Review Article The British Empire, I1

T. J. BARRON University of Edinburgh

British Irnpcrialirm: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914-1990. By P. J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Harlow: Longman. 1993. xiv + 337pp. f30.00 (hb), f11.99 (Pb).

Cain and Hopkins have sought to take their study of what John A. Hobson called the motor of British imperialism into a second volume, bringing the story from the outbreak of the First World War down to the end of the Thatcher years. Though they acknowledge that much of the ‘argument, concepts and methodology’ for their study are to be found only in volume 1 (reviewed above), they insist that this book is self-contained and can be read independently. This might have required us to take much of the underlying thesis on trust, which not all readers would wish to do, but here the notion of ‘imperialism’ is so attenuated that for the most part it can be understood even when left undefined.

What we are offered is an account of some aspects of the British economy and of British economic policy in this period (and, to a much lesser extent, an examination of the nature and views of the particular social elite supposedly responsible for the policy), which emphasizes Britain’s desire and capacity to sustain and develop its position as a leading financial and imperial power. Despite the title of the book, the principal conclusion is that until the end of the inter-war period this capacity remained real and great and, in some sectors, largely unchallenged during what some historians have seen, at least in terms of influence within the Empire and Dominions, as an age of retreat and decline. (The post-Second World War transformation or collapse of Britain’s imperial power is, of course, less disputed.) Inevitably, what is presented in evidence are often the shifts, accommodations and devices which enabled that capacity to be sustained in a time of international tensions and commercial crises. But these are read as proof of creativity, adaptability and strength, rather than of weakness or decline.

As a work seeking to summarize recent research and to weld this material into a coherent analysis of the period, this volume will be widely welcomed. It is throughout written with clarity, readability, coherence and force, qualities not always found in the sources from which the work is in part derived. Its focus is generous and includes relations with the Dominions, India, South America, tropical Africa, China and the USA. It offers a perspective on Britain in the twentieth century and on Britain’s economic role in the wider world which will

0 The Historical Association 1994. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 238 Main St, Cambridge, MA 02142. USA.

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doubtless be unfamiliar to some and will illuminate for many others the path of Britain’s progress from Empire to Common Market. Though securely based in a keen knowledge of recent literature, it often offers genuinely fresh and lively insights.

But it will also spark controversy and criticism. Whether ‘the basis of Britain’s global influence’ can be understood in the narrow terms offered here seems extremely doubtful; whether terms like ‘invisible’ or ‘informal empire’ are any less contentious to scholars working on the twentieth century than they are for historians of the nineteenth seems unlikely. And whether the ‘influence of gentlemanly values’, which apparently conveys infer uliu a shared wish and capacity to play a dominant role in the world economy, can be systematized into an independent force and offered as an explanation of the workings of the imperial engine seems more dubious still. None the less, this book is meant to have a polemical flavour and doubtless its authors would welcome the knowledge that they have excited debate as well as contributed something to restore interest in the subject of the British as imperial hegemonists and world financial strategists which, in recent years at least, has sometimes appeared to lack a past as well as a future.

0 The Historical Association 1994