166at which point the Americanisation of consumer society in some parts of the British World began to gather pace.162
Conclusions
If the phenomenon of globalisation is that of ‘a world of things in motion’, then the logic of the market has been central to it.163 During the nineteenth century, the effects of falling transport costs, tariff liberalisation and mass migration intensified the integration of global commodity, capital and labour markets.164 Yet these global markets were embedded in complex cultural matrices.165 Co-ethnic networks, in particular, played a
162 Campbell, ‘The Americanization of South Africa’, pp. 41ff.
163 A. Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination’, in A. Appadurai
(ed.), Globalisation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 1–22 (p. 5).
164 D. K. Das, The Economic Dimensions of Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004); D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics,
Economics and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); O’Rourke and
Williamson, Globalization and History.
165 J. Brewer and F. Trentmann, ‘Introduction: Space, Time and Value in Consuming
Cultures’, in J. Brewer and F. Trentmann (eds.), Consuming Cultures: Global Perspectives,
Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
pp. 1–17 (p. 13); P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds.), Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and
Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002).
167Markets and consumer cultures key role in overcoming obstacles to the circulation and exchange of economic knowledge. ‘As commodities travel greater distances, knowledge about them tends to become partial, contradictory, and differentiated.’166 By building trust and reciprocity, co-ethnic networks in the British World broke down barriers to long-distance trade, and thus helped to match consumer tastes to producer knowledge and skills. They also helped to spread new scientific and technological ideas, to facilitate the transfer of labour, to develop commercial facilities, and to improve transport and communications infrastructure. In short, they were instrumental in expanding British World trade. The irony here, of course, is that for a long time empire markets were perceived not as an engine of economic convergence and modernity but exactly the reverse – a form of economic escapism. Reliance on ‘safe’, ‘soft’ or ‘sheltered’ colonial markets supposedly debilitated British manufacturing by depriving it of the competitive stimulus that would have come from fuller participation in European and American trade. By retreating into the empire, industry in Britain is said to have managed (for a while) to hold at bay the globalising forces of commodity market integration, only eventually to pay the price for failing to invest in new technologies, or to renovate and restructure their business organisation.
However, recent scholarship has become more mindful of the relationship between group values and beliefs and levels of economic performance, and the capacity of culture to promote (as well as retard) economic growth.167 Ethnic affiliation, in particular, is understood to have influenced trading patterns, present and past. Whether it be Chinese business networks in South East Asia during the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries,168 or the networks forged by Maghribi traders in the eleventh century Mediterranean, it is now clear that such networks could either facilitate trade by deterring opportunistic behaviour, or hinder it by becoming too exclusive in their membership.169 A key conclusion drawn from these examples is that trade can often develop more readily, and effectively, among people sharing a common identity, whether that identity is ethnic, religious or political.
166 A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai
(ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), pp. 3–64 (p. 56).
167 M. C. Casson and A. Godley, ‘Cultural Factors in Economic Growth’, in Casson and
Godley (eds.), Cultural Factors in Economic Growth (Berlin: Springer, 2000), pp. 1–43;
D. S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
(London: W. W. Norton, 1999), esp. pp. 516–18.
168 Menkhoff and Gerke (eds.), Chinese Entrepreneurship; and Haley, Tan and Haley (eds.),
New Asian Emperors.
169 Grief, ‘Contract Enforceability’.
168In the British World of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the information, trust and reciprocity flowing through co-ethnic networks created value for those lucky enough to participate in them, yet further marginalised and impoverished those who were not. In this sense, ‘imperial globalisation’ was far from being truly global in its reach. The business and commercial networks upon which this first ‘wave’ of modern globalisation was built not only exhibited a strong bias towards the empire’s Anglophone societies, they exposed the marked social and ethnic prejudices within those societies. To what extent were these powerful exclusionary tendencies offset, or at least concealed, by Britain’s dogged pursuit of tariff liberalisation before 1914? Unlike the English-speaking world’s other major power, the United States, Britain did not seek to shelter its own industries behind tariff walls, nor did it favour a view of the international order based around exclusive economic zones. This policy ensured a degree of openness in the world economy, and helps to explain why Britain’s commercial and financial relationships with the dominions mapped so easily on to its relationships with foreign states, and why the two sets of relationships often strengthened and reinforced each other. To be sure, the economy of the British World had its own cultural dynamic. Yet this dynamic did not prevent Britain, or the dominions, from engaging with, and expanding into, the wider world economy.
However, the conspicuous failure of the United States to subscribe to this heady vision of ‘free trade, empire and universalism’,170 increasingly pushed politicians and businessmen in Britain to reconsider the relationship between tariffs and trade loyalties. While subject to ebbs and flows, the level of media and political attention to American competition in trade grew steadily throughout these years. According to one commentator, ‘America loomed larger than any other foreign nation as a commercial or emotional force in many portions of the Empire, especially in Canada’.171 Thus, in the sphere of trade, the Anglo-American relationship took a different course from that of migration (Chapter 3) and finance (Chapter 5). Much of what people consumed in the colonies, and the way they consumed it, was a marker of identity. In choosing what
170 See here A. Howe, ‘From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: Free Trade, Empire and
Globalisation, 1846–1948’, Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies (2003), 137–59.
171 Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914: A Study of the United States
in World History (New York: Octagon Books, first published 1940, reprinted 1968),
p. 163. America traded four or five times as much with Canada as with all the other
British dominions combined, so there is no surprise that the proposed Canadian–
American Reciprocity Agreement of 1910 provoked such heated political controversy;
see B. Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New
York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 124–30.
169Markets and consumer cultures to eat, wear or drink, or how to furnish their homes, people made statements about themselves, and these statements frequently expressed how they perceived their role in, and relationship to, the colonising process. Yet this ‘cross-fertilisation’ in consumption172 was increasingly squeezed in the case of the United States by its move from revenue-raising to protectionist tariffs, and by the rapid growth of its domestic industries. It is only evident with respect to genteel habits of consumption.173 High tariffs actually helped British migrants to transfer their skills and technology to the United States, and to develop new crafts and industries there – the 2,000 or so Staffordshire potters who poured into Ohio from the mid century eventually broke Britain’s virtual monopoly over the production of earthenware.174 Fast becoming its greatest trade rival, America’s relationship to the British World was decidedly, and increasingly, ambiguous.
172 For this term, see Ross, ‘Cross-Continental Cross-Fertilisation in Clothing’.
173 The similarities in English and American consumer behaviour were much stronger in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in terms of the consumption of grocer-
ies (tobacco, sugar products and tea) and durables (haberdashery, clothing and table-
ware); see C. Shammas, ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from
1550 to 1800’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 177–205.
174 W. E. Van Vugt, British Buckeyes: The English, Scots, and Welsh in Ohio, 1800–1900 (Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), pp. 135–7.