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Was it Worth Having? the British Empire 1850–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2010

Peter Cain
Peter Cain
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
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Extract

The question of whether the possession of an empire under a regime of free trade was beneficial or not to Britain has become a serious matter of dispute in recent years amongst British and American economic historians. Nonetheless, as some of them recognise, the question they are asking is hardly a novel one: they are often consciously reviving, in a more sophisticated form, a controversy which was already dividing contemporaries in Britain at the time the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts were repealed in the late 1840s and which only lost its relevance when decolonisation began in earnest in the late 1950s. O'Brien and Davis and Huttenback are on the side of those who traditionally disparaged the economic value of empire and saw it as the preserve of special interests: Edelstein and Offer, though careful not to justify empire, are more willing to accept that the nation as a whole might have benefited materially from its possession even if the benefits were very unevenly spread. The discussion, though ingenious and highly informative has, however, been somewhat narrowly focused. So, in the latter part of the paper, it is suggested that a full assessment of the value of the empire to Britain depends upon taking account of a wider set of circumstances than has usually been evident in the current debate. In this respect, present day historians may have something to learn from the contemporary controversy where the question of the material costs and benefits of empire was always considered in the context of the social and political trajectory of the British nation.

Type
Articles-Artículos: Part 3. The Second Epoch: Liberal Imperialism and Decolonization, 1846–1974
Information
Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History , Volume 16 , Issue 1: The costs and benefits of european imperialism from the conquest of Ceuta, 1415, to the treaty of Lusaka, 1974. Twelfth International Economic History Congress. Madrid 1998 , March 1998 , pp. 351 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Instituto Figuerola de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid 1998

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