Globalisation Fraying. The Pre-Great War Version.

Over the last few months I’ve been writing — quite a lot — on globalisation and slowing world trade over at my BBC blog.

For various reasons — to do with a conversation with a producer about Harold Mackinder — I was reminded today of an essay I wrote when doing a part-time evening class master’s degree in history a few years ago.

The themes here — globalisation, regionalisation, shifting economic power, new technologies — all feel relevant today. The might not not, but they at leats feel that way.

So, just in case anyone really fancies 5,000 words with footnotes on the early stages of the break-up of the last great period of globalisation… Here it is:

How did British Imperialists see their Empire in relation to other preferential trading regimes in the Edwardian Period?

In the Edwardian period an influential group of British imperialists became increasingly pessimistic about Britain’s future prospects and its place in the world. Worries about the rise of new powers, the changing global order and Britain’s perceived relative economic decline combined with a new intellectual climate in economics, geography and social thinking to create a set of policy prescriptions based around imperial unity and a programme of tariff reform. This essay will argue that the ‘new imperialism’ of this era was an essentially defensive strategy aimed at consolidating and safeguarding the British Empire in the face of concerns about the changing global balance of power. Much of this thinking was heavily influenced by the increasingly ‘globalised’ nature of the world economy and a perceived ‘shrinking’ of the world, both driven by the impact of rapidly changing technologies.

This essay will, after refining the terms of the question, discuss the globalised nature of the world economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting how technological change in the fields of transportation and communications had created a ‘smaller’ and more inter-linked world. It will then discuss how imperial thinkers in Britain came to perceive this world system as essentially ‘closed’, before proceeding to discuss how this ‘closed system’ led to a rising tide of pessimism about Britain’s future and brought into sharp contrast the rise of other global powers, each of which seemed to have their own closed economic system. This new political geography, I will argue, led to a fundamental rethinking of both politics and economics by certain sections of the British imperial elite. I will finally discuss how this new thinking, combined with Social Darwinism, produced the intellectual ingredients for the policy programme based around closer imperial links, tariffs and a ‘Greater Britain’. A Greater Britain that, despite its name, was essentially a defensive attempt to maintain Britain’s existing role and consolidate her empire rather than a programme of expansion. Overshadowing the whole agenda was a fear of falling behind other preferential trade systems and worries about Britain’s ability to compete.

This essay deals with the thoughts and perceptions of ‘British imperialists’ in the Edwardian era. Of course most mainstream Edwardian political figures were, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘imperialists’ in as much as they believed in a continuing role for the British Empire, even if they disagreed about questions of colonial governance and expansion. Therefore this essay will mainly deal with figures associated with the movement towards to tariff reform and greater imperial unity, people such as Joseph Chamberlain, Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Lord Curzon and Halford Mackinder. In particular I shall discuss the ideas of those associated with the Compatriots Club, a group of imperial and social reformers who broke with the Co-Efficients Club, founded by Beatrice and Sydney Webb, over the question of tariff reform.[1] Whilst this group never had full control of British imperial policy in this period their ideas were influential and came to a greater prominence in the years between the World Wars. It should be remembered that the group of imperialists I am discussing not only often excludes the Liberal Imperialist wing of the Liberal Party but also Conservative ‘Free Fooders’, both of which continued to defend free trade in this period.[2]

The Edwardian period is defined broadly to encompass the years from approximately 1895 until the First World War. Occasionally earlier ideas and influences will be discussed. The ‘other preferential trading regimes’ of the title refer to, in particular, the rising powers of Germany and the United States but also to the older empires of Russia and France.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the ‘first major episode of globalisation’[3] marked by unprecedented flows of labour, trade and capital. This integration was brought about not only by a flourishing of free trade on the Continent in the 1860s and 1870s but more importantly by a revolution in transportation and communications technology.[4] As O’Rourke and Williamson have noted ‘sharply declining transport costs brought distant national markets much closer together than at any time before’.[5] The economic effects of this shift were profound; ‘formerly self-sufficient peasants in Russia, farmers in Kansas and artisans in Japan were brought into intimate contact with the world economy’.[6] The development of faster steam ships, more efficient engines and the opening of the Suez Canal in the second half of the nineteenth century together with the further development of railway lines and the laying of submarine telegram cables revolutionised the world’s communications networks. The flow of both information and goods increased exponentially[7], meaning that by 1880 ‘it became commonplace that the world had shrunk’[8] and the ‘annihilation of distance became a late-Victorian cliché’[9]. Much as in the contemporary era, technological change was driving an integration of the world economy, an economic integration that was accompanied by profound changes in politics.

The integration of the world economy in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by two parallel developments of much interest to British imperialist thinkers: the growth of other global empires and a perceived relative decline of the British economy. The combination of these three trends (increasing integration, new rising powers and economic decline) led a certain section of imperial thinkers to perceive the world to be ‘closed system’, one in which Britain’s place was under threat.

In the fifty years before the First World War, Britain’s international position was increasingly challenged. The unification of Germany in 1871 created a powerful new state in Central Europe, whilst following the Civil War of 1861–1865 the United States embarked on a new round of westward expansion and economic growth, France expanded her colonial presence in both Africa and Asia and new Russian railway lines, cumulating in the Trans-Siberian line completed in 1904, created a more united landmass.[10] As early as the 1880s ‘it had become obvious to many observers that Britain’s uniquely favourable mid-century position was slipping away under the pressure of competition’.[11]

One sign of the ‘pressure of competition’ was perceived relative economic decline. Such a decline was in many respects inevitable — Britain after all had been the first industrialised nation and its economic lead would diminish as other nations gradually industrialised. In absolute terms there was no decline in either economic activity or living standards over this period, ‘the notional ‘average’ British working-class family on the eve of the First World War consumed many more goods and services than their hypothetical grandparents in the 1870s’.[12] Export performance, the usual contemporary measure of economic vitality, was also strong in absolute terms with British exports growing by 23% between 1880 and 1900. However over the same period German exports grew by 63%.[13] The risk of Britain losing its pre-eminent international economic position was widely discussed during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Commenting on ‘poor’ export performance in 1910 The Times noted ‘some apprehension at our future prosperity as a manufacturing State’.[14]

By the dawn of the Edwardian era the late Victorian beliefs in a ‘shrinking world’, rising powers and economic decline had combined to produce, amongst certain imperialists, a belief that the world had become a ‘closed system’. Writing on the changing nature of the world economy in 1899 the geographer and prominent Compatriot Club member Halford Mackinder noted how ‘we now have a closed circuit — a machine complete and balanced in all its parts’.[15] Five years later, writing on the expansion of global empires, he argued that there was ‘scarcely a region left for the pegging out of a claim of ownership’.[16] In his 1907 Romanes Lecture Lord Curzon spoke on similar themes, perhaps influenced by a draft paper Mackinder had recently given him.[17] He noted that he spoke ‘as the habitable world shrinks’.[18]

This belief, wide spread amongst members of the Compatriots Club whom Mackinder regularly addressed,[19] that the world was now a ‘closed system’ had important ramifications for imperial thought. Territorial gain for any state could now only come at the cost of a loss by another state. Whilst frontiers have always constituted ‘a decisive site of imperial politics’,[20] Curzon now referred to them as the ‘hinge of civilisation’ and noted how in recent years, giving the example of the German wars of unification, ‘frontier wars’ were rapidly replacing dynastic and religious wars as the primary source of international conflict and tension.[21] The growth of other empires could now been seen as occurring at the expense of Britain, if not in lost territory than at least in a further narrowing of already limited opportunities.

The growth of rising powers was seen not just as territorial threat but also as an economic one. Internationally the doctrines of Adam Smith and a belief that open and free trade, as opposed to mercantilism, was in a nation’s best interest was under pressure. American commercial policy had been guided by the beliefs of Alexander Hamilton in a ‘national economic system’ since independence.[22] This system had left a major impression on the German political economist Friedrich List following his visit to the United States in the 1820s[23], who came to believe that ‘Manchesterism’ and the system of free trade rigged the rules of the global economic order in Britain’s favour. His advocacy of tariff protection for infant industries flowed from his belief in a system of ‘national political economy’. He argued that ‘national wealth’ secured by ‘national power’ was of far more importance than ‘individual wealth’, which unless protected by a strong state was always at risk of foreign seizure.[24] Such ideas, already long accepted in the in the United States, became increasingly important determinants of German commercial policy throughout the late nineteenth century and were also, after the 1880s, widely accepted across continental Europe. Germany instituted a tariff policy in 1879, France followed suit in the 1880s and protectionism spread through the continent ending the brief period of relative European free trade that had been built by the reciprocal ‘most favoured nation’ clauses of commercial treaties. [25] Such practices increasingly coincided with the rise of nationalism during the century.

In Britain itself, whilst the majority of the economic profession retained their traditional support for free trade, a smaller group of economists and political economists began to argue for a British ‘national system’. The so-called ‘Historical Economics’ school, which rejected the formalised approach of much existing economic scholarship and instead looked to draw case studies from history, argued that the appropriate unit for economic analysis was the ‘nation’. The work of this school was very popular amongst Compatriot Club members.[26]

One leading proponent, William Cunningham, went as far as to criticise Smith for his attacks on mercantilism. In 1892 he wrote that the English Mercantilists of Smith’s day ‘were considering how the power of this country might be promoted relatively to other nations. The object of their system was not absolute progress anywhere but relative superiority to their neighbours’.[27] In other words what matters is the relative gain to one country (Britain) from any engagement in trade, rather than the aggregate gain in human welfare.

A rising concern with questions of ‘national economy’, the relative decline of the economy (whether inevitable or not) and the growing economic prowess of, in particular, Germany and the United States led British imperialists to worry about how their own Empire would fare against other preferential regimes. Following the move towards a more protectionist international trading environment in the 1880s there was a growing awareness that the ‘German and French empires were designed to confer national advantages and erected barriers to ‘free exchange’’.[28] Howe has argued that the traditional historgraphical view of the period 1870 to 1914 as a high age of globalisation and 1918–1939 as a period of deglobalisation is too black and white: ‘ [in the 1880s and 1890s] international exhibitions were replaced by colonial exhibitions; companies reorganised on an imperial basis; even education and patterns of travel to some extent became imperial, rather than cosmopolitan’.[29] To some extent the ‘regionalisation’ which characterised the inter-war global economy was already evident in the 1890s. Against such a background and given the ‘very specific and potent threat’[30] posed by, for example, American industry to certain British manufacturer interests, it is perhaps unsurprising that a programme based around tariffs and sheltered, unified markets began to appeal to some segments of British imperial opinion. A policy of shifting British exports from a global market to an imperial one was, to an extent, the natural reaction to regionalisation. Following the adoption of the McKinley Tariff by the United States, demand increased for ‘ a trans-Pacific cable, the trans-continental Canadian railroad, steamship lines, a better imperial postal service, usage of the Suez Canal’ all to ‘augment the defensive and commercial benefits of the Imperial Federation’.[31]

Alongside a concern that the global economy of the mid-Victorian period was giving way to a regional model was a related concern that the development of railways had fundamentally altered the balance between land and sea powers.

List had been quick to spot the potential of the railway in altering the strategic position of Germany from one of Europe’s more exposed powers to one of its strongest.[32] Railways not only allowed the rapid movement of goods across land but also soldiers. Whereas previously a power able to move soldiers by sea would always have an advantage over a land based foe in terms of speed, the railway undermined this. Mackinder’s views of the world order became increasingly pessimistic as he considered the impact of rail. Where as in 1899 (Great Trade Routes) he regarded the ‘closed circuit’ of the world economy as a fairly neutral development, by 1902 (Britain and the British Seas) he had extended his analysis from the economic to the political and became increasingly concerned about Britain’s strategic position.[33]

By 1904 and Mackinder’s most famous lecture, The Geographic Pivot of History,[34] he now believed that ‘over much of the globe space had become more integrated by rail’,[35] upsetting the traditional dominance of sea power. Indeed Mackinder’s most famous argument, the notion that a ‘Heartland’ (to be found in central Europe) was now the key to the control of Eurasia and hence the world, was based around the notion that railways had made control of core producing regions far more important than previously. Sea travel was no longer as necessary for either war or commerce.[36] In discussions after the first reading of the Geographical Pivot he argued that ‘pivot region’ or ‘Heartland’ would eventually ‘cut itself off from economic action with the oceanic world’[37] and hence Britain. The ‘Colombian epoch’ of sea powers was over and Britain risked a future of both strategic and commercial isolation. Given Britain’s position as a sea power such ideas were bound to cause concern amongst imperialists about the future sustainability of Britain’s international position. Although at the time of the Geographic Pivot, Mackinder still believed that it would be many years before a power dominated the Heartland, giving Britain time to react and develop a counter strategy (he would later revise these views in light of first German victory over Russia in 1917 and then again with the rise of the USSR). The imperialist counter strategy he suggested was greater imperial union.

The fullest expression of Mackinder’s belief in the ‘closed system’ came in 1919, although it certainly reflected earlier thoughts:

‘Whether we think of the physical, economic, military or political interconnections of things on the surface on the globe, we are now for the first time presented with a closed system. The known does not fade any longer through the half-known into the unknown; there is no longer elasticity of political expansion in land beyond the Pale. Every shock, every disaster or superfluity, is now felt even to the antipodes, and may indeed return from the antipodes’.[38]

These concerns about Britain’s place in a ‘closed system’ fed into a general atmosphere of pessimism about the future of the Empire. ‘Pessimism was in fact an all pervasive and quintessential characteristic of Edwardian thinking about the Empire’.[39] The rise of the great continental powers, with their more centralised executives, led to a ‘profound sense of strategic insecurity’[40] and a general belief that the decentralised, Victorian Empire was now a luxury Britain could ill afford.

Militarily there was a widely shared concern about the ‘ability of the Royal Navy to control strategic maritime communications across the globe’[41]. This concern dated to the early 1890s when Balfour professed himself ‘filled with anxiety’[42] over the strength of the French and Russian fleets. It was a naval scare that led to Gladstone’s final resignation as Prime Minister, in the decade before the construction of the German High Seas Fleet and Theodore Roosevelt’s expansion of the American Navy. Such anxieties became more pressing following the passage of the Naval Laws in Germany.

The relatively small size of Britain when compared to the rising powers of Germany or the United States or the older Russian Empire, meant that many imperialists saw the Empire as the only way to preserve British power. As Chamberlain put it, without colonies Britain would become a ‘fifth-rate nation’.[43] However to draw maximum advantage from the Empire, both commercial and defensive, would require a reorganisation. As Duncan Bell has argued of the late Victorian period ‘with the rise of the nascent German States and the threatening presence of the Russian ‘bear’ in the East, and an economically resurgent America across the Atlantic, a giant [imperial] polity offered the possibility of maintaining and strengthening Britain’s place in the global order’.[44] The need for this imperial reordering was explicitly driven by the challenge posed by other nations. By the Edwardian period many statesmen argued that ‘the Empire had to be reorganised so that it could compete with States like Germany and America that had huge resources and growing populations’.[45]

The routes of such thinking can be traced back to at least 1883 and John Seeley’s ‘Expansion of England’, an influential work described by Lieven as the ‘imperialist bible’[46] of the time. Seeley argued that the settler colonies (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Cape Colony) did not constitute an ‘empire’ at all but rather represented a widespread ‘English’ polity, a polity that could be reunited in one Imperial unit.[47] Varouxakis has noted that ‘perhaps the most striking feature’ of this work is the ‘ever-growing anxiety about the inexorable rise of the United States’.[48] Mackinder, like Seeley, was a proponent of a wider British nation-state built around the white settler colonies, a ‘Greater Britain’, and, like Seeley, the driving factor was a deep sense of anxiety. Deudney has noted that they both shared three assumptions: ‘(1) the British system was an anomaly in world politics that defied simple categorization, (2) new material forces were creating major threats and opportunities, and (3) fundamental changes were needed to avoid ruin’.[49]

Another feature of imperialists thinking in this period which should be considered alongside the worries about economic and military decline and the ‘closed system’ view of the world was a wide spread belief in Social Darwinism. In May 1898 the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury famously spoke of ‘living and dying nations’,[50] giving voice to a widely shared assumption that the nation’s of the Earth could be divided into those with ‘strong qualities’ that would prosper and weaker nations (and indeed races) that would not. The qualities needed to be an ‘imperial people’ were often seen as synonymous with those of a strong ‘living nation’.[51]Indeed the Imperial Federation League, founded in 1884, made widespread use of the terms ‘imperial race’ and ‘British race’.[52] In his Romanes Lecture, Curzon spoke of the ‘Anglo-Saxon races’ and noted how the American character had been forged on the frontier, whilst the ‘British Empire may be seen shaping the national character’.[53]

Concerns over the qualities of the ‘British nation’ came to the fore following the military’s relatively poor performance in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century and became part of a wider debate around ‘National Efficiency’.[54] To the members of the Compatriots Club (and their old colleagues in the Co-Efficients before the split) a belief in Social Darwinism led to a shared interest in imperial and social reform, with the two often explicitly linked.[55]

For member of the Compatriots, and many other imperialists of the Edwardian age, a belief in Social Darwinism, a rethinking of economics with the emphasis on ‘national’ performance, general pessimism about Britain’s global position and a concern that a globalised world had become a ‘closed system’ all interacted together to produce a programme of imperial reform that was driven more by worries about other preferential trading regimes than by any positive agenda.

For Mackinder, and his contemporaries, the new transport and communications technology was the ‘silver lining in the clouds of doom gathering around the weary British titan’.[56] New technologies offered the chance to link the Empire (or at least the settler colonies) in a way previously impossible, rapid communications would allow for a stronger executive at the centre and rapid transport would unite the military potential of the ‘Greater Britain’, giving her the ability to assemble a land army on a par with the continental powers.

Chamberlain sometimes chose not to stress the potential economic benefits of imperial federation. He told, for example, a Birmingham audience in 1903 that he ‘care[d] very little whether the result will be to make this country, already rich a little richer’[57] and stressed instead the emotional ties to the colonies. At other times though he, and other tariff reformers and imperialists, did emphasise the potential economic benefits of a preferential trading regime. Other imperialists, notably Mackinder, also stressed the potential military and defensive benefits. These three potential outcomes from closer imperial union (economic prosperity, military security and a reinvigorating of the ‘British race’), which would secure Britain’s global position, were all made possible by improved technologies. Each though was derived at root from a sense of foreboding about Britain’s future and the threat posed by the rising preferential regimes in Germany, the United States and Russia.

At heart the aim of the programme was to preserve Britain’s existing role in the light of fundamental changes and challenges rather than to expand it. The ‘central goal’ of the ‘new imperialism’ was ‘consolidation not expansion’.[58] Mackinder was explicit about this writing in 1902 that what Britain needed was to ‘maintain a lead’ ‘won under earlier [and more benign] circumstances’.[59] The imperialists’ strategy was a defensive programme, rather than an expansionary one.

It should also be noted that the programme was, for members of the Compatriots, a truly imperial agenda aimed at addressing challenges to Britain’s role in the world. Trentmann has rightly pointed out that Chamberlain’s policies offered the appearance of a British Sammlungspolitick,[60] a programme, based on the German model, capable of uniting ‘producers’ in industry and labour into an election winning political coalition through shared interests. Green is inclined to see tariff reform primarily as a domestic, electoral programme.[61] However it seems doubtful that electoral motives were at the fore for men such as Milner, Mackinder and Amery, all of whom were committed imperialists with deep-seated worries about the sustainability of the Empire. As Thompson has convincingly argued the tariff reform/imperial federation project should not simply be seen as an electoral programme aimed at securing Conservative votes.[62] Rather it was a response to a genuine fear of falling behind Germany and the United States.[63]

None of which is to suppose that the imperial federation agenda would have been a successful strategy if actually attempted in the Edwardian period, certainly there often seemed to be less desire for such a union in the Dominions, which were reluctant to give up their greater independence,[64] than in the home country. In addition Britain was culturally and powerfully wedded to the idea of free trade in this period.[65]

The potential economic benefits of a closer imperial union may have been grossly overstated. Whilst there is an active debate on the costs and benefits to Britain of its overseas Empire,[66] it seems that any benefits were relatively modest. Fieldhouse has argued that ‘before 1914 the Empire was not in anyway essential to the British economy but provided some tangible benefits’,[67] whilst Edelstein concluded that the benefits were ‘not large’ but certainly higher by 1914 than in 1870, suggesting an increasing imperial role in economic performance,[68] even if not a significant one.

The military benefits of greater political union were often underestimated by contemporary observers but are easier to quantify. As Lieven has noted the colonial contribution to Britain’s performance in the First World War was ‘huge’, with 2.5 million colonial soldiers serving in the armed forces and, on the Western front, the ‘best formations in the British army’ coming from Australia, New Zealand and Canada.[69] This certainly suggests that thinkers such as Mackinder were not wrong to emphasise the security benefits from a greater imperial union.

Whether or not a closer imperial union based around a stronger central executive, better communications links, a tariff barrier and the notion of a ‘Greater Britain’ could have been formed in the Edwardian period, and it seems unlikely given political resistance in both Britain and the Dominions, the idea remains interesting and was hugely influential both at the time (especially in Conservative circles) and in the inter-war period, when elements of the strategy were actually attempted.

It represented not an ‘aggressive’ attempt to expand the British Empire but a defensive programme aimed at clinging on the existing gains in the face of new and rising powers. At heart the programme was driven by a pessimistic view of Britain’s place in a globalised world, one in which rapid changes in transport and communications technology were perceived to have changed the fundamental order in both economics and politics. Many British imperialists came to view the world as a ‘closed system’ and worried about Britain’s ability to compete commercially and militarily with the preferential trading regimes of Russia, Germany and the United States. In the end they came to view their Empire not on its own terms but in comparison to those other empires and states. Their programme reflected these fears.

[1] Green, E., The Crisis of Conservatism. The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2004) pp. 161–162

[2] Trentmann, F. Free Trade Nation (London, 2008), pp. 162

[3] Daunton, M., ‘Britain and Globalisation Since 1850: I. Creating a Global Order, 1850–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, (2006) pp.1–38 pp. 1

[4] Indeed O’Rourke and Williamson have utilised economic regressions to demonstrate that, in contrast to the post 1945 era of globalisation, technological improvements rather than policy shifts explain most of the nineteenth century convergence in global commodity prices. O’Rourke, K. and Williamson, J., Globalization and History. The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (London, 2000) pp. 55

[5] ibid. pp. 55

[6] idid. pp. 55

[7] Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K., Power and Plenty. Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Oxford, 2007) pp. 379–383

[8] Darwin, J., After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (London, 2007) pp. 300

[9] idid. pp. 301

[10] Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K., Power and Plenty pp. 387–395

[11] Kennedy, P., ‘Idealists and Realists: British Views of Germany, 1864–1939’ , Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, (1975), pp. 137–156 pp. 142

[12] Mackinnon, M., ‘Living Standards 1870–1914’, in Floud, R. and McCloskey,D. (ed.) The Economic History of Britain Since 1700. Volume 2: 1860–1939 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 265–290 pp. 290

[13] Porter, B., The Lion’s Share. A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–2000 (London, 2004) pp. 124

[14] The Times, 21 Jan 1910, quoted in Trentmann Free Trade Nation pp. 144

[15] Mackinder, H., ‘Great Trade Routes. Their Connection with the Organisation of Industry, Commerce and Finance’, Journal of the Institute of Bankers, Vol. 21(1900), 1–6, 137–155 & 266–273 pp. 271

[16] Mackinder, H., ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, Vol.23 (1904), pp.437–444 pp. 439

[17] Goudie, A., ‘George Nathaniel Curzon: Superior Geographer’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 146, No. 2 (1980) pp. 203–209 pp. 207

[18] Curzon, G., ‘Frontiers’, Romanes Lecture (1907)

[19] Kearns, G., ‘The Imperial Subject: Geography and Travel in the Work of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol.22, No. 4 (1997), pp.450–472 pp. 450

[20] Maier, C., Among Empires. American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (London, 2006) pp. 78

[21] Curzon, G., ‘Frontiers’

[22] Earle, E., ‘Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power’ in Paret, P. (ed.) The Makers of Modern Strategy. From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford, 1986)

[23] ibid pp. 245

[24] ibid pp. 247

[25] O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History pp.93–97

[26] Green, E., The Crisis of Conservatism pp. 160–166

[27] ibid. pp. 163

[28] Howe, A. ‘Free Trade and Global Order: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Vision’, in Bell, D., (ed.) Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 26–46 pp. 41

[29] ibid

[30] Rogers, R., ‘The United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873–1913’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2007) pp.593–622 pp. 594

[31] Palen, M., ‘Protection, Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the Mckinley Tariff Upon the British Empire, 1890–94’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 38, No. 3, (2010) pp. 395–418 pp. 410

[32] Earle, ‘Smith, Hamilton and List’ pp. 254

[33] Blouet, B., ‘The Imperial Vision of Halford Mackinder’ The Geographical Journal, Vol.170, No. 4 (2004) pp. 322–329 pp. 324

[34] Mackinder, H., ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Journal, Vol.23 (1904), pp.437–444

[35] Kearns, J., Geopolitics and Empire. The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford, 2009) pp. 134

[36] Mackinder ‘Geographical Pivot’.

[37] Blouet, ‘Imperial Vision’, pp325

[38] Mackinder, H., Democratic Ideals and Reality (London, 1919) pp. 40

[39] Hyam, R., ‘The British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, in Brown, J. and Louis, W. (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999) pp.47–63 pp. 50

[40] Darwin, J., ‘A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’ in Brown, J. and Louis, W. (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999) pp.64–87 pp. 66

[41] Lieven, D., Empire. The Russian Empire and its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (London, 2002) pp. 91

[42] Porter Lion’s Share pp.127

[43] Green Crisis of Conservatism pp.35

[44] Bell, D., ‘Victorian Visions of Global Order’, in Bell, D., (ed.) Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 1–25 pp. 17

[45] Thompson, A., ‘The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895–1914’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, (1997) pp.147–177 pp. 151

[46] Lieven, Empire pp.108

[47] Varouxakis, G., ‘’Great’ Versus ‘Small’ Nations: Size and National Greatness in Victorian Political Thought’, in Bell, D., (ed.) Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 136–158 pp. 147

[48] idib. pp. 146

[49] Deudney, D., ‘Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder and Wellson Britain in the Global Industrial Era’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 27 No. 2 (2001) pp. 187–208 pp. 189

[50] Porter Lion’s Share pp. 130

[51] Thompson ‘Imperial Language’ pp. 174–175

[52] idib.

[53] Curzon, ‘Frontiers’

[54] Kennedy, ‘Idealists and Realists’, pp. 145

[55] Green, Crisis of Conservatism pp. 181–182

[56] Deudney, ‘Greater Britain’ pp. 194

[57] James, H., The Roman Predicament. How Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Oxford, 2008) pp. 104

[58] Green, Crisis of Conservatism pp. 35

[59] Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas

[60] Trentmann, Free Trade Nation pp. 136–137

[61] Green Crisis of Conservatism

[62] Thompson, A., ‘Tariff Reform: An Imperial Strategy, 1903–1914’, The Historical Journal, Vol.40, No.4 (1997) pp.1033–1054

[63] ibid. pp. 1038–1039

[64] Darwin, ‘Third British Empire’

[65] Trentmann Free Trade Nation

[66] Daunton, ‘Britain and Globalisation’, pp. 34–36

[67] Fieldhouse, D., ‘The Metropolitan Economics of Empire’ in Brown, J. and Louis, W. (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999) pp.88–113 pp. 111

[68] Edelstein, M., ‘Imperialism: Cost and Benefit’, in Floud, R. and McCloskey,D. (ed.) The Economic History of Britain Since 1700. Volume 2: 1860–1939 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 197–216 pp. 213

[69] Lieven, Empire pp. 104