61British World. Moreover, as technological advances in this era tended to manifest themselves first within and along British trade routes, this ‘informational asymmetry’ intensified over time. In subsequent chapters, we show how this asymmetry played itself out in various guises: in the choice of migrant destination, in the patterns of colonial consumption and in the preferences of British investors.

Conclusion

By focusing on the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, we offer a new perspective on the British World during the ‘first wave’ of modern globalisation. We take as our starting point the flows of information and knowledge that accumulated within a range of widereaching imperial networks, and the effects of these networks upon the British people’s perceptions of the empire and their relationship to it.55 In recent years, scholars of globalisation have become interested in the impact of ‘dissolving distance’ upon people’s sense of space. What is argued here is that co-ethnic networks, which became markedly more diverse and extensive during the half-century or so before 1914, helped

54 P. Milgrom and J. Roberts, Economics, Organization and Management (Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentis Hall, 1992), p. 26.

55 D. A. Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space and Empire in British Political

Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005), 523–62.

62to foster a sense of belonging to a pan-British community based on shared values, trust and reciprocity. This sense of belonging in turn eased the flow of people, commodities and capital between Britain and its settler colonies, and led to major changes in the way economic knowledge was created, disseminated and consumed.

We believe our analysis of imperial networks sheds light on the origins of modern globalisation. The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a period when globalisation gathered considerable momentum – demographic, technological and financial; they were also the time when the British empire expanded most vigorously.56 In a new and provocative study, Niall Ferguson has coined the neologism ‘Anglobalization’ to describe how the empire imposed free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on its colonies. According to Ferguson, Britain’s major imperial achievement was to have benevolently spread ‘economic liberalism’ to ‘roughly a quarter of the world’.57 This thesis has some merit. As we contend, by integrating labour, commodity and capital markets, and by dramatically improving the quality and quantity of information circulating around Britain and its settler colonies, the empire did contribute to the convergence of income levels that was such a marked feature of the capitalist economies of the English-speaking world during the period 1850 to 1914. However, contra Ferguson, ‘imperial globalisation’, as presented in this book, was far from being truly global in its reach. Rather it was focused on particular ethnic groups and exhibited a strong bias towards the empire’s Anglophone societies. Nowhere was this more so than in places like southern Africa where the networks displayed marked ethnic and social prejudice. These powerful exclusionary tendencies not only skewed the distribution of the economic gains that came from the British World, they ensured that the globalising forces of the pre-First World War era were circumscribed by geography and culture. The significance of these ‘intermediate historical spaces’ for an understanding of the ancestry of present-day globalisation is argued forcefully by a recent study of the interconnectedness of the peoples of the Indian Ocean rim during the heyday of the British Raj.58 ‘Just as waves in one

56 K. O’Rourke and J. G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a

Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1999).

57 N. Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane,

2003), pp. xxiii–xxv.

58 S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

63Networks and the British World ocean produce fluctuations in sea levels in others, the human history of the Indian Ocean is strung together at a higher level of intensity in the interregional area while contributing to and being affected by structures, processes, and events of global significance.’59 Interestingly, this (historical) interpretation of globalisation also seems to resonate with recent scholarship from international business theory, which is increasingly moving away from the idea of today’s world economy as one in which distinct national economies are subsumed and rearticulated into the system by international processes and transactions.60 Instead international business theory now lays greater emphasis on the reality of ‘regionalised integration’.61 Likewise, this book emphasises the regionalised nature of the so-called ‘first wave’ of modern globalisation that centred on the settler states of the empire. Understood in this way, the British World did indeed help to diminish the divisions between a diverse group of ‘national’ economies, yet it manifestly lacked the capacity to create a ‘borderless world’.

59 Ibid., p. 3.

60 R. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question: The International Economy and

the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 8.

61 For the importance of regional trading blocs within an integrating global econ-

omy, see especially P. Buckley and P. N. Ghauri (eds.), The Internationalisation of the

Firm (London: International Thomson Business Press, 1999), and ‘Globalisation,

Economic Geography and the Strategy of Multinational Enterprises’, Journal of

International Business Studies 35 (2004), 81–98. For the view of regional trading blocs

as an ‘optimistic response to the new challenges of globalized markets’ as well as

a ‘defensive strategy’ in the face of the challenges and threats of globalisation, see

B. Axford, The Global System: Economics, Politics and Culture (Oxford: Polity, 1995),

pp. 121–2. It is also worth remembering here that the Asian ‘emerging economies’,

sometimes held up as exemplars of globalisation, in fact grew their economies behind

tariff barriers and protected infant industries from international competition.