56and diversify trans-nationally. Such an outcome was not unique to the world of nineteenth-century migration. Social scientists point to the positive interplay between contemporary emigration and social capital formation.42 Some even argue that the trans-national social networks moulded by emigrants tend to be more tightly bonded than national or regional ones: a consequence, it is claimed, of the desire of emigrants to stick together and to use all the resources at their disposal to overcome the uncertainty of their situation. In their new setting, new arrivals are often more reliant and intent on accessing and accumulating social capital, both of the old and new vintage, than they had hitherto been ‘back home’.43 As we will see, these findings certainly appear to resonate with the experiences of British emigrants from the mid nineteenth century to the First World War.
Networks and the British World economy
So far we have provided an overview of recent research on social capital and networks, in order to identify the key features of network dynamics.
42 D. Massey, L. P. Goldring and J. Durand, ‘Continuities in Transnational Migration:
An Analysis of 19 Mexican Communities’, American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994),
1492–533; A. Palloni, D. S. Massey, M. Ceballos, K. Espinosa and M. Spittel, ‘Social
Capital and International Migration: A Test Using Information on Family Networks’,
American Journal of Sociology 106 (2001), 1262–98.
43 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.
57Networks and the British World Networks, we have learned, are built upon trust, reciprocity and moral obligation. They work better when they are inclusive by nature, allow information to flow more freely, comprise people who share a common sense of identity, and when personal or institutional leadership is provided. We have also discovered that national barriers, while posing problems, need not place limits on the trans-national expansion of networks. This book draws upon this research to place networks at the heart of the British World economy. We argue that networks had a profound effect on how economic knowledge was created, disseminated and consumed across the British World, and that they provided the basis for co-operative, collaborative and, crucially, remunerative forms of economic exchange. Yet to benefit from these connections, one needed access to them. Given the basis of most of the networks in question, many of which were formed as a result of migration, the extent to which one could achieve access to them was, in some respects, a proxy of ‘Britishness’. In other words, these networks frequently combined material support with more symbolic attractions, including a continuing sense of cultural identity in new circumstances.44 They involved a commitment to a certain set of beliefs and values, as well as a shared desire for pecuniary gain. There are several implications of this conceptualisation of ‘imperial networks’. First, an excessively top-down approach to studying them will fail to take account of the significance of much network activity ‘from below’. The majority of networks discussed in Chapters 3 to 5 belonged to civic society rather than the realm of officialdom, though there are significant exceptions here.45 Second, although non-Anglophone groups did participate in some of the networks maintained by Britons, their role tended to diminish over time, as what it meant to be ‘British’ became increasingly racially circumscribed. Put simply, material power relations exposed the limits of these imperial networks to provide a counter-weight to the ethnic divisions, discrimination and dispossession associated with settler colonialism. There were, of course, exceptions, such as humanitarian networks like that of the Aborigines’ Protection Society; while, by the end of the nineteenth century, indigenous subjects were increasingly
44 On the different properties of ‘global’ networks, see Robertson and Scholte, Encyclopedia
of Globalization, pp. 867–72.
45 For semi-official and official networks, see the Colonial Land and Emigration
Commission, the Emigrants’ Information Office, the Dominion Emigration
Agents, the Crown Agents, the Patent Agents, and the Congress of the Chambers of
Commerce of the Empire.
58able to create and maintain counter-networks of their own,46 often preferring to make claims for inclusion rather than fostering outright colonial resistance.47 Nonetheless, few of the networks discussed in Chapters 3–5 offered much scope for African or Asian peoples to join and exploit them. Third, while varied in nature and composition, imperial networks engendered a sense of interdependence. They bridged the ‘Old’ world and the ‘New’, creating strong and enduring linkages between Britain and its colonies – linkages that shaped people’s daily lives. They did this partly by fostering shared habits of consumption and norms of desirable lifestyles, especially among the more affluent middle classes; partly by building knowledge systems that enhanced the diffusion of economic ideas and information across colonial spaces, thereby integrating the different parts of the British World; and partly by encouraging entrepreneurship and the spread of new technologies, commercial ideas and practices across geographically disparate markets.
Thus our approach to networks emphasises the importance of social familiarity, even in the efficient, impersonal markets of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such a finding runs against the grain of much of the historical literature that tends to view networks as a crucial stage of organisation on the way to the development of modern, well-functioning states and markets. In such pre-modern contexts, the only thing you could trust was what you knew. By bringing people together, networks thus played a vital, albeit transient, role in extending the range of trade and financial opportunities. As a form of organisation, though, networks were ultimately destined to yield to the superior efficiency of the modern state.48 Mathias even posits this as a ‘general law’, whereby ‘the weaker the institutional context, from a wide variety of sources of risk and uncertainty, then the higher the premium to be
46 V. Bickford-Smith, ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–1920’, in P. D. Morgan and
S. Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), pp. 194–227; A. S. Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern
Africa, c. 1870–1939’, English Historical Review 118 (2003), 617–50.
47 Holton, ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European World’.
48 For this strand of the literature, see D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and
Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. Scott, Social
Network Analysis: A Handbook (London: Sage, 1991); M. Casson and M. B. Rose (eds.),
Institutions and the Evolution of Modern Business (London: Taylor and Francis, 1993);
R. E. Kranton, ‘Reciprocal Exchange: A Self-Sustaining System’, American Economic
Review 86 (1996), 830–51; R. Kali, ‘Endogenous Business Networks’, Journal of Law,
Economics, and Organization 15 (1999), 615–36; Grief, ‘Contract Enforceability’;
P. D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984); and K. Arrow, ‘Gifts and Exchanges’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1
(1972), 343–62.
59Networks and the British World placed on dealings with known individuals, personal trust and kinship nexus’.49 Stressing the importance of later-Victorian and Edwardian networks also runs counter to another strand of the literature, which sees transnational networks as a uniquely contemporary, grass-roots response to the pressures of modern globalisation. Far from being a relic of the past, business networks are alive, well and all around us. Furthermore, their importance is tipped to strengthen in the twenty-first century as information technology improves and international migration and capital flows continue to grow in importance.50 Some even deny that nineteenth-century immigrants were able to forge such trans-national ties: according to Portes, for example, ‘communications and transportation technologies were such as to make it prohibitive for the turn-ofthe-century immigrants to make a living out of bridging the cultural gap between countries of origin and destination or lead simultaneous lives in both’.51 As Chapters 3 to 5 demonstrate, such a conclusion is misplaced and underestimates both the extent and variety of types of trans-nationalism at work within the Anglo- and British worlds at that time. Surveying the literature, therefore, leaves one with a rather strange and confusing impression: networking is seen as a phenomenon that was and is widely practised in the contemporary and pre-modern eras, but somehow not in the modern period.52 By contrast, our position is to emphasise continuity. For us, the forging of networks represents a type of social and economic behaviour that is timeless: it is an innovation of neither the nineteenth nor the twenty-first centuries. Nor do we regard networks and community-based activities simply as secondbest substitutes for well-functioning state and market institutions, or as foils against the increasingly global reach of big business. Rather, we contend here that networks survive now – as they did in the past – precisely because they work alongside more formal institutions in order
49 Mathias, ‘Risk, Credit and Kinship’, p. 17.
50 J. E. Rauch, ‘Business and Social Networks in International Trade’, Journal of
Economic Literature 39 (2001), 1177–203 (p. 1200); D. Encaoua and A. Jacquemin,
‘Organizational Efficiency and Monopoly Power: The Case of French Industrial
Groups’, European Economic Review 19 (1982), 25–51; Annen, ‘Social Capital’.
51 Portes, ‘Globalization from Below’, p. 17.
52 The same pattern is apparent in imperial historiography. Historians of Britain’s
eighteenth-century empire readily acknowledge the importance of networks in the
expansion of British Atlantic trade at this time. The discussion of economic and trade
networks, however, is much more limited with respect to the nineteenth-century
empire. It is not clear why. For an excellent survey of imperial networks in the eight-
eenth century, see N. Glaisyer, ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth
Century British Empire’, HJ 47 (2004), 451–76.
60to facilitate the spread of markets. Networks are not just mechanisms designed to cope with the intense risk of developing markets (as most of the historical literature emphasises) – though that function is not denied – but continue to provide benefits long after that risk has been mitigated by formal institutions (effective courts and commercial laws) and the emergence of market-based solutions (such as insurance companies). We believe that there are synergies between well-constructed networks and solid institutions. While governments can provide a framework and a conducive environment within which networks operate, they do not have the wealth of grass-roots information about individual behaviour, capabilities and needs to make their policies work without community support. Networks thus enable government and community to work better hand-in-hand. Hence neighbourhood watch schemes are effective against crime if, and only if, they are backed up by police support; community-based health clinics are more likely to succeed when reinforced by an appropriate public hospital system.53
In a similar tone, this book asserts that, in so far as imperial networks functioned efficiently and effectively, they did in no small measure because their security and safety were assured by the formal military power of the colonial state. We must not sanitise these networks. Britain’s armed forces underwrote the webs of migration, trade and investment studied in the next three chapters, and thereby ensured that a high degree of confidence could be placed in them. Indeed, the networks we study were nourished and sustained by the empire. Its legal and political systems provided rule of law, enforcement of contract and common standards that enhanced the transfer of goods and capital. Official attitudes, if not actual policy, at times privileged the interest of British World networks over non-British. Meanwhile, the movement of civil servants, military personnel, religious officers and professionals across the British World further acted to broaden the range of connections made. This book also shows how these networks created economic value and promoted common identity across the British World. Hence the interplay between the economy, on the one hand, and Britishness, on the other, is central to our analysis. One effect of the networks we study was to build a sense of belonging to a trans-national community of British peoples. This sense of identity, in turn, motivated migrants to act in favour of the community. Such an alignment of interests came about partly because of shared tastes and outlooks, partly because of a moral obligation to help and support other members of the same community.
53 Bowles and Gintis, ‘Community Governance’, pp. 423–31.
61Networks and the British World Most importantly, the networks of the British World shaped knowledge flows in powerful ways. The availability and supply of information are crucial in understanding how and why decisions are made. Decision-makers can act only on the basis of what they know (or think they know). The dataset with which they work is thus vital.54 One of the most distinctive features of these networks was that they channelled (intentionally and unintentionally) rich information flows about ‘British’ products, demands, tastes, laws, conventions and peoples back and forth between the UK, its settler colonies and the rest of the British diaspora. Various mechanisms ensured this torrent of information: inter alia official reports; personal contacts; and the workings of imperial organisations; as well as acquired knowledge of existing trade, transportation and communication links. This, though, was a very specific brand of ‘in-house’ knowledge. The same informational flows were not shared, or not shared to the same extent, with other parts of the world; nor did those parts at this time supply the British with the same density of information. Consequently, British decision-makers operated not with complete information, but with a stock of knowledge that was heavily weighted in favour of the opportunities that existed within the