Abstract
In Part I, I argued that the only feasible route to a stock figure for British investment overseas just before the First World War was ‘direct’ — the compilation of numbers for securities bought and sold on a stock exchange. The ‘balance of payments method’, whatever its theoretical advantages, has not yet reached a point when it can realistically be expected to supply any such thing, besides which its practitioners have themselves aimed at a different kind of result.
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Notes
A. Emil Davies, Investments Abroad (Chicago, 1927) p. 105.
Charles Duguid, The Stock Exchange (London, 1904) p. 88; Duguid was City Editor of the Morning Post.
Hartley Withers, Stocks and Shares (London, 1917 edn) p. 47.
Lance Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, ‘The Export of British Finance: 1865–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XIII, 3 (May 1985) p. 33.
R. Giffen, ‘Recent Accumulations of Capital in the United Kingdom’, in his Essays in Finance (1880) p. 171.
Albert Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) pp. 78–9. Brinley Thomas also adopted the Paish formula in his ‘The Historical Record of International Capital Movements to 1913’, in J. H. Adler (ed.), Capital Movements and Economic Development (New York, 1967) p. 6.
J. M. Keynes, ‘Great Britain’s Foreign Investments’, New Quarterly, February 1910, reprinted in Elizabeth Johnson (ed.), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XV (1971) p. 58.
C. K. Hobson, The Export of Capital (1914) pp. 181, 218.
A. R. Hall, ‘A Note on the English Capital Market, as a Source of Home Investment before 1914’, Economica, n.s. XXIV (1957) p. 62 (fn. 2), and Simon, ‘The Pattern of New British Portfolio Investment, 1856–1914’, in Adler, Capital Markets, p. 54.
W. P. Kennedy, ‘Foreign Investment, Trade and Growth in the United Kingdom, 1870–1913’, Explorations in Economic History, 11, 4 (Summer 1974) p. 442.
A Stockbroker, ‘The Depreciation of British Home Investments’, Economic Journal, XXII, 86 (June 1912) pp. 220, 223–4.
Avner Offer, Property and Politics 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (Cambridge, 1981) p. 104.
T. Skinner, The Stock Exchange Year Book for 1913 (1913) p. v.
J. H. Lenfant, ‘British Capital Export, 1900–1913’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1949) pp. 264–6.
E. Crammond, ‘British Investments Abroad’, Quarterly Review, 412 (July 1907) p. 249.
Cassell, ‘The Utility of Foreign Investment’, in G. Cassell et al., Foreign Investments (Chicago, 1928) p. 55.
Hall (ed.), The Export of Capital from Britain, 1870–1914 (1968) p. 13.
E. V. Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy, 1914–25 (1952) p. 323.
M. Edelstein, ‘Realized Rates of Return on UK Home and Overseas Portfolio Investment in the Age of High Imperialism’, Explorations in Economic History, 13 (1976) p. 298.
Ibid., ‘Foreign Investment and Empire, 1860–1914’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, vol. II (Cambridge, 1981) pp. 84–5.
Imlah, ‘British Balance of Payments and Export of Capital, 1816–1913’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. V, 2 (1952) p. 226, and in chapter III of Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica. Paish argued that losses were more than amply compensated for by gains: Paish (1909) p. 473.
Alexander D. Noyes, Forty Years of American Finance (New York, 1909) p. 218.
Statist, quoted by W. Turrentine Jackson, The Enterprising Scot: Investors in the American West after 1873 (Edinburgh, 1968) p. 251.
P. Arndt, ‘Neue Beiträge zur Frage der Kapitalanlage im Ausland’, Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft, N.F., VI (1915) p. 305.
J. D. Bailey, A Hundred Years of Pastoral Banking: A History of the Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Company 1863–1963 (Oxford, 1966) p. 66.
Ibid., pp. 61–2. Also Bailey, ‘Australian Borrowing in Scotland in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XII, 2 (1959) pp. 268–79,
and Eric Richards, Australia and the Scottish Connection, 1778–1914 (London, 1985) pp. 146–7.
J. Viner, Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, 1900–1913 (Cambridge, Mass., 1924) pp. 122, 126.
W. A. Thomas, The Provincial Stock Exchanges (1973) p. 190.
As does J. Fred Rippy, British Investments in Latin America, 1822–1949 (Minneapolis, 1959) p. 67.
M. J. Bonn, ‘The Nationalization of Capital’, in E. M. Patterson (ed.), America’s Changing Investment Market (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, 1916) pp. 256–7. Bonn was a professor at the University of Munich.
Alexander D. Noyes, The War Period of American Finance, 1908–1925 (New York, 1926) p. 127.
J. M. Atkin, ‘British Overseas Investment, 1918–1931’ ‘Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1968) p. 225. He was quoting a memorandum dated 12 Nov. 1928.
Edelstein, ‘The Determinants of UK Investment Abroad, 1870–1913: The US Case’, Journal of Economic History, XXXIV, 4 (Dec. 1974) p. 991.
Mira Wilkins, ‘Modern European Economic History and the Multinationals’, Journal of European Economic History, 6, 3 (Winter 1977) p. 584. This is a pioneering and bibliographical article of some importance. Professor Wilkins has taken particular care to isolate direct investments (using the modern definition); she has published much already on the subject, and is publishing more.
A. T. K. Grant, A Study of the Capital Market in Britain from 1919–36 (edn 1967) pp. 120, 123.
D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘The Economic Exploitation of Africa: Some British and French Comparisons’, in Prosser Gifford and Roger Louis (eds), France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (Newhaven, Conn., 1971) p. 655, table 8.
Kenneth Buckley, Capital Formation in Canada, 1896–1930 (Toronto, 1955) p. 66.
C. F. Remer, Foreign Investments in China (New York, 1933) pp. 63–76.
J. Viner, Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, pp. 120–6, and Y. S. Pandit, India’s Balance of Indebtedness 1898–1913 (1937) pp. 109–31.
N. G. Butlin, Australian Domestic Product, Investment and Foreign Borrowing, 1861–1938/9 (Cambridge, 1962) p. 453.
This is well documented by now, and much has been published, notably by A. K. Bagchi. Bagchi’s Private Investment in India 1900–1939 (Cambridge, 1972) is particularly valuable.
J. Stopford, ‘The Origins of British-Based Multinational Manufacturing Enterprises’, Business History Review, XLVIII, 3 (Autumn 1974) pp. 305, 307.
H. S. Foxwell, Papers on Current Finance (1919) pp. 3, 13 (a reprint of an article published originally in the Economic Journal of Dec. 1915), but see also Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy, p. 332.
T. Balogh, Studies in Financial Organization (Cambridge, 1947) p. 248.
Minutes of Evidence, Report of the Committee on Finance and Industry, vol. I (HMSO, 1931), Q.1157.
Williams, ‘London and the 1931 Financial Crisis’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XV (1963) p. 515, fn. 1.
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© 1986 D. C. M. Platt
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Platt, D.C.M. (1986). The Stock of British Investment Overseas on the Eve of the First World War: A Revised Estimate. In: Britain’s Investment Overseas on the Eve of the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18254-1_2
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