The history of Britain is dead; long live a global history ofBritain

Abstract

I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• Britain
• British World
• imperialism
• liberalism
• political economy
• the market

Tony Abbott’s government spent much of 2014 and 2015 attempting to remove the cap on tuition fees so that Australian universities become entirely debt-financed by students. No other country in the world has yet reached this precipice, although much of the former British world is racing to catch-up. The privatisation of higher education and the fashioning of a neoliberal university has proceeded faster and further in the so-called Anglosphere than anywhere else. Arguably, Britain itself (with the notable exception of Scotland), is playing catch up. Take the student debt funding of higher education.¹ In 1989 and 1990 Australia and New Zealand followed Canada’s example by introducing tuition fees and student loan programs. Tuition fees were not introduced in Britain until 1997 and their extension through a government-backed, income-contingent loan system in 2004 was explicitly modeled on the systems in Australia and New Zealand. University administrators from these countries, with first-hand experience of privatisation, were in big demand in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. To take just one example: the University of Manchester hired Alan Gilbert in 2004 the year before the private campus he had created at the University of Melbourne was closed with massive debts. Clearly, the former British world is not responsible for the neoliberal restructuring of universities in Britain. My point is simply that at the beginning of the twenty first century we should be more aware than ever that Britain was made by, and in, the modern world that it once claimed to have made all by itself.

The flight from the nation

I am aware that, as this will hardly be news to readers of this journal, I am guilty of bringing coals to Newcastle. Ever since J. G. A. Pocock published his plea for a new version of British history in 1975, the history of Britain as a nation has been unraveling and expanding.² An impeccable product of the ‘Empire of Scholars’ who shuffled between England, New Zealand, and eventually landed in the United States, Pocock sought to replace the discrete national histories of the four nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland with a new understanding of ‘British history’ as the product of a broader ‘Atlantic archipelago’ that stretched from the ‘banks of the Mississippi’ to ‘those of the Waimakariri’.³ Pocock described this history as an ‘antinationalist’ one that was appropriate for a ‘post-Commonwealth’ age when Britain had joined the European Economic Community, ‘the Troubles’ were raging in Northern Ireland, and the break-up of Britain was threatened by the push for Scottish and Welsh devolution.⁴ It was a history that also resonated at a moment when the migration of Commonwealth citizens of colour, especially South Asians fleeing or expelled from Kenya and Uganda between 1964 and 1972, had inflamed a vitriolic English nationalism that was skillfully harnessed by the emergent politics of what became Thatcherism.⁵ For whatever reason, Pocock’s essay catalysed a variety of historiographical flights from a national history narrowly conceived (invariably as English).

A so-called ‘new British history’ emerged from work on the intersection of the early modern ‘four kingdoms’ that called into question the old view of English imperial dominance over Scotland, Ireland and Wales.⁶ Yet while histories of the four kingdoms made British history polycentric they remained centred upon the British Isles. Atlantic history, with its interest in the traffic of goods, peoples, and ideas across an ocean region, expanded the geographical frame.⁷ The Atlantic history envisaged by Pocock, and practiced by Bernard Bailyn and Jack Greene (Pocock’s colleague at Johns Hopkins), gradually moved beyond its initial Anglo-colonial, North American, orientation to include Europe and the Americas as a whole, as well as the continent of Africa and the Caribbean. This oceanic or regional form of transnational history was soon echoed elsewhere in histories of the Indian and Pacific oceans and the worlds they crafted and connected.⁸ Meanwhile, the history of Britain, often traditionally conceived as the history of the English state, was also increasingly placed in a broader European context. This either took the form of resituating Britain in relation to the broader history of the continent, or an explicitly comparative method where Britain became one of several ‘national’ cases.⁹ Much of this scholarship appeared to explain and even repudiate the hostility to European integration that gripped British political culture from the 1980s.

In many ways these debates were soon eclipsed by the development of a ‘new imperial history’ during the 1990s.¹⁰ Here again, as with so many of these historiographical flights from the nation, the new imperial history was largely not made in Britain. The culture wars in the North American academy, and the rethinking of South Asian history by the subaltern studies collective, allowed British history itself to be understood as an imperial formation.¹¹ When it was taken up in Britain it was energised by a different set of concerns: namely the attempt to unsettle Britons’ amnesia about Empire and to grapple with the continuing hold of racialised forms of politics in a multi-ethnic and multi-faith, post-imperial, nation.¹² Despite the differing investments associated with its locales of production, the new imperial history shared a determination to demonstrate that it was impossible to separate the histories of Britain and its Empire because they were, politically and culturally, mutually constitutive of each other. Imperial power, it was argued, worked through hierarchies of racial difference that were always gendered and sexed, and intimately related to understandings of class. This emphasis on culture and politics has recently been given a more materialist bent both by those interested in the violence of colonialism, and those exploring the legacies of imperialism through Britain’s material culture.¹³

Initially, studies of what became known as ‘the British world’, often produced by Antipodean historians, emerged somewhat at odds with the new imperial history. In some ways this work took its cue from the powerful restatement of the economics of British imperialism around the imperatives of finance by Cain and Hopkins.¹⁴ Yet while Cain and Hopkins looked outwards from Britain – or the City of London to be more precise – scholars of the British world broadened the focus to examine how migration and colonial settlement generated patterns of trade, politics and military endeavour that in turn helped to shape Britain.¹⁵ No doubt Pocock would be delighted that this work has restored the centrality of the white Dominions to the creation of a British world. Not only was it a British world with no centre, for trans-colonial relations and networks were as important as those of metropole and colony, but it was one in which the cultivation of whiteness and the quest for a better Britain took place in the ‘settler societies’ of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.¹⁶ The intellectual history of this ‘Greater Britain’ has now also allowed us to see the influence of ideas of imperial federation and cooperation in the germination of the varied forms of internationalism after the Great War.¹⁷ Even those who have dispensed with the idea of a holistic British world for an understanding of a series of related but varied spaces and networks, forged in part through encounters with indigeneity, still reside on the one-time frontiers of British settlement.¹⁸ Increasingly, biographical accounts of the everyday lives of migrants and their trans-colonial careers have been substituted for systemic analyses of how the British world was made.¹⁹ Some reasonably fear that these various strategies for the ‘worlding’ of British history reek of a reconstituted Anglosphere imperialism in which white people, and an Anglo-orientated political and economic culture, once again take centre stage.

National history in a post-national age?

This whirlwind historiographical tour is merely meant to illustrate the myriad ways in which, over the past forty years, historians of Britain, encouraged by those who worked beyond its shores, have sought to escape the nation. They have not been alone. Once the organising category of historical thought, the very analytical foundation of our discipline in the age of nationalisms, the nation has generally fallen out of historiographical favour. Local, regional, oceanic, ‘connected’, transnational, international, global and world histories proliferate across the discipline in every continent. Kenneth Pomeranz chose to make his 2014 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association a plea to produce ‘Histories for a Less National Age’.²⁰ Why then write national histories at all, let alone a history of Britain since 1750?

There are several reasons. First, it is not clear that we actually do live in a post-national age. The apostles and analysts of globalisation suggest that the deregulation of finance, trade and labour markets by inter- or supra-national institutions of government, as well as the capacities of technology (from digital cables, satellite systems, container ships, and air travel) to collapse time and distance, have made capital, goods and people – to say nothing about terror or pollution – transferable across the planet.²¹ And yet there is plenty of evidence that all these characteristics were evident in the first age of globality during the late nineteenth century when History as a discipline was organising itself around nations.²² Perhaps the novelty of the contemporary world is the level of global consciousness that has been facilitated by new media technologies and new discourses of political mobilisation like the environment and human rights.²³ Although nation-states may enjoy less autonomy now than they once did, it remains the case that they still claim sovereignty and they still structure the conditions of our lives through their forms of economic management, their legal and security systems, and even their forms of political representation.

Secondly, it is arguable that histories of the nation do not just stubbornly remain the common sense of our discipline; they have been given even more significance as the consciousness of globalisation appears to erode national difference. As History, and a few historians, have become hot commodities among literary agents and television producers, it is invariably a national story that is told and sold. You would be hard-pressed to imagine that there was anything other than American history, at least outside of its wars, from the History Channel in the United States. And the historical unconscious of British and Australian television is no better. No less than television producers, politicians also remain devoted to the nation. The more cosmopolitan and demographically diverse countries like Australia, Britain and the United States become, the more frequently politicians invoke the nation and its history to shore up the civics that they fear are eroded by migration and multi-culturalism. Two years ago David Cameron claimed that supposedly ‘British values’ of democracy, equality, tolerance and the rule of law were rooted in a shared national past that stretched back to the Magna Carta.²⁴ A group called ‘Historians for Britain’, formed in July 2013 to advocate for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from European integration, champions this story of British exceptionalism.²⁵ It is a largely fictional national history upon which those seeking to become citizens of the country are now tested.²⁶

The recent ‘History Wars’ in Australia, Britain and the United States, concerning how History should be taught in schools, are effectively arguments about how the national past should be told. In each of these countries, politicians have complained that professional historians have destroyed a national narrative, either through politically correct acts of inclusion (what John Howard memorably described as ‘black armband’ history), or by dispensing with a continuous chronological account in favour of themes and case studies.²⁷ For all the voguish talk of the extra- or trans-national, the vast majority of staffing and curricula in university History Departments remain locked around national fields. According to Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, national myopia is particularly bad in the UK, where 40 per cent of historians do British history (in the US 33 percent of historians do American history).²⁸ Historians may want to escape the nation but it retains a stubborn hold on our practice and historical imagination. Our challenge is not to unthink the nation as a category of historical analysis, but to explain its continuing traction, to wrestle with its political possibilities, and to come to terms with its limitations in helping us to understand the past.

At least that is why I took on writing the last volume of a new Cambridge History of Britain series. My volume in this series runs from 1750 to the present and it will compete for attention with a new generation of modern British history textbooks, as well as new editions of older ones.²⁹ I am clearly not alone in thinking about the continuing resonance of national histories. This new generation of histories of modern Britain seeks to update its predecessors, primarily produced by scholars trained in the 1950s and 1960s, by incorporating the insights of social, women’s, gender, cultural and new imperial histories.

There are two striking absences. The first is any sustained account of Britain’s economic history, let alone its global footprint, aside from the obligatory sections on slavery, the industrial revolution and ‘decline’. At a historical moment when the changing forms, locations and injuries of capitalism are painfully evident, they have receded from view and practically disappeared in our textbooks. The second is any organising narrative or explanatory principle.³⁰ I do not say this as an apologist for Tony Abbott’s or David Cameron’s dim-witted view of a whitewashed and triumphalist national history, but as a historian concerned not just to detail many historical events and processes but also to explain their causes and relationships to each other. Without an organising narrative and a structure of causation, there is a bricolage effect of writing people into a national past without understanding why they, or it, matter.

In this sense these new textbooks capture well the current state of modern British history as a field broadly understood. Although there is a plethora of talented historians doing wonderful work, there is often little sense of what the big questions are that could help us reignite a conversation about what is important and why, let alone one that could motivate an account of a national past.³¹ Partly, this is a generational issue. Those who set the field’s intellectual agenda since the 1980s – figures like Judith Walkowitz, Gareth Stedman Jones, Carolyn Steedman, Patrick Joyce, Catherine Hall, Maxine Berg, Mary Poovey, John Brewer, Linda Colley, Tom Laqueur, Pat Thane and Ross McKibbin – were mostly the boomers that came of age in the struggles of 1968 and they are coming to the end of their careers.³² Their work, almost without exception, was driven by a particular set of investments and arguments around Marxism, feminism and social democracy. They reminded us of the inhumanity and inequities generated by capitalism’s global division of labour, as well as of the compromised but indispensable forms of politics and welfare used to contest and manage it. As the new textbooks illustrate, it is now far from clear what defining set of intellectual and political questions shapes the next generation of scholars and their understanding of Britain’s modern history. In part this is because the work of this next generation – which is mine – was forged through an engagement with the critiques of essentialism and metanarratives that animated some parts of the cultural turn. Cultural history is now the air that we breathe, and even though it has been shored up by a new empiricism that has largely evacuated it of its once critical edge, the suspicion of metanarratives, and not just those organised around the nation, remains. No wonder then that the new generation of textbooks is confused and uncertain about how to tell the history of modern Britain.

Writing the history of Britain since 1750

So the challenge is not just to recuperate, while complicating, a national past, but to organize it around a central question that is historically and politically exigent as well as capable of motivating a coherent narrative. My contention is that we can best do this by asking why, how and when ‘the market’ became seen as an organising principle for governing the economic domain as well as its relationship to social, cultural and political life. Clearly, markets had existed for centuries, and had taken many different forms across the world, but I will suggest that a new understanding of ‘the market’ as an almost transcendental force with its own rhythms and logics emerged in imperial Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century and slowly came to structure the work of government. By asking when, and under what conditions, the market became ascendant, as well as when and where its logic was checked and refused, I trace the rise, demise and reinvention of what I call liberal political economy in Britain and its Empire since 1750. This is an imperial story for liberal political economy and its forms of governmentality were inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. It is also a global story as much as an imperial British one, for just as Britain and its Empire played a key role in making the modern world so the modern world – and transnational processes of economic, political and cultural change – made Britain. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention.

Far from being a romance of the nation, then, my global history of Britain is a largely tragic story of how political economies that promised emancipation and prosperity to Britons, colonial subjects, and others across the globe, rarely delivered either, were frequently secured by violence, and have left us facing an ecological crisis. Yet it is also a hopeful history that reminds us that change happens. It cherishes those who had the imagination and courage to think otherwise, those who challenged the rationalities of the market and the forms of inequity and subjugation built around it. It is perhaps in this sense, of recuperating a history of contention and struggle, that the book draws most palpably on the tradition of Marxist historiography through which I was taught British history at university. Yet, while I am determined to restore the centrality of economic history to Britain’s global past, mine is neither a Marxist nor even a materialist history. Instead I lean on Polanyi and Foucault to insist that, pace both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, markets and economies have no irresistible logic but are always the work of politics and culture. Tracing the rise, demise and reinvention of liberal political economy is precisely to highlight the historicity and contingency of a faith in the market as the organising principle of government that can only be explained politically and culturally.³³

Accordingly the book is structured around five chronological sections, each with three thematic chapters that move from politics to economy and society. The first section explores ‘The Ends of the Ancien Regime’ through the critiques of mercantilism, slavery and Old Corruption that stretched from Edinburgh to Boston and Calcutta between 1750 and 1819. Starting with the creation of the Gold Standard and the gradual abolition of mercantilist controls, the second focuses on the triumph of liberal political economy and how markets were made ‘free’ up to the Berlin conference of 1884, when the Great Depression that had struck the global economy began to impact Britain and restructure its world system. The period from 1884 was characterised by the gradual eclipse of Britain’s global hegemony and its liberal political economy that finally came crashing down in 1931 with the end of free trade and the Gold Standard. Britain may not have had a New Deal but after 1931 a new social democratic system of managing the economy gradually emerged and it required the development of a Sterling Area and its colonial economies, as well as American loans and new structures of global economic management, to survive. By 1976 that system, which had been rocked by decolonisation, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the Sterling Area, was falling apart and subjected to an IMF structural adjustment program. Entrance to the European Economic Community could not save the British economy or its social democratic fabric, which was gradually stripped away by the increasingly ascendant neo-form of liberalism that currently rules our planet.

That, in a paragraph, is the book. Needless to say I am painfully aware that some will think this emphasis on the primacy of political economy is an elision of all that we have learnt from recent decades about the autonomy of culture and politics, the centrality of the ordering and experience of difference to the operation of power, as well as the inadequacy of the nation as an analytical category.³⁴ I do not myself see any necessary opposition here. It seems perfectly possible to write global histories of nations that are attentive to local particularities and do not render the cultural and political as simply effects of economic life. Indeed I would hope that it is impossible to write a history of the reification and renunciation of the market as a principle of government without attending to those very issues. Inevitably, however, the challenge of writing a synthetic national history, especially one conceived in a global frame, is that interpretive choices have to be made and there are always particular events, processes, and peoples left out of the narrative. The challenge is all the greater when, as I do now, one has around 3000 words to narrate that history. So in what follows I shall focus on just three crucial moments in the global history of Britain – the 1770s, the 1880s and the 1970s. Certainly there are other moments that I could use but I have chosen these because they serve to illustrate how the rise, demise and reinvention of liberal political economy’s market rationalities in Britain were, necessarily, an imperial and global story. The long history of liberal political economy in Britain both gave shape to, and was shaped by, the first, second and third incarnations of the British Empire. Yet these imperial systems were also embedded in global structures, processes and conflicts that they helped to create and by which they, in turn, were shaped.

1770s

Clearly, the imperial ambitions of the English state stretch back to the sixteenth century but by the Seven Years War (1756–1763) they had assumed an unprecedented scale. As European powers battled for territory they engulfed kingdoms, states and peoples across the Mediterranean, the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and West Africa. In many ways this was the globe’s first world war. By the end of the war the so-called ‘First’ British Empire had been secured, with Minorca joining Gibraltar in the Mediterranean, Canada (including Quebec and Newfoundland) as well as Florida joining the 13 North American colonies, and much of eastern and southern India now under military control. As John Brewer taught us, this was made possible by the development of a new type of fiscal-military state in the first half of the eighteenth century.³⁵ Support for Britain’s navy and army routinely accounted for over half of all government expenditure during the eighteenth century but peaked at 70 percent during the Seven Years War. Even though 25 percent of its budget went on hiring mercenaries and securing the loyalty of local allies, the army quadrupled in size between the 1690s and the 1760s, when it was 200,000 strong. By then the navy employed over 8000 men to build and repair its ships that accommodated 80,000 men (the size of Britain’s two largest provincial cities of Bristol and Norwich combined). All of this military capacity was debt-funded by new financial institutions whose loans were serviced by an increasingly elaborate system of taxation. Everything that moved, and lots that did not, was taxed, including windows, dogs and servants. Britain’s tax revenue increased a remarkable sixteen times between 1660 and 1815 while its national income only tripled – only the Dutch were taxed more heavily.

The purpose of building this enormous military capacity was to secure overseas territory and trade as much as to secure the new Protestant state from its continental Catholic rivals. Britain’s ‘Great Divergence’ from the 1760s was less about the availability of cheap coal and Enlightened labour than about a state-sponsored military-industrial complex and the creation of a mercantilist imperial economy that, of course, had slavery at its centre.³⁶ Eric Williams was wrong to argue that the profits from slavery had financed the industrial revolution – it was far more important than that.³⁷ British ports grew rich on the triangular trade and as imports of raw cotton harvested by slaves accelerated, so the export of finished products manufactured in British mills increased tenfold between 1750 and 1770 (90 per cent of which went back to colonial markets). Large slave plantations were not just laboratories for new ways of organising labour and calculating its productivity, they also devoured capital investment from the City of London. The bitter fruits of slavery were harvested across Britain. Coffee, tobacco and sugar reached many consumers, while the profits from slavery made by owners and investors funded political careers, country estates, Oxbridge colleges and merchant banks. Adam Smith may have associated mercantilism and slavery with the ancien régime but it was a dynamic system that created the global conditions for Britain’s industrialisation. It was the success of the system that proved its undoing, fomenting unrest across the Empire.

Although the mercantilist controls of this imperial economy were impressive they were neither failsafe nor popular, especially in the colonies. After the Seven Years War a series of measures were introduced to tighten regulation and increase revenue from the East India Company and the American colonies. The company state had much of its financial and political autonomy curtailed between 1769 and 1773. In America between 1764 and 1767 the imperial state’s attempt to centralise power and revenue by declaring sterling as the only legal paper currency, extending Britain’s stamp taxes and custom duties, and increasing the military presence around Boston, all generated protests. The slide to the war and revolution that culminated in the Declaration of American Independence in 1776 had begun. Over the next six years, as the British and their Loyalists tried to keep control of the thirteen colonies, they were sucked into conflicts with the French, Dutch and Spanish in the Caribbean, Mediterranean and South Asia. Twenty years after emerging victorious from the Seven Years War Britain suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a rebel army of colonial subjects.

The Seven Years War and the attempt to centralise power and consolidate the imperial state’s forms of monopoly capitalism also catalysed a diverse and often contradictory politics of reform in Britain. A peace that required Britain to hand back its seizures of Cuba, the Philippines, Martinique, Grenada and even France’s Indian ‘factories’ was one thing, but the new tax introduced on cider to help pay for the war was another. A torrent of abuse rained down upon Bute, the King’s adviser. Leading the charge was the MP John Wilkes, who criticised the King’s speech announcing ‘Bute’s Peace’ in 1763 and was promptly expelled from the House of Commons for sedition. Forced to flee to France to avoid arrest, Wilkes became a cause célèbre who had exposed the tyrannical nature of the King and his ministers. Over the next decade, in both Britain and its American colonies, this arch-xenophobe came to personify the cause of liberty and the rights of the people to free elections and a free press. Tellingly, it was Wilkes who introduced the first bill for parliamentary reform in 1776 as Major John Cartwright’s Take Your Choice made the revolution in America a rallying cry for reform at home.

Some Britons empathised with these calls for reform because, like the American colonists, they had experienced the full force of the imperial state. The peacetime standing army of some 15,000 men was routinely deployed to suppress unrest across the country as well as to enforce mercantile, monopoly capitalism at home by preventing smuggling and enforcing enclosure, the clearing of the Highlands and the operation of turnpike tolls. In 1766 this army intervened in no less than 68 towns across 20 counties. Adam Smith was no fan of the commons, but The Wealth of Nations (1776), which he had started to write a decade earlier in Paris, can be seen as a response to the tightening grip of a mercantilist imperial state. For Smith, Britain’s imperial expansion was a drain on the wealth of metropole and colony alike, and slavery was just the most inhumane element of a corrupt and inefficient political economy. In contrast, for evangelicals like Grenville Sharp, the fact that the imperial state authorised slavery was such a stain on the conscience of all Britons that the loss of American colonies was understood as God’s Temporal Vengeance Against Tyrants, Slave-Holders and Oppressors (1776). Only the new imperial project in India, and Cook’s ‘discovery’ of a New World in the South Seas from 1768, promised to build a new type of Empire based, it was hoped, on the practice of reason and evangelism.

The increasing reach of Britain’s imperial state and its mercantilist system was then first evident in the decades between the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. If that political economy produced the conditions of its critique across the first British Empire, it was not until the end of the Napoleonic Wars that liberal Tories and Whigs alike sought to defuse critiques of mercantilism, and its associated forms of Old Corruption, by dismantling it. The creation of the gold standard, the liberalisation of trade, and the reduction of the national debt were made possible by austerity measures that were coupled with ‘emergency’ powers to suppress and criminalise the resulting protest. The elaboration of this new liberal political economy required the massive growth and frequent use of state power to make markets ‘free’ at home and to extend their reach overseas. Even so, the final vestiges of mercantilism – the monopoly of the East India Company, slavery, the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts – were only finally removed in the 1840s.

1880s

In 1876, to mark the centenary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Walter Bagehot, the influential editor of The Economist, a journal founded in the 1840s to evangelise for free trade, proclaimed that Smith’s ideas were now ‘the common sense of the nation, and have become irreversible’. Bagehot was right that liberal political economy, whether it had been invented by Smith or not, had indeed triumphed. Yet Bagehot was wrong to claim that its valorisation of the market was hegemonic because it had made ‘the life of almost everyone in England – perhaps of everyone – … different and better’.³⁸ Instead its triumph had been manufactured by the British state, which had forged a world system, and a global division of labour, around its understanding of the market and free trade. That system allowed Britain to take advantage of its early, and often mercantilist-enabled, innovations in industrial manufacturing. Britain exported finished goods to the world in return for raw materials and capital investment that accelerated the extraction of natural resources. This flow of trade and investment was secured by the Gold Standard and made possible by British transport and communication networks.

Railways were the quintessential product of Britain’s liberal political economy and its global imprint. Requiring massive capital investment in joint stock companies that pioneered new forms of management, their networks were forged in iron and steel, their engines were driven by coal fired steam-engines, and their workers subjected to new divisions and disciplines of labour. Between 1845 and 1850 railways accounted for almost half of domestic investments, consumed close to 20 per cent of Britain’s iron output and employed around 4 per cent of its working men. By the 1860s the export of iron rails, trains and rolling stock to places like the United States, Argentina, India, Canada and Russia, to name just a few, gathered pace. Railways accounted for 40 per cent of Britain’s overseas investments in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the new networks enabled the import of cotton from the Egyptian delta, corn from the American Midwest, beef from the Argentine pampas, wool from southern Australia, gold from the South African goldfields, timber from the Baltic and Canada, as well as flax from the Russian Steppes.

The increasing interdependence of a global economy forged by the unparalleled reach of British manufacturing, transportation and finance was made manifest by the financial crisis that ushered in the world’s first Great Depression between 1873 and 1896. The immediate trigger of the crisis was over-investment of European capital in rail stock, especially in the United States. On 9 May 1873 a crash on Vienna’s stock exchange produced a chain reaction of bankruptcies and bank failures across Euro-America that resulted in the default of $800 million of American rail bonds by 1875. Even the Bank of England was forced to protect its reserves by raising the bank rate to 9 per cent, 7 per cent higher than in the preceding decades.

The Great Depression was a global crisis that ushered in new forms of economic nationalism and a competitive quest for overseas territories and markets by the American, European, Ottoman and Japanese empires. Clearly, the so-called ‘new imperialism’ was neither entirely new nor solely the product of the Great Depression, but the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 effectively authorised and accelerated an imperial land grab that was decades old. As Britain’s rivals sought to protect their fledgling industries they embraced protectionist policies: Russia did so in 1874, the United States extended its tariffs in 1875, Germany in 1879, and France in 1892. Britain alone kept faith in the gospel of ‘free trade’ as she was able to impose it upon her colonies. Exports to the colonies – principally Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – increased from 30 to 35 per cent of the total between 1870 and 1914. By 1913 Britain imported 87 per cent of its tea, 80 per cent of its wool, 57 per cent of its rubber, 35 per cent of its grains, and 25 per cent of its meat from the colonies. 30 per cent of imperial imports were re-exported in 1913, half of the total of Britain’s re-exports. The increasing cry for imperial federation across ‘Greater Britain’ to encourage trans-colonial trade in many ways described an imperial economy that was already evident. It was but a small step to Joseph Chamberlain’s call in 1903, as Colonial Secretary, for the abandonment of free trade in favor of a protectionist system of imperial preference.

As the Great Depression deflated commodity prices, squeezed profits, and lowered rates of return on British securities, British capital flooded overseas in search of higher yields – especially to the white settler colonies. Britain’s overseas investments increased from £770,000,000 in 1870 to £4,107,000,000 in 1914, and the earnings on them rose from 35.3 to 199.6 per cent in the same period. In the 1870s a third of overseas investments went to the colonies and a decade later it was almost a half. By 1914 the new British Dominions alone accounted for 37 per cent of British overseas investment, considerably more than the 26 per cent that went to Europe and the United States. Britain’s economy had always been an imperial formation but the new global conditions created by the Great Depression shifted its centres of gravity to finance and trade with the colonial world of ‘Greater Britain’.

‘Free trade’ in this imperial idiom deepened structures of colonial dependence and soon generated new economic forms of nationalism. The white settler colonies gradually embraced protection, starting with Canada in 1879 and ending with the introduction of tariffs in Australia between 1902 and 1908 (even if these continued to give preference to British goods). In the so-called dependent colonies, especially Ireland and India, nationalist movements, from the Land League to the Swadeshi movement, increasingly orientated themselves around economic questions of land reform, the inequities of colonial trade, the cost of colonial rule and the destruction of ‘native’ industries.

Insulated as they were by this imperial economy not even Britons were immune from the global shock of the Great Depression. As demand contracted and prices fell, wages were squeezed and unemployment rose during the 1880s. New forms of trade unionism that extended beyond skilled workers emerged alongside a labour politics that increasingly articulated the discontent of working people as a class and pushed the primacy of the social over the market. Animated by the achievement of manhood suffrage in Australia and New Zealand, the Reform Acts of the 1880s finally enabled the emergence of a mass politics and the mobilisation of women to overcome their exclusion from the franchise. By 1900 Bagehot’s assertion that liberal political economy was irreversible looked decidedly shaky as both the Liberal and Conservative parties emphasised social policies intended to address the systematic failures of the market. A central concern of those social policies was to protect Britain’s imperial race from the degenerating effects of poverty and immigration at home as well as disease and miscegenation abroad. It would take the ruinous expense of World War One and a further worldwide economic depression before an emergency ‘National’ government finally abandoned free trade and the Gold Standard in 1931. Yet the demise of Britain’s liberal political economy – the waning of its seemingly unshakeable faith in the market as a benevolent, efficient and just force – began with the restructuring of the global economy during the first Great Depression.

1970s

Between 1931 and 1976 the emergent social democratic state was no less active than its liberal precursor in managing markets but it sought instead to secure economic growth in the interests of society as a whole. Of course, profound inequities of wealth and welfare, structured by class, race, gender and sex, either remained or were entrenched in new ways by a welfare state built around the interests of white, working-class, heterosexual, men. Although that story is a familiar one we rarely acknowledge how the political economy of social democracy was no less embedded in imperial and global structures. Indeed, after 1931 Britain became even more dependent on its satellite colonial economies. No longer pegged to the Gold Standard, the value of the pound was bolstered by the creation of a broader Sterling Area from its colonial economies, with the Bank of England retaining control and currency reserves in London. After 1945 the Sterling Area persisted under the Bretton Woods system, with Commonwealth currencies pegged to the pound not the US dollar – they even shared the pain of sterling’s devaluation from $4 to $2.8 in 1949. Ironically, Britain had only been able to peg the pound to the dollar at $4 thanks to a US loan of $3.75 billion. Quite apart from the support of the Marshall Plan, further loans from the US government were necessary in 1950 to secure social democracy in Britain. Moreover, a series of Colonial Development and Welfare Acts in 1929, 1940, 1945 and 1958 desperately sought to ensure that the remaining dependent colonial economies would better service their ailing metropolitan counterpart as the Dominions slowly reorientated their trade elsewhere. These were the imperial and international structures of social democracy in Britain.

So it should come as no surprise that the unravelling of social democracy was also a product of global as much as domestic forces. Even though decolonisation did not immediately free postcolonial economies from their reliance upon British trade and finance, it slowly led to the weaning of the British economy from its colonial dependence between the loss of India in 1947 and the retreat from Aden in 1967. There was no better illustration of the new realities than when the United States refused to provide the loans necessary to prevent a run on the pound in 1967, forcing a further devaluation that most of the Sterling Area refused to follow. Within five years the Sterling Area was effectively finished and Britain had to pay back its sterling reserves to Commonwealth countries as a condition of membership to the European Economic Community. The growing power of the EEC and Japan, together with the growth of the unregulated petro-dollar currency market, catalysed the collapse of the Bretton Woods system by 1971. Two years later, the depreciation of the dollar, together with the Yom Kippur War, sparked the Oil Crisis and ushered in the era of so-called stagflation with its pressure on wages, its unemployment and the inevitable wave of strikes by organised labour. By 1976 Britain’s then Labour government was forced to take a loan from the IMF of $3.9 billion in return for a structural adjustment program of austerity measures. The 20 per cent cuts to public expenditure culminated with the Winter of Discontent and helped usher in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Arguably, the subsequent Thatcherite assault on the public sector and the labour movement was only the beginning of the neoliberal ‘New Times’ identified by Marxism Today in 1988.

Changing global conditions assured that social democracy in Britain had a brief life. Even domestically much of the political and cultural challenge, from both the left and the right, came from overseas. In the late 1960s and 1970s many of the leading figures of the New Left, student movements, second wave feminism and the black power movement were postcolonial intellectuals (think Stuart Hall, Tariq Ali, Vinay Chand, Germaine Greer and Darcus Howe). American politics was also important. The civil rights movement animated both the emergence of black politics and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (1968), just as the politics of gender and sexuality there influenced the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Gay Liberation Front (1970). And, of course, the trans-Atlantic free market ‘think-tank archipelago’ was vital for fostering neoliberal critiques of social democracy and the forms of monetarism that slowly gained ascendancy within the Conservative Party through Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.³⁹

This is the end …

I have already belaboured my points. Instead of being in flight from national history we have to remember its continuing force while challenging its reduction to a simple or self-congratulatory ‘national’ narrative. Yet to challenge such narratives we cannot make do simply with expanding the geographical frame and including a broader array of actors. We need an alternative narrative. I have proposed one that recentres the history of modern Britain around the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a history that shaped the lives of Britons, their colonial subjects and many others across the world. For the many lives of liberal political economy in Britain were embedded within imperial and global structures that were simultaneously economic, political and cultural. This history of Britain is a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain. It is a history intended to help us understand our neoliberal present and to remind us that markets, like ‘British’ values and their professed liberalism, are neither timeless nor progressive. In that sense national histories are still worth fighting for because the cost of dispensing with them is too great.

About the author

James Vernon, is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Politics and the People (1993), Hunger: A Modern History (2007) and Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (2014). He is also editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) and co-editor of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011), ‘The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University’ Representations 116 (2011) and ‘The Berkeley Series in British Studies’ with University of California Press. The Cambridge History of Britain Since 1750 will be published in spring 2017.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Kate Fullagar and Leigh Boucher for inviting me to the ‘Modern British History Workshop’ and forcing me to think harder about the book I am writing and why I am writing it! I learnt a lot at that workshop and thank all of those who participated in it for sharing their work and generating such a rich discussion. Initially written as a talk about a textbook that has no footnotes, this article only cites the historiography it engages with, not the archival bases of its evidence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 We need more studies of how university management practices, national systems to measure the productivity of academic labour, as well as the protests against the student debt-financing of higher education, have taken remarkably similar forms across the British world. On the latter see Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon, eds, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (London: Verso, 2011).

2 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject,’ Journal of Modern History 47, no. 4 (1975): 601–21.

3 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester Manchester University Press, 2013).

4 Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject,’ 620, 621.

5 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6 Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War,’ History 72 (1987): 395–415; Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morril, eds, The British Problem c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Raphael Samuel, ‘British Dimensions: Four Nations History,’ History Workshop Journal 40, no. 1, (1995): i–xxii.

7 For good overviews see David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2002); Jack Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

8 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: From the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Edward Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds, Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land and People (London: Palgrave, 2014).

9 Jonathan Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Brewer, Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1838 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds, Comparison and History: Europe in Cross National Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

10 Antoinette Burton, After the Imperial Turn? Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Dane Kennedy, ‘The Imperial History Wars,’ Journal of British Studies 54, 1 (2015): 5–22.

11 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds, Selected Subaltern Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For historians of Britain Antoinette Burton’s ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History,’ Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (2002) quickly became iconic.

12 Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bill Schwarz, White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

13 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Holt, 2005); Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Catherine Hall, et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jordanna Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)

14 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism vols 1 & 2 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993–2002).

15 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Andrew Thompson, Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

16 Indeed histories of whiteness, and the racialisation of settler society, often through biopolitical regimes, have been one important strand of this work that was more closely related to the new imperial history. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (London: Palgrave, 2004); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

17 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of the World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

18 See Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London & New York: Routledge, 2001); Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, eds, Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (London: Palgrave, 2015).

19 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (New York: Cape, 2002); Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

20 Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Histories for a Less National Age,’ American Historical Review 119, 1 (2014).

21 David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).

22 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

23 Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2002).

24 David Cameron, ‘British Values are Not Optional, They’re Vital’, Daily Mail, 14 June 2014.

25 David Abulafia, ‘The “Historians for Britain” campaign believes that Britain’s unique history sets it apart from the rest of Europe,’ History Today, 11 May 2015. The group’s website is http://historiansforbritain.org.

26 ‘The All New British Citizenship Test – Take the Quiz,’ Guardian, 26 March 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/quiz/2013/jan/27/british-citizenship-test-quiz-new. I am quite pleased to report that I got 8 out of 10!

27 Tony Taylor and Robert Guyver, eds, History Wars and the Classroom: Global Perspectives (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2012). See also Ann Curthoys, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories and You Want us to Stop Already,’ in Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn, 70–89; Richard Evans, ‘Michael Gove’s History Wars,’ Guardian, 13 July 2013; James Grossman, ‘The New History Wars,’ New York Times, 1 September 2014.

28 Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, ‘It’s a Small World After All: The Wider World in Historians’ Peripheral Vision’ http://smallworldhistory.org/Its_a_Small_World_After_All/Findings_files/2012-09%20Small%20World-full%20report.pdf. See also, for slightly different figures, Richard Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13. I have not been able to find any comparable study of historians in Australia or New Zealand.

29 Susan Kingsley Kent, A New History of Britain Since 1688: Four Nations and an Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Stephanie Barczewski, et al., Britain Since 1688: A Nation in the World (London & New York: Routledge, 2015); T.W. Heyck and M. Veldman, The Peoples of the British Isles: 1688 to the Present. A New History, 4th ed. (Chicago: Lyceum, 2014); Jamie Bronstein and Andrew Harris, Empire, State and Society: Britain since 1830 (Chichester: Wiley, 2012); Ellis Wasson, A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present (Chichester, Wiley, 2010); Paul K. Monod, Imperial Island: A History of Britain and its Empire, 1660–1837 (Chichester, Wiley, 2009); Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (London & New York: Routledge, 2007).

30 Wasson is here the exception, but an unhappy one, for his text is a romance for tradition and a celebration of freedom and democracy. Wasson, A History of Modern Britain, xiv–xvii.

31 For recent laments of the interpretive fragmentation of the field see Modern British Studies at Birmingham University, ‘Working Paper No.1’ (February 2014), https://mbsbham.wordpress.com; V21 Collective, ‘Manifesto of the V21 Collective,’ http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/.

32 Festschrifts proliferate: at least for the men! See David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds, Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds, The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte, eds, Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

33 This has been one of the few consistent threads of my work over the last decade, see James Vernon, ‘On Being Modern and Other Things,’ Victorian Studies 57, no. 3 (2015): 515–22.

34 For a powerful articulation of this view see Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). That is to say, pace Lyn Hunt, it is possible to write global histories that do not render the cultural and the political an effect of economy.

35 Brewer, Sinews of Power.

36 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Joel Mokyr, Enlightened Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

37 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

38 Walter Bagehot, ‘The Postulates of English Political Economy No.1,’ Fortnightly Review CX (February 1876): 215.

39 Ben Jackson, ‘The Think-Tank Archipelago: Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism,’ in Making Thatcher’s Britain, ed. Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 43–61.