Holding Back the Tide: Liverpool Shipping, Gentlemanly Capitalism and Intra-Asian Trade in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In analysing debates about the complementarity of British gentlemanly capitalism and the growth of intra-Asian trade, this chapter spotlights Liverpool-based shipping interests in southern and eastern Asia from the 1920s to the 1970s.¹ After establishing the significance of Asian trade for twentieth-century Liverpool, the analysis addresses the degree to which Liverpool’s shipping elite slotted into gentlemanly capitalism: the amalgam of London-centred finance and services with aristocracy and officialdom, which for Cain and Hopkins dominated imperial policymaking.² Obviously, Merseyside’s shipping barons were geographically divorced from the southern genteel elite. Nevertheless, shipowners gravitated towards the gentlemanly cluster as the twentieth century wore on. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, this maritime network came to terms with Japanese business interests, supporting Akita’s and Kagotani’s symbiosis between British gentlemanly capitalism and Japanese industrialisation in the promotion of a new economic order in Asia. This was interrupted by the Great East Asia War (1937–1945), but came to full fruition in the Japanese-led Asian trading realm of the 1970s and 1980s.³ Yet, in support of Best, the discussion reveals tensions by the 1930s between British and Japanese business interests.⁴ Primarily, there was an estrangement between British and Japanese economic interests in Asia, as Liverpool shipowners complained of unfair competition.