Abstract
How do we account for the course of British expansion in Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the ‘imperial century’ between 1815 and 1923 and for the long contraction that followed? For nearly fifty years the high ground in this debate has been occupied by two great schools and the stage army of their critics and camp followers. The ‘imperialism of free trade’1 and ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ each provide a grand synthesis into which may be fitted the economic, strategic, international, domestic and colonial components of imperial growth and decline. Each has attracted a barrage of criticism: the ‘imperialism of free trade’ from those who resisted ‘informal empire’ as an implausible fiction;2 ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ from those who rejected it as an inadequate description of the British economy3 or who doubted the ‘Schumpeterian rationality’ of the City.4 And each contained arguments and emphases at odds with the other. Robinson and Gallagher had stressed the importance of the colonial factor in the imperial equation, and seen strategic rather than economic motives as the force behind late-Victorian imperialism, Cain and Hopkins had insisted upon metropolitan dynamism as the engine of expansion and commercial gain as its target.5 It was the Late-, not the Mid-Victorians, they argued, who won Britain a world-wide commercial imperium.
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Notes
For the extension of the original argument of the ‘imperialism of free trade’ into the twentieth century, J.A. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982).
D.C.M. Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’, Economic History Review, 2s, 21 (1968), 296–306;
M. Lynn, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade and the Case of West Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15 (1986), 22–40.
M. Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry 1820–1914’, Past and Present 122 (1989), 119–58;
G. Ingham, ‘British Capitalism, Empire, Merchants and Decline’, Social History 220, 3 (1995), 339–54.
I.R. Phimister, ‘Corners and Company-mongering: Nigerian Tin and the City of London 1909–1912’ JICH, 28, 2 (2000), 23–41.
A.N. Porter, ‘“Gentlemanly Capitalism” and Empire: the British Experience’, JICH, 18, 3 (1990), 265–95.
A.G. Hopkins, ‘Informal Empire in Argentina: an alternative view’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994), 469–84.
J. Gallagher and R.E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Econ Hist Rev, 2s, 6 (1953), 1–15.
For a recent attempt, J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), 614–42.
A.G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: from national history to imperial history’, Past and Present 164 (1999), 198–241.
See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, 2000), 53–4;
D.A. Washbrook, ‘Britain and India in the Pre-history of Modernity’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40, 4 (1997), 421.
K.B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power: an Economic History of the United States (New York and London, 1989), 14–15.
J.H. Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old South: Mississippi 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1988), 16.
Ulrich B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908), p. 54.
Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834–98 (Charlottesville, 1970).
European migration to the Americas in the 1830s was four times the figure for the 1820s. D. Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migration: some comparisons’, American Historical Review 88, 2 (1983), 278.
See P. Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969).
Thus China’s import of opium increased fourfold 1838–1860. H.B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire (New York and London, 1908), 337.
S. Roberts, The Squatting Age in Australia 1835–47 (Melbourne, [1935] 1964), ch. 1.
H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (pbk. edn. Ringwood, Vic., 1982), 84.
P. Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 1830–1847 (Auckland, 1977).
Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath (Johannesburg, 1995).
Thus, the tonnage of Western shipping at Canton increased by 23 times between 1719–25 and 1833. See L. Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident: le commerce à Canton 1719–1833 (Paris, 1964), II, 520.
Britain was the first country to permit absolute freedom of movement. M.A. Jones, Destination America (pbk. edn. London, 1977), 13.
Potential emigrants from subsistence economies were ‘too poor to move’. K.H. O’Rourke and J.G. Williamson, Globalisation and History (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 130.
R.A. Stafford, ‘Geological Surveys, Mineral Discoveries and British Expansion 1835–71’, JICH 12, 3 (1989), 5–32;
Stafford, Scientist of Empire (Cambridge, 1989), 205.
For its receptiveness to humanitarian pressure in the 1830s, J.A. Gallagher, ‘Fowell Buxton and the New Africa Policy, 1838–42’, Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1950), 36–58.
P. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 726–55.
See, for example, Elgin to Clarendon, 29 July 1857, in D. Bonner-Smith, The Second China War 1856–60 (Naval Records Society, 1954), 218.
P. Winn, ‘Britain’s Informal Empire in Uruguay’, Past and Present 73 (1976), 104, n.20.
H. Blumenthal, Franco-American Relations 1830–1871 (Chapel Hill, 1959), 43.
Maori armed resistance continued into the 1880s. J. Binney, Redemption Songs: a Life of Te Kooti (Auckland, 1995) ch. 12.
Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (26th impression, London, 1928), 242.
E.D. Steele, ‘Palmerston’ in K.M. Wilson (ed.) British Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Policy (London, 1987).
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For this term, E. Luttwak, Turbo Capitalism (London, 1998).
League of Nations, The Network of World Trade (Geneva, 1942), 9.
A.J.H. Latham and L. Neal, ‘The International Market in Wheat and Rice 1868–1914’, Econ Hist Rev 36, 20 (1983), 260–75.
D. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration (Princeton, 1957).
See J.P. Fogarty, ‘The Comparative Method and 19th Century Regions of Recent Settlement’, Historical Studies 19, 76 (1981), 412–29.
Even before the Chinese revolution in 1911, three-quarters of the population of Manchuria was made up of recent Chinese immigrants. For subsequent immigration, I. Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (NY, 1931), 281.
As emphasized by Halford Mackinder and Leo Amery in 1904. See P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976), 183–4.
R.C.O. Matthews, C.H. Feinstein and J.C. Odling-Smee, British Economic Growth 1856–1973 (Oxford, 1982), 128.
S. Pollard, ‘Capital Exports 1870–1914, Harmful or Beneficial?’, Econ Hist Rev 38 (1985), 489–514.
Britain’s net overseas assets rose from £1 billion in 1873 to £4.2 billion in 1913, a rise of £3.2 billion. Over the same period, Britain’s overseas investment earnings totalled £4.04 billion, more than enough to cover the increase. See B.R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), p. 334.
P. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (second ed., London, 2002), chs. 12, 13.
D. Blackbourn, Fontana History of Germany: the Long Nineteenth Century 1780–1918 (London, 1997), 315–18, for a recent discussion.
For Bismarck, O. Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, Vol 3: the Period of Fortification 1880–1898 (Princeton, 1990), 123–5. Like Salisbury, Bismarck hoped to avoid the cost and trouble of ruling these colonial spheres.
For the mutual anxiety of Britain and France at the time of the Russo-Japanese war, G. Monger, The End of Isolation (London, 1963), 128–9, 139.
J. Lonsdale, ‘Scramble and Conquest in African History’ in R. Oliver and G.N. Sanderson (eds) Cambridge History of Africa VI: From 1870 to 1905, Cambridge, 1985).
J. Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford, 1902) 8–9;
H.J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal 23, 4 (1904), 422.
J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (pbk. ed. Harmondsworth, 1994), 4–6.
H. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London, 1902), 12–13.
Egypt was the test-case: hence its controversial role in British politics and the importance of propaganda tracts like A. Milner, England and Egypt (London, 1892).
See J. Gooch, The Prospect of War (London, 1981), 79–106.
R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (London, 1961) chs. 8, 10, 12;
L.K. Young, British Policy in China 1895–1902 (Oxford, 1970).
For this episode, Baron Meyendorff (ed.) Correspondance diplomatique de M. De Staal, vol. 2 (Paris, 1929), 441, 450;
N. Rich, Friedrich von Holstein, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1965), 617.
For the argument that Britain’s entente policy was chiefly motivated by imperial concerns, K. Wilson, ‘British Power in the European Balance 1906–14’ in D. Dilks (ed.) Retreat from Power (London, 1981), 41.
A. Offer, ‘The British Empire 1870–1914: a Waste of Money?’ Econ Hist Rev 46, 2 (1993), 234–35; generally, Offer, The First World War: an Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989).
A. von Tirpitz, My Memoirs (Eng. trans, London, c. 1926), vol. 1, 287.
A. Zimmern, The Third British Empire (3rd edn., Oxford, 1934), 75.
For the development of a German Grossraumwirtschaft in Eastern Europe after 1934, A. Basch, The Danube Basin and the German Economic Sphere (London, 1944), chs. xi, xvi;
E.A. Radice ‘The German Economic Programme in Eastern Europe’ in M. Kaser (ed.), The Economic History of Eastern Europe 1919–1975 (Oxford, 1986), II, 300–1.
F.C. Jones, Japan’s New Order in Asia: Its Rise and Fall 1937–45 (London, 1954).
For German abandonment of China to Japan, see J.P. Fox, Germany and the Far Eastern crisis 1931–38 (Oxford, 1982), 55 ff.
See B. McKercher, Transition of Power; Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1999) ch. 4.
See D. Brotel, ‘Indochina (Vietnam) between National Independence and Colonial Continuity’ in G. Krebs and C. Oberland (eds) 1945 in Europe and Asia (Munich, 1997).
See J. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation (London, 1988).
A. Deporte, Europe between the Superpowers (New Haven, 1986).
J. Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire: the Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’ in W.R. Louis and J. Brown (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), ch. 3.
* I have benefited from the advice of Dr Ian Phimister to whom I am most grateful. Errors of fact and interpretation are mine.
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Darwin, J. (2002). Globalism and Imperialism: the Global Context of British Power, 1830–1960. In: Gentlemanly Capitalism, Imperialism and Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919403_3
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