GREAT CAPITALISTS AND THE DIRECTION OF BRITISH OVERSEAS INVESTMENT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH....

The article focuses on the British overseas investment in the late 19th century. The suggestion by economist John A. Hobson suggestion that foreign investment led on to war and annexation never fitted more than a handful of cases even as a simple correlation. Besides, the causal mechanism by which the imperialism of investment was supposed to operate rested on a naive analysis of social relations between financiers and governments. It was suggested that the yield on overseas investments toward the end of the nineteenth century was probably lower rather than higher than that on domestic investments. Briefly stated, the argument of this paper is that the informational and intentional imperfections which explain the insensitivity of foreign investment to rates of return may also help explain the breakdown of the cosmopolitan liberal consensus of the mid-nineteenth century into domestic confrontations of monopoly capital and labor at the heart of the world economy and international confrontation between metropolitan monopoly and peripheral States. With regard to British investment in Argentina it will be argued that some leading capitalists made a marginal sacrifice of income in a more or less deliberate attempt to underwrite the provision of liberal oligarchy in Argentina.