imperial preference

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy

by Robert B. Zoellick  · 3 Aug 2020

and then as a free trader. But the Depression had forced London to become a leader of a system based on a sterling bloc, protectionism, imperial preferences, and even bilateral balancing and barter deals. The aftermath of the Great War had left both countries frustrated with one another; the war debt issue

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1941, America’s trade with Britain would depend on a new Lend-Lease program. Hull’s successors would have to contend later with London’s imperial preferences and discriminatory trade.54 Hull was a natural opponent of the dictatorships. His political inclinations were reinforced by his antagonism to Germany’s and Italy

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system. But the president had too many other priorities with Britain in 1947, and the United States agreed to launch GATT even with Britain’s imperial preferences.113 This first multilateral trading round, with twenty-three participants, proved that cooperation on trade liberalization was possible. The parties cut tariffs on forty-five

China: A History

by John Keay  · 5 Oct 2009

of clerks, must have distanced the Yuan emperors from the minutiae of government. Nor was the employment of Chinese advisers and officials any indication of imperial preference. Grading the population into a four-tier hierarchy ensured that Mongols and other non-Chinese enjoyed positive discrimination in respect of office and privilege. Under

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970

by John Darwin  · 23 Sep 2009

growth of their trade. The ‘Canadian’ interest grasped soon enough that Montreal's future depended on railways, if it was to survive the end of imperial preference in the late 1840s.46 The British government's role in building the ‘commercial republic’ was not insignificant, but it was bound to be limited

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by the enormous surplus in the balance of payments. The sense of general prosperity checked the appeal of tariffs and helped smother the campaign for imperial preference. Since tariff reform and its political rider ‘imperial unity’ (between Britain and the white dominions) were at odds with the free trade basis of commercial

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South Africa adopted this view. Their Progressive (Unionist after 1910) party embraced the classic programme of Britannic nationalism: support for immigration, the ‘Imperial Navy’ and imperial preference in a ‘united…nation, forming an integral part of the Empire and cooperating harmoniously with Imperial authority’.109 But the party's leaders saw that

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deputy, General Smuts. The dominion delegates were convened with British ministers as the ‘Imperial War Cabinet’. War aims were discussed. London made ambiguous promises about imperial preference after the war. But the main outcome of the meetings was agreement that relations with the dominion governments would have to be adjusted after the

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and Europe. The severity of the depression after 1920 encouraged others to propose more radical solutions. The grudging nod by the wartime British government towards imperial preference, ‘imperial development’ and subsidised empire settlement was converted by post-war tariff reformers like Leo Amery into a full-scale programme to relieve unemployment and

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. With the Ottawa system they emerged as the leader of a large trading bloc, whose members favoured each other by discriminatory tariffs – the so-called ‘imperial preference’. Needless to say, this did not mean that London imposed its commercial agenda – we shall see in a minute that the City's commercial empire

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to protect Britain's own floundering agriculture, but could hardly have done so without some concession to dominion producers. They may have thought that offering imperial preference would help to silence demands for a general devaluation of dominion currencies against sterling, with dangerous consequences for its strength and stability. Ensuring the dominions

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large British investment in the country's railways and utilities. These had been blocked by Argentina's exchange control since the onset of depression.55 Imperial preference and the pacts London made with the ‘agreement’ countries helped to stave off the worst effects of depression and also the danger that other countries

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‘alien’ (i.e. non-British) migration. In a speech criticising the Ottawa terms, Scullin (whose origins were Catholic and Irish) insisted that the point of imperial preference was the mutual advantage of ‘British nations trading with one another and…keeping the maximum amount of business within the British family of nations’.105

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America's wartime aid demanded the rapid return to peacetime ‘normality’ making sterling convertible (so that sterling countries could buy dollar goods freely) and ending imperial preference (to remove the tariffs imposed on dollar goods in British Empire countries since the early 1930s). On this scenario, before the British could catch their

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European Recovery Programme. So the British were allowed to seal off the sterling economy from American competition, to discriminate heavily against dollar goods, to keep ‘imperial preference’ and put off the day when the pound was exchanged freely for dollars – precisely those things that American leaders had been so determined to crush

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cardinal fact of their national existence. Of the trade and monetary blocs into which the world was divided after 1931, the combined sterling bloc and imperial preference system seemed the best placed to restore its members’ prosperity and escape economic disaster. If British power was constrained, so was that of other great

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–1, 576–7 and ‘Britannic nationalism’ 151–9 and dominion status 395–8 federation 148–9 and First World War 333–4, 336–9 and imperial preference 455–6 and navy question 156–9 and Second World War 494–5, 501–2, 520, 522 settlements in 49, 50 and South African War

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and South Africa 230, 233–4, 236 and tariff reform 271 Chamberlain, Neville and Egypt 473 on empire 449 and foreign policy 487–90 and imperial preference 438 at Ottawa Conference 436 views on defence 427, 430–1, 441–2 China 35, 40–1, 56–7, 81–3, 132–5, 374, 424

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

by Niall Ferguson  · 1 Jan 2002  · 469pp  · 146,487 words

turn the Empire into a Customs Union, with common duties on all imports from outside British territory: Chamberlain’s catch-phrase for the scheme was ‘Imperial Preference’. The policy had even been tried out during the Boer War, when Canada had been exempted from a small and temporary duty on imported wheat

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. But what had been unthinkable in good times came to be seen as indispensable in the general crisis. And just as Joseph Chamberlain had hoped, ‘imperial preference’ – preferential tariffs for colonial products, adopted in 1932 – boosted trade within the Empire. In the 1930s the share of British exports going to the Empire

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Empire. And it was a message drummed home relentlessly by bodies like the Empire Marketing Board (established by Leo Amery to convey the case for imperial preference subliminally). In 1930 alone there were over two hundred ‘Empire Shopping Weeks’ in sixty-five different British towns. At the Board’s suggestion, the King

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

by Paul Kennedy  · 15 Jan 1989  · 1,477pp  · 311,310 words

; the Navigation Acts, designed among other things to preserve a large stock of British merchant ships and seamen for the event of war, were repealed; imperial “preferences” were ended. By contrast, defense expenditures were held to an absolute minimum, averaging around £15 million a year in the 1840s and not above £27

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. By that time, the cosmopolitan world order had dissolved into various rivaling subunits: a sterling block, based upon British trade patterns and enhanced by the “imperial preferences” of the 1932 Ottawa Conference: a gold block, led by France; a yen block, dependent upon Japan, in the Far East; a U.S.-led

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and rail with, the eastern European market, but it could readily absorb the area’s agricultural surpluses in the way that farm-surplus France and imperial-preference Britain could not, offering in return for Hungarian wheat and Rumanian oil much-needed machinery and (later) armaments. Moreover, these countries, like Germany itself, had

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found themselves obliged to conform to American requirements on free convertibility of currencies and open competition (as the British did, despite their efforts to preserve imperial preference)44—or to stand clear of the entire system (as the Russians did, when they perceived how incompatible this was with socialist controls). The practical

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

by Benn Steil  · 14 May 2013  · 710pp  · 164,527 words

it, referring to Acheson’s boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.15 Keynes knew that Article VII was, in reality, code for an end to “Imperial preference,” by which Britain secured privileged trade access to the markets of its colonies and dominions. In the war’s aftermath, the Americans would be in

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’s State Department, which Roosevelt had in May designated to lead the consideration negotiations, had a separate and sometimes conflicting priority: to dismantle Britain’s “imperial preference” trading system. The grand principle behind this demand was that the postwar world needed to be grounded in nondiscriminatory multilateral trade—a longtime obsession of

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1925, “in justification of their exclusion from extensive areas of the earth’s surface.”41 The currency and trade issues melded in the pot of imperial preference, which became more of a “mandate” than a “preference” under wartime practices. By the summer of 1940, Britain was dangerously short of dollars, and all

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.” In a desperate act of petulance, he even proposed weeks after the conference adding to the fourth principle an unqualified commitment to the elimination of imperial preference. Winant reported back from London that Churchill, unsurprisingly, was not keen on presenting such an amendment to his cabinet or to the dominion governments.60

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.” Negotiations between the State Department and the British embassy over Article VII dragged on into the autumn. Though State was immovable on the elimination of imperial preference, British negotiators made headway on two fronts. First, they persuaded State that the achievement of this aim should be determined by “agreed action,” and that

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, some three-quarters of Churchill’s war cabinet opposed any reference to trade preferences in Lend-Lease. Even those not afflicted with sentimental attachment to imperial preference, such as the prime minister himself, found offensive the impression that Britain was bartering away the foundations of its empire in return for war goods

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considerate manner” that “nothing could be further from his mind than an attempt to use Lend-Lease as a trading weapon over the principle of imperial preference.”61 This was sufficient to mollify the British cabinet, and the British-American Lend-Lease Agreement was finally signed on February 23. It was not

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the Commons two years later, “ … without having previously obtained from the President a definite assurance that we were no more committed to the abolition of Imperial Preference, than the American Government were committed to the abolition of their high protective tariffs.”64 What, in the end, was Keynes’s substantive role in

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hope to survive,” Amery wrote. “We must be free to take whatever measures we think necessary to the safeguard of our own production, to develop Imperial Preference, to use our bargaining power with foreign countries, and to strengthen that wonderful monetary instrument the sterling system. We must enter into no international commitments

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of the sterling area and arrangements regarding the crucial immediate postwar transitional period. It also recommended that British negotiators not concede any prospect of ending imperial preference, but should consider the matter only in the context of general tariff cuts and allowance for state purchasing and subsidies in the agricultural sector. Still

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the Bank of England, opposing the scheme as a gold standard in disguise that would depress the British economy, reduce sterling’s international role, destroy imperial preference, and decimate British agriculture. Keynes directed his fire at both the bank and Beaverbrook. In a letter to the chancellor dated February 23, Keynes blasted

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it is essentially international and free-trade, and because my beliefs are neither the one nor the other,” Beaverbrook explained. “I put a value upon imperial preference and on the protection of domestic agriculture which is higher than anything assigned to them under the Plan,” he continued. “And I would not be

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an opportunity for imposing (entirely, of course, for our good) the American conception of the international economic system.”114 This clearly included the abolition of imperial preference, the abolition of exchange controls preventing the use of sterling-area balances to buy American exports, and the enthronement of the dollar atop the international

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ease in being unable to allay Acheson’s concerns over lack of British movement on Lend-Lease Article VII—specifically, a British commitment to dismantling imperial preference and allowing currency convertibility after the war. The issue remained a political minefield in London, but Robbins was under no illusion that the British could

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the form of a thirty-year, 2.5 percent interest loan instead of a grant, and further requiring it to be conditional on Britain dismantling imperial preference, making sterling freely convertible, and cooperating with the United States on the establishment of a global free-trade system. America and Britain were now farther

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, led by Max [Beaverbrook] and supported by others too near Winston [Churchill], [they] were convinced, with some reason, that the proposed commercial policy ruled out [Imperial] Preference as a serious, substantial policy for the future.… It annoyed them, of course, to have me pointing out the Empire in question would not include

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essential complement to American aid. This proved a tougher nut to crack. Throughout the summer, Clayton had struggled simultaneously with London over the dismantling of imperial preference and with protectionists in his own capital determined to erect new wool import tariffs. He ultimately won Truman over in the wool wars, thereby salvaging

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troubled global trade talks in Geneva. The British resisted mightily in the face of Clayton’s public upbraids on imperial preference. They had committed to dismantling it in return for Lend-Lease, and then again for the loan. Vinson’s promises to Congress in 1946 that

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admiringly, “was nearly a decade ahead of the [1957] Treaty of Rome,” the European Union’s founding document.54 Britain, interestingly, did not finally dismantle imperial preference until joining the European Economic Community in 1973. It is in the end little wonder that the Marshall Plan, and not Lend-Lease, is so

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States. Amery, Leopold (1873–1955). British Conservative politician. Secretary of state for India and Burma, 1940–45. A leading supporter of Churchill’s policy of imperial preference. Anderson, Sir John (1882–1958). British civil servant and politician. Chancellor of the exchequer, 1943–45. Attlee, Clement (1883–1967). British Labour politician. Labour Party

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who believed that the economic and political crises of the 1930s were largely attributable to protectionist policies. Was determined to eliminate the British system of imperial preference. Kahn, Richard (1905–1989). British economist. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was Keynes’s favorite student. Fathered the concept of the fiscal

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Commons and, 107, 184, 283–85, 305; House of Lords and, 85, 169, 184–88, 204, 212, 285–88, 307; IMF vision of, 301–5; imperial preference and, 3, 14, 115, 121–23, 179–81, 191, 225, 265, 288, 313, 315, 355, 362; imports and, 14, 76, 110, 115–17, 141, 143

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, 269, 357 Cambridge Apostles, 63 Camp Deven, 19 Canada, 218, 229, 244, 310; espionage and, 298; Export-Import Bank of, 289; gold reserves and, 67; imperial preference and, 288; Normandy and, 201; Quebec Agreement and, 261–65, 268, 270–72, 281; U.S. War planes sent to, 101; White Plan and, 146

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, David, 347 Hungary, 38 Husseini, Jemal, 306 Hutton, Graham, 84–85 imperialism, 40, 97, 117, 121, 125, 178, 184, 188, 260, 263, 281, 284, 306 imperial preference, 14, 115, 121–23, 179–81, 191, 225, 265, 288, 313, 315, 355, 362 Import Duties Act, 84 imports: barriers to, 30, 83; Britain and

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and, 283; end of, 306; espionage and, 294; Hopkins and, 114, 116; House of Representatives and, 106; Hull and, 105–9, 115–17, 121–23; imperial preference and, 14, 115, 121–23, 313; Keynes and, 14, 110–19, 123–24, 180, 190–91, 261, 279–80; lingering Bretton Woods issues and, 261

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Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and, 314, 383n7; Gold Reserve Act and, 28, 33–34; gold standard and, 1, 20, 23–25 (see also gold standard); imperial preference and, 14, 115, 121–23, 179–81, 191, 225, 265, 288, 313, 315, 355, 362; Import Duties Act and, 84; import restrictions and, 178; International

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, 368; White and, 22–23, 28, 46 Vinson, Frederick, 351–52, 368, 400n14; Anglo-American Financial Agreement and, 283; Clayton and, 281; Dalton and, 280; imperial preference and, 313–14; Keynes and, 282, 299–301; Lend-Lease and, 275, 280, 313; Morgenthau and, 227; Office of Economic Stabilization and, 205; Office of

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World

by Kwasi Kwarteng  · 14 Aug 2011  · 670pp  · 169,815 words

Churchill, the British Empire was an empire of free trade; for Joseph Chamberlain, on the other hand, the empire was perfect for protectionism, known as ‘imperial preference’, in that goods from the British colonies were ‘preferred’, more lightly taxed, in comparison with goods from Britain’s industrial competitors, such as Germany and

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941

by Alan Allport  · 2 Sep 2020  · 1,520pp  · 221,543 words

the world’s markets were being divided up by high tariff walls. In 1932 the United Kingdom had formally abandoned free trade in favour of imperial preference – the once shocking idea of turning the Empire into an autarkic trading bloc, a vast British Zollverein girded by protectionist barriers, had become a reality

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics

by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce  · 5 Jun 2018  · 215pp  · 64,460 words

from Balfour's administration in 1903 to prosecute his campaign in the country at large. Launching it in Birmingham, he argued that his scheme for imperial preference would not apply to Indian or any other ‘native fellow subjects’ but only to ‘our own kinsfolk’ – that ‘white population that constitutes the majority in

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the price of food on the kitchen table. Free traders contrasted their ‘big loaf’ of bread with the ‘little loaf’ working families would get under imperial preference. Chamberlain's cross-class political appeal to imperialism abroad and radicalism at home failed him at this point. At the start of his campaign, he

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the war, at the 1900 ‘Khaki’ election, the Conservatives had been returned to office and, a few years later, Chamberlain launched his tariff reform campaign. Imperial preference, it has been said, was ‘born on the veld’.36 Edwardian South Africa was also to prove the nursery of a new generation of imperial

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a brief renaissance. In the 1930s, economic depression, the collapse of the gold standard and the outbreak of competitive protectionism strengthened the political case for imperial preference. When Britain came off the gold standard in 1931, the dominions devalued with it, effectively creating a managed sterling area. At the Ottawa Imperial Conference

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agreed to give each other's products preferential tariff treatment. Britain got comparatively little out of the agreements, but the conference consolidated a system of imperial preference. Between 1929 and 1938, the volume of British imports from Australia and Canada more than doubled, while those from Argentina were almost cut in half

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the National Government, as tariff reform had divided political parties and governments since the turn of the century. Free traders resigned from office. But although imperial preference strengthened the ties of trade within the empire, it did not fundamentally recast Britain's political economy: empire goods still accounted for only 40 per

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substantiate. The Commonwealth, as we saw in chapter 3, was now increasingly depicted as a pathway to the past, a hangover from the era of imperial preference, and viewed by modernisers of both right and left as an unhelpful crutch to which Britain was still inclined to cling. And, for a growing

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attempt to align the class interests of British industrialists and their workers in a new political economy of empire and to justify a system of imperial preference, a position that represented a significant break from the established orthodoxies of economic liberalism. And, while Chamberlain's project was defeated, it created the space

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on Conservative Party; and Northern Ireland; and Powell; and USA Tooze, Adam trade: and Brexit; within British Empire and Commonwealth; and digital technologies; within EU; imperial preference; and New Right Anglosphere; post Brexit; post-war US dominance; with South Africa; twentieth-century free trade movements; US Open Door policy; UKIP's attitude

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

by John Darwin  · 12 Feb 2013

-born or of Scottish descent) needed Britain’s help to escape commercial annexation (or straightforward conquest) by their wealthier neighbour to the south. They enjoyed imperial preference in the British market for their timber and grain – until the British adopted free trade. Because London worried about reinforcing its garrison if the Americans

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