1Introduction
At the start of the third millennium, the times are very much a-changing; or at least there are many who would wish us to believe that this is so. ‘Globalisation’ is the word that has been coined to capture this sense of living in an age of transformation – one in which little can be taken for granted and no-one quite knows what the future might bring.1 ‘Globalisation’ trips off the tongues of journalists and politicians in a way it manifestly did not before, while university libraries now struggle to make space for the swathe of new studies of our globalised world and how it came to be so.2 Few disciplines in academia have been left untouched by globalisation’s claims, or have remained immune to its conceptual allure. Readily translatable into French, Spanish, German and other European languages, ‘globalisation’ is perhaps the pre-eminent way of conceptualising contemporary change.3 A growing number of sceptics question its novelty, feel frustrated by its lack of specificity and are critical of its Eurocentricity.4 ‘A messy idea for an anxious world’ is the verdict of one recent commentator upon the concept.5 Yet there are many more champions of globalisation. Indeed, like the discourse of ‘evolutionism’ in the nineteenth century, globalisation has been
1 For the recent history of the concept, see N. Bisley, Rethinking Globalization
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–31.
2 For the currency or purchase of the concept, see A. Giddens’ 1999 Reith Lectures,
published as Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York:
Routledge, 2002), pp. xi, 7; and Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. For its impact upon
academe, see C. Hay and D. Marsh, ‘Introduction: Demystifying Globalization’, in
Hay and Marsh (eds.), Demystifying Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999), p. 1.
3 It has also been likened to a prism through which major debates about the human
condition – capitalism, modernity, inequality, ecology, gender, identity etc. – are
now refracted; see J. Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 1, 7.
4 For a powerful critique, see F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 91–112.
5 J. Garvie, ‘Globalisation and Its Cures’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 February
2008.
1 readily appropriated for a variety of (often competing) causes. Talk of ‘globality’,6 ‘global society’, ‘global governance’, ‘global economy’, ‘global justice’, ‘global warming’, the ‘global war against terror’ and a ‘new global order’ is, for the moment, here to stay.
2Globalisation is about the interconnectedness of different parts of the world.7 It is best understood as a process, or a set of processes, that compress time and space, and accelerate the ‘interdependence’ of societies and states.8 It tends to be assumed that globalisation is deepening, not least because of recent and rapid advances in communications, which have transformed the speed, and often substantially lowered the cost, of human travel, correspondence and conversation.9 However, while
6 Some commentators distinguish ‘globality’ from ‘globalisation’; others leave the
relationship between the two undefined. For the former, see U. Beck, What Is
Globalization? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which suggests that
‘globality’, which is supposedly irreversible, means that ‘we have been living for a long
time in a world society, in the sense that the notion of closed spaces has become illu-
sory’, whereas globalisation denotes ‘the processes through which sovereign national
states are criss-crossed and undermined by trans-national actors with varying pros-
pects of power, orientations, identities and networks’, pp. 10–11.
7 There are diverse perspectives on the more specific meanings of the concept: see, inter
alia, Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, pp. 1–18; and Bisley, Rethinking
Globalization, pp. 17–31. For agreement upon globalisation’s ‘fundamentals’ or
‘core features’, see Roland Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture
(London: Sage, 1992), p. 8, who refers to the concept as ‘the compression of the world
and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’; and Barrie Axford,
The Global System: Economics, Politics and Culture (Oxford: Polity, 1995), p. 27: ‘The
core of the idea is that the world is undergoing a process of ever-intensifying intercon-
nectedness and interdependence, so that it is becoming less relevant to speak of separ-
ate national economies, or separate national jurisdictions founded upon principles like
to sovereignty of the territorial nation-state.’
8 The different nuances of the concept are explored in more detail in the chapters that
follow. Fred Halliday unpacks this particular definition further to argue for three
aspects of globalisation: ‘a marked reduction in the barriers between societies and
states, an increasing homogeneity of societies and states and an increase in the vol-
ume of interactions between societies’; see The World at 2000: Perils and Promises
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 61. See also D. Held and A. McGrew,
‘The Great Globalization Debate: An Introduction’, in Held and McGrew (eds.), The
Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3, who identify ‘distance’, ‘time-space com-
pression’, ‘accelerating interdependence’, ‘shrinking world’ and ‘integration’ as key
elements of definitions of the term. Some, yet by no means all, commentators fur-
ther emphasise that globalisation’s intensification of mutual dependence neces-
sarily undermines the sovereignty of nation states; see, for example, Beck, What is
Globalization?, p. 8.
9 See W. H. McNeill, ‘Globalization: Long Term Process or New Era in Human
Affairs?’, New Global Studies 2:1 (2008), 1–9. McNeill defines globalisation as ‘the
way recent changes in transport and communication have tied mankind in all parts of
the earth together more closely than ever before’, though he is mindful of the impact
of steam transport and electrical communication on the ‘global pace of change’ in the
past, pp. 1, 4.
3Introduction cutting-edge technology, such as today’s electronic and news media, can provide the means for greater integration, there is a growing recognition that globalisation is as much about people as machines, and that its roots extend back in time.10 Thus the progress of globalisation has recently been traced through distinct phases, the latest of which may be more inclusive than its predecessors yet which is by no means wholly distinct from them. Historians of migration have played an important role in delineating earlier ‘eras’ or ‘episodes’ of globalisation.11 The large-scale movement of people across state borders during the nineteenth century is widely regarded as a key feature of the making of the ‘modern’ world.12
10 For the view that globalisation has long been a fact of life, see Cooper, Colonialism in
Question, pp. 94–7, 100–4; and Halliday, The World at 2000, p. 62. For the argument
that the era of (modern) globalisation is characterised by ‘a sense of living in the midst
of unprecedented change’ – a sense that has ‘dominated social and political sensibil-
ities, and that can be traced back to the early nineteenth century’ – see A. McKeown,
‘Periodizing Globalization’, HWJ 63 (2007), 218–30 (quotations are taken from
p. 219).
11 See, for example, M. Kearney, ‘The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of
Globalization and Transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995),
547–65 (p. 549); and Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture, pp. 4, 32. For
the way in which experiences of globalisation have been shaped by mass migration,
the modern media and their joint effect on the ‘social imagination’, see A. Appadurai,
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996); M. P. Smith and L. E. Guarnizo (eds.), Transnationalism
from Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); and S. Vertovec
(ed.), Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999).
Trans-national migration, in the form of the slave trade, is understood to have been
a defining feature of Africa’s ‘encounter with the “modern world”’, and one with
‘lasting global implications’, not least in terms of how Africans would be ‘located in
the emerging global order’; see M. Vaughan, ‘Africa and the Birth of the Modern
World’, TRHS (2006), 143–62 (pp. 155–8). For the view that contemporary inter-
national migrations arise from the accelerating process of global integration, and
that more countries are currently and simultaneously being affected by migratory
movements, see S. Castles and M. Miller (eds.), The Age of Migration: International
Population Movements in the Modern World, 2nd edn (Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 4, 8.
Alejandro Portes also recognises the importance of migration to globalisation, again
coupled mainly to twentieth-century changes in technology (airplanes, telephones,
fax machines and electronic mail); see A. Portes, ‘Globalization from Below: The
Rise of Transnational Communities’, in W. P. Smith and R. P. Korczenwicz (eds.),
Latin America in the World Economy (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996),
pp. 151–68.
12 For a persuasive periodisation of globalisation, which has been influential in framing
the debate, see A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico,
2002), and Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially Hopkins’ ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–38. See also
G. Eley, ‘Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name’,
HWJ 63 (2007), 154–88. For the ‘prehistory’ of globalisation, and how earlier periods
both empowered and challenged the ‘nineteenth century international system’, see
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 41–4.
4Waves of emigration, or ‘diasporas’ – ethnic groups in dispersal – not only helped to mesh large portions of the world together materially, spiritually and intellectually, but left in their wake new, more transnational ways of thinking.13 The great transatlantic migrations, as well as migrations of contract or indentured labourers from and across Africa and Asia, were central to this first major phase of modern globalisation in the half-century prior to the First World War. These migratory flows, it is claimed, profoundly altered ‘the economic, cultural and political geography’ of the world.14 Their scale, timing and direction – whether coerced, semi-voluntary or free – were intimately tied up with territorial expansion and the consequent dispossession of indigenous peoples. Within Europe, the British peoples were prolific migrants.15 From the mid nineteenth century they comprised a major part of a great global
13 The word ‘diaspora’ derives from the Greek: dia, ‘through’; and speirein, ‘to scatter’.
Hence the word embodies the notion of a ‘home’ or ‘centre’ from where dispersal
occurs, as well as the idea of settling down and putting one’s roots elsewhere. See
A. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1997),
pp. 181–2. Several commentators allow for the formation of European diasporas
through conquest and colonisation. For the classic text, see R. Cohen, Global
Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997). ‘Victim diasporas’ (e.g. the
Jews, Armenians and Africans) were involuntary movements of people, driven or
deported from their homes; as such, they loom large in the popular imagination.
But the concept of a ‘diaspora’ can be used more broadly to encompass peoples
who imagine themselves as part of a nation while residing outside their homeland.
Scattered to many corners of the globe, diasporic migrants nonetheless retain their
language and other elements of their culture, at least for a few generations. They
also tend to be involved economically with the society they have left behind. For
an important study of a ‘voluntary’ diaspora, couched in these broader terms, see
D. R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000). Her defin-
ition, based around the idea of a trans-national ethnic community, and a grow-
ing sense of group consciousness arising from migration, has also been applied to
today’s Indian diaspora: see B. Parekh, G. Singh and S. Vertovec (eds.), Culture
and Economy in the Indian Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003). For the suggestion
that a sense of ‘Greater Britishness’ or ‘imperial Anglo-Saxonism’ might usefully
be conceived as a form of ‘diasporic transnationalism’, see R. C. Young, The Idea
of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 226, 231: ‘So it was that during
the course of the nineteenth century, Englishness was translated from the national
identity of the English living in England into a diasporic identity beyond any geo-
graphical boundaries which included all the English who had now emigrated all over
the globe’ (quotation from p. 231).
14 McKeown, ‘Periodizing Globalization’, pp. 226–7; J. Darwin, After Tamerlane: The
Global History of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 251.
15 The notion of a British ‘diaspora’ has received much less consideration than that of
its Jewish, Italian, Indian or Chinese counterparts: for an early use of the term, see
H. Tinker, ‘The British Diaspora’, in Tinker (ed.), The Diaspora of the British, Collected
Seminar Papers of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London: Institute of
Commonwealth Studies, 1982), pp. 1–9. For a definition of ‘diaspora’ that encom-
passes migrants from Europe, see Gabaccia’s ‘a way of life that connects family, work
and consciousness in more than one territory’: Italy’s Many Diasporas, p. 11.
5Introduction movement of population.16 Ethnically, racially and culturally defined, this outflow of human capital from Britain saw millions of individuals leave their homes voluntarily in search of greater opportunity, real or imagined, in the wider world.17 Their complex, multi-layered set of migrations encompassed the ‘settler’ colonies, the United States, and a host of smaller ‘expatriate’ communities in the empire’s dependent territories and regions of so-called ‘informal’ colonial rule.
Crucially, emigration from Britain underpinned a new division of labour in the international economy, one effect of which was to ‘put a different order of strain’ on native peoples everywhere,18 another to make ‘transnationalism’ – living in and identifying with more than one country or place – a normal way of life for many British people in the half-century before 1914.19 Shared conceptions of ‘Britishness’ gave rise
16 For key works, covering the period up to 1914, see D. Baines, Migration in a Mature
Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles:
The Great Scottish Exodus (London: Profile Books, 2004); H. L. Malchow, Population
Pressures: Emigration and Government in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Sposs,
1979); and B. Thomas, Migration and Atlantic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the
Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). Further references
are provided in Chapter 3. For the latest publications, see R. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and
Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); M. Harper
and S. Constantine, Migrants and Settlers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010);
K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1760–1914’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The
British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and,
especially, E. Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales
and Ireland since 1600 (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004).
17 ‘Ethnicity’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are, of course, all overlapping and imprecise concepts,
open to differing interpretations. For further consideration of ‘race’ and racial atti-
tudes across the ‘British World’, see Chapter 1 (‘Reconfiguring empire’), as well as
the discussions of indentured and contract labour (Chapter 3) and cultures of con-
sumption among indigenous peoples (Chapter 4). For a working definition of ‘cul-
ture’, see below, p. 13 and n. 36. ‘Ethnicity’ figures prominently in social science,
as well as public policy discourses. A useful introduction to the concept is provided
by Steve Fenton: Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), which refers to ethnic groups
as ‘descent and culture communities’ (p. 13). As Fenton is at pains to point out,
this definition is only a starting point: ethnicity, like race, is not a fixed category
but rather is socially constructed: ‘People or peoples do not just possess cultures
or share ancestry; they elaborate these into the idea of a community founded upon
these attributes’ (pp. 3–4). For a skilful exposition of the view that ethnic (and cul-
tural) identity is as much ‘a matter of becoming’ as a matter of ‘being’, see S. Hall,
‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture,
Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), pp. 222–37, esp. pp. 222–8. For
the argument that ‘English ethnicity was effectively globalized’ during the nineteenth
century, and ‘moved out from the centre to absorb the remotest colonial peripheries’,
see Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, pp. xi–xii, 1–2, 196–230, 231–27 (quotation
from p. 225).
18 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 439.
19 Or, more precisely, the co-existence of intense social, economic and political ties
across national boundaries; for this definition see S. Vertovec, ‘Transnationalism and
Identity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (2001), 573–82.
6to the notion of a ‘British World’,20 a world whose foundations were cultural as much as political, personal as well as official, and changeable rather than fixed. While those who belonged to this ‘British World’ might have struggled to trace its outlines on a map, it was a concept that nonetheless meant something important to them. Migrants to Britain’s settler colonies remained ‘British’, or at least partly so; and being ‘British’ had material implications, not only shaping consumer tastes and preferences, but impacting more broadly on the very nature and orientation of economic activity and behaviour. The so-far unexplored history of this British World economy is the subject of this book.
There is, however, a problem. Why, in the economic sphere, would rational, self-interested individuals prefer to interact with particular cultural or ethnic groups? In pre-modern times, when reliable market institutions were weak or did not exist, economic actors had little option but to rely on personal connections – the risks of dealing with strangers were high, whereas those whom you knew were felt more likely to be trustworthy. Co-ethnic and co-religious networks, therefore, offered a relatively secure way of expanding the scope of economic activity. Such solutions, however, were supposedly no more than second best, and by the nineteenth century, when the workings of impersonal markets had become ensconced, there remained potentially much less need for such devices. Economic behaviour could surely now become culturally neutral. After all, to those engaged in trade, it was ultimately the exchange itself that mattered, not the identity of those with whom they did business. Nineteenth-century consumers would thus buy from the cheapest seller, sellers would supply the buyer who was prepared to pay the most or to pay the most promptly, migrants would go to societies where their skills would be best rewarded, and capital would flow to projects that promised the highest or most secure return. In short, key economic decisions could (and should) have been made on the basis of profit-maximisation and the rational calculation of material well-being. If we follow this logic, then little room is left for non-economic considerations. Yet, as this book demonstrates, there is overwhelming evidence that the influence of such non-economic considerations did not disappear, but remained active and strong in the British World of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A distinct ‘British World economy’ existed: how was this possible?
The answer to this question lies in the uneven process of globalisation. Barriers to integration frequently impede economic interaction by
20 For an introduction to the literature, see C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, The British
World: Culture, Diaspora and Identity (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003).
7Introduction obstructing or diverting certain types of economic behaviour. There are three conceptually distinct if, in practice, inter-related, types of barrier. The first type is cultural, ethnic or religious. Differing tastes, values, expectations and beliefs, in the past as now, tend to complicate crosssocietal economic activity. A trader wishing to sell English meat products in the Middle East, for example, will have little success if he or she does not appreciate the distinctiveness of Middle Eastern tastes or understand Islamic law about appropriate foodstuffs and the manner of slaughter. Attempts to sell non-halal meat would inevitably prove fruitless. The scope for such economically disadvantageous misunderstanding is typically reduced when the people involved share similar cultural backgrounds. The second type of barrier is informational.21 The flow and differing availability of information in different contexts can block, retard or even re-orientate the focus of integration. Markets need information to work efficiently. One can make optimal economic choices only if one has adequate, accurate and relevant knowledge of all the available options. Thus, while our British meat trader may have the potential to adapt his or her products profitably to Middle Eastern demands, he or she may be simply unaware of the market opportunities that pertain there. In other words, there is no-one to tell him or her that a rewarding market exists in the Middle East. Instead, the trader continues to supply the British and western Europe markets exclusively, even though greater profits could, in theory, have been made by catering for the Middle Eastern customer. Moreover, even within Europe, information can skew the direction of the trader’s exports in ways that appear economically ‘irrational’. If our British trader were more familiar with and, hence, better informed about, say, French markets than Italian, he or she would tend, ceteris paribus, to export more to the former than the latter – again irrespective of the real relative profitability of either. In a world of less than perfect information (the real world), the uneven creation, dissemination and distribution of knowledge will inevitably influence the extent and direction of economic activity.22
21 For two key studies of the influence of information and communication flows on
economic (and political) life, see D. R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age:
Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); and H. A. Innis, Empire & Communications (Victoria,
BC: University of British Columbia, 1986).
22 For the social organisation of knowledge, and its implications for debates about glo-
balisation, see Hay and Marsh, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–13.
8The third type of barrier to market integration is political. Export prohibitions, tariffs and the whole panoply of other devices are designed to protect trade. Our British meat trader may be aware of and able to supply Middle Eastern demand, but be prevented from doing so by an embargo on such trade imposed by a British parliament concerned about local food supplies, or by a Middle Eastern tariff designed to protect local butchers. Either way, domestic and commercial policies and regulations can place limits on the expansion of all types of economic activity. While such barriers exist, markets are not free to develop to the fullest extent.
The growth of cross-cultural economic activity therefore depends upon the ongoing mitigation of these barriers. The state can assist this process by removing obstructions to the movement of people, goods and capital across societies, by providing physical and legal protection to those who seize the opportunities, and by creating an infrastructure that enables information and ‘social capital’ to flow more freely across borders.23 In the pages that follow we explain how the migration of the British peoples during the ‘long’ nineteenth century was integral to the birth of a British World economy. The spread of ‘neo-British’ communities reduced all three of the above barriers – cultural, informational and political – thereby facilitating trade, investment and further rounds of migration between the United Kingdom and British settler societies overseas.24 Yet, at the same time, information flows engendered by such a culturally and ethnically led expansion of economic activity tended to make comparable activity with racial or other ‘outsiders’ relatively less appealing. These flows skewed trade, investment and migration patterns, for a time at least, further towards those perceived as being ‘British’. Of course, the economic effects of being ‘British’ were never absolute. Despite the best efforts of empire loyalists and ‘constructive imperialists’, British colonies continued to consume and attract people, products and monies from elsewhere, and barriers to integration were
23 For a definition of ‘social capital’, see Chapter 2, pp. 46–51 below.
24 For the term ‘neo-Britons’, see J. Belich, ‘The Rise of the Angloworld: Settlement
in North America and Australasia, 1784–1918’, in P. Buckner and D. Francis
(eds.), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005),
pp. 39–58. Critics object to the term on the grounds that it can be taken to imply the
erasure of pre-colonial, distinctively non-British societies and the recreation of their
landscapes as replica Britons. This was certainly not Belich’s intention. However,
the empire’s settler societies (and, to a degree, the United States) did face certain
common challenges as a result of having imported a good deal of their population,
ideology, cultural baggage and lifestyle. On this point, see A. S. Thompson, ‘The
Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c. 1870–1939’, English Historial Review
118 (2003), 617–50 (pp. 617–18).
9Introduction never completely eradicated, but continued to exist (to different degrees, and hence with differing outcomes) across locations. That said, places that had well-established British communities were better known and more welcoming, and could provide greater support and protection to the British emigrant, investor and merchant, so that cultural, informational and political barriers tended to be accordingly less problematic.25 The incompleteness of the process of integration helps to explain why nineteenth-century reality (like any other reality) varied from the hypothetical world of the perfectly neutral market, and why there remained space for a distinctively British World economy not only to survive, but to flourish. Incomplete integration also explains how an economic system ostensibly based on free trade could have and retain an ‘imperial’ (or more accurately ‘British’) component to it.
Yet what we identify in this book is a very different type of ‘imperial’ economic system from that usually depicted. The British imperial economy is often cast in one of two starkly contrasting moulds: it is conceived either as a largely fictitious entity or as a very real one based on hegemonic power relations. The former position typically derives from the observation that, while Britain’s internal and external economic policies were guided by the principle of laissez-faire, there could be little scope – beyond the provision of basic infrastructure, education, and law and order – for government involvement in the economy.26 According to this view, the course of economic development and integration was driven by self-interested individuals operating within free markets in a manner that paralleled the neo-classical trade theories of modern economics. Moreover, within this tradition, the focus of much historical writing about nineteenth-century global economic development is not the wider British Empire but more the so-called ‘Atlantic world’.27 For
25 For the ‘unprecedented globalisation of information’ in the British Empire of the
later nineteenth century, see C. A. Bayly, ‘Informing Empire and Nation: Publicity,
Propaganda and the Press 1880–1920’, in H. Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and
Power through the Ages (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001), pp. 179–98,
although this ‘global information order’ could be used as much by fledgling nation-
alist movements to challenge colonial power, as it could by agents of British rule to
shore it up.
26 To some, these principles of small government and liberal institutions were in fact
the greatest (and most beneficial) of Britain’s legacies to its empire. See N. Ferguson,
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
(London: Basic Books, 2002), pp. xxi–xxiii.
27 This is the definition provided by K. O’Rourke and J. Williamson in Globalization
and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 6. Effectively they mean today’s OECD coun-
tries. Even were their definition to be reworded as ‘countries that first experienced
the impact of industrialisation’ it would still be contentious.
10example, according to Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, it was this Atlantic region that industrialised first and experienced the ‘first great globalisation boom’. By implication, the British empire – formal or informal – was largely irrelevant to the unprecedented integration of capital and commodity markets, and to the consequent convergence of real wages and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) witnessed by this group of countries during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.28 Certainly, in such accounts, the British empire rarely rates a mention.29 Meanwhile, to many others, the view that imperial factors played no major role in the evolution of either global commodity or financial markets in the nineteenth century would seem, at the very least, contentious. There is, after all, a long tradition of political thought dating back at least to Hobson and Lenin that not only acknowledges the role of empire, but places it at the heart of late-nineteenth-century economic development.30 Such approaches are typically based around ideas of dependency, exploitation and coercion.31 Their assumptions about supposedly unequal power relations between the metropolis and periphery lead them to highlight how the trajectories of extra- European economies were subject to, and shaped by, the requirements of an industrialised Britain.32 Moreover, they usually present Britain’s ‘imperial economy’ either as part of some ‘grand design’, concocted in Whitehall and implemented at the highest reaches of government, or as an inherent expression of an emerging global (and exploitative) capitalist system. These two approaches, however, have one thing in common: they both attempt to understand the prevailing economic system in terms of broader policy frameworks, social aggregates and political economy. While there is no doubt that they can shed light on those things upon which they choose to focus, neither truly provides a complete or entirely accurate description of what the British World economy was
28 Ibid.
29 For a further example of a major work where the empire barely figures, see L. E. Davis
and R. E. Gallman, Evolving Financial Markets and International Capital Flows:
Britain, the Americas, and Australia, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
30 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, 3rd rev. edn (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902);
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline by V. I.
Lenin (London: Pluto Press, 1917).
31 These approaches have developed out of the work of A. G. Frank and I. Wallerstein.
For an overview of their work and for more recent iterations, see B. N. Ghosh,
Dependency Theory Revisited (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
32 See, for example, J. Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), pp. 72–3.
11Introduction or how it really functioned. By portraying individuals in stylised and highly abstracted ways as profit-maximisers, or as members of certain classes, each theory fails to address the mechanisms that such individuals utilised or the behaviours they adopted to achieve their goals within the system. Hence, while these approaches can provide answers to broader questions such as why protectionism was adopted in certain places and times, and why the international division of labour emerged in the manner in which it did, they are less helpful in explaining how British exporters found their markets, how British investors acquired information about overseas investment opportunities, and how potential emigrants chose their destinations. These latter questions are, crucially, about actual economic behaviour rather than theories of political economy. Providing answers to these ‘real world’ questions requires us to place the ‘economics’ back into the analysis of the ‘imperial’ or British World system. In discussing the economic relationships arising from empire, one therefore needs to bear in mind that no single set of characteristics, taken together, in itself constitutes an ‘imperial’ economy. Rather, Britain’s economic relationships with its settler colonies could (and did) assume a variety of forms. The key to understanding this variety is the realisation that enduring economic systems do not arise entirely by accident. Their creation, evolution and maintenance are contingent upon an array of government and individual actions. Government action and policy provide the formal structural underpinnings of the economic system. These actions and policies are, in turn, shaped by official perceptions of the nature of the desired economy and of the state’s role in creating it. Excluding non-market, centrally planned empires (which have little relevance in this context), the state’s approach to economic affairs can take three forms: dirigiste, guided, or laissez-faire.
In the first, dirigiste, form, the state becomes the conscious architect of the economic system, a system that is usually explicitly designed to favour economic activity with certain groups (such as those within the empire), often to the exclusion of those outside it. The guiding state, on the other hand, may provide the basic infrastructure of the system, yet decide to take a less interventionist role and allow the economy to evolve in response to prevailing conditions. In this context, policy is used to make the system as efficient as possible within current circumstances, and at times to nudge economic activity in certain preferred directions. Thus, whereas a dirigiste state might protect, say, intra-imperial trade simply by prohibiting all extra-imperial imports, a guiding state might prefer to provide incentives to local consumers and producers to ‘think imperially’ rather than explicitly directing economic activity. Finally, laissez-faire states may typically choose to allow their economies to be shaped by market forces alone and, hence, have no desire at all to orientate themselves economically towards empire.
12Yet government policy alone cannot make an economic system. If trade chooses not to follow the flag, even the most earnest of intentions can create little more than the appearance of economic integration. The essence of any economic system reflects the actions of those who utilise it, so that the extent to which private interests – be they individual, organisational or even institutional – support or actively seek closer economic integration will shape the outcome. Self-interest may, of course, support closer imperial economic bonds,33 while political belief also has a role to play. Cultural affinity, understanding and prejudice are likely to be even more powerful drivers of private attitudes: for example, a feeling of a genuine sense of attachment towards the ‘imperial’ or ‘British’ project, or of kinship with fellow Britons across the globe. An economic orientation towards the empire may, moreover, have been more likely when the existing stock of knowledge was moulded by the empire itself. All decisions have to be made on the basis of the available information. If one of the consequences, whether intended or unintended, of Britain’s imperial relations was that its producers, consumers and investors were blessed by a rich flow of information about commercial and financial opportunities in the colonies, and comparatively ignorant about those outside the empire, it is easy to see how even the most hard-headed economic rationalist might choose to buy, sell or invest in the empire. Like cultural attachment, this informational bias in favour of empire varied in intensity across contexts. The ways in which private and state perceptions of, and information about, the economy interact with each other thus shape the nature of any economic system. When the effects of such interactions are allowed for, it becomes clear that a variety of different economic forms are possible. These forms range from, at one end of the spectrum, free trade – where individuals regard markets within the British imperial world no differently from any other, and the government consciously provides just the basic infrastructure necessary for market activity to occur – to, at the other end, a strong culturally orientated customs union – one in which both individuals and government are strongly committed to the idea of actively shaping economic relations in purely ‘imperial’ terms. Of course, other possible forms lie somewhere between these two
33 Indeed, if the return on the activity is high enough, even the most dispassionate busi-
nessman can willingly subscribe to closer economic bonds within the empire; declar-
ations of imperial piety are always easily made when they come at no cost.
13Introduction positions, and the British World economy analysed in this book is to be found in this intermediate space. As we shall see, the British World was an economic form that typically had as strong a cultural dimension as a political one, and one that saw the British state play at most a limited ‘guiding’ role.34 As subsequent chapters also demonstrate, the lack of strong political direction certainly did not impede its ability to survive, develop and expand.
The interplay between the cultural and economic dynamics of globalisation today is a subject of growing interest.35 In exploring the relationship between empire and globalisation in the past we, too, seek to integrate these two dimensions. Until recently, the humanities appeared to have turned away from ‘economy’ and towards ‘culture’.36 Imperial historiographies, in particular, seem of late to have bifurcated into ‘new’ imperial histories that lay particular claim to the social and cultural terrain, and older histories that focus on the political, military and economic.37 Yet to think of the empire as a series of interlocking networks or webs, which impacted as much on metropolitan as on colonial life,
34 There was, of course, room for significant variation between different parts of the
British World, since at certain times and in certain places the effects of cultural and
political influence could significantly differ.
35 See, for example, Hay and Marsh, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–13.
36 Scholars tend to be much less comfortable around the word ‘culture’ than ‘econ-
omy’. Like ‘class’, there is no generally accepted definition of the term ‘culture’.
P. Burke, for instance, refers to it as ‘a concept with an embarrassing variety of defini-
tions’ (see History and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
p. 118), and R. Williams as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the
English language’ (see Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976), p. 76). That said, many definitions have at their core the
idea of ‘culture’ as the embodiment of a group’s experiences, which refers to patterns
of thinking, feeling and acting that are shared by groups of people (large or small)
who live in the same social environment, while recognising that these patterns are
learned, not inherited. See, for example, Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, pp. 18–21;
G. Hofstede, Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind (London: McGraw-
Hill Professional, 1991), pp. 4–5; and E. L. Jones, Cultures Merging: A Historical and
Economic Critique of Culture (Princeton: Yale University Press, 2006), p. ix. A poten-
tial problem with such broad-based definitions is that it is not entirely clear where
‘culture’ stops and where ‘society’, the ‘social’ or ‘social institutions’ begin. (The
difficulty of isolating ‘culture’ as a variable is, of course, one reason why economists
fight shy of it in their explanations.) In view of the fact that the study of migration is
central to our enquiry, we see little profit in trying completely to separate ‘culture’
and ‘society’. Rather we understand ‘culture’ in terms of patterns of beliefs, values
and expectations, or ‘norms’ that, if widely shared and strongly felt, can influence and
be influenced by the social and economic conditions, attitudes and behaviours of
individuals and groups.
37 For a notable exception, see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–
2000 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), which, in elaborating the notion of ‘gentlemanly
capitalism’, deftly weaves together social and economic histories.
14requires us to place economy and culture in the same analytic frame.38 Although imperial power has long been recognised as crucial to the mobilisation and distribution of material resources, there is a growing consciousness of how economics, like any other form of human activity, is culturally influenced. We therefore need a merging of cultural and economic histories – a recognition of culture as the matrix in which economic life occurs.39 We use the term ‘cultural economy’ to highlight how cultural factors can influence economic behaviour. Our starting point is the idea that all economies operate within cultural contexts, and that, since the advent of the ‘first wave’ of modern globalisation, both cultures and economies have been increasingly trans-national by nature. ‘Cultural economy’, it should be noted, complements rather than supersedes the concept of ‘political economy’. The political context, of course, matters: the influence of politics is both direct (in that policy effects economic activity), and indirect (in that political structures and policy frameworks influence the ability of cultures to expand and assert themselves, including within the realm of economic activity). Yet our study also allows culture a measure of economic significance. We do not see ‘culture’ simply as the creature of the economy, though nor do we deny that cultural practices may sometimes be subordinated to economic ends or demands. How, then, did cultural features underpin different forms of economic organisation? Some scholars identify a ‘work’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ culture, whereby individual companies, or whole immigrant or other groups, exhibit certain characteristics or
38 There is some frustration among historians of empire regarding the reluctance of
specialists in postcolonial studies to take adequate account of the economics of
imperialism. For a powerful manifesto for future research, bridging the divide, see
A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’,
Past & Present 164 (1999), 198–243, esp. p. 199. For the sense of frustration, see
N. Ferguson, ‘We Must Understand Why Racist Belief Systems Persist’, Guardian,
12 July 2006, p. 26. Meanwhile, there is now greater, if overdue, recognition from a
small but growing number of economists of the importance of culture in understand-
ing economic development and performance. See M. Casson, ‘Cultural Determinants
of Economic Performance’, Journal of Comparative Economics (1993), 418–42, and
Enterprise and Competitiveness: A Systems View of International Business (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 86–104; D. S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:
Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (London: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 516–18;
D. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: Yale University
Press, 2005). Sociologists insist that ‘economic processes do not operate outside of
cultural and ideological conditions’; see S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds.), Formations
of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13–14. For an
acknowledgement from cultural theory that economic matters cannot be ignored,
see L. Ray and A. Sayer (eds.), Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn (London;
Sage, 1999), esp. pp. 1–21.
39 J. Gascoigne, ‘The Expanding Historiography of British Imperialism’, HJ 49 (2006),
577–92 (p. 591).
15Introduction behaviours. Of particular relevance here is the ‘moral aspect of culture’, and the extent to which networks of trust, arising principally from religious or family ties, can help to lower transaction costs and thereby give firms a competitive advantage.40 Meanwhile, there is an emerging interest in how far British companies operating overseas exhibited a specifically ‘imperial culture’, whether in terms of employment and recruitment practices, the organisation of expatriate life, the marketing of their produce, or the backgrounds and personal beliefs of their leaders.41 While we offer only a limited number of company case studies in this book, we do touch upon some of the above issues when we discuss colonial markets and cultures of consumption.42
The literature also pays attention to the type of cultural meanings attached to economic activity,43 whether in terms of consumption, scientific and technical knowledge, or the context in which such knowledge was created and the means by which it was disseminated.44 In each case, it is clear that cultural influences were mediated not only through direct prohibitions or encouragements of certain types of behaviour, but through their impact on the nature and flow of information. We share this perspective. By bringing about a larger market for information (vital for settler societies in the early stages of economic growth), migration permitted a wider range of choices, fashioned new types of consumption, and furthered the take-up of new technologies. To this extent, cultural reproduction and economic integration across the British World were mutually reinforcing. Yet it was, above all, personal connections and social networks that embedded economic activity within cultural contexts, and, as a result, many of the trends we observe and the patterns we describe, although trans-national in nature, were nonetheless racially circumscribed – an issue to which we shall later return.
So far we have alluded to, yet have not directly addressed, the spatial imagination of migrants. In particular, we have highlighted the
40 Casson, ‘Cultural Determinants of Economic Performance’, pp. 419–20, 425–7, and
Enterprise and Competitiveness, pp. 87–8.
41 For a spirited exploration of the ‘imperial culture’ of leading British multinationals,
see V. Johnson, ‘British Multinationals, Culture and Empire in the Early Twentieth
Century’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London (2007).
42 See our previously published work on empire markets and consumer cultures: G. B. Magee
and A. S. Thompson, ‘A Soft Touch? British Industry, Empire Markets and the Self-
Governing Dominions, c. 1870–1914’, EcHR (2003), 689–717.
43 For the possibilities of a new history of economic culture, see, for example, M. Finn’s
study of the cultural meanings attached to personal debt: The Character of Credit: Personal
Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
44 For a review of recent work in the field, see M. W. Jackson, ‘A Cultural History of
Victorian Physical Science and Technology’, HJ 50 (2007), 253–64.
16‘networks’ of contact and communication forged by migrants, and how they gave rise to a wider consciousness of the British peoples. What is the relation between these ‘networks’ and the other terms that we have been using: ‘globalisation’, ‘diasporas’ and ‘trans-nationalism’? How far do they overlap? Some studies of social networks tie them explicitly to the concept of trans-national (rather than truly global) communities – they are understood to have bridged British (and other European) societies at home and overseas, as well as to have provided mutual support for migrants in their newly adopted country.45 But other studies place financial and communications networks at the heart of economic globalisation,46 or accord knowledge-based networks a central role in the forging of a global public sphere,47 or use the concept of ‘network power’ (defined as a shared norm or convention in language, technology or the law) as a signifier of global co-ordination, eclipsing local standards: a type of ‘new imperialism’.48
We were drawn to the concept of networks as a way of analysing with greater precision long-distance connections over extended periods of time. We conceive of these networks as the ‘software of empire’, the most important of which arose from migration. Informal and integrative, migrant networks operated supra-nationally.49 They were built upon kinship structures, religious institutions, ethnic societies and fraternal organisations. They connected private, unofficial and provincial interests in Britain with their overseas contacts and communities. It was through them that ideas and information were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded and people travelled. Part of the attraction of such a networked conception is that it helps us to see the empire more clearly for what it really was: an interconnected zone constituted by multiple points of contact and complex circuits of exchange; not just the preserve of an ‘official mind’ in Whitehall, but, as John
45 Portes, Globalization from Below; Kearney, ‘The Local and the Global’, p. 548.
46 R. J. Barnett and J. Cavanagh, ‘A Globalizing Economy: Some Implications and
Consequences’, in B. Mazlish and R. Buultjens (eds.), Conceptualizing Global History
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 153–73 (pp. 155–60); M. Castells, The
Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols., Vol. I: The Rise of the Network
Society (Malden: Routledge, 2000), pp. 101–6.
47 R. Holton, ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European World in International Society,
1870s–1920s: Evidence from Global Networks’, Global Networks 5 (2005), 239–59.
48 D. S. Grewal, ‘Network Power and Globalization’, Ethics and International Affairs 117
(2003), 89–98.
49 Nor were they exclusively white: for a study of Punjabi migrant networks, as they
operated in an imperial context, see T. Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora:
Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006).
17Introduction Darwin and Alan Lester have remarked, a field of enterprise for the whole of British society.50 This view of the empire as a species of global networking is, however, not free from pitfalls. It has been suggested that Britain’s international pre-eminence during the ‘long’ nineteenth century was built on a complex and overlapping series of social networks, which expanded through railway, telegraph and steamship technology (the ‘hardware of empire’);51 that after 1850 such networks became much more diverse and extensive; and that they had a marked impact on the transmission of news, opinion and values within the British imperial world – indeed, that they helped to hold it together.52 But this still leaves several questions begging. Were all networks of equal significance? How do we set about evaluating those networks radiating in and out of Britain to the colonies, compared to those that meshed the different colonies together? What were the relative strengths of the impulses flowing through these different types of connection? What were the limitations on them? What sort of controls or restrictions were they subject to?
Although these questions are pursued further in the chapters that follow, there are two points worth emphasising here. First, the type of traffic that moved through networks was very much shaped by their location. In terms of material flows around the empire, the place that mattered most was undoubtedly Britain. It was, after all, Britain (and frequently London) that was the node through which information, people, capital and commodities often moved. In many cases these movements were relatively simple back-and-forth flows between metropole and each (settler) colony, rather than movements between the colonies themselves. Yet it would be wrong to think of the British world in terms of the spokes of a bicycle wheel; connections were not simply radial, connecting different parts of the so-called ‘periphery’ with
50 J. Darwin, ‘The Descent of Empire: Post-Colonial Views of Britain’s Imperial History’,
annual guest lecture given to the Leeds Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,
University of Leeds, 4 May 2006; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in
Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).
51 T. Ballantyne, ‘Empire, Knowledge and Culture: From Proto-Globalization to
Modern Globalization’, in Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London:
Pimlico, 2002), pp. 116–140; R. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and
Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Bridge and
Fedorowich, The British World, pp. 1–15.
52 R. W. Desmond, The Information Process: World News Reporting to the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 1978), p. 289; Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping
the British World’, p. 6; S. J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an
Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
18the ‘core’.53 Across our period, there were growing linkages between the colonies, and especially between the settler colonies, arising from skilled labour migration;54 indentured labour;55 organised crime and prostitution;56 women’s, humanitarian and religious movements;57 peripatetic professionals and officials;58 even scandal and gossip among the ruling class.59 It is these inter-colonial connections and exchanges that partly account for the attraction of the web metaphor in analysing British World relations. Second, the different characters of the settler colonies themselves affected the networks we discuss later in this book, including the strength of the impulses travelling along them. Put simply, it mattered that Canada was among the first dominions to develop a strong manufacturing base;60 that, in southern Africa, power was at first contested, but later increasingly shared, between two white elites;61 that convict transportation loomed large in the early history of migration to Australia;62 and that the journey by steamship to America was cheaper, quicker and more comfortable than it was to the rest of the ‘Anglo’
53 S. J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, JBS 46 (2007), 621–46.
54 J. Hyslop, The Notorious Syndicalist: J. T. Bain, a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa
(Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2004), and ‘The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself
“White”: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the First
World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1999), 398–424.
55 D. Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
56 C. Van Onselen, ‘Jewish Marginality in the Atlantic World: Organised Crime in the
Era of the Great Migrations, 1880–1914’, SAHJ 43 (2000), 96–137.
57 I. Fletcher, L. E. Nym Mayhall and P. Levine (eds.), Women’s Suffrage in the British
Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (London: Routledge, 2000); Z. Laidlaw,
‘Integrating Metropolitan, Colonial and Imperial History: The Aborigines [sic]
Select Committee of 1835–1837’, in T. Banivanua Mar and J. Evans (eds.), Writing
Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2002),
pp. 75–91.
58 Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and
Colonial Government (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); A. S. Thompson,
The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth
Century (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 17–29.
59 K. McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 2004).
60 See, for example, our discussion of the Empire Chambers of Commerce in Chapter 4,
pp. 145–50, in which Toronto and Montreal merchants and businessmen had a lead-
ing voice – although manufacturers from Victoria were also prominent.
61 See, for example, the implications of Anglo-Afrikaner relations, during and after the
period of Milnerite reconstruction, for the ability of American and German firms to
penetrate the region’s markets, in Chapter 4, pp. 141–3.
62 The heightened emphasis on ‘respectability’ among middle-class Australian con-
sumers from the mid century makes more sense when set in this context in Chapter 4,
pp. 157–8, 161.
19Introduction world.63 None of this is to imply that British World networks cannot be talked about as generalised phenomena; but given their intrinsically geographical nature, it is important not to overlook the influence of place and space upon them.64 Another question is how far migrant networks were truly imperial in the sense of being confined to the colonies and largely absent from the United States. There is a discreet silence on this subject in the literature. When exactly did the United States leave the ‘British World’ for an ‘American World’? By what yardstick should we decide? Is the Anglo-American connection best approached through the realm of geo-politics, diplomacy and military co-operation (which is the basis of much writing on the ‘special relationship’ of a later period), or is there a case for revisiting Britain’s involvement with America, and vice versa, from the perspective of grass-roots society, family histories and various forms of popular culture? In the chapters that follow we caution against focusing too much on the imperial sphere. We seek to show how, in exploring the economic effects of migrant networks, it is helpful to include the United States and, indeed, other extra-imperial sites, such as Latin America. Many of the networks forged by British migrants were not confined to the formal British imperial world. By comparing the effects of networks within and beyond the empire’s settler societies we can see more clearly what was distinctive about them in their particular contexts. The ambivalent relationship between the two great halves of the ‘Anglo-World’ has, of course, been a central theme in modern world history.65 What we try to establish in this book is how, from the mid nineteenth century, demographic expansion, allied to improved communications technology, created a consciousness of ‘Britain beyond the seas’, a consciousness that neither fully embraced, nor wholly excluded, the United States. The sense that America was a part of the British diaspora was real, but it was also ambivalent, open to dispute by contemporaries, and it eroded over time. Protectionism placed limits on the spread and survivability of ‘foreign’ cultures of consumption, whereas the shifting origins of migratory flows to the United States – whereby migrants from Britain were at first matched in number by those from
63 See, for example, how this underpinned the distinctive return and remittance behav-
iour of US migrants in Chapter 3, pp. 99, 104–5.
64 See especially here D. Lambert and A. Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces,
Imperial Subjects’, in D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives across the British
Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 3–8.
65 J. Darwin, ‘The British Empire and the “British World”’, keynote lecture at Defining
the British World, 11–14 July 2007.
20Germany, and later overshadowed by those migrating from central and eastern Europe – ensured that, by the end of our period, the United States had become the home to many diasporas, more so than any other part of the world. Finally, any study of imperial networks must address the question of forms of inclusion and exclusion, and how they changed over time. To what extent did networks incorporate elements of non-European or indigenous society? Largely constructed by settler-colonial interests, participation in imperial networks was racially defined. This racial exclusiveness, however, was not universal. Some non-Anglophone groups were able to attach themselves, with varying degrees of success, to imperial networks maintained by Britons. The humanitarian networks forged by the Aborigines Protection Society, and knowledge-based networks such as the African Society and Asiatic Society, would be obvious examples yet by no means the only ones.66 Freemasonry, for instance, based as it was on claims to universal brotherhood, sometimes championed the rights of colonial subjects to join. ‘Indigenous members who were engaged in commercial pursuits or who travelled extensively welcomed access to the global network of lodges and brethren.’67 That said, even in more inclusive networks, the role for non-white and non-Anglophone groups tended to diminish through the nineteenth century. This, in turn, spurred indigenous peoples to create and maintain counter-networks of their own. Here one might point specifically to the response of Indian merchants to their treatment by the colonial authorities in Natal (see pp. 149–50) and, more generally, to the migrant networks fashioned by Indian and Chinese indentured labourers, described by one scholar as ‘a crucial . . . response to the economic and cultural pressures of colonialism’.68
British migrants’ investment in a self-consciously worldwide British community brought with it new economic possibilities and potential. At the same time, participation in the networks upon which such a community was built tended to be racially and ethnically circumscribed. Social scientists usually present networks in progressive and cosmopolitan terms. They do so with some justification. By improving the quantity and quality of information flows around the British world,
66 Holton, ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European World’, pp. 249–55; Lambert and
Lester, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
67 J. L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 216–22, 232 (quote
from p. 232). Though outright racial prejudice also erected barriers to the admission
of coloured and black Masons.
68 Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora, p. 31.
21Introduction by bridging relations between producers and consumers, and by facilitating the adoption of new technologies, imperial networks did indeed contribute powerfully to the growth in trade and to the convergence of income levels that were such marked features of economic globalisation, as experienced by English-speaking societies, from 1850 to 1914.69 However, we must remember that the co-ethnic networks studied in this book were equally systems of power and domination that incorporated some parts of colonial society and marginalised others. Hierarchies of race and class determined access to the commercial, financial and professional networks spawned by the empire in just the same way as notions of status and gentility shaped patterns of colonial consumption. Only by analysing the material foundations of the British World in these terms can we perceive the cultural and institutional realities implicit in them. Such interplay of culture and economy is characteristic of all marketplaces, and historians are increasingly recognising how markets have been deeply embedded in distinctive traditions and practices that influence both how they are conceived and how they functioned.70 To understand the British World better we now need to uncover what these traditions and practices actually were.
69 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History.
70 M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds.), Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in
the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).