Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2007

Research in Action

Globalisation through the prism of Empire

That tidal wave of 21st century convergence known as globalisation may not be what it seems. It isn’t new, it isn’t global, and it may not be unstoppable. These are some of the insights to emerge from an ongoing collaborative study by two acclaimed scholars of global economics - La Trobe Professor of Economics and Head of Economics and Finance, Gary Magee, and visiting British historian and Institute for Advanced Study Distinguished Fellow Andrew Thompson, Professor of Commonwealth and Imperial History and Dean of Arts at the University of Leeds.

The two former Oxford collegians are collaborating on a two-year study of contemporary globalisation through the economic and cultural prism of the former British Empire, to be published as a jointly-authored book.

The world’s first experience of globalisation - from the midnineteenth century to the First World War - comprised an ethnically, racially and culturallydefined movement of millions of people from Britain into the wider world in search of greater opportunity.

These British migrants took their labour, ideas, and often their money with them - in a complex, multi-layered set of migrations encompassing Britain’s then colonies: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, and the United States.

This flow of wealth, wisdom and ideas, however, was not one-way. Britain was as much defined by her relationship with her colonies as the reverse, and ‘what it meant to be British’ was partly determined by Britain’s links with the wider world.

‘Influences didn’t just radiate out from Britain to the colonies, they also came back, and some of the colonies were well ahead of Britain in their experiments with responsible government, the secret ballot, voting rights, and free secular compulsory education,’ Professor Thompson says.

Although historians now recognise that patterns of exchange were much more complex in the old Imperial world than previously realised, Professors Thompson and Magee take this concept further, viewing the Empire as ‘a species of global networking’ directly comparable to the forces of globalisation evident today.

‘This has the implication that people and ideas might have cut across those old binary relationships Britain had with its colonies. We are much more open to the possibility that some influences between the colonies didn’t necessarily go through Britain at all,’ Professor Thompson says.

In re-conceptualising British Imperial migration as an ethnically-based ‘species of networking’ - in effect, a 19th century British diaspora - Professors Thompson and Magee suggest intriguing parallels between 19th and 21st century globalisation.

They say the bedrock of both phenomena was international, regionalised migration, fuelled by a revolution in transportation and communications technologies - railways, steamships, undersea cables and telegraphs in the 19th century; air travel, faxes, the internet and mobile phones in the 21st.

Both originated in co-ethnic networks involving the mass movement of skilled labour and capital, in parallel with other regionally-focused migrations - and both stimulated reverse migration.

These regional migrations also facilitated the transnational economy, through the homeward flow of ‘migrapounds’ - remittances sent home for reasons ranging from migrantsponsored family reunions, and ongoing income support for families left behind, to building a nest egg or starting a new business.

This happened on a much greater scale in 19th century Britain than historians imagine, according to Professor Thompson. He discovered when trawling through UK Post Office archives that remittances from Britain’s settler colonies ranged from family allowances to donations to church and charities, and even to industrial causes - in one instance to long-running Australian support of a UK dockers’ strike.

While their study focuses on the British diaspora, Professors Magee and Thompson acknowledge it was one of many co-ethnic, regionally-integrated entities powering that first wave of globalisation - including the French, German, Italian and Jewish diasporas among the Europeans, and the Chinese and Indians in the Asian sphere.

As regional networks with increasingly transnational economic and social influence, these diasporas were a force for integration. Yet paradoxically, they say, those same diasporas were prone in difficult economic conditions to retreat into themselves.

‘There’s potential for looking at diasporas as the building blocks for globalisation, in that they are integrated on an ethnic basis in the big regions of the world; but in other ways - because they are ethnically, culturally and even racially defined - they may actually impede globalisation,’ Professor Thompson says.

‘In the case of the British, that first wave of globalisation ran up against the First World War. Up to 1914 this was a relatively open and outward-looking diaspora, but in the 1920s and 30s, with much more difficult trading conditions and eventually world depression, the tendency was to turn in on itself.’

While wary of over-extrapolating, Professors Thompson and Magee warn against the assumption that globalisation is unstoppable.

‘There’s a tendency when the world economy is going through a relatively benign phase to think that the changes and developments we perceive are irreversible. I’m sure that was strong back in 1912-1913. Perhaps a lot of people thought that way about regionalised integration promoted on the back of these ethnic diasporas, but in a couple of years it didn’t look like that at all,’ Professor Thompson says.

‘We have to recognise that globalising trends that have established themselves in recent decades have overlapped with a relatively benign period in the world economy. If there were an international economic downturn maybe, just maybe, we would find the regionalised integration we see today would be a lot less outward-looking.’