tackled, and in doing so point to ways in which the scholarly frontier can be moved into new territory.

Bowen's essay amplifies our highly compressed view of the eighteenth century and prompts the question of whether 'peripheral gentlemanly capitalism' existed elsewhere, apart from America, before the nineteenth century. In parallel fashion, Krozewski's chapter expands our abbreviated treatment of the period after the Second World War and establishes the need to look more closely at the timing of the demise of gentlemanly capitalism in the metropolis itself in the second half of the twentieth century. Darwin's spacious contribution raises large issues relating to the interaction between economic events and political action and between domestic impulses towards imperialism and the inter­national forces constraining them. Despite the immense amount of ink spilled over the partition of Africa, Phimister's concise assessment shows that many of the links between imperial expansion and the economic development of tropical and southern Africa remain either undiscover­ed or underresearched. The chapters dealing with Asia have research implications of equal importance. The broad survey by Shunhong opens up the possibility of further dialogue between Marxist and non­Marxist scholars on issues such as decolonization and neo-colonialism. Petersson's detailed analysis of the years between 1905 and 1911 is a model of its kind and should encourage studies of other regions that played host, reluctantly, to international diplomacy and cosmopolitan finance. By harnessing British imperialism to the study of industrializa­tion in the Far East, Sugihara's chapter and the complementary contri­bution by Akita and Kagatoni point to the need for similar studies of Britain's relations with other parts of the globe. They suggest, too, that a closer investigation of the complex web of relations that held the international economy together after 1870 would be a rewarding exer­cise and might change our view of its evolution, especially during the crisis years of the 1930s. Kibata's essay adds to this new Asian pers­pective by showing how economics was linked to politics in the making and breaking of Anglo-Japanese relations, and not only in the 1930s, which is his own special interest.

Anyone familiar with the historiography of imperialism will be aware that there has been discussion recently of the emergence of a 'new' imperial history.¹⁴⁶ Like all such novelties, the term carries different meanings for different authors. They have in common the broad sense that imperial history, though ably studied by numerous scholars over many years, has lost the status it once enjoyed when empires were going concerns. From the 1960s it was gradually broken down, follow­ing the fate of the empire itself, and its various fragments were annexed by the rising power of Area Studies. Its appeal to younger scholars is limited, and in recent years has been confined largely to a restricted number of themes inspired by postmodernism. One reading of the term 'new' in relation to imperial history is that it consists of superimposing

themes such as gender, race, science, art, architecture and the environ­ment on older forms of the subject, perhaps to the point of liquidating them. This enterprise has already been launched, and has both departed from and added to the agenda inspired half a century ago by scholars such as Gallagher and Robinson. The issue is not whether these new topics are desirable additions to the repertoire, for it would be hard to deny their claims or their merits. The difficulty, which has yet to be addressed, is how to incorporate them in such a way as to produce an integrated programme for research and teaching.

A second meaning of the 'new' imperial history is one that seeks to rescue the central but neglected themes of economic and political history, to relate them not only to the role of the state but to forces that bypassed or permeated state agencies, and to place them in a long­term and comparative context.¹⁴⁷ The endeavour, though heroic enough in its ambitions, needs also to encompass cultural history and social history rather than be set against them. This design is a consider­able departure from the postmodernist agenda, which not only relegates economic and political issues but is also hostile to the 'totalizing project' and the 'essentialism' inherent in studying structural change and continuity in the long run.¹⁴⁸ It will be apparent that it is this version of the new imperial history, or at least facets of it, that is set out in the present book. The approach adopted here connects in turn with other studies, such as Pomeranz's notable contribution discussed earlier, which promise to give new life and fresh appeal to large-scale, compara­tive histories of the material world.

The events of 11 September 2001 are certain to have a considerable impact on scholarship as well as on the wider world. When the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down, so too, surely, was the fashionable assertion that sophisticated thinkers speak only of perceptions and not of realities. On that day, reality made an instant come-back, tragically with a big bang. It was a reality, moreover, that could be understood only by placing it in a global perspective because it was a distant, different and poorly understood part of the world that suddenly 'struck back'. It then became apparent that to understand this world it was also necessary to grasp some of its past and, by a further step, to reach into the history of defunct empires in order to understand the economic, political and cultural impulses they transmitted and the reactions they provoked. In this circuitous way, globalization met history on 11 September. History, through the medium of historians, now has an opportunity to respond by re-energizing the study of those parts of the world that conventional histories of the nation state cannot reach.

Notes

1 Our title is adapted from a famous essay by E.P. Thompson, 'The Peculiarities of the English' in idem, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), which discusses the unique features of the British form of capitalist civilization.

2 PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (2001), pp. 1-19.

3 The first was R.E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: the New Debate on Empire (1999).

4 We make this point in response to the criticism that the concept of a gentle­man, and by extension of gentlemanly capitalism, is too vague to be useful. See the valuable discussion in Penny Corfield, 'The Democratic History of the English Gentleman', History Today, 42 (1992), pp. 40-7; also our com­ments in British Imperialism, pp. 8-10.

5 On India see PJ. Marshall, 'British Society in India under the East India Company', Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 89-108.

6 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).

7 H.V. Bowen, 'British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1763-83', Jour. Imp. and Comm. Hist., 26 (1998), pp. 1-27. For a view 'from below', see Linda Colley, 'Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire', Past & Present, 168 (2000), pp. 170-93.

8 Patrick K. O'Brien, 'Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688-1815', in PJ. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II (Oxford, 1998), pp. 53-77, and the further references given there.

9 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 77.

10 Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 2.

11 For a concise restatement, see John Darwin, 'Imperialism and the Victorians: the Dynamics of Territorial Expansion', English Historical Review, CXII (1997), pp. 614-15.

12 Tony Ballantyne, 'Empire, Knowledge and Culture: from Proto-Globalization to Modern Globalization', in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (2002), pp. 115-40.

13 David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (1994), ch. 1.

14 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, 'The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750-1914', Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXXIII (1980), pp. 474-81; idem, British Imperialism, pp. 82-7, and chs. 2-3; D.C.M. Platt, 'The National Economy and British Imperial Expansion before 1914', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2 (1973-4), pp. 3-14.

15 British Imperialism, p. 658.

16 We argued against this view in British Imperialism. See, especially, ch. 11 and p. 311.

17 We are glad to acknowledge here, as in British Imperialism, the influence of Darwin's important article on this theme: 'Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars', Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 657-79.

18 Though we are aligned with him on the broader, diplomatic considerations: see John Darwin, 'The Fall of the Empire State', Diplomatic History, 25 (2001), pp. 501-5.

19 British Imperialism, ch. 19 and chs. 22 and 25.

20 Ibid., ch. 20. Also PJ. Cain, 'Gentlemanly Imperialism at Work: the Bank of England, Canada, and the Sterling Area, 1932-1936', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd. ser. XLIX (1996), pp. 336-57.

21 Pp. 335-6.

22 D.K. Fieldhouse, 'Gentleman, Capitalists and the British Empire', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994), pp. 531-41.

23 British Imperialism, pp. 312-17. We take this opportunity to advertise, again, the excellent unpublished PhD dissertations cited in notes 44 and 48, as they appear not to have been used, even by specialists on this subject.

24 See, for example, Juan R.I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's Urabi movement (Princeton, 1992), and Afal Lufti Al-Sayyid-Marsot, 'The British Occupation of Egypt from 1882', in Andrew Porter (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1999), pp. 651-64.

25 La France et l'Egypte de 1882 a 1914: interets economiques et implications poli- tiques (Paris, 1997), pp. 535-70, 697-8. We are grateful to Professor Saul for helpful correspondence on this subject.

26 Phimister generously acknowledges this and provides the relevant citations.

27 PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, 'The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750-1914', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser. XXXIII (1980), pp. 463-90.

28 Pp. 331-5.

29 A.G. Hopkins, 'The “New International Order” in the Nineteenth Century: Britain's First Development Plan for Africa' in Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to Legitimate Commerce: the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 240-64, outlines a framework for treating this theme on a continent-wide basis. Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (1994), provides an illuminating case study.

30 Cloves accounted for about 25 per cent of the value of total exports from Zanzibar in the 1880s and ivory for about 40 per cent.

31 British Imperialism, pp. 331-5.

32 It need hardly be said that this is a far more complex matter than this sum­mary suggests. Specialists vary in their emphases on how strong the Sultanate was at the moment of partition. Compare, for example, Norman R. Bennett, Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (1986) with Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873 (1987). This really is a case where 'more research is needed'.

33 The best statement of Kirk's policy, including his links with the 'unofficial mind' of imperialism, is now Roy Bridges, 'Towards the Prelude to the Partition of East Africa', in Roy Bridges, ed. Imperialism, Decolonization and Africa (2000), ch. 2.

34 British Imperialism, pp. 327-31.

35 Ibid., p. 331.

36 Ibid., p. 338.

37 See Trevor Lloyd, 'Africa and Hobson's Imperialism', Past and Present, 55 (1972), pp. 130-53. Lloyd makes this point in the broader context of arguing that, in general, flows of capital had little to do with imperialist expansion in Africa.

38 For example, David E. Torrance, The Strange Death of Liberal Empire: Lord Selborne in South Africa (Liverpool, 1996), p. 29. We are grateful to Professor Torrance for his advice on Selborne's views of the City and of imperial union, though he is not responsible for the stance we have taken here.

39 Kenneth E. Wilburn, 'Engines of Empire and Independence: Railways in South Africa, 1863-1916', in Clarence B. Davis and Kenneth E. Wilburn (eds), Railway Imperialism (1991), pp. 32-5. For Rothschild's views on infor­mal empire in South Africa, see Niall Ferguson, The World's Banker: the House of Rothschild (1998), pp. 876-90.

40 Bill Nasson, The South African War, 1899-1902 (1999), p. 29. This point, in turn, has to be placed in context: it was still the case that 75 per cent of the Uitlanders were British. Ibid., p. 27.

41 See Peter Henshaw, 'The “Key to South Africa” in the 1890s: Delagoa Bay and the Origins of the South African War', Journal of Southern African Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 527-43.

42 Nasson, South African War, p. 39.

43 Iain R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War (1996), pp. 268-9.

44 On Chamberlain's and Milner's philosophy, see PJ. Cain, 'The Economic Philosophy of Constructive Imperialism', in Cornelia Navari (ed.), British Politics and the Spirit of the Age (Keele, 1996), pp. 41-66.

45 Quoted in Iain R. Smith, 'Joseph Chamberlain and theJameson Raid', in Greg Cuthbertson (ed.), The Jameson Raid: a Centennial Retrospective (Houghton, South Africa, 1996), p. 101.

46 We hope it will be clear that we are following a line of thought prompted by Phimister's interpretation of Selborne's memorandum, and not attempting a comprehensive explanation of the causes of the Anglo-South African war. A judicious recent assessment can be found in Nasson, South African War, which evaluates other important considerations - from Kruger's policy to the attitude of the mine-owners, as does Cuthbertson, The Jameson Raid.

47 Smith, Origins, pp. 157-60.

48 Phimister's earlier argument that the Transvaal's tariff independence was a barrier to union and to Britain's trade interests in South Africa takes on particular significance in this context. See I.R. Phimister, 'Unscrambling the Scramble for Southern Africa: the Jameson Raid and the South African War Revisited', South African Historical Journal, 28 (1993), pp. 218-19.

49 The detailed study is R.M. Kesner, Economic Control and Colonial Develop­ment: Crown Colony Financial Management in the Age of Joseph Chamberlain (Oxford, 1981). See also S.B. Saul, 'The Economic Policy of “Constructive Imperialism”', Journal of Economic History, 17 (1959), pp. 173-92.

50 On the Crown Agents, see David Sunderland, 'Principals and Agents: the Activities of the Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1880-1914', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. LII (1999), pp. 284-306.

51 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 195-6.

52 Torrance, The Strange Death of Liberal Empire, passim.

53 Ibid., p. 195, and pp. 181-95 generally.

54 Gerold Krozewski, Money and the End of Empire: British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947-58 (2001).

55 British Imperialism, p. 619, and our related comments on p. 9.

56 W.D. Rubinstein, 'Britain's Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1918-39', Contemporary British History, 12 (1998), pp. 1-18.

57 Ronald Robinson, 'The Moral Disarmament of African Empire', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8 (1979), pp. 86-104.

58 Ronald Robinson, 'Andrew Cohen and the Transfer of Power in Africa', in W.M. Morris-Jones and G. Fischer (eds), Decolonisation and After; the British and French Experience (1979), pp. 50-72.

59 E.H.H. Green, 'The Influence of the City over British Economic Policy, c.1880-1960', in Youssef Cassis (ed.), Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880-1960 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 193-218.

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

61 Scott Newton and Dilwyn Porter, Modernization Frustrated: the Politics of Industrial Decline in Britain since 1900 (1988).

62 See, for example, Philip Murphy, Alan Lennox-Boyd: a Biography (1999); and the patterns of recruitment revealed by A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Britain's Imperial Administrators, 1858-1996 (Basingstoke, 2000).

63 Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: a Symposium (1959). We note that Krozewski does not attempt to engage with our, admittedly limited, defence of the idea that gentlemanly capitalist elites continued to flourish after 1945, as presented in British Imperialism, pp. 620-2, or with the references con­tained therein. In this context, we would draw attention especially to W.D. Rubinstein, 'Education and the Social Origins of British Elites, 1800-1970', Past and Present 112 (1986), pp. 163-207.

64 We may refer here to the authority of Susan Strange, who felt that our argu­ment had a great deal of contemporary relevance: See her review of British Imperialism in Review of International Studies 20 (1994), pp. 407-10.

65 Important recent contributions to this subject include: R.L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945-1963 (Princeton, 1998); Philip Murphy, Party Politics and Decolonization: the Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951-1964 (Oxford, 1995); Nicholas J. White, Business, Government and the End of Empire: Malaya, 1942-1957 (Oxford, 1996).

66 Pp. 640-4.

67 Further assistance, if needed, can be found in Darwin's chapter, which also draws attention to the continuities between prewar and postwar Britain.

68 There were two prominent considerations: making friends rather than enemies out of nationalists by turning them into statesmen, and devising strategies for keeping colonies that might become independent 'sterling minded'. See, for example, A.G. Hopkins, 'Macmillan's Audit of Empire, 1957', in Peter Clarke and Clive Trebilcock (eds). Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities. Essays in Honour of Barry Supple (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 234-60.

69 British Imperialism, pp. 658-9.

70 Ibid., pp. 15-17.

71 Macartney, too, wanted influence, not annexation.

72 See British Imperialism, pp. 335-9, 379-80.

73 The phrase is from J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: a Study (1988 ed.), p. 332.

74 See Roberta Allbert Dayer, Finance and Empire: Sir Charles Addis, 1861-1945 (1989).

75 The basic elements of the plan were put in place after the conclusion of the French Wars in 1815, when Britain turned her attention to 'winning the peace'. See Hopkins, 'The “New International Economic Order” in the Nineteenth Century'.

76 Paul Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865-1980 (1981), esp. Pt.I.

77 See below, p. xxx.

78 David McLean, 'The Foreign Office and the First Chinese Indemnity Loan', Historical Journal 16 (1973), pp. 303-21; F.H.H. King, History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, II (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 264-75.

79 The most thorough account is E.W. Edwards, British Diplomacy and Finance in China, 1895-1914 (Oxford, 1987).

80 David Kynaston, The City of London: the Golden Years, 1890-1914 (1995), pp. 564-71.

81 British Imperialism, ch. 25.

82 Ibid., pp. 57-61.

83 See the summary in Hans van de Ven, 'The Onrush of Modern Globalization in China', in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (2002), pp. 167-93.

84 British Imperialism, pp. 6-7.

85 Ibid., pp. 63, 99-100, 102, 261.

86 For the reference and further comment, see British Imperialism, p. 7, n.18 and pp. 7-8, 50-3.

87 He also notes in passing the Opium Wars of 1840-42 and 1856-58, but the brevity of his comments on this subject precludes a short response, and there is insufficient space for a long one.

88 See PJ. Marshall, 'Britain and China in the Late Eighteenth Century', in Robert A. Bickers (ed.), Ritual and Diplomacy: the Macartney Mission to China, 1792-1794 (1993), pp. 11-29. James L. Hevia's study, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (1996), also cited by Shunhong, is an interesting postmodernist account but is of tangential relevance to the issue in hand.

89 Macartney's humanitarian, pacific and also prejudiced outlook is assessed by PJ. Marshall, 'Lord Macartney, India and China: the Two Faces of the Enlightenment', South Asia, 19 (1996), pp. 121-31.

90 The established means being shipments of silver. Macartney's involvement with India and the Company is dealt with by L.S. Sutherland, 'Lord Macartney's Appointment as Governor of Madras, 1780: the Treasury in East India Company Elections', English Historical Review, 90 (1975), pp. 523-35.

91 Rudrangshu Mukherjee, 'Trade and Empire in Awahd, 1765-1804', Past and Present, 94 (1982), pp. 85-106.

92 Amar Farooqui, 'Opium Enterprise and Colonial Intervention in Malwa and Western India, 1800-1824', Indian Economic and Social History Review, 32 (1995), pp. 447-73. This was also a key consideration in the subsequent annexation of Sind: J.Y. Wong, 'British Annexation of Sind in 1843: an Economic Perspective', Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 225-44. British shipping, and British merchants based in India and the Far East, gained sig­nificantly from the opium trade. See the important article by Freda Harcourt, 'Black Gold: P & O and the Opium Trade', 1847-1914', International Journal of Maritime History, 6 (1994), pp. 1-83.

93 Anthony Webster, 'The Political Economy of Trade Liberalization: the East India Company Charter Act of 1813', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XLIII (1990), pp. 404-19.

94 Van de Ven, 'The Onrush of Modern Globalization in China', pp. 176-9.

95 Ch. 6 above.

96 See also British Imperialism, pp. 368-77, which notes Manchester's failure to prevent an increase in China's external tariff in 1902 (p. 371), and the inability of Paulings, the railway contractors, to tie British loans to the pur­chase of manufactured goods (pp. 376-7).

97 Both in British Imperialism (p. 619) and in our comments on Krozewski's essay in this volume.

98 British Imperialism, ch. 26.

99 Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980).

100 Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: the Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (1975), especially chs. 1 and 2. Gilpin's study influenced our early thinking on this subject but has been rather neglected by historians, possibly because its title disguises its substantial historical content.

101 This is explored in P.T. Marsh, Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860-93 (New Haven, 1999).

102 A. Marrison, 'Insular Free Trade, Retaliation and the Most-Favoured-Nation Treaty, 1880-1914', in idem, Free Trade and its Reception, 1815-1960 (Manchester, 1998).

103 British Imperialism, p. 241 notes the process before 1914. For the 1930s see ibid., pp. 471-2, 502-3, 508-9, 520, 527, 531, 539-40, 557-9, 594-6, 609, 615, 654-5.

104 Sugihara is mistaken in claiming that sterling was divorced from gold in the 1930s: it was exchangeable for gold but not at a fixed rate, as it had been before 1931. Moreover, the implication that, after devaluation in 1933, the US dollar was linked in some way to sterling is misleading. Sterling was managed with the aim of maintaining its stability against the dollar; from the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 onwards the dollar was tacitly recognized as being the numeraire of the system.

105 British Imperialism, ch. 3. See also C.H. Lee, 'The Service Sector, Regional Specialisation and Economic Growth in the Victorian Economy', Journal of Historical Geography, 10 (1984), pp. 139-55.

106 We made a similar point in a different context in British Imperialism, pp. 182-3.

107 Sugihara notes that Hong Kong played a key role as a British colony in ser­vicing Asian industrialization after 1945. Since Hong Kong was run by a British gentlemanly elite, as Sugihara notes, this development might be seen as a modern manifestation of 'peripheral gentlemanly capitalism' of the kind discussed by Bowen with reference to the eighteenth century.

108 Hobson, Imperialism, pp. 304-19.

109 British Imperialism, pp. 190-1.

110 William Cunningham, The Rise and Decline of the Free Trade Movement (1904), pp. 115-17, and quoted in Cain, 'The Economic Philosophy of Constructive Imperialism', p. 51.

111 Ritortus, 'The Imperialism of British Trade', I & II, Contemporary Review, 76 (1899).

112 An extended version of this argument can be found in PJ. Cain, 'Was it Worth Having? The British Empire, 1850-1950', Revista de Economica Historia, 16 (1998), pp. 351-76, especially 362-72.

113 A.C. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford, 1997); A. Marrison, British Business and Protection, 1903-1932 (Oxford, 1996).

114 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).

115 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (1973); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

116 Patrick O'Brien, 'Metahistories in Global Histories of Material Progress', International History Review, 23 (2001), pp. 365-7.

117 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, for example, pp. 185, 282-5, 296.

118 Ibid., p. 19. See also pp. 178-9, where the generalisation about Europe is again qualified by being related to England.

119 Ibid., p. 207.

120 For a critical discussion of our position on the 1930s from a different angle of vision, see Angela Redish, 'British Financial Imperialism after the First World War', and our response in Dumett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism, pp. 127-40, 210-11.

121 British Imperialism, pp. 470-8.

122 Ibid., pp. 502-3.

123 Ibid., p. 504.

124 On the cotton-trade rivalries, see Ishii Osamu, 'Markets and Diplomacy: the Anglo-Japanese Rivalries over Cotton Goods Markets, 1930-36', in Ian Nish and Yoichi Kibata (eds), The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600-2000, Vol. II: The Political-Diplomatic Dimension, 1931-2000 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 51-77. The three-cornered trade conflict between Britain, Australia and Japan in 1936-37 was clearly aggravated by British and Japanese cotton interests. Ibid., pp. 71-3.

125 Antony Best, 'The Road to Anglo-Japanese Confrontation, 1931-41', in Nish and Kibata, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, pp. 26-50.

126 See John Sharkey, 'Economic Diplomacy in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1931-41', in Nish and Kibata, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, p. 103.

127 There is an excellent short presentation of the various choices open to Japan vis a vis Britain in the 1930s in Yoichi Kibata, 'Anglo-Japanese Relations from the Manchurian Incident to Pearl Harbour: Missed Opportunities?', in Nish and Kibata, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, pp. 1-25.

128 Sharkey, 'Economic Diplomacy', pp. 81-91, 102.

129 See ch. 10 and our comments above, pp. 235-6.

130 For a summary and further references see British Imperialism, pp. 549-50.

131 See ch. 8, pp. 157-9.

132 The trade negotiations between India, Britain and Japan in 1933-34 showed that the British were concerned more with the needs of Indian millowners than with Lancashire's demands. Sharkey, 'Economic Diplomacy', pp. 85-6.

133 British Imperialism, Ch. 20.

134 With a strong leaning towards finance and an accompanying cosmopolitan worldview. See Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, The Netherlands and the Rise of Modern Capitalism: Colonies and Foreign Policy, 1870-1902 (Oxford, 1991); idem, 'Capitalism and Imperialism: Britain and the Netherlands', Itinerario, 18 (1994), pp. 105-16. Also the summary and references in A.G. Hopkins, 'Globalization with and without Empires: from Bali to Labrador', in Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, pp. 223-4.

135 See notes 124, 125 above.

136 Peter Duus, Ramon Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds), The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton, 1989), provides a comprehensive account of Japan's considerable economic and cultural presence in China.

137 British Imperialism, p. 608; Akita and Kagotani are in agreement here, but note too Sugihara's argument that both China and Japan were effectively linked, if not formally pegged, to sterling (see above, p. 235).

138 British Imperialism, p. 610; PJ. Cain, 'British Economic Imperialism in China in the 1930s: the Leith-Ross Mission', Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies 7 (1997), pp. 23-34: For a different view, see Shigeru Akita, 'British Informal Empire in East Asia: a Japanese Perspective', in Dummet, Gentlemanly Capitalism, pp. 147-52.

139 Best, 'The Road to Anglo-Japanese Confrontation', pp. 34-5.

140 British Imperialism, p. 609.

141 On the Barnby Mission, see also Kibata, 'Anglo-Japanese Relations', p. 9.

142 Above, p. 220.

143 On these tensions in British policy, see Gill Bennett, 'British Policy in the Far East, 1933-1936: Treasury and Foreign Office', Modern Asian Studies, 26 (1992), pp. 545-68.

144 For Norman's views on the Leith-Ross mission, see Bank of England archive G1/300/2525/2, file 13. It must be emphasized that this is a preliminary view: this is a subject that still awaits its researcher.

145 Dane Kennedy, 'Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996), pp. 345-63. We also expect that a cross-fertilization between our own approach and that represented by Kennedy would bear much fruit, as we tentatively suggest in British Imperialism, pp. 665-6.

146 See, for example, the 'Afterword' to British Imperialism; Hopkins, 'Back to the Future'; Dane Kennedy, 'The Boundaries of Oxford's Empire', International History Review, 23 (2001), pp. 604-22.

147 British Imperialism, 'Afterword'; Hopkins, 'Back to the Future; idem. Globalisation in World History.

148 We dissent here from Kennedy's categorization in 'The Boundaries of Oxford's Empire', which runs the postmodernist agenda and globalization together. Quite apart from the fact that the literature on globalization is heavily weighted towards economic and political issues, which are not given the same prominence by postmodernists, there are fundamental dif­ferences of approach to the writing of history, as this paragraph has pointed out.