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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“Britain’s economic relations with China could be taken as an example of
this growth of
informal British power. Initial penetration arose out of the activities
of the East India Company. Then
private traders, such as the Rathbones and
Swires, moved in and they, backed up by an official British
strategic presence in
Hong Kong after1841, began to institute a greater British influence into
mainland
China as the century progressed. By the 1870s British-Indian-Hong Kong trade
with China was
at a peak, supplying ninety per cent of China’s imports and taking
seventy per cent of its exports.
Meanwhile, Britain was also pushing open markets
in Brazil as well as tapping supplies there and in Cuba
and Peru.”12

Financial Pressures on the British
Empire

“Individual British subjects were creating an informal empire of economic
interests (alongside
the existing formal empire) “13 and the British political
elite
saw no need for interference since not only was there no threat to Britain’s
industrial,
trading or financial position, but more surplus capital for overseas
investment was being accumulated,
due to the activities of the traders and
investors.

“The empire of free trade, operating full-blown from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards, looked
well beyond the retention of an empire established upon
mercantilist ideas. The open, expansive approach
of free trade meant that
industrial Britain needed firstly to keep a foothold in the expanding markets
of
Europe and the United States as both areas entered industrial phases, and secondly
to exploit new
areas of the world for materials that could be processed in Britain’s
factories, as well as to
maintain the safe trading bloc which the empire provided.
The formal empire provided a safe backshop for
British power, but in a world of

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