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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country’s educational structure did not provide. It would also have needed a high
rate of
replacing obsolescent plant; yet in fact the proportion of Gross National
Product invested inside Britain
fell behind that of its competitors.”19 Having seen
these
possibilities close, the long-term decline was inevitable.

If
this is the basic long-term trend, it is important to emphasise that the loss
of primacy did not
immediately affect all sectors of the British economy. The
ship-building industry, for example, benefited
from the steady expansion of
global commerce, as did shipping itself. So, too, did the various services
of the
City of London, which were, literally ‘cosmopolitan’ in their activities, since
they
aspired to be bankers, insurers, investors and commodity-dealers to the whole
world. The growth
in the economies and trade of other countries in the second
half of the nineteenth century meant even
more business for the City, and the
massive rise in earnings from such ‘invisible’ services more
than compensated for
the otherwise alarming increase in the balance-of-payments deficit on
‘visible’
trade.

Crudely speaking, “while many British industries were suffering from
greater foreign
competition, the City of London was in its hey-day in the decades
before 1914, funding and arranging and
insuring and shipping – and thus profiting
from the growth in the trade of foreign
countries.”20 This important sector of the
economy strongly
opposed all efforts to reintroduce protective tariffs and other
tools of the enclosed and combative world
of mercantilism; moreover it could not
share in the alarmism shown elsewhere in the country.

“Quite apart from such vested interests which were not suffering decline,
it would be wrong to
suggest that economic crisis was at hand almost before the
1860s were over: it is only with the benefit
of hindsight that one can point to the
mid-century decades as the zenith of Britain’s relative
position in the world
economy. Very few statesmen shared the apprehension of the Annual
Register
which in 1867 precisely warned that if the British neglected ‘the arena of industry

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