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Markets and consumer cultures
Introduction
This chapter explores a key feature of late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury globalisation, namely the emergence of the empire’s settler societies as the fastest-growing export market for the British ‘metropole’.1 Not only did these colonies consume comparatively high levels of British exports, the share of income they devoted to British goods also deepened relative to other parts of the developed and developing world over time. The latter is an intriguing fact with implications for how we perceive the evolution of colonial consumer behaviour prior to the First World War. Most importantly, it suggests a quickening of economic relationships within the British World at this time: a more precise and intensive drawing together of the interests and needs of Britain and its settler colonies. Migrant consumers, it seems, were becoming more, not less, wedded to the British product, as other competing uses for their income, such as the consumption of local or foreign (non-British) goods and services, became available to them. Why, then, did British products fare so well in these markets, and why did colonial consumers, by that time free to buy from anyone in the international marketplace, spend such a large share of their income on them? We argue that a good part of the answer lies in the rich and layered interconnections that characterised the British World – the ethnic and cultural ties that bound settlers emotionally, financially and spiritually to ‘home’. Thus, at root, the dominions’ ability to absorb high volumes of British imports from the mid century had its origins in British
1 Detailed studies of the character of British colonial trade date back at least as far as John
Stuart Mill. According to Mill, British colonial trade was so ‘British’ that it was not really
external trade at all, but domestic. Mill’s focus, however, was on the mid nineteenth
century and the colonial dependencies – territories not at liberty to set their own fiscal
or monetary policy, and which functioned as specialised producers for a wider economy,
the financial and commercial centre of which was very much in the United Kingdom.
For a useful discussion of Mill’s views, see I. Greaves, ‘The Character of British Colonial
Trade’, Journal of Political Economy 62 (1954), 1–11.
117 emigration. It was emigration that conditioned consumption habits within the colonies such that their tastes, expectations and values were readily familiar, communicable and comprehensible to manufacturers back in Britain; and it was emigration that enabled a rapid establishment of trust between commercial partners in the colonies and Britain, thereby facilitating long-distance trade.
118The British ‘diaspora’ was hardly unique in this regard. Trade often develops more readily between peoples sharing a common identity, whether that identity be ethnic, religious or political.2 Exploiting such ties was a perfectly rational response to the challenges of the market economy, rather than a form of economic escapism. Ethnic groups, in particular, are known to have developed distinct structures of economic opportunity.3 The dense set of associations found within such groups promoted forms of co-operative behaviour that were distinctly (and materially) advantageous to group members.4 Instead of relying on impersonal contractual bonds, which, when available, may often be unreliable, merchants and manufacturers from the same ethnic background have frequently looked to effective ‘trust networks’ to provide fast and accurate information about business conditions, to co-ordinate multiple far-flung transactions, and to secure good behaviour from distant, difficult-to-monitor clients. Consumption, meanwhile, is recognised to have been profoundly influenced by the ‘cultural baggage’ that settlers carried.5 Settlers attached specific meaning and value to the goods that they purchased. These goods, and the lifestyle that went with them, were thus very much part of the global cultural flows set in train by mass migration.
Applying these insights to the study of the British World economy allows us to move away from the rather hackneyed view of colonial markets as passive ‘bolt-holes’ or ‘safe havens’ from the competitive forces of an international economy. By improving the quality and quantity of information flows, by bridging relations between producers and consumers, and by facilitating the adoption of new technologies, imperial networks contributed powerfully to the growth in trade and the convergence of
2 See for example A. Grief, ‘Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early
Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition’, American Economic Review 83 (1993), 525–48;
T. Menkhoff and S. Gerke (eds.), Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2002); and G. T. Haley, C. T. Tan and V. C. V. Haley (eds.),
New Asian Emperors: The Overseas Chinese, Their Strategies and Competitive Advantages
(London: Butterworth Heinemann, 1998).
3 A. Portes and M. Zhou, ‘Gaining the Upper Hand: Economic Mobility among Immigrant
and Domestic Minorities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 15 (1992), 491–522.
4 J. S. Coleman, ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’, American Journal of
Sociology 94 (1988), 95–120.
5 See especially L. Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia
and Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
119Markets and consumer cultures income levels that were such marked features of English-speaking societies from 1850 to 1914.6 Moreover, they did so without sealing off Britain or its settler colonies from the wider international economy. The co-ethnic webs of trade explored in this chapter were, however, also systems of power and domination that incorporated some parts of colonial society and not others. Hierarchies of race and class determined access to the business and professional networks spawned by the empire, just as notions of status, gentility and gender shaped patterns of colonial consumption. Such interplay of culture and economy is, of course, characteristic of all marketplaces, and historians are increasingly recognising how deeply embedded markets are in distinctive traditions and practices that influence how they are conceived and how they function.7 In the