Abstract

"Expansion and Protection: Interwar British Business Elites and the Empire"

Ian Kumekawa, Harvard University (kumekawa@fas.harvard.edu)

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, British business leaders were well positioned. After years of working in cooperation with the wartime state during World War I, they were newly energized, empowered, and politically connected. Like many political observers and administrators, business leaders sensed that German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman defeat opened up new possibilities for a profitable and expansionary empire of commerce in newly accessible markets around the world. Yet in the early 1930s, the same businesspeople became staunch protectionists, as Britain’s economic prosperity and global position waned. This paper provides a business-eye view of the British empire in the interwar years. It contends that business leaders moved from boisterous proponents of “informal” imperial expansion to ardent defenders of “formal” imperial boundaries.