Search

Introduction So far we have examined the overseas movement of British people and British goods. This chapter concerns itself with Britain's other great export of the pre-First World War period: its capital. We seek to uncover the key relationships and mechanisms that made possible a massive and rapid movement of money across borders. For many scholars, it is this ‘runaway quality of global finance’ that lay at the very heart of the forces integrating the world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certainly, it had a profound and lasting effect, in its wake opening up new regions of the world, delivering efficiency gains from improved transport and communication, and widening the scope of the multi-lateral payments system. Britain's imperial and financial pre-eminence are, moreover, traditionally understood to have been two sides of the same coin. Yet appearances can be deceptive. While the empire was at times prized by British investors, these same investors also freely sank even larger sums of money outside it. ‘Imperial piety’ or ‘British traditions’, of themselves, could not and did not replace the profit motive. Rather, it was the attractions of the rapidly expanding temperate regions of recent settlement – political stability, economic security and protection within the law – that mattered. These attractions were not confined to the British World, even if they manifested themselves most strongly there.

Introduction The idea that social connections matter, and can be thought of in networked terms, should startle few scholars. Dubbed a ‘metaphor for our times’, networks are currently given a prominent role in historical and contemporary social analysis, as well as in debates about globalisation. Yet the term ‘network’ tends to be employed rather casually. The technological and social aspects of networks are not always sufficiently differentiated, while networks seemingly encompass an ever-wider range of human activities and forms of interaction. At worst, the network concept serves as little more than a shorthand for human behaviour deemed too collective to be determined by pure individual choice, yet too diffuse and personal to be taken up by formal state or market institutions. There is clearly a danger here. If networks can be taken to mean almost any kind of informal set of interpersonal connections, the term is likely to be too imprecise to have much purchase. As one commentator warns, ‘if everything is a network then nothing is’. Hence great care is required in assessing the importance of networks as agents of historical change. In the following chapters we explore how a variety of social networks created links between individuals and groups, and how these links in turn facilitated the movement of commodities, money, information and people across national or, more accurately, colonial borders. That said, it must be emphasised at the outset that causative relationships between two phenomena cannot be inferred from spatial and temporal co-existence alone.