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
A very good and concise survey of Irish history is given by Liam de Paor, Divided Ulster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
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).
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 expapded 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).
See E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) ch. 7.
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).
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).
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.
See D. Watt, Personalities and Policies (London: Longman, 1965), especially ‘America and the Elite, 1895–1956’.
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.
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© 1994 Andrew Gamble
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Gamble, A. (1994). The world island. In: Britain in Decline. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23620-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23620-6_2
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