Ольга Кравцова - Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

There would certainly not have been so much free trade between the 1840s and the 1930s had it not been for the British Empire. Relinquishing 1Britain's colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century would have led to higher tariffs in their markets, and perhaps other forms of trade discrimination. The evidence for this need not be purely hypothetical; it manifested itself in the highly protectionist policies adopted by the United States and India after they secured independence, as well as in the tariffs adopted by Britain's imperial rivals France, Germany and Russia in the 1870s and after. Britain's military budget before the First World War can therefore be seen as a remarkably low insurance premium against international protectionism. According to one estimate, the economic benefit to the UK of enforcing free trade could have been as high as 6.5 per cent of gross national product. No one has yet ventured to estimate what the benefit to the world economy as a whole may have been; but that it was a benefit and not a cost seems beyond dispute, given the catastrophic consequences of the global descent into protectionism as Britain's imperial power waned 7 7 To relinquish — to give up, abandon, surrender 8 8 To wane — to decrease gradually in size, decline, approach an end in the 1930s.

Nor would there have been so much international mobility of labour — and hence so much global convergence of incomes before 1914 — without the British Empire. True, the United States was always the most attractive destination for nineteenth century migrants from Europe; nor did all the migrants originate in the colonising countries. But it should not be forgotten that the core of the US had been under British rule for the better part of a century and a half before the War of Independence, and that the differences between independent and British North America remained minor.

It is also worth remembering that the significance of the white dominions as destinations for British emigrants grew markedly after 1914, as the US tightened restrictions on immigration and, after 1929, endured a far worse Depression than anything experienced in the sterling bloc. Finally, we should not lose sight of the vast number of Asians who left India and China to work as indentured 9 9 Indentured — наемный labourers, many of them on British plantations and mines in the course of the nineteenth century. There is no question that the majority of them suffered great hardship; many indeed might well have been better off staying at home. But once again we cannot pretend that this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold had no economic value.

Consider too the role of the British Empire in facilitating capital export to the less developed world. Although some measures of international financial integration seem to suggest that the 1990s saw greater cross-border flows than the 1890s, in reality much of today's overseas investment goes on within the developed world. In 1996 only 28 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1913 the proportion was 63 per cent. Another, stricter measure shows that in 1997 only around 5 per cent of the world stock capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20 per cent or less of US per capita GDP. In 1913 the figure was 25 per cent. A plausible hypothesis is that empire — and particularly the British Empire — encouraged investors to put their money in developing economies. The reasoning here is straightforward. Investing in such economies is risky. They tend to be far away and more prone 1to economic, social and political crises. But the extension of empire into the less developed world had the effect of reducing such risks by imposing, directly or indirectly, some form of European rule. In practice, money invested in a de jure British colony such as India (or a colony in all but name, like Egypt) was a great deal more secure than money invested in a de facto ‘colony' such as Argentina.

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

For all these reasons (see text A), the notion that British imperialism tended to impoverish colonised countries seems inherently problematic. That is not to say that many former colonies are not exceedingly poor. Today, for example, per capita GDP in Britain is roughly twenty-eight times what it is in Zambia, which means that the average Zambian has to live on something less than two dollars a day. But to blame this on the legacy of colonialism is not very persuasive, when the differential between British and Zambian incomes was so much less at the end of the colonial period. In 1955 British per capita GDP was just seven times greater than Zambian. It has been since independence that the gap between the coloniser and the ex-colony has become a gulf. The same is true of nearly all former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, with the notable exception of Botswana.

A country's economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short); this is economic history's version of the nature-nurture debate 10 10 Prone — having a tendency, inclined 11 11 Nature vs nurture debate — the phrase “nature and nurture” in its modern sense was coined by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton in discussion of the influence of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) on social advancement . While a persuasive case can be made for the importance of such ‘given' factors as the mean temperature, humidity, the prevalence of disease, soil quality, proximity to the sea, latitude and mineral resources in determining economic performance, there seems strong evidence that history too plays a crucial part. In particular, there is good evidence that the imposition of British-style institutions has tended to enhance a country's economic prospects, particularly in those settings where indigenous cultures were relatively weak because of thin (or

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

thinned) population, allowing British institutions to dominate with little dilution. Where the British, like the Spaniards, conquered already sophisticated, urbanised societies, the effect of colonisation were commonly negative, as the colonisers were tempted to engage in plunder rather than to build their own institutions. Indeed, this is perhaps the best available explanation of the ‘great divergence' which reduced India and China from being quite possibly the world's most advanced economies in the sixteenth century to relative poverty by the early twentieth. It also explains why it was that Britain was able to overhaul her Iberian rivals: precisely because, as a latecomer to the imperial race, she had to settle for colonising the unpromising wastes of Virginia and New England, rather than the eminently lootable cities of Mexico and Peru.

But which British institutions promoted development? First, we should not underestimate the benefits conferred by British law and administration. A recent survey of forty-nine countries concluded that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French-civil-law countries the weakest, legal protection of investors', including both shareholders and creditors. This is of enormous importance in encouraging capital formation, without which entrepreneurs can achieve little. The fact that eighteen of the sample countries have the common-law system is of course almost entirely due to their having been at one time or another under British rule.

A similar point can be made about the nature of British governance. At its apogee in the midnineteenth century, two features of the Indian and Colonial services are especially striking when compared with modern regimes in Asia and Africa. First, British administration was remarkably cheap and efficient. Secondly, it was remarkably non-venal. Its sins were generally sins of omission, not commission. This too cannot be wholly without significance, given the demonstrable correlations today between economic under-performance and both excessive government expenditure and public sector corruption.

The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which ‘the ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would

1. secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;

2. secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;

3. enforce rights of contract;

4. provide stable government ... governed by publicly known rules;

5. provide responsive government;

6. provide honest government . (with) no rents to favour and position;

7. provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government . to hold taxes down (and) reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.

The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are points 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democracy was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed, the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.

It is a point worth emphasising that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign 12 12 Benign — favourable, beneficial effect. According to the work of political scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, countries that

were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratisa-tion after independence than those ruled by other countries. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million that has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony. True, there have been many former colonies which have not managed to sustain free institutions: Bangladesh, Burma, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe spring to mind. But in a sample of fifty-three countries that were former British colonies, just under half (twenty six) were still democracies in 1993. This can be attributed to the way that British rule, particularly where it was ‘indirect', encouraged the formation of collaborating entities; it may also be related to the role of Protestant missionaries, who clearly played a part in encouraging Western-style aspirations for political freedom in parts of Africa and the Caribbean.