imperial preference

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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

But to add grievous insult to such injury, Hull’s State Department, which Roosevelt had in May designated to lead the consideration negotiations, had a separate and sometimes conflicting priority: to dismantle Britain’s “imperial preference” trading system. The grand principle behind this demand was that the postwar world needed to be grounded in nondiscriminatory multilateral trade—a longtime obsession of Hull’s. Bitterness toward the economics of empire had been growing for decades. “Excluded nations cannot be expected to accept the fiction of empire,” wrote American diplomat and Hull ally William Culbertson in 1925, “in justification of their exclusion from extensive areas of the earth’s surface.”41 The currency and trade issues melded in the pot of imperial preference, which became more of a “mandate” than a “preference” under wartime practices.

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Clayton immediately left Paris for London to press his case on trade liberalization, which he saw as an essential complement to American aid. This proved a tougher nut to crack. Throughout the summer, Clayton had struggled simultaneously with London over the dismantling of imperial preference and with protectionists in his own capital determined to erect new wool import tariffs. He ultimately won Truman over in the wool wars, thereby salvaging troubled global trade talks in Geneva. The British resisted mightily in the face of Clayton’s public upbraids on imperial preference. They had committed to dismantling it in return for Lend-Lease, and then again for the loan. Vinson’s promises to Congress in 1946 that Britain would “immediately accept the principles of fair and non-discriminatory currency and trade practices” if given the loan had been shown to be hollow.48 The British were now balking anew, despite the dangling Marshall carrot.

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Reading an earlier draft wording of Article VII in July 1941, Keynes exploded in rage in front of the State Department’s Dean Acheson: “the lunatic proposals of Mr. Hull,” he later termed it, referring to Acheson’s boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.15 Keynes knew that Article VII was, in reality, code for an end to “Imperial preference,” by which Britain secured privileged trade access to the markets of its colonies and dominions. In the war’s aftermath, the Americans would be in a powerful position to supply the markets previously served by the British, and, stripped of its traditional export rights, war-ravaged Britain would remain wholly dependent on American succor to pay for imports vital to its survival.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

In the 1930s, economic depression, the collapse of the gold standard and the outbreak of competitive protectionism strengthened the political case for imperial preference. When Britain came off the gold standard in 1931, the dominions devalued with it, effectively creating a managed sterling area. At the Ottawa Imperial Conference of 1932, Neville Chamberlain, son of Joseph, helped negotiate a network of interlocking agreements by which empire countries agreed to give each other's products preferential tariff treatment. Britain got comparatively little out of the agreements, but the conference consolidated a system of imperial preference. Between 1929 and 1938, the volume of British imports from Australia and Canada more than doubled, while those from Argentina were almost cut in half.

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These tariffs would help pay for the defence of the empire, obviating the need for direct imperial taxation. Having failed to persuade the cabinet to back his proposal, Chamberlain resigned from Balfour's administration in 1903 to prosecute his campaign in the country at large. Launching it in Birmingham, he argued that his scheme for imperial preference would not apply to Indian or any other ‘native fellow subjects’ but only to ‘our own kinsfolk’ – that ‘white population that constitutes the majority in all the great self-governing Colonies of the Empire.’ This population was growing through emigration and the economic development of newly settled territories.

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Working-class support was readily neutered by the fact that, since foodstuffs constituted the bulk of imports from the settler colonies, tariff reform would simply put up the price of food on the kitchen table. Free traders contrasted their ‘big loaf’ of bread with the ‘little loaf’ working families would get under imperial preference. Chamberlain's cross-class political appeal to imperialism abroad and radicalism at home failed him at this point. At the start of his campaign, he held out the promise of using tariff revenues to pay for new state pensions, but somehow, ‘during the summer of 1903, Chamberlain let this grand design slip between his fingers.’

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

When the wartime coalition went to the polls in 1918, it noted that ‘One of the lessons which has been most clearly taught us by the war is the danger to the nation of being dependent upon other countries for vital supplies on which the life of the nation may depend.’ Thus they proposed that ‘key industries’ should be supported, and dumping controlled. Imperial preferences would be given.8 The non-coalition Liberals, and the new Labour Party, in its first outing as a major party, remained loyal to free trade: ‘Labour is firm against tariffs and for Free Trade,’ they said, and looked to new international labour legislation to make ‘sweating impossible’.9 The coalition won the election and introduced many protectionist measures with imperial preferences. It continued the McKenna duties and introduced the Safeguarding of Industry Act, 1921. The duties on manufactured goods under the act did not affect empire, which did not export such goods.

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The duties on manufactured goods under the act did not affect empire, which did not export such goods. Where imperial preference mattered was in a 1919 measure which granted imperial preference on revenue duties on sugar, dried fruit and tobacco. Table 1.1: The United Kingdom’s most important suppliers and export markets, 1928 The story of interwar politics can usefully be understood as, in part, the politics of free trade versus protection. David Lloyd George was deposed in 1922, to be succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservatives. He was succeeded by another Conservative, Stanley Baldwin, who called an election in an attempt to get a popular endorsement for protection.

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The British were forced to take out a loan from the USA, of around £1 billion, in order to continue to import necessities which could only come from the USA, and which they could not pay for because of the wartime mobilization, which had prioritized British arms production over exports. Furthermore, the loan came with controversial conditions. The British side was forced to agree to make sterling convertible by 1947. The US also wanted to dismantle imperial preference, to open to its own producers a global market. As it happened, the priorities of the Cold War intervened, and imperial preference continued, and, apart from a very brief spell in 1947, sterling was not convertible till 1958. The US loan of 1945 was supplemented by Marshall Aid from the USA from 1947, which allowed the purchase of dollar raw materials, food and tobacco, and machinery.37 The British nation was an active participant in the Cold War.

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War by Andrew Stewart

British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, Monroe Doctrine, union organizing

It would be beside Great Britain always. If Great Britain was at war, New Zealand would be at war.'66 A key feature determining how London and the Dominions reacted to one another was finance and the global economy. In 1897 Canada had been the first of them to introduce a conditional form of 'Imperial Preference' into its tariff. From this point onwards, escalating economic dependency effectively required all of the far-flung Dominions to retain the closest possible link with the fiscal actions of the authorities in London.67 Figures for trade between Britain and its Empire before 1914 reveal a mixed picture.

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The Empire was useful as a market for goods that faced major international competition but the pattern of imports was such that the Empire could not offer any real measure of independence to Britain in terms of a guaranteed supply of essential imports.68 The 'Final Report of the Dominions Royal Commission', released in 1917, recommended that there be greater exploitation of Dominion resources and it is clear that after 1919 the 'white Empire' did play a much greater role in Britain's trade.69 The global financial crisis that worsened at the beginning of the 1930s only confirmed this, now placing even greater emphasis on the role played by the British government. With the world's economies in turmoil, at the Imperial Economic Conference held at Ottawa in September 1932, the importance of protective 'Imperial Preference' measures was re-endorsed by all sides. This took place against a backdrop of generally deteriorating political relations and the raising of more questions about the durability of the Dominion idea.70 But there seemed few economic alternatives to the agreements and although future commercial relations were often worse rather than better, the fiscal policies accepted by the Dominion governments kept them close to London, in mind if not always in heart.

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The planners anticipated a war 'of long duration' because 'the Red race' is 'more or less phlegmatic' but 'noted for its ability to fight to a finish'.5 Sir Charles Mallet was by no means alone in his warnings that all things connected to trade and commerce were disastrous issues for the two countries to squabble over. This did not prevent the 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff becoming law, which precipitated, in turn, a strong Imperial response, guaranteeing that suspicion and hostility endured. While it still proved impossible to agree to a full system of Imperial Preference, at the 1932 Ottawa Conference, there was an acceptance between Britain and the Dominions of a preferential understanding of low tariffs within the Empire and higher tariffs elsewhere.6 Essentially, in return for concessions on the part of the Dominions, the British government agreed to give them 'definite advantages' in the domestic market.

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The economic dimension of empire remained both important and a significant aspect of the public debate. Taking forward the pre-war campaign of Joseph Chamberlain, Imperial Preference was an attempt to overcome tensions over economic benefits and to strengthen the empire. A cause championed from 1929 by Max, 1st Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express, the largest circulation newspaper, in his “Crusade” for Empire Free Trade, Imperial Preference was eventually established in agreements reached at the Imperial Economic Conference held at Ottawa in 1932. Yet, British exporters benefited less than Dominion producers because, while the Dominions raised tariffs on British imports, they were unwilling to cut tariffs on British imports, as they feared the impact on Dominion producers.

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He went on writing Fu Manchu stories until his death.18 In Australia, the equivalent was concern about Japan,19 alongside strong opposition to Chinese immigration, opposition also seen in Canada and leading to an apology by the prime minister in 2007. In Britain, there were many voluntarist bodies pledged to imperial and national assertion, while the pressure for tariff reform (protectionism) was linked to support for an “Imperial Preference” in trade that was designed to contribute to imperial federation. If such bodies and political concern were dominated by the middle class, that was more generally true of the voluntarist sector, for example sports organizations.20 A long-established aspect of criticism of empire is to present it in class terms, and to castigate both accordingly.

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The Ottawa Agreement was part of a new footing in Anglo-Dominion relations, one seen in compromises, for example, over assisted migration and empire settlement, in which the British government had to give way.30 Nevertheless, in light of rising protectionism elsewhere during the Depression, the agreement was promising. Thanks to Imperial Preference, the empire took 49 percent of British exports between 1935 and 1939 compared with 42 percent a decade earlier. British policymakers, instead of thinking, as in the Victorian era, primarily in terms of the glob al economy theoretically made possible by free trade, were increasingly discussing the future in terms of an economic bloc (led by Britain with major contributions from the Dominions) that operated as a sterling area and that played a central role in strategic planning.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Smith) 407–9 Bombay 197 Borden, Robert 158, 334–9, 395 Botha, Louis 250, 254, 281, 290, 344–6, 402 Bourassa, Henri 337, 397–8, 457 Brazil 55, 137–9, 140 Britain attitudes to empire in 287–8, 329–33, 410–17, 439–49, 482–4, 529, 545–6, 574–5, 611–12, 647–8 commercial expansion of 36–9, 114–15, 122–4, 273–9, 285–6 defence policy of 256–63, 309–19, 365, 421–31, 486–8, 643–7 and East of Suez policy 641–7 economic weakness of 518–20, 530–2, 536, 547–8, 562–3, 579–90, 607 and European Economic Community 586–9, 633–4, 636–8, 641, 644, 647–8 foreign investment of 116–17, 274, 276, 284 and great depression 431–9, 440–1 and India Bill 445–8 Labour movement in 332–3, 411–14 and Suez Crisis 600–9 Burma 561 Callaghan, James 644 Canada after 1945 550–1, 576–7 and ‘Britannic nationalism’ 151–9 and dominion status 395–8 federation 148–9 and First World War 333–4, 336–9 and imperial preference 455–6 and navy question 156–9 and Second World War 494–5, 501–2, 520, 522 settlements in 49, 50 and South African War 155 transcontinental expansion 149–50 Cape Colony 51–2, 220–3, 224, 232–3, 236–7 Chamberlain, Austen and dominions 407 and India 348, 448 and Locarno 365–6 Chamberlain, Joseph 106 and Ireland 299 and South Africa 230, 233–4, 236 and tariff reform 271 Chamberlain, Neville and Egypt 473 on empire 449 and foreign policy 487–90 and imperial preference 438 at Ottawa Conference 436 views on defence 427, 430–1, 441–2 China 35, 40–1, 56–7, 81–3, 132–5, 374, 424–5 ‘Chinese slavery’ 250 Churchill, Winston as Chancellor of Exchequer 368, 416 and Cold War 567, 572 and Egypt 595–8 and India 444–8 and Middle East 318 and naval policy 268–70, 368 and Second World War 499–500, 515–17 Cobden, Richard 36 convertibility See sterling Cripps, Stafford 507–8, 532, 536 Cromer, Lord 71–5, 77–8, 91 Curtin, John 341–2, 452, 503, 520 Curtis, Lionel 349 Curzon, Lord 189, 213 and India 202–5, 349 and Middle East 317–19, 364, 378–85 Cyprus 632 Dafoe, John W. 337, 397–8, 454–5 De Gaulle, General 636–8 De Valera, Eamonn 356, 461 Delhi Durbar (1911) 211 Devlin Report (1959) 620–1, 627 Dilke, Charles 26, 73, 99 Dominions 11–12, 15–16, 393–5, 406–8, 443–5 East India Company 17, 25, 61 East of Suez 641–7 Eden, Anthony and Middle East 590–609 and Second World War 515 and Suez crisis 600–9 Egypt 70–1, 131–2 after 1945 533, 555–6, 563–5 and British occupation 71–5, 77–8, 105, 107 and Second World War 500, 524–5 and Suez base 563–5, 590–605 and Suez crisis 600–5 treaty with Britain (1936) 471–4 uprising (1919) 380–1, 383 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 603–4, 634, 636 emigration from Britain 41–4, 58–9, 98–9, 104 from India 183 Ethiopia 428–9 Exchange Equalisation Account 435 Feisal, king 382–3 Fitzpatrick, Percy 237–8, 244, 250–1, 405 France 29, 107, 109, 260–1, 309–19, 488–90, 492, 499 Fraser, Peter 503, 523 free trade 59–60 Gandhi, Mahatma 216, 351–3, 385–93, 462, 467–9 George, David Lloyd 311, 319, 330–3, 415–16 Germany 107, 263–4, 271, 273–9, 311–15, 361–3, 485–7, 636–8 Gladstone, W.

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British exporters complained bitterly at the miserly spending of the East India Company's government on railways and roads, which they blamed for the shortage of return cargoes from India and the slow growth of their trade. The ‘Canadian’ interest grasped soon enough that Montreal's future depended on railways, if it was to survive the end of imperial preference in the late 1840s.46 The British government's role in building the ‘commercial republic’ was not insignificant, but it was bound to be limited. As Palmerston claimed, it was keen to advance the sphere of free trade abroad. Through treaties of commerce, it sought to protect British merchants and their property from unfair or discriminatory treatment, and to obtain ‘most favoured nation’ status – the right for British goods to enter on terms at least as good as those enjoyed by the ‘most favoured’ foreign state.

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Lloyd George's new taxes, controversial as they were, easily paid for the increase in naval and social expenditure.103 The economic burden of rearmament was easily carried by the enormous surplus in the balance of payments. The sense of general prosperity checked the appeal of tariffs and helped smother the campaign for imperial preference. Since tariff reform and its political rider ‘imperial unity’ (between Britain and the white dominions) were at odds with the free trade basis of commercial empire and excluded India, their disruptive potential for the British system would have been considerable. Of course, the Edwardians were not free from economic anxiety.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

On the one hand, the Chamberlain-Milner-Rhodes variety would lead to wars on the scale of the Boer conflict, not to speak of protection; on the other, Liberal Imperialists, though free traders, seemed ready to commit Britain to France and Russia in a still more foolhardy confrontation with Germany. Grey’s secretive diplomacy as foreign minister caused anxiety on this score. So did his public acts – adding to the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 an agreement with Russia in 1907 fixing up their spheres of influence in Persia and Tibet. To counter the first threat, of imperial preference – a campaign that Chamberlain had begun in the downturn of 1903, and his sons Austin and Neville carried on – the Economist insisted that free trade had become so fundamental to the imperial order that the two could not be safely disentangled. To abandon ‘our policy of the open door’ and ‘knowledge that wherever British sovereignty is exercised foreign commerce can come and go freely on equal terms’ would invite ‘envy, hatred, and malice’, the ‘hostility of the world’.66 What mattered most were the invisible ties binding the colonies and dominions to England.

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The Morley-Minto reforms added a token layer of elite native representation in India in 1909: from zero to one on executive councils of the viceroy and governors, with separate appointed and elected spots for Hindus and Muslims on the legislative councils.79 The aim of these reforms was not to prepare the way for Indian self-government under the British flag – as in South Africa – but to make such demands redundant. For Hirst, they proved that liberalism could triumph over jingoism while still pursuing vital imperial work.80 The Raj was just as central to the economic side of this vision, and Hirst used it to poke holes in the case for imperial preference.81 Revealingly, on the issue of India, this defence of Morley put the Economist on the same side as Grey. For the foreign minister, that had been the point: Morley’s ‘unimpeachable’ record of hostility to ‘the Jingo’ as the ‘devil incarnate’, wrote Grey, shielded the government from ‘sentimental’ Liberal critics of imperialism and the repression of Indian nationalism.82 To radicals, even the Agadir Crisis in 1911 could be made to look like a victory, once the dust had settled on this major diplomatic spat.

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‘Britain’s centuries old position as a Great Power’ was at stake; and it was not a naval mutiny but the ‘stability of sterling’ and ‘maintenance of our credit abroad’ that threatened it.74 The Economist thus announced ‘The End of an Epoch’ in late September with a thud, admitting the flight from gold had produced no bank runs, no riots, no crash, instead heralding an uptick in exports, consumer and business confidence. And yet the paper continued to view the situation as temporary. In 1932, it denounced as ‘nauseating the symphony of imperial wind instruments’ braying for imperial preference, and called on Liberals to resign from the National Government over the adoption of tariffs at the Ottawa conference, this ‘mere piece of pettifogging political hoodwinking’.75 Layton dispatched eight pages explaining free trade to prime minister MacDonald, who meekly apologized. And though he resigned from the planning of the London Economic Conference due the next year, Layton in fact played a key behind-the-scenes role, in part because this gathering would still be empowered to negotiate a return to gold, to which he and the Economist remained committed.76 Far from lamenting the ‘end of an epoch’, Keynes celebrated.

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

Alistair Cooke, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, European colonialism, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, indoor plumbing, jobless men, old-boy network, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

In a cable that was dispatched to the president, Churchill noted that the British cabinet had already decided the issue. It voted against swapping imperial preference for Lend-Lease, feeling that, if Britain did so, “we should have accepted an intervention in the domestic affairs of the British Empire.” In the end, a compromise was worked out. It committed both governments to take postwar action to achieve international economic cooperation but eliminated an explicit British commitment to end imperial preference. The Americans, however, would raise the subject again at the end of the war, and, this time, the British would not escape.

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Aware that America’s oil reserves were insufficient to meet its future needs, U.S. government officials were determined to break Britain’s dominance in the region and acquire concessions of their own. American businessmen, meanwhile, were anxious to acquire access to markets protected by Britain’s imperial preference system, which bound Britain and its empire together in an economic common market and imposed stiff tariffs on imported goods from nonempire countries. While the military alliance between the two countries was unprecedently close, “it is similarly true,” as historian Kathleen Burk has noted, “that the United States treated Britain as a rival which had to be cut down.”

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At the end of the conflict, British exports had plummeted 50 percent while American exports had expanded threefold. At the same time, however, the British strenuously resisted another American effort to use Lend-Lease as a stick. In the summer of 1941, the Roosevelt administration proposed that, as a payback for Lend-Lease, the British agree to end its imperial preference system. Arguing that such trade discrimination greatly inhibited international economic growth, American officials pushed free trade as the path to postwar peace and prosperity. As the British saw it, free trade was particularly good for the United States, which had long sought access to empire trade on equal terms but, at the same time, insisted on keeping its own high tariffs.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Hancock and David Charles Douglas, citing Political Speeches in Scotland (1880), 1:115–17. 220 deeply mercantilist as well: As with, for example, the “Imperial Preference” system of reduced tariffs between Great Britain and its colonies. See: Brian Varian, “Britain’s Post-Brexit Trade: Learning from the Edwardian Origins of Imperial Preference,” VoxEU, Center for Economic Policy Research, June 23, 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/what-imperial-preference-can-teach-us-about-post-brexit-trade-deals. 220 first modern arms control agreements: Notably the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. 221 seventy-two times: Lindsey A.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Part of this was a pure belief in the benefits of free trade, a return to British liberal values of the nineteenth century. Also, however, it was an attempt by the Americans to drive another nail into the coffin of the British Empire, which had managed to survive the traumas of the Great Depression through the adoption in 1932 of Imperial Preference, a protectionist policy based on the principle of ‘home producers first, empire producers second and foreign producers last’.3 Given that Congress had pushed through the infamous Smoot–Hawley tariff in 1930 – which arguably triggered the wholesale move to protectionism in the years that followed – it was a bit rich of the Americans to complain.

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The GATT Tokyo round lasted from 1973 to 1979, with the participation of a remarkable 102 countries.9 Customs duties were cut by around one-third across the world’s major industrial markets, bringing the average tariff on tradable goods down to 4.7 per cent. The negotiators also attempted to introduce a process of ‘harmonization’, which basically meant that higher tariffs had to be cut by proportionately more than lower tariffs. All of this was a far cry from the 1930s, when Smoot–Hawley and Imperial Preference ruled the roost. Admittedly, the outcome of the Tokyo round was far from perfect: only a handful of major industrialized countries signed up to many of the agreements – on, for example, subsidies, import licensing and government procurement – suggesting that multilateralism was but a distant dream.

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(i) Hall of Mirrors (Versailles) (i) Hamas (i) Han Chinese (i) see also China Hangzhou (i) Hausas (i) Hawaii (i) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) HBOS (i) Healey, Denis (i), (ii) Hearst, William Randolph (i) Heath, Edward (i) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (i) Heineken (i) Henry VIII, King (i), (ii), (iii) Himalayas (i) Hindus (i) Hitler, Adolf (i) HIV (i) Hobbes, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Hofstadter, Richard (i) Holy Roman Empire (i) Honduras (i) Hong Kong (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (US) (i) House of Debt (Atif Mian and Amir Sufi) (i) hukou system (i) Hundred Years’ War (i) Hungary (i), (ii), (iii) Husayn (son of Ali) (i) Hussein, Saddam (i), (ii), (iii) Huxley, Aldous (i) hydraulic fracturing (i) hyperinflation (i) see also inflation Iberian Peninsula (i) Iceland (i) IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration (i) 19th century (i) 20th century (first half) (i) 20th century (second half)–21st century (i) Africa (i), (ii) Commonwealth citizens in UK (i) German Gastarbeiter (i) Hispanics in US (i) Irish potato famine (i) key drivers for (i), (ii) opposition to in UK (i), (ii) Schengen and (i) Syria (i) Immigration Act 1917 (i) Immigration and Naturalization Act 1965 (i) Imperial Preference (i), (ii) India British in (i) bureaucracy (i) China and (i) economic resurgence (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) glacial melt threat (i) immigration into Britain (i) Islam spreads to (i) living standards (i) population statistics (i) SCO and (i) steel and textiles (i) Indian Ocean (i), (ii) Indochina (i) Indonesia (i), (ii), (iii) Industrial Revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) industrialization (i) IMF and (i) India loses out (i) Lewis Model on (i) Russia (i), (ii) inequality (i) infant mortality (i), (ii) inflation a bad thing?

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Much of the East’s sharp decline – perhaps too much – has been blamed on the direct effects of colonial exploitation. The British East India Company, for example, suppressed Indian textile production, which had led the world. Indian silks were displaced by Lancashire cotton. Chinese porcelain was supplanted by European ‘china’. Both suffered from variations on what Britain later called Imperial Preference, which forced them to export low-value raw materials to Britain, and import expensive finished products, thus keeping them in permanent deficit. There was nothing free about such trade in any sense of the word. In China’s case, the Western powers each wrested their own concessions that enabled them to do much the same thing in China as the British were doing in India – but without nationwide garrisons.

…

advertising, 65–6, 178 Afghanistan, 80 Africa: Chinese investment in, 32, 84; economic growth in, 21, 31, 32; future importance of, 200–1; and liberal democracy, 82, 83, 183; migration from, 140, 181; slave trade, 23, 55, 56 African-Americans, 104 age demographics, 34–5, 155, 156; ageing populations, 39; baby boom years, 39, 121; and gig economy, 64; life expectancy, 38, 58, 59, 60; millennials, 40–1, 121–2; and support for democracy, 121–2; and voter turnout, 103–4 Airbnb, 63 Albright, Madeleine, 6 American Revolution, 9 Andorra, 72 Andreessen, Marc, 61 Apple, 27, 31, 59, 60, 156 Arab Spring, 12, 82 Arab world, 202 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 128 Aristotle, 138, 200 artificial intelligence, 13, 34, 51–5, 56, 60–2 Asian Development Bank, 84 Asian economies, 21–2, 162; as engine of global growth, 21, 30, 31, 32; and Industrial Revolution, 23–4; and optimism, 202; of South Asia, 31; see also China; India Asian flu crisis (1997), 29 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 84 Attlee, Clement, 90 Australia, 84, 160, 167, 175 Austria, 15–16, 116 autocracy: and America’s post-9/11 blunders, 80–1, 85, 86; authoritarian nature of Trump, 133, 169, 171, 178–9; China as, 78, 80, 83–6, 159–60, 165, 201; and end of Cold War, 5, 78–9; and First World War, 115; and Great Recession, 83–4; and illiberal democracy, 204; myth of as more efficient, 170–1; popular demagogues, 137; rising support for, 11, 73, 82–3, 122 automation: and Chinese workforce, 62, 169; communications technology, 13, 52–5, 56–7, 59–60, 61–6, 67–8 see also digital revolution; and education, 197, 198; and Henry Ford, 66–7; political responses to, 67–8; steam revolution, 24, 55–6; techno-optimists, 52, 60; in transport, 54, 55, 56–7, 58, 59, 61 Bagehot, Walter, 115 Baker Institute, 68 Baldwin, Richard, 25, 27, 61 Bangladesh, 32 bank bail-outs, 193 Bannon, Steve, 130, 148, 173, 181–2 Belgium, 140 Bell, Daniel, 37 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 3–5, 6, 7, 74, 77 Bernstein, Carl, 132 Berra, Yogi, 57 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 159 Bismarck, Otto von, 42, 78, 120, 156, 161 Black Death, 25 Blair, Tony, 45, 89–90, 91 Blum, Léon, 116 Boer War (1899-1902), 155, 156 Bortnikov, Alexander, 6 Botswana, 82 Brazil, 29 Brecht, Bertolt, 86, 87 Breitbart News, 148 Brexit, 15, 73, 88, 92, 98, 101, 104, 119, 120, 163; UKIP’s NHS spending claim, 102; urban–hinterland split in vote, 47, 48, 130; xenophobia during campaign, 100–1 Britain: elite responses to Nazi Germany, 117; foreign policy goals, 179; gig economy, 63; growth of inequality in modern era, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50–1; history in popular imagination, 163; Imperial Preference, 22; London’s elites, 98–100, 130; nineteenth-century franchise extension, 114–15; policy towards China, 164; rapid expansion in nineteenth century, 24; and rise of Germany, 156, 157; rising support for authoritarianism, 122; separatism within, 140; Thatcher’s electoral success, 189–90 British East India Company, 22 British National Party (BNP), 100 Brown, Gordon, 99 Brownian movement, 172 Bryan, William Jennings, 111 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 60 Buffet, Warren, 199 Bush, George W., 31, 73, 79–81, 103, 156, 157, 163, 165, 182 Bush Republicans, 189 Cameron, David, 15, 92, 98, 99–100 Carnegie, Andrew, 42–3 Cherokee Indians, 114, 134 Chicago, 48 China: as autocracy, 78, 80, 83–6, 159–60, 165, 201; circular view of history, 11; colonial exploitation of, 20, 22–3, 55; decoupling of economy from West (2008), 29–30, 83–4; democracy activists in, 86, 140; entry to WTO (2001), 26; exceptionalism, 166; expulsion of Western NGOs, 85; future importance of, 200–1; and global trading system, 19–20, 26–7; Great Firewall in, 129; handover of Hong Kong (1997), 163–4; history in popular imagination, 163–4; hostility to Western liberalism, 84–6, 159–60, 162; and hydrogen bomb, 163; and Industrial Revolution, 22, 23–4; internal migration in, 41; investment in developing countries, 32, 84; military expansion, 157, 158; as nuclear power, 175; Obama’s trip to (2009), 159–60; political future of, 168–9, 202; pragmatic development route, 28, 29–30; pre-Industrial Revolution economy, 22; rapid expansion of, 13, 20–2, 25–8, 30, 35, 58, 157, 159; and robot economy, 62; Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 80; Trump’s promised trade war, 135, 145, 149; and Trump’s victory, 85–6, 140; US naval patrols in seas off, 148, 158, 165; US policy towards, 25–6, 145–6, 157–61, 165; US–China war scenario, 145–53, 161; in Western thought, 161–2; Xi’s crackdown on internal dissent, 168; Zheng He’s naval fleet, 165–6 China Central Television (CCTV), 84, 85 Christianity, 10, 105 Churchill, Winston, 98, 117, 128, 169 cities, 47–51, 130 class: creeping gentrification, 46, 48, 50–1; emerging middle classes, 21, 31, 39, 159; in Didier Eribon’s France, 104–10; Golden Age for Western middle class, 33–4, 43; Hillaryland in USA, 87–8; ‘meritocracy’, 43, 44–6; mobility as vanishing in West, 43–6; move rightwards of blue-collar whites, 95–9, 102, 108–10, 189–91, 194–5; poor whites in USA, 95–6, 112–13; populism in late nineteenth century, 110–11; and post-war centre-left politics, 89–92, 99; ‘precariat’ (‘left-behinds’), 12, 13, 43–8, 50, 91, 98–9, 110, 111, 131; and Trump’s agenda, 111, 151, 169, 190; urban liberal elites, 47, 49–51, 71, 87–9, 91–5, 110, 204; West’s middle-income problem, 13, 31–2, 34–41 Clausewitz, Carl von, 161 Clinton, Bill, 26, 71, 73, 90, 97–8, 157–9 Clinton, Hillary, 15, 16, 47, 67, 79, 160, 188; 2016 election campaign, 87–8, 91–4, 95–6, 119, 133; reasons for defeat of, 94–5, 96–8 Cold War: end of, 3–5, 6, 7, 74, 77, 78, 117, 121; nuclear near misses, 174; in US popular imagination, 163; and Western democracy, 115–16, 117, 183 Colombia, 72 colonialism, European, 11, 13, 20, 22–3; anti-colonial movements, 9–10; and Industrial Revolution, 13, 23–5, 55–6 Comey, James, 133 communism, 3–4, 5, 6, 105–8, 115 Confucius Institutes, 84 Congress, US, 133–4 Copenhagen summit (2009), 160 Coughlin, Father, 113 Cowen, Tyler, 40, 50, 57 Crick, Bernard, 138 crime, 47 Crimea, annexation of (2014), 8, 173 Cuba, 165 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 165, 174 cyber warfare, 176–8 Cyborg, 54 D’Alema, Massimo, 90 Daley, Richard, 189 Danish People’s Party, 102 Davos Forum, 19–20, 27, 68–71, 72–3, 91, 121 de Blasio, Bill, 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 106, 116 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 38, 112, 126–7 democracy, liberal: as an adaptive organism, 87; and America’s Founding Fathers, 9, 112–13, 123, 126, 138; and Arab Spring, 82; Chinese view of US system, 85–6; communism replaces as bête noire, 115; concept of ‘the people’, 87, 116, 119–20; damaged by responses to 9/11 attacks, 79–81, 86, 140, 165; and Davos elite, 68–71; de Tocqueville on, 126–7; declining faith in, 8–9, 12, 14, 88–9, 98–100, 103–4, 119–23, 202–3; demophobia, 111, 114, 119–23; economic growth as strongest glue, 13, 37, 103, 201–2; efforts to suppress franchise, 104, 123; elite disenchantment with, 121; elite fear of public opinion, 69, 111, 118; failing democracies (since 2000), 12, 82–3, 138–9; and ‘folk theory of democracy’, 119, 120; Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, 5, 14, 181; and global trilemma, 72–3; and Great Recession, 83–4; and Hong Kong, 164; idealism of Rousseau and Kant, 126; illiberal democracy concept, 119, 120, 136–7, 138–9, 204; in India, 201; individual rights and liberty, 14, 97, 120; late twentieth century democratic wave, 77–8, 83; and mass distraction, 127, 128–30; need for regaining of optimism, 202–3; need to abandon deep globalisation, 73–4; nineteenth-century fear of, 114–15; and plural society, 139; popular will concept, 87, 118, 119–20, 126, 137–8; post-Cold War triumphalism, 5, 6, 71; post-war golden era, 33–4, 43, 89, 116, 117; post-WW2 European constitutions, 116; and ‘precariat’ (‘left-behinds’), 12, 13, 43–8, 50, 91, 98–9, 110, 111, 131; the rich as losing faith in, 122–3; Russia’s hostility to, 6–8, 79, 85; space for as shrinking, 72–3; technocratic mindset of elites, 88–9, 92–5, 111; Trump as mortal threat to, 97, 104, 111, 126, 133–6, 138, 139, 161, 169–70, 178–84, 203–4; and US-led invasion of Iraq (2003), 8, 81, 85; Western toolkit for, 77–9; see also politics in West Diamond, Larry, 83 digital revolution, 51–5, 59–66, 67–8, 174; cyber-utopians, 52, 60, 65; debate over future impact, 56; and education, 197, 198; exponential rate of change, 170, 172, 197; internet, 34, 35, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 163; internet boom (1990s), 34, 59; and low productivity growth, 34, 59, 60; as one-sided exchange, 66–7; and risk-averse/conformist mindset, 40 diplomacy and global politics: annexation of Crimea (2014), 8, 173; China’s increased prestige, 19–20, 26–8, 29–30, 35, 83–5, 159; declining US/Western hegemony, 14, 21–2, 26–8, 140–1, 200–1; existential challenges in years ahead, 174–84; multipolarity concept, 6–8, 70; and nation’s popular imagination, 162–3; parallels with 1914 period, 155–61; and US ‘war on terror’, 80–1, 140, 183; US–China relations, 25–6, 145–6, 157–61, 165; US–China war scenario, 145–53, 161; US–Russia relations under Obama, 79 Doha Round, 73 drugs and narcotics, 37–8 Drutman, Lee, 68 Dubai, 48 Durkheim, Émile, 37 Duterte, Rodrigo, 136–7, 138 economists, 27 economy, global see global economy; globalisation, economic; growth, economic Edison, Thomas, 59 education, 42, 44–5, 53, 55, 197, 198 Egypt, 82, 175 electricity, 58, 59 Elephant Chart, 31–3 Enlightenment, 24, 104 entrepreneurialism, decline of in West, 39–40 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 137 Eribon, Didier, 104–10, 111 Ethiopia, 82 Europe: ‘complacent classes’ in, 40; decline of established parties, 89; geopolitical loss, 141; growth of inequality in modern era, 43; identity politics in, 139–40; migration crisis, 70, 100, 140, 180–1; nationalism in, 10–11, 102, 108–9; nineteenth-century diplomacy, 7–8, 155–6, 171–2; post-war constitutions in, 116; Putin’s interference in, 179, 180; as turning inwards, 14 European Commission, 118, 120 European Union, 72, 117–19, 139–40, 179–80, 181, 201; see also Brexit Facebook, 39, 54, 67, 178 fake news, 130, 148, 178–9 Farage, Nigel, 98–9, 100, 184 fascism, 5, 77, 97, 100, 117 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 131–2, 133 Felt, Mark, 131–2, 134 financial crisis, global (2008), 27, 29, 30, 91; Atlantic recession following, 30, 63–4, 83–4 financial services, 54 Financial Times, 136, 200 Finland, 139 First World War, 115, 154–5 Flake, Jeff, 134 Florida, Richard, 47, 49, 50, 51 Flynn, Michael, 148, 149 Foa, Roberto Stefan, 123 Ford, Henry, 66–7 Foucault, Michel, 107 France, 15, 37, 63, 102, 104–10, 116; 1968 Paris demonstrations, 188; French Revolution, 3 Franco, General Francisco, 77 Franco-German War (1870–1), 155–6 Frank, Robert H., 30, 35–6, 44 Franklin, Benjamin, 204 Freelancer.com, 63 Friedman, Ben, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, 38 Friedman, Thomas, 74 Frontex (border agency), 181 FSB, 6 Fukuyama, Francis, 12, 83, 101, 139, 193–4; ‘The End of History?’

9 Lessons in Brexit by Ivan Rogers

Boris Johnson, continuous integration, imperial preference, non-tariff barriers

It is just comical listening to right-wing populist politicians claiming they are avid free traders and simultaneously saying that one of the purposes of taking back control is to be able to rig domestic markets/competitions in favour of British suppliers/producers. Protectionism is always someone else’s sin, of course. And the Tory Party has been through these – decades-long – spasms before. Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference campaign, as loudly pious, nationalist and messianic as many today, led all the way through to his son Neville’s protectionist legislation of the early 1930s which helped worsen a post-financial crisis economy. Sound familiar? A post-Brexit Britain which is committed to openness and free trade will need first of all to run hard to stand still, as two thirds of UK exports are currently either to the EU or to countries with whom the EU has a preferential trade deal, which we shall first have to try and roll over.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

In 1948, an Empire Youth Annual described an exciting train journey from Delhi to Lahore without once mentioning the horrors of the previous year’s partition when many thousands of people were massacred along that single route in the refugee crisis created by Britain’s botched division of India. The high point of the celebration of empire came long after its point of greatest economic dominance, which peaked around 1897. In the 1920s and ’30s, notions of free trade were abandoned and ‘imperial preference’ was imposed, which required British greatness to be emphasised. It was at the very point that empire was beginning to fall apart that ideas of British exceptionalism began to be most strongly developed. The Empire Exhibition in London in 1924 was aimed at persuading people to buy the empire’s goodies and not ‘foreign muck’.

…

In New Zealand (where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed) to this day cotton sheets and towels are still referred to as ‘Manchester’ on retailers’ shelves as a result of British dominance. But, formally, there was some genuine commitment to free trade, which changed in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, notions of free trade were abandoned and ‘imperial preference’ (a predecessor of today’s ‘buy British’) was quickly ushered in. A plethora of organisations were created, devoted to extolling colonial trade and urging people to buy goods from the empire, including the 1924 Empire Exhibition in London, established to show off imperial goods, which attracted millions of visitors.

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WHERE REALITY LEAVES BRITAIN So where does this leave Boris Johnson, the other Brexiteers, the Prime Minister and the future of UK trade deals? Since the EU takes 44 per cent of UK exports, as compared to 9.5 per cent to the Commonwealth, and the Indian Tata empire has recently effectively (via a merger with a German company) signed another trade deal with the EU, will Britain really get any imperial preference in trade deals? As of November 2017, the government was still not letting on about what it thought trade and the economy would actually be like after Brexit. The shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, had to use a ‘humble address’, an ancient parliamentary procedure not used since the nineteenth century, to try to find out what civil servants and their ministers believed might happen.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

The government, now led by Salisbury’s nephew, the brilliant but fundamentally frivolous Arthur Balfour, was deeply divided over how best to pay for the war. Fatally, as it proved, Chamberlain seized the moment to argue for a restoration of protectionist tariffs. The idea was to turn the Empire into a Customs Union, with common duties on all imports from outside British territory: Chamberlain’s catch-phrase for the scheme was ‘Imperial Preference’. The policy had even been tried out during the Boer War, when Canada had been exempted from a small and temporary duty on imported wheat and corn. This was yet another bid to turn the theory of Greater Britain into political practice. But to the majority of British voters it looked more like an attempt to restore the old Corn Laws and put up the price of food.

…

Overnight the sterling bloc became the world’s largest system of fixed exchange rates, but a system freed from its gold mooring. There was also a radical change in trade policy. Twice before the British electorate had rejected protectionism at the polls. But what had been unthinkable in good times came to be seen as indispensable in the general crisis. And just as Joseph Chamberlain had hoped, ‘imperial preference’ – preferential tariffs for colonial products, adopted in 1932 – boosted trade within the Empire. In the 1930s the share of British exports going to the Empire rose from 44 to 48 per cent; the share of her imports coming from there rose from 30 to 39 per cent. Thus it was that even as the political bonds between Britain and the dominions were loosened by the Statute of Westminster (1931), the economic bonds grew tighter.* The message of the Wembley Exhibition had not been so misleading: there really was still money in the Empire.

…

Thus it was that even as the political bonds between Britain and the dominions were loosened by the Statute of Westminster (1931), the economic bonds grew tighter.* The message of the Wembley Exhibition had not been so misleading: there really was still money in the Empire. And it was a message drummed home relentlessly by bodies like the Empire Marketing Board (established by Leo Amery to convey the case for imperial preference subliminally). In 1930 alone there were over two hundred ‘Empire Shopping Weeks’ in sixty-five different British towns. At the Board’s suggestion, the King’s chef provided his own carefully devised recipe for an ‘Empire Christmas Pudding’: 1 lb. of sultanas (Australia) 1 lb. of currants (Australia) 1 lb. of stoned raisins (South Africa) 6 ozs. of minced apple (Canada) 1 lb. of bread crumbs (United Kingdom) 1 lb. of beef suet (New Zealand) 6 ozs. of cut candied peel (South Africa) 8 ozs. of flour (United Kingdom) 1 lb. of demerara sugar (West Indies) 4 eggs (Irish Free State) ½ oz. of ground cinnamon (Ceylon) ½ oz. of ground cloves (Zanzibar) ½ oz. of ground nutmegs (Straits Settlements) 1 pinch of pudding spice (India) 1 tbsp. of brandy (Cyprus) 2 tbsps. of rum (Jamaica) 1 pint old beer (England) The composition of this delectable concoction conveyed an unambiguous message.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

The scope of tariffs was broadened to include industry, Democrats joined Republicans, and by the end, as Kindleberger describes it, “both Republicans and Democrats were ultimately pushed from the committee room as lobbyists took over the task of setting the rates.”6 Foreign retaliation did not wait for the bill’s final passage in June 1930. Italy, France, and others reacted forcefully in late 1929 and early 1930. Great Britain finally abandoned free trade, devalued sterling, and instituted a system of imperial preferences a couple of years later. This outcome is plain to see in the data. Figure 21 shows two tariff averages for the United States and one for the world. The lower U.S. rate is the full average—that is, it includes all goods. The higher figures are for goods that are “dutiable”—that is, goods where the tariff is not zero.

…

Because of a lack of data, the Figure shows only the world tariff averages for all goods, but for comparability it also shows the U.S. numbers for the “all goods” average. By the end of the 1930s, the world had broken into trading blocs. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union maintained systems of bilateral trade arrangements with explicitly autarkic aims and dreams of global domination. Britain, the dominions, and colonies were linked by the British Imperial Preference system, and Japan carved out a trade bloc called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The breakdown of the trading system surely hastened the world down the path toward World War II. It fostered acceptance of the autarkic trade philosophies expounded by fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

Britain would be spared another such force for years to come. After Bonar Law took over as Tory leader and then prime minister, winning a massive majority in 1922, he ran a brief and unmemorable administration. His admirers, notably Beaverbrook, had assumed he would bring in protection, or ‘imperial preference’, finally ushering in the paradise Joseph Chamberlain had conjured up twenty years earlier. But by now he was a caricature of his former self, and even his former self had never been inspiring. He was pallid, nervous, indecisive, tobacco-scented and increasingly frail. His voice disappeared.

…

Advised by Keynes, Lloyd George returned to the fray with his Orange Book, promising ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’. He called for high public borrowing to fund more house building and road construction. Some of the younger Tories, backed by the press barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere, returned to imperial preference, with a nationwide campaign for tariff walls, inside which the Bank of England could pursue deficit financing to boost the economy. There was excited talk of a new ‘Young Party’ which might bring together Churchill, radical Tories, Liberals and Labour people, including Mosley, who was bombarding the cabinet with his own plans for expansion.

…

There was another by-election pending, this time in the St George’s Division of Westminster, a constituency which covered some of the richest property in Britain. The Empire Crusaders were standing again. The official Tory candidate panicked and withdrew, saying he could not honestly make the case for Baldwin. The party’s chief agent suggested Baldwin should stand down. Neville Chamberlain, whose father had started the imperial preference campaign thirty years before and who was now eyeing the leadership for himself, took this proposal to Baldwin with Uriah Heep apologies. Over a Sunday afternoon, the Tory leader seemed to have reconciled himself to going. But with the encouragement of friends his mood turned and he resolved to fight.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Only Britain stood alone, defiantly refusing to introduce tariffs, or retaliate against those who did, until well into the twentieth century. Despite strong pressure from Joseph Chamberlain and his Tory allies for ‘tariff reform’ and ‘imperial preference’, Britain’s almost religious devotion to free trade persisted up until and after the First World War. Then gradually the Liberal Party was squeezed out by imperial-preference Conservatives from the right, and protectionist Labour candidates urging self-sufficiency from the left. Still, it was not until 1932 that Neville Chamberlain brought in a general tariff. The return of protectionism was part of what Brink Lindsey has called the industrial counter-revolution that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – when suddenly progressives and radicals decided that the state was no longer their enemy but their friend.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION 1 THE GRAIN AND THE GRAPE 2 BACCHANAL 3 IN VINO VERITAS 4 WINE, BLOOD, SALVATION 5 BARBARIANS 6 ISLAM 7 BREWS FOR BREAKFAST 8 A NEW WORLD OF DRINKING 9 WATKIN’S ALE 10 PILGRIMS 11 RESTORATION 12 RUM 13 GIN FEVER 14 PROGRESS 15 REVOLUTION 16 WARRA WARRA 17 WHISKEY WITH AN E 18 ROMANTIC DRINKING 19 APOSTLES OF COLD WATER 20 WEST 21 THE KING OF SAN FRANCISCO 22 GOOD TASTE 23 EMANCIPATION 24 IMPERIAL PREFERENCE 25 LA FÉE VERTE 26 HATCHETATION 27 IN THE CHALK TRENCHES OF CHAMPAGNE 28 AMPHIBIANS 29 LOST 30 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 31 THE BOTTLE 32 RECONSTRUCTION 33 FLASHBACKS 34 WESTERNIZATION 35 MESSAGES 36 SINGLETONS, WINE LAKES, AND THE MOSCOW EXPRESS 37 FIAT LUX NOTES INDEX GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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In addition to refreshing their visitors, the brewers supplied them with propaganda, which explained that the duties they paid were by far the largest source of internal revenue in the United States: That “a brewer is just as necessary to the commonweal as a butcher, a baker, a tailor, a builder, or any other economic industry, is proven by the present position of the trade in the United States.” 24 IMPERIAL PREFERENCE Here with a loaf of bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse, and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness And Wilderness is Paradise enow. —Edward FitzGerald Whereas the British and American temperance movements had marched hand in hand during the first half of the nineteenth century, exchanging ideas, sharing tracts, and lending each other their orators, by the 1870s, when American women were invading saloons and American men were electing a dry president, their paths had diverged and the British temperance movement was in retreat.

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., p. 220. 318 “hundreds of thousands of women”: Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1998, p. 18. 319 “from speaking at a Sons of Temperance”: Murdock, p. 26. 321 “a brewer is just as necessary”: Baron, p. 226. 24 IMPERIAL PREFERENCE 322 “Here with a loaf of bread”: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1st (1859) and 5th (1889) editions, Edward Fitzgerald, Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 322 “pledged 4,000 children between”: Harrison, p. 192. 323 “a Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions”: “Household Words,” Charles Dickens, No. 184, Vol.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Mercantilist measures, with their emphasis upon the links between national security and national wealth, were steadily eliminated: protective tariffs were abolished; the ban on the export of advanced technology (e.g., textile machinery) was lifted; the Navigation Acts, designed among other things to preserve a large stock of British merchant ships and seamen for the event of war, were repealed; imperial “preferences” were ended. By contrast, defense expenditures were held to an absolute minimum, averaging around £15 million a year in the 1840s and not above £27 million in the more troubled 1860s; yet in the latter period Britain’s GNP totaled about £1 billion. Indeed, for fifty years and more following 1815 the armed services consumed only about 2–3 percent of GNP, and central government expenditures as a whole took much less than 10 percent—proportions which were far less than in either the eighteenth or the twentieth century.24 These would have been impressively low figures for a country of modest means and ambitions.

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Competitive devaluations in currency, and disagreements at the 1933 World Economic Conference about the dollar-sterling rate, completed this gloomy picture. By that time, the cosmopolitan world order had dissolved into various rivaling subunits: a sterling block, based upon British trade patterns and enhanced by the “imperial preferences” of the 1932 Ottawa Conference: a gold block, led by France; a yen block, dependent upon Japan, in the Far East; a U.S.-led dollar block (after Roosevelt also went off gold); and, completely detached from these convulsions, a USSR steadily building “socialism in one country.” The trend toward autarky was thus already strongly developed even before Adolf Hitler commenced his program of creating a self-sufficient, thousand-year Reich in which foreign trade was reduced to special deals and “barter” agreements.

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What was more, although French and British bankers and enterprises moved into these successor states after 1919, a much more “natural” trading partner for those nations was Germany, once it had recovered its own economic stability in the 1930s. Not only was it closer to, and better connected by road and rail with, the eastern European market, but it could readily absorb the area’s agricultural surpluses in the way that farm-surplus France and imperial-preference Britain could not, offering in return for Hungarian wheat and Rumanian oil much-needed machinery and (later) armaments. Moreover, these countries, like Germany itself, had currency problems and thus found it easier to trade on a “barter” basis. Economically, therefore, Mitteleuropa could again steadily become a German-dominated zone.39 Many of the participants at the Paris negotiations of 1919 were aware of some (though obviously not all) of the problems mentioned above.

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In Italy FIAT, an independent and internationalist concern, resorted to Mussolini’s protection to consolidate its virtual national monopoly during the critical interwar years. In the Netherlands, the buildings of the Spijker factory, the last national car firm, were sold to a paper manufacturer in 1929.47 If in Britain the automobile industry flourished compared to the depressed situation on the continent, this occurred under the specific conditions of the Imperial Preference System and the corporatist collusion between capital and labour under the auspices of the state-monopoly tendency in the bourgeoisie. The breakthrough of a consumer-durables industry and the rise of strong automobile firms like Austin and Morris here represented a protracted ‘consumption’ of British imperial hegemony rather than a restructuration of industry towards a Fordist accumulation pattern, as is testified by the resistance put up by the steel industry to the introduction of a continuous wide-strip mill and the conditions of its eventual operation in 1939.48 In the United States, the restructuration of class relations towards the progressive accumulation pattern and the new corporate-liberal concept of control was consummated between 1933 and 1941.

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The British, struggling to retain control of the air against the German bomber offensive, were only able to add the ‘due regard to present obligations’ clause to the Charter’s Article IV dealing with equal access to trade and raw materials, but as Sumner Welles, who replaced Hull, recollected later, ‘It was fully understood … that this reservation was inserted solely to take care of what it was hoped would be merely temporary impediments to the more far-reaching commitment originally envisaged in that article’.28 Churchill, however, clung to the ‘existing obligations’ clause and stubbornly resisted American pressures for liberalization. ‘I found the Cabinet at its second meeting on this subject even more resolved against trading the principle of imperial preference as consideration for lease-lend’, he cabled to Roosevelt on February 7, 1942, two weeks before the Anglo-American Lend-Lease Agreement was concluded.29 The Agreement again contained a compromise formula on the post-war international economy, reflecting British determination in this respect.

America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

Hull later wrote “that our trade agreements program could not be considered complete until the United Kingdom was inserted as the apex of the arch.” For centuries, Britain reigned as the world’s great trading power, first as a mercantilist with colonies ringing the globe and then as a free trader. But the Depression had forced London to become a leader of a system based on a sterling bloc, protectionism, imperial preferences, and even bilateral balancing and barter deals. The aftermath of the Great War had left both countries frustrated with one another; the war debt issue remained a bleeding wound, too. In the mid-1930s, the image of Britain for many Americans was that of a snobbish commercial rival that resented America’s rise, held on to old imperial privileges, and failed to pay its obligations—not that of Winston Churchill leading a plucky democracy that stood up to fascists.

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The Munich Agreement of September 1938 appeared to break the last impasse, and the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States signed a modest deal on November 17, 1938. Within a year, Britain would be at war and would adopt severe controls on trade. After 1941, America’s trade with Britain would depend on a new Lend-Lease program. Hull’s successors would have to contend later with London’s imperial preferences and discriminatory trade.54 Hull was a natural opponent of the dictatorships. His political inclinations were reinforced by his antagonism to Germany’s and Italy’s autarkic economic and trade policies. Yet his economic logic blinded him to the fascists’ true motivations. Hull kept believing that “economic rehabilitation” would offer people “contentment” through trade rather than militarism.55 Japan presented a more complex case.

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Once countries—and their interest groups—invest in alternatives to open trading systems, the cost of prying them back toward freer trade can be very high politically. At one point in August, Clayton was ready to leave the British out of the new multilateral trading system. But the president had too many other priorities with Britain in 1947, and the United States agreed to launch GATT even with Britain’s imperial preferences.113 This first multilateral trading round, with twenty-three participants, proved that cooperation on trade liberalization was possible. The parties cut tariffs on forty-five thousand items, covering about half of world trade. The process stimulated world trade even as economies were struggling to recover and remove foreign exchange controls.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

AMONG THE MAJOR economic casualties of the American Revolution was the indigo trade of South Carolina and Georgia. Indigofera tinctoria, a plant native to central Asia and north Africa, produces a blue dye that was in wide demand in the British cloth industry. The best indigo came from Spanish and French sources, but imperial preference gave the British market, by far the world’s largest, to Georgia and South Carolina. At the end of the colonial era, about 10 percent of the slave labor in the American colonies was used in producing indigo. With American independence, however, Britain turned to India for its indigo supply and, without the British market, the indigo industry in South Carolina and Georgia quickly collapsed.

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., at the Morgan Bank, wrote, “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.” The economists’ arguments proved all too true, and world trade began to collapse. Great Britain, the great champion of free trade since the 1840s, and the world’s largest trading nation, established the “imperial preference system”—in other words, a tariff wall—to keep British trade within the British Empire. Other nations adopted similar restrictions. In 1929 total global trade had amounted to $36 billion. In 1932 it was about $12 billion. American exports had been $5.241 billion in 1929. Three years later they were a mere $1.161 billion, a 78 percent drop and below the export level of 1896 if inflation is factored in.

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Churchill knew that both concepts had ominous implications for Britain and her empire, but he did not dare annoy the man on whom his hopes of victory depended. He and his advisers hurriedly drafted the declaration, which Roosevelt then significantly rewrote, but Churchill managed to dilute it somewhat by deleting the president’s reference to trade ‘discrimination’ – an attack on the tariff system imposed across the British Empire – known as ‘imperial preference’ – that left American companies trying to sell goods in this enormous market at a significant disadvantage. But he had no choice but to agree to what would become known as the ‘Atlantic Charter’ and it was clear the issues that it broached were not going to go away, particularly once the United States started footing the bill for Britain’s war effort, and then – after Pearl Harbor – joined battle herself.

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And the two men had to agree to differ over India to avoid a heated argument.22 Thanks to Churchill’s backsliding, by early 1942 Roosevelt was fending off questions from the press about the Atlantic Charter’s significance and scope. Behind the scenes the president warned Churchill that he would not release Lend-Lease aid until the British government abandoned imperial preference; the fall of Singapore that February revealed tensions between Britain and her dominions that Roosevelt then exploited to force the beleaguered prime minister to concede. On the same day that the deal was signed – committing Britain and America to the ‘elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers’ – Roosevelt made a broadcast.

On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

President Woodrow Wilson’s famous rhetorical flourishes during World War I concealed measures by which the U.S. displaced Britain from Central America, taking over control of Guatemalan petroleum resources, for example. During World War II, the U.S. exploited Britain’s travail to expand its influence and control at Britain’s expense in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. The U.S. has consistently been “anti-imperialist,” in the sense that it has opposed and sought to dismantle the imperial preference systems established by Britain and lesser powers. The meaning of this “anti-imperialism” is hardly obscure to its Third World victims, or to competing imperial powers displaced by these operations. As conflicts over this matter erupted within the Western alliance during World War II, the British Colonial Office observed that “the Americans are quite ready to make their dependencies politically ‘independent’ while economically bound to them and see no inconsistency in this” as “American imperialism” is attempting “to elbow us out” in many parts of the world, relying on its overwhelming economic and military power facilitated with trusteeship schemes and other devices to ensure U.S. control.

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Thus, while the debt to income ratio remained high (75 percent, mainly due to World War I), the servicing burden as a proportion of the budget fell by a half, thereby releasing money for spending. It was monetary policy which did much of the work, as well as devaluation of the pound sterling which boosted exports. Monetary and exchange rate policies, far from being ineffective, did the job for the UK. Britain also gained from a de facto protectionist policy by adopting Imperial Preference. Thus, to give Keynes credit for the escape of the economy from depression would be to commit an anachronism, or at least an exaggeration. The cure for the Great Depression, much of which had ended before 1936, was perhaps more due to international exchange rate depreciation, and in Britain a loose monetary policy.

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

As late as 1951, British industrial production was still roughly equivalent to that of France and West Germany put together. Meanwhile, the experience of war and fascism meant that the Six did not appear especially stable allies, and to integrate with their economies would have been to compromise imperial preference. As Stafford Cripps, Attlee’s first President of the Board of Trade and later Chancellor, told the Cabinet, Britain ‘could not integrate its economy into that of Europe in any way which would prejudice the discharge of its responsibilities towards the Commonwealth and the rest of the sterling area’.

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

Churchill’s legendary devotion to the empire notwithstanding, he was supportive of initiatives to create a “United States of Europe.”38 Yet a British inter-ministerial committee on the Paris talks observed that Britain was “not economically part of Europe.” Europe accounted for only a quarter of British trade. Under the country’s long-standing policy of imperial preference, it traded twice as much with the Commonwealth as it did with Europe—and moreover did so in its own currency. “The recovery of continental Europe,” the committee concluded, “would not itself solve our problem; we depend on the rest of the world getting dollars.”39 For Britain, being compelled to abandon its position at the center of an empire, even a fraying one, in favor of becoming a mere spoke in a European wheel, meant dishonor, disruption, and a drain on dollar reserves.

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It would, they argued, be “more prudent and much wiser” just to get the Europeans to commit to “reduc[ing] trade barriers,” among themselves and with the United States, and to fix “appropriate exchange rates.”92 At the eleventh hour, the deal was done. THE TWENTY-THREE-NATION GENERAL AGREEMENT ON tariffs and trade (GATT) would be completed in Geneva a few weeks later, after which Clayton would write his sixth and final letter resigning from the State Department. He was disappointed that Britain’s imperial preferences remained largely intact; Marshall had prevailed in this regard to save the Paris talks. Still, Truman would rightly hail the conclusion of the GATT as “a landmark in the history of international economic relations.”93 Praise for Clayton’s efforts was effusive. “This vast project [the GATT], which makes all previous international economic accords look puny,” wrote The New York Times on October 15, “is the realization of Mr.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

That same strand was evident in periodic delusional calls for a post-Brexit CANZUK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom) confederation or even single market, which had no connection at all with the contemporary nature of these countries. It was also evident in the idea that the Commonwealth might be reconstructed as a kind of post-Imperial Preference trading system. As with the way Ireland was spoken of, such ideas betrayed a world view which was only slightly less insulting than it was fatuous. SEQUENCING VERSUS PARALLELISM The fantasies about Irexit, CANZUK and the Commonwealth were irrelevant to the EU, but the centrality of Northern Ireland for Brexit was certainly well-understood and of much concern, and this informed another of the ways in which the lack of planning for – or understanding of – what Brexit meant in practice came to haunt the process of leaving.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

However, should the United States decide to imitate the commitments of high-value-added manufacturers and exporters like Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, some success would be likely, especially given dollar weakness. As for education, shortcomings and calls for renewal have received attention in the past as national decline threatens, especially from progressives—the British Liberal Party of 1900 to 1910 comes especially to mind—who sought a rebuttal to trade proposals emphasizing reciprocity, imperial preference, or protection. This works politically because progressives are also usually associated with educators and education interests. Overall, though, improved education has been no more of a nostrum than airy schemes to rebuild lost industrial glories. Instead of listing any more leaden linings, let me close with a silver lining.

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

Parliament began to pass laws compelling New England, for instance, to trade only with the British possessions in the West Indies. And it doubled the export tax the colonies would have to pay on European goods shipped to America. These new restrictions were not inspired in the first place by a theory of imperial preference. They were practical responses to the huge cost of the French and Indian Wars, which saddled the British with whopping new taxes and doubled the national debt. Troops would have to be raised to form a more or less permanent patrol of the country beyond the Appalachians, and the British began to think that, at the least, the British in America should do something in their own defense.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

These fears spawned the ‘national efficiency’ movement, designed to make Britain a healthier, more productive, rational and thus robust society.87 From February 1902, the National Service League, to which one in four MPs belonged, campaigned for the introduction of conscription, thus ‘distributing the burdens of national defence equally among all classes, instead of allowing them to weigh crushingly upon the proletariat’.88 A year later, Joe Chamberlain’s ‘Tariff Reform League’ sought to bind the empire more closely to Britain through ‘imperial preference’ against ‘unfair’ foreign imports, even if this resulted in reduced competition and thus in higher prices for consumers, especially with regard to agricultural produce.89 Its aim was the transformation of the British empire into a consolidated trading bloc which could compete on equal terms with Germany and the United States.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to keep.’ Sure enough, there was soon an Empire Marketing Board, to try to secure the enterprise by promoting the products of Britain’s scattered possessions to British citizens,* which was followed by a trading doctrine of ‘Imperial Preference’ whereby a country which had sermonized the world on the life-giving virtues of free trade introduced tariffs on goods from countries which had the misfortune not to belong to its empire. The 1924 exhibition seemed rather purposeless, a shop-window display laid out by officialdom to try to grab the attention of largely indifferent passers-by.

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Instead of the ‘gift’ of £1,500 million and an interest-free loan of £3,500 million Keynes sought, and thought he would obtain, he was offered £3,750 million at 2 per cent interest, with payments (made in dollars) spread over the next fifty years. And even that was subject to the approval of Congress. There were other shocks in the small print. Britain had to forgo the system of ‘imperial preferences’ that made it harder for British colonies to trade with countries outside the Commonwealth, and, more seriously, the Americans insisted that sterling must become a freely convertible currency within a year of the loan being agreed. That, as Keynes realised, would have disastrous consequences: a year on, there was a ‘run on the pound’ that forced a devaluation, which ate into the principal of the loan.*5 In 1946 the ‘special relationship’ was not as special as it would become.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

Undeterred, the four activists agreed to lobby the rest. They were only able to find Jo Richardson, and so abandoned the search until the following morning. They were up at 7.00 a.m. and back at the Imperial Hotel. Jon Lansman was supposed to be ‘gunning for Dennis Skinner’ who refused on principle to stay at the Imperial, preferring a boarding house nearby. Lansman takes up the story: I went out to the toilets and found Dennis Skinner, having just washed his face, combing his hair in front of the mirror. I started talking to him. All of a sudden in walks Chris Mullin doing precisely the same thing, completely independently on his own initiative.

The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

American and British embrace of protectionist trade policies during the 1920s crippled tobacco growers, who relied heavily on sales for export.94 After the war, overseas dollars dried up, and with them foreign tobacco markets. The United Kingdom was the tobacco farmer’s most important overseas customer: British men smoked at higher rates than their American counterparts, and they had a particular taste for American flue-cured cigarettes. However, an interwar policy of “imperial preference” had special significance for tobacco as Canada, India, and Australia began competing in bright leaf production to satisfy British cigarette demand. At the same time, U.S. trade protectionism meant that American farmers had to buy more expensive finished goods from merchants. When farmers cursed the protective tariff for helping manufacturers at the expense of agriculture, they said more than they realized.

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Ambitious American officials in the Philippines even had visions of the island of Mindanao supplying the world’s coffee needs.6 This gave coffee planters and exporters across Latin America new cause for worry. Would the U.S. protect its new colonial coffee industry behind tariff barriers and imperial preferences, as European empires had done, or would it continue to import coffee duty-free from the independent republics of Latin America, nine of which were then “largely dependent” on coffee exports?7 Especially for those in Latin America who had invested heavily in coffee in the years around Brazilian emancipation, it was an urgent question.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

England was beginning to catch the protectionist influenza, spread by Joseph Chamberlain, a prominent politician (first in the Liberal Party, and then the Liberal Unionist Party), president of the Board of Trade, and father of the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. His protectionism was of a different strain from the ordinary continental variety; it would have erected a high tariff wall around the entire empire and the commonwealths, within whose ambit there would be free trade-so-called "imperial preference." But England was not ready to abandon free trade. Chamberlain's proposals became the major issue in the general election of 1906, in which he and his supporters were roundly defeated.)8 While most of continental Europe walled itself off from foreign imports, and even the English fretted over their free-trade policy, one nation took a different path, based on, of all things, pigs and cows.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

One example of different people appropriating the empire for their own purposes occurs in the field of economic theory. For old-fashioned economic liberals like Winston Churchill, the British Empire was an empire of free trade; for Joseph Chamberlain, on the other hand, the empire was perfect for protectionism, known as ‘imperial preference’, in that goods from the British colonies were ‘preferred’, more lightly taxed, in comparison with goods from Britain’s industrial competitors, such as Germany and the United States. The empire has been invoked to support a multitude of causes. Perhaps the key to understanding the British Empire is the idea of natural hierarchy.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

As the disjointed remains of Britain’s American empire, British North America depended on the imperial connection. The merchants who created its separate northern economy (mostly Scottish-born or of Scottish descent) needed Britain’s help to escape commercial annexation (or straightforward conquest) by their wealthier neighbour to the south. They enjoyed imperial preference in the British market for their timber and grain – until the British adopted free trade. Because London worried about reinforcing its garrison if the Americans attacked (a recurrent fear until the late 1860s), it was willing to guarantee the investment in an inter-regional railway, priming the pump for the railway spine that helped to make Canada an economic as well as a political reality after confederation was agreed in 1867–73.56 London also held the keys to the vast hinterland to which merchants in Montreal – the local metropolis – looked for economic salvation: the huge and (largely) empty North West beyond the Great Lakes.57 Until 1869, this was the domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company whose charter from the British Crown went back to 1660, and whose claims successive British governments had defended against American pressure.58 It was the knock-down sale of this colossal inheritance and the addition of the separate British colony of British Columbia that turned Canada into a true transcontinental dominion after 1867.

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

It was highly significant, moreover, that under the aegis of the US, German capital—especially with the imposition of an anti-cartel competitive framework—had already fully embraced what would later be called neoliberalism, and indentified “internationalization,” with the closest of ties to the US, as central to its postwar rehabilitation. While the rest of Europe increasingly exported to Germany in the 1950s, Germany increasingly exported to the US.57 By contrast, the UK, clinging to the imperial preference system and sterling’s place within it, and resistant to American pressures to join in European integration, proved more intractable—despite (or perhaps because of) the “special relationship.” Yet with the City of London pressing for the removal of currency controls in order to regain its place as a leading financial center, the way was being paved for the role the UK soon came to play as one of the main conduits of the American financial penetration of Europe.58 “The Rest of the World” In his 1936 State of the Union Address, President Roosevelt used the phrase “The rest of the world—Ah!

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

These loyalist groups, including the Orange Order and Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), joined other British-Canadians in successfully pushing for Sifton’s resignation.17 The British share of Canadian immigration rebounded to 60 per cent by 1920, but subsequently slipped to a third of the intake by 1930. In response, Canada enacted an Imperial Preference immigration system in 1931 similar in intent to the US National Origins scheme of 1924. The categories, in order of preference were: 1. British subjects from Britain and the ‘white’ Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and Newfoundland; 2. US citizens; 3. Relatives of Canadian male residents; and 4.

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

By the late 1930s these proportions had swelled to 39.5 per cent and 49 per cent respectively.23 The First World War and the economic uncertainty that had followed it had brought an end to the Victorian old order of laissez-faire in which people, products and capital had been able to move across national borders with little or no restriction. Now the world’s markets were being divided up by high tariff walls. In 1932 the United Kingdom had formally abandoned free trade in favour of imperial preference – the once shocking idea of turning the Empire into an autarkic trading bloc, a vast British Zollverein girded by protectionist barriers, had become a reality. Henceforth, as Amery put it, ‘the creative energies of the markets of the Empire’ could be ‘directed in the main to mutual development, instead of being dissipated upon an unreciprocating world’.24 These were the most obvious benefits of Empire.

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Faced with the rise of major national competitors, some imperial pundits, advocates of a ‘greater Britain’, began to lobby for this heterogeneous conglomerate to be forged into a single, self-enclosed economic bloc.29 But thanks to Britain’s entrenched culture of free trade, a preferential imperial tariff would only be adopted amid the disaster of the Great Depression. The United States was everything that the champions of imperial preference longed for, but the British Empire was not. The United States began as a heterogeneous collection of colonial settlements that in the early nineteenth century had developed into an expansive and highly integrative empire. Unlike the British Empire, the American Republic sought to incorporate its new territories in the West and the South fully into its federal constitution.

China: A History by John Keay

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, invention of movable type, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, éminence grise

Nor did many of his successors. The laborious transcription of official papers from Chinese to Mongol and back again, though it provided employment for an army of clerks, must have distanced the Yuan emperors from the minutiae of government. Nor was the employment of Chinese advisers and officials any indication of imperial preference. Grading the population into a four-tier hierarchy ensured that Mongols and other non-Chinese enjoyed positive discrimination in respect of office and privilege. Under this system, first came those of Mongol birth, then the ‘coloured-eye people’ (mainly Uighurs, central Asian Muslims and oddities like the Polo family, who might or might not have eyes that were other than brown), then, well behind in terms of privileges, the ‘Han people’ (northern Chinese plus Khitans, Jurchen and Koreans), and finally the ‘Southern people’ (ex-subjects of the Song).

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Imperial states had taken on unprecedented importance in structuring global raw cotton markets: They secured huge swaths of territory on which cotton could be grown and they used their accumulated bureaucratic, infrastructural, and military might to mobilize cotton-growing labor. And such commitments were only one facet of policies that also included import duties, imperial preferences, and powerful national industrial policies. Within the empire of cotton, global networks had spread their geographic reach and intensified significantly. States shaped these networks, demonstrating how state formation and globalization were part and parcel of the same processes. States captured territories, facilitated their infrastructural incorporation, and mobilized workers to labor on this new land.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

British and French high imperialist ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been built on the prospect of improvement for all inhabitants of their empires, and implied a move away from the naked exploitation of earlier years. But wars and depression had made the metropoles more dependent on their colonies in economic terms, not less. They therefore attempted to reconstitute some of the mechanisms that would favor the Europeans, but found it difficult to do. Imperial preference systems counted not only as key examples of what the Americans thought was wrong with colonialism—restrictions against free trade and US access to foreign markets—but they also alienated indigenous elites who had taken the imperial reformers at their word. But on the whole these measures did not correspond to changing global realities.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Seriously alarmed by the rise of German economic power, the former Mayor of Birmingham launched an energetic campaign for the introduction of import tariffs to reduce the effects of goods ‘made in Germany’ on the British economy. This breached the principle of free trade that had been held sacrosanct since the abolition of the Corn Laws more than half a century before. The introduction of import duties was to be linked with ‘Imperial Preference’, which would keep food prices low with minimal duties on imports from the empire. The campaign alienated the Whig aristocrats among the Conservatives, and they broke away from the government in 1903 to form the Unionist Free Fooders. It also aroused the united opposition of the Liberals and the trade unions, who thought that even low import tariffs on foodstuffs from the empire would raise the cost of living for the working classes.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The issue here was not European peace, threatened by the Scramble for North Africa, but tariff reform and redeeming the Scramble for the South. It was ironic that the Empire – the acid which had corroded the Liberal Party for twenty years – had now proved the undoing of the Tories, and helped, negatively at least, to provide the cement to bind the Liberals together. For tariff ‘reform’ meant imperial preference and the betrayal of free trade; Britain and the Empire would impose preferential tariffs against the rest of the world. Free trade remained a canon of faith for Liberals, hard and soft alike, for the ‘Limps’ (Liberal imperialists) like Grey and Asquith, as well as for the Gladstonians like Campbell-Bannerman, for the outsiders inside Parliament like Dilke, and for outsiders outside it like Morel.