Imperial Preference – and Deference: the Economics of Empire, 1920S
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IMPERIAL PREFERENCE – AND DEFERENCE: THE ECONOMICS OF EMPIRE, 1920S Prologue: Wembley wood As a show of what the Empire produced – could buy – could sell, the exhibition at Wembley proved a real draw... You could see the Witton Kramer Electric Lifting Magnet the Constantineseo Converter Motor Chassis (for driving standard-gauge engines) wonderful machines that turned a fluid of emulsified wood pulp into paper or packed cigarettes into boxes... The kind of thrill you get once in a life-time .... if you’re lucky. But all this praise for the self-sustaining Empire got a bad crimp on the opening day when the King gave his speech. Reporters noticed that the platform wasn’t English-made. The lumber came from the U.S.!1 Right there was a symbol of something gone askew with the English 1 “Britain’s Empire Packed into One Big Show,” Literary Digest (June 14, 1924): 44. political economy. I. OWE CALCUTTA A. ENGLAND TRIMS ITS SALES World War I wrecked international trade. The 1920s saw a very incomplete recovery. Blame America for a lot of the trouble. It came out of the world war as the great creditor nation. Then it enacted policies that made it impossible for debtors to pay without ruining themselves.... and demanded that they pay. It closed its doors to Europeans with the most pressure of population by severe immigration laws. It closed its shops to Europe’s products, by tariffs. The Hawley-Smoot tariff was the worst of all. Exports Decline: Manufactures Trouble like this England didn’t need. 3 British wealth depended on what it could sell abroad. But what England made, people didn’t want as much as before. – coal – cotton textiles – iron and steel – tools and hardware What people wanted was ... – motor cars – bikes – airplanes – rayon – plastics – chemicals – stainless steel – scientific instruments – and more than anything else, something that England couldn’t do a thing about: oil. English firms could make bicycles and artificial silk and dyestuffs and all the rest. But that wasn’t where most of the money and workers were. And where they were, the world wasn’t buying. Which is why joblessness was 28% in the coal industry in 1930 and 32% in the iron and steel industry. Even in good times, in 1924, one worker in iron and steel out of every four was out of a job. 4 And in shipbuilding? 28%. And in cotton? One worker in seven. Competition had been stiff before, and was getting stiffer. England never sold as much abroad as it had before the war, in terms of volume, in the 1920s or 1930s. They couldn’t. Prices soared in wartime. They never went all the way back down again. In wartime, a lot of markets were cut off. So those countries had to find somebody else to buy from .. The United States Japan being at the top of the list. Anyhow, in wartime, England just wasn’t making as many goods for sale as before. It was turning its products to the war effort instead. Britain might not notice that things had changed – not at first. After all, in 1920 it had a bigger share of world trade than seven years before. 5 But that was because other European countries were in ruins. When they set to work building again, and their factories were able to sell products, the story would be very different. Good times in the mid-1920s were hard times for English exports. Britain’s share dropped steeply. In 1913, its share of world trade was 26% ... in 1929, it was only 21%. Things were worst for cotton textiles, the one thing England shipped out the most of – In fact, about one fourth of all exports before the war. Then came the Depression, and bad turned very much worse. Britain’s share of world trade actually edged up a little. But that was because EVERYBODY was slumping. It was still shipping only about 2/3ds as much goods as it had before the war. And the amount England imported went up and kept going up. 6 Some of it was raw materials, like oil, that England couldn’t find at home. Some was that people had a higher living standard and could afford to buy more consumer items. Whatever the reasons, by the mid-1930s, for the first time, Britain was buying more goods from abroad than it was selling. Exports Decline: Invisible Exports Now, that’s not the whole story. A lot of England’s income came from “invisible exports.” That’s the money that investments overseas send back to you. It could be stocks and bonds – could be loans – could be property. It could be the money you make as a shipper, carrying other people’s goods. Whatever it is, it’s assets. But invisible exports were not doing at all well after the war, either. Oh, pound for pound, their value stayed nearly as high as before. 7 But the pound wasn’t worth anywhere near what it had been. Take inflation into account, and invisible exports were just about cut in half in twenty years. All the money put into Russia was lost, when the Bolsheviks came in and repudiated the Czar’s debts. Other British assets abroad got sold off – about a fourth of them – in wartime, to help pay for war supplies. Shipping wasn’t paying as well as before. Too many other countries were getting into the merchant marine business. And the less goods that are being traded, the less there is to ship. A lot of merchant banks and discount houses had given out short-term loans all over the world. They couldn’t, in wartime. So Wall Street took up the slack – turning into the lender to the world. By the time the war ended, foreigners had got into the habit of turning to New York when they wanted credit. British overseas banks had competition as never before. 8 Put visible and invisible trade together, and what you’ve got is a bad balance of payments problem. The surplus Britain always ran, it doesn’t run any more. In the 1930s, it was gone completely. B. The Social State and Holding the Line In wartime, there was a lot of questioning: what would the British economy be like after the war? For wartime purposes, the government had to create boards and set up systems of managing the private sector. And among imperialists, there had been talk of a permanent change in the political economy of Britain: – protection (sheltered markets) With the revenues from the tariff, you can pay off the war debts But it will be foreigners who pay most of it, not people back hoime. An empire, dominated by British industry, and with high tariffs, could survive, even if Germany ended up winning the war (And in 1916, that certainly did seem possible). Self-sufficiency – that’s the key to the empire surviving now. 9 It will keep out German competition. – a strategy of planned emigration to the Dominions. All of these plans went for nothing. By 1921, the economy was de-centralized and decontrolled again. Free trade was the orthodoxy. Government’s main aim was balanced budget and a gold standard The fact was, English folks never had trusted government, and still did not. And that was truest of the businessmen. And that economic state of siege was okay IF GERMANY WON. But Germany did NOT win. And by 1920, nobody thought it would be a serious competitor in trade with the world for a long, long time to come. But the commitment to a small budget and not much money in it, meant, above all, that the spending had to be cut somewhere. And that usually was some place in defense. The issue of planning isn’t important just for seeing that everybody ate well and ate better. It was a matter of imperial survival. 10 Other countries had become top world powers by national planning. German railroads were set down by the state – not just for commercial, but strategic ends. And there were a lot of industries that, if you wanted to fight a modern war, you couldn’t afford to import. If your sea lanes were cut off, your power to make war was gone... scientific instruments and scientific glassware optical glass Various high technology items. You needed a class of trained experts, and that meant public money for the kind of education that would make scientists and mathematicians. In Germany, there’s 600 students taking courses in mining engineering in any given year, at just four universities. But go to fourteen universities and England, and you’ll find a mere third that many students taking courses like that. The money’s not there for well equipped labs. What could planning have done? Go to the electrical industry for an example. 438 generating stations, all with their own voltages and frequencies made a muddle of just plugging in the toaster in England. 11 In the 1920s, the government decided to make the whole thing rational. It would set up a Central Electricity Board. The government would pay half the costs – local firms would pay the rest. It would coordinate, standardize, customize. Results? In three years, electricity’s output was up four times over. The cost of generating it had gone way down. In 1926, only 3/4 of a million people in England used electriticy. By 1929, nine million did. Now if you can do this for electricity, why not to make a new steel industry? Why not centralized planning to build high tech? The simple fact is that the planners didn’t.