Selling Washing Machines in Düsseldorf

There was a rapid decline in British World trade networks in the decade between 1961, when Macmillan’s government announced the UK’s first attempt to join the EEC, and the confirmation of its entry in 1972. Wilson’s subsequent renegotiation of Britain’s membership only won minor concessions for Commonwealth imports. British enthusiasm for EEC membership largely derived from a belief that it provided the best basis for future economic prosperity. By the late 1960s there was certainly little sense that the Commonwealth could provide valuable future markets, which would compensate for Britain abandoning its ongoing efforts to join the EEC.

Buying for Britain, China, or India?

Chapter 3 seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the language, reach, and limits of competing patriotic trade campaigns in the Empire-Commonwealth during the 1920s and 1930s. Efforts to foster the concept of ‘buying British’ served to highlight the marginality of Indian and Chinese businesspeople within the imperial economic community. This stimulated the development of competing patriotic trade campaigns in which non-white imperial subjects challenged British economic leadership by presenting themselves as part of alternative economic communities connected across and beyond imperial spaces. The hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities impeded efforts to develop patriotic trade networks and meant that the content, character, and popular appeal of trade campaigns shifted between different regions. Despite the prevalence of a ‘Buy British’ rhetoric in the Dominions, patriotic trade drives there quickly came to focus chiefly on national protectionism rather than wider themes of imperial collaboration.

We’re All Backing Britain?

Chapter 5 considers the role that Britannic loyalism played in various facets of everyday life in the UK and the Dominions, exploring developments in the fields of advertising and market research, attempts to promote Commonwealth collaboration in non-fiction film production and distribution, and the politics of post-war patriotic trade campaigns. The dismantling of import controls in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to a revival in patriotic trade campaigns. However, such campaigns increasingly came to be seen as outmoded during these years, jeopardizing trade with growing foreign markets. Moreover, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, discouraged businesses from making undifferentiated appeals to national markets. Earlier ideas that consumers across the British World had broadly similar interests and tastes were comprehensively challenged with the expansion of segmented marketing.

‘What Are We Doing to Earn Dollars?’

The Dominions, with the key exception of Canada, were members of the Sterling Area, which meant they continued to be connected to an economic system centred on London after 1945. However, this system was challenged by the disastrous economic effects of world war on the British economy, waves of decolonization, the development of trade liberalization with the emergence of GATT, and the declining importance of intra-Commonwealth trade. Chapter 4 focuses on how existing networks such as the Congresses of Chambers of the Commonwealth and Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conferences tried to move away from their earlier focus on ‘British World’ links to include Asians and Africans in policymaking. Such efforts had little success, and business associations increasingly focused on promoting regional rather than imperial trade, fuelled by the growing influence of the EEC and UN regional commissions.

Between Geneva and Ottawa

The interwar years marked the completion of attempts to establish a system of preferential trade within the British Empire, and the newly formed Imperial Economic Committee sought to present a modern vision of empire, in cooperation with the League of Nations. However, while Britannic sentiment remained strong in the Dominions, there was a new sense of scepticism regarding the British World’s cohesion and its future economic prospects. The League of Nations also provided new opportunities to challenge Britain’s economic leadership. Understandings of preferential trade were reshaped during the First World War and its aftermath, with increased attention focused on imperial modernization through ‘scientific’ management and the value of grading tariffs to aid relations with ‘friendly’ nations. During the 1930s it became increasingly clear that imperial cooperation could do little to solve key economic problems connected to production and food supplies, which needed to be tackled through broader international agreements.

Introduction

Forging a British World of Trade explores the politics of culture, ethnicity, and market in the Empire-Commonwealth between the 1880s and 1970s, focusing on efforts to promote an economic system centred on trade between the UK and the old Commonwealth. This chapter situates the themes of the study within the existing historiography on British World networks. In recent years British World studies have received significant criticism both for the focus of their research and its absences. A key part of the problem here is that studies of the British World too often neglect key questions of uneven cultural and power relations. No one idea about the optimal future of British World collaboration was ever hegemonic. We should not discard the British World as a category of analysis, but rather explore how British World economic networks competed over time with alternative national, regional, and international ideas of trade community.

Coda. 1886–1932–1973–2016

The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum fits into a wider pattern of historical change. At various points since the 1880s, hopes placed in the economic future of regional blocs have reshaped Britain’s identity as a trading nation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many people in the UK and its settler colonies argued that it was essential to invest resources into British World cooperation. The British World trade system slowly unravelled after 1945 as it became increasingly difficult to see the Commonwealth as a coherent and attractive economic bloc with a bright future. The triumph of the Leave campaign in 2016 resulted from their ability to overhaul this earlier perception that European Community membership was vital to Britain’s economic future, and to revitalize earlier narratives which presented the UK’s global trade role as key to its economic prosperity.

The Importance of Being British

From the 1880s onwards the Colonial Conferences and empire chamber of commerce movements promoted ‘British World’ trade connections and schemes for imperial preference in particular. Much of the appeal of schemes for promoting preferential trade within the empire rested on widespread beliefs about the vast future population capacity of the Dominions. However, Joseph Chamberlain’s subsequent tariff reform campaign proved highly divisive, and efforts to promote British World collaboration more broadly sharpened divisions between ‘British’ and Indian and colonial business elites. The development of British World trade networks led to the establishment of competing trade organizations, particularly amongst ethnic Indian and Chinese communities, which began to challenge the economic subordination of their communities within the imperial trade system.