Abstract
Britain’s decline can only be understood, indeed only exists, in relation to the world economic system of which Britain is a part. This chapter considers the history of the expansion of the British state, and the consequences for Britain’s subsequent progress of the relatively slender base of population and resources upon which its massive world empire was established. All understanding begins here, for this is the feature that most clearly marks Britain off from other states.
We can with safety make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis on their cursed island.
Adolf Hitler1
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Notes and references
The Testament of Adolf Hitler (London: Cassell, 1961) p. 34.
Wales was incorporated in England in 1536. Scotland and England were united by the Act of Union in 1707, so forming Great Britain. The United Kingdom was created in 1801 when the formal independence of the Irish Parliament was abolished, although Ireland had long been an English dependency.
This was certainly true for Scotland and England, though less true for Wales. Wales did have heavy industry, but has been described (by Eric Hobsbawm) as a ‘mining annexe’ of the British economy with its own distinctive class structure. Nevertheless it was still very different again from Ireland.
A very good and concise survey of Irish history is given by Liam de Paor, Divided Ulster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
Four million emigrated from Ireland during the nineteenth century. Irish labour was employed in England particularly in building and railway construction.
The most important was the split in the Liberal party in 1886 over Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Joseph Chamberlain led the breakaway Liberal Unionists into alliance with the Conservatives. The Union was to be a central political issue for the next twenty years, the Conservatives even adopting a new name, the Unionists, to emphasise its overriding importance. For Chamberlain’s career see D. Judd, Radical Joe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977).
See A. T. Q. Stewart, Ulster Crisis (London: Faber, 1967).
The history and dynamics of this world economy have been explored in the major study by Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
This strategy is set out by Halford Mackinder (Geographer, Imperialist, Director of LSE, Unionist MP, Commissioner to the White forces during the Russian Civil War) in Democratic Ideals and Reality (London: Constable, 1919).
A judgement made by the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley in his highly influential work The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1909). The growth of this trade was not uniform and its expansion was generally interrupted by wars. There was a peace party in England which disliked the expense of the commercial policy because of the wars it involved. Nevertheless, it was the successful prosecution of the wars that laid the foundation for the periods of greatest expansion of trade. Some historians seem curiously blind to this. W. E. Minchinton in his Introduction to The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 1969) notes how trade always expanded fastest in times of peace and concludes that the idea that the commercial expansion began with Cromwell is mistaken. At the same time he notes the crucial steps that were taken under Cromwell which made the great expansion from 1660 to 1685 possible — the Navigation Acts, the war with Holland, and the seizure of Jamaica from Spain.
See B. Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1970), the outstanding study of the subject. In 1815 the Empire covered some two million square miles with a population of approximately 100 million.
The Anti-Corn Law League, in which Cobden and Bright were leading members, never became strong enough to force through repeal against the united resistance of the landed class. Repeal came because of a split within this class. See N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968).
By the 1840s 3.4 million Britons were fed on foreign wheat.
See E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) ch. 7.
The most notorious use of British naval power to open markets was the Opium war of 1839–41. The Chinese Emperor had attempted to halt all trade, especially the trade in opium. At the conclusion of the war Hong Kong was handed over to Britain and China opened to trade and western penetration.
Tariffs rose very steeply after 1870. The general American tariff was 57 per cent by 1897. Russia imposed protective tariffs in 1877. France in 1878, Germany in 1879.
There were many different protectionist programmes. Some wanted a uniform tariff imposed on all imports, others wanted it imposed only against those countries that discriminated against British goods. The latter principle was often acceptable to pragmatic free traders, but it was the former that marked out the true tariff reformers, since the object was not primarily retaliation against those states that had themselves imposed tariffs, but a permanent protection of trade. Ideally they wanted the Empire to be a single free trade economic bloc protected by an external tariff barrier. Imperial preference was a second-best solution whereby every self-governing state of the Empire would impose its own external tariff but admit goods from other imperial countries at preferential rates. Protectionist sentiment began to stir in the 1880s, and the Tariff Reform League, established in 1903, was preceded by the Campaign for Fair Trade in the 1880s and such organisations as the United Empire Trade League.
The Free Trade doctrine is set out with great clarity in Richard Cobden’s Political Writings, 2 vols (London: Ridgeway, 1867), and also in the Sophismes Economiques of Frederic Bastiat, which the Cobden Club (motto: Free Trade, Peace, Goodwill among Nations) reprinted at the height of the controversy on tariff reform under the title Fallacies of Protection (London: Cassell, 1909).
Jingoism was so named after the popular music hall song. We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
A point emphasised by D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).
Charles Dilke, the radical liberal politician, wrote a very influential book, Greater Britain (London: Macmillan, 1868), which set out these ideas. See also the earlier theories and practical enterprises of Edward Gibbon Wakefield for middle-class settlement of the Empire, described in Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism.
For the very varied ideology of imperialism see A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and its enemies (London: Macmillan, 1957).
Before the Tariff Reform League was established this was already made embarrassingly clear at the Congress of the Chambers of Commerce of the Empire in 1896. The Dominions feared that any scheme of imperial free trade would be mainly to the advantage of British manufacturers. They wanted protection against British competition so as to establish their own industries. The Social Imperialists were forced to recognise this reluctance, but believed that if a strong enough political initiative were taken by Britain, all parts of the Empire would be prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of greater unity.
Although free trade triumphed over protection, the Liberals remained committed to the Empire and to a policy of free trade imperialism safeguarding Britain’s colonial possessions while maintaining the openness of the world economy to British goods.
The Empire, though vast, was extremely undeveloped. Only Malaya was a significant source of supply of raw materials for the British economy, and even by 1914 the bulk of British investment still continued to flow to the more developed parts of the world economy. See S. Pollard, The Development of the British Economy (London: Arnold, 1969) pp. 19–23. The British empire was always very unlike the continental empires which America and Russia already had, and to which Germany aspired.
See A. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (New York: Russell, 1958). The total foreign investments of Germany, France and Italy combined were £5500 million in 1914.
H. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London: Heinemann, 1902) p. 343.
The British battle fleet had to be superior to the two next largest navies in the world combined. The arms race before 1914 was begun by the German decision to build a fleet. The German bourgeoisie, not the German aristocracy, was the class that pressed for this, with the explicit aim of challenging England. See David Calleo, The German Problem Re-Considered (Cambridge University Press, 1978) chs 3, 4.
Mackinder’s strategic ideas had most influence not in Britain, but in Germany, on Haushofer. One of Haushofer’s research assistants in the early 1920s was Rudolf Hess, shortly to spend some time in a prison cell with Adolph Hitler. In this way Mackinder’s ideas helped to shape the geopolitical thinking of Hitler.
This is most strongly argued by Corelli Barnett in his book, The Collapse of British Power (London: Methuen, 1972). He goes so far as to state: ‘The British and imperial armies which marched and conquered in the latter half of the war … were not manifestations of British imperial power at a new zenith, as the British believed at the time and long afterwards, but only the illusion of it. They were instead manifestations of American power — and of the decline of England into a warrior satellite of the United States’ (p. 592). This is an exaggeration, but it is a correction to the view of Britain as an equal ally and equal power in the war.
See D. Watt, Personalities and Policies (London: Longman, 1965), especially ‘America and the Elite, 1895–1956’.
Joseph Chamberlain, when Colonial Secretary in the 1890s, briefly favoured a German alliance. British ties with Germany were close, particularly through the royal family. When the Great War broke out the British royal family changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor (in 1917).
German war aims are discussed by Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), and by David Calleo, The German Problem Re-Considered.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (1835).
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© 1990 Andrew Gamble
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Gamble, A. (1990). The world island. In: Britain in Decline. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20940-8_2
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