The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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on the
British political elite when formulating policies to safeguard British
interests. Hence, this too, led them
to proceed with the granting of independence
to the colonies more speedily.

As the
book in Chapter Four showed, as a consequence of her rapid
industrial and technological development in the
first half of the nineteenth
century, Britain had already been forced to seek markets in China, Cuba and
Peru.
For example, Britain supplied ninety per cent of China’s imports and took seventy
per cent of
its exports. Additionally, Germany, Holland, Belgium and the United
States also in the nineteenth century,
had become the biggest buyers of British
goods. As a result of this the traders learnt that economic
expansion did not
necessarily have to depend on the creation of a territorial or political
empire.
Britain saw that imports could often be purchased cheaper outside the imperial
territories,
instead of inside. For example, wheat was being purchased from
America and Russia rather than Canada. The
British investors and traders, by
shopping around wherever there was the cheapest markets, could obtain
raw
materials at a much lower price than the markets inside the Empire. This meant
they were able to
swamp markets in other countries with British manufacturing
goods. By 1870 when the traders were pushing to
open an even wider market, for
example, in South America in places such as Brazil, a colony, thus, was
not
necessarily a commercial advantage over a non-colonial area for them. In fact
they thought that
absence of official British control was more practical. This has
because of bureaucratic procedures in the
colonies. The traders, however, thought
that in order to prevent other European and US competitors from
moving into and
taking over their established markets, a minimum British presence was
satisfactory.
Therefore, due to her fast expanding economy in the nineteenth
century, Parliament in Britain had gradually
adopted the free trade idea of Adam
Smith which involved removing trade barriers between states in favour of
open
international trading, where trade goods could be bought and sold freely in the

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