Notes and References Preface 1. PRO CAB 24/273, p. 268. CP 316(37) Defence Expenditure in Future Years. Interim Report by the Minister for Coordination of Defence, 15 December 1937, p. 2. 2. G. Schmidt, The Politics and Economics of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy in the 1930s (Leamington Spa, 1986), p. 3. 3. S. Newton, Profits of Peace: the Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement (Oxford, 1996), p. 69. 4. R.A.C. Parker, ‘British Rearmament 1936–9, Treasury, Trade Unions and Skilled Labour’, English Historical Review 96 (1981), p. 314. This position is also taken in the following influential articles: R.A.C. Parker, ‘Economics, Rearmament and Foreign Policy: the United Kingdom before 1939: a Preliminary Study’, Journal of Contemporary History 10 (1975), pp. 637–47; and G.C. Peden, ‘A Matter of Timing: the Economic Background to British Foreign Policy, 1937–1939’, History 69 (1984), pp. 15–28. 5. Newton, Profits of Peace, pp. 68–9. 6. Schmidt, Politics and Economics, p. 3. 7. C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London, 1972), epitomises this approach. Barnett combines contempt for political liberalism with a commitment to liberal financial orthodoxy worthy of Montagu Norman. 8. For example, B.J. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: the Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1992); S. Howson and D. Winch, The Economic Advisory Council, 1930–1939: a Study in Economic Advice during Depression and Recovery (Cambridge, 1977); and I.M. Drummond, The Floating Pound and the Sterling Area, 1931–1939 (Cambridge, 1981), are among works indispensable to a serious study of British war potential. 9. K. Middlemas, Diplomacy of Illusion: Britain and Germany 1937–39 (London, 1972), p. 8. The point has recently been repeated by McDonough, though he is apparently unaware of the problem in the field of defence finance, and thus of its scale and wider importance. F. McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (Manchester, 1998), p. 7. 10. For example, see D.C. Watt, How War Came: the Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (London, 1989), p. 307; Parker, ‘Economics, Rearmament and Foreign Policy’, pp. 643–4; Newton, Profits of Peace, pp. 114–17; G.C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 102–3. 11. Chamberlain to Mrs Morton Prince, 16 January 1938. Quoted in K.G. Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), p. 324. 12. B.J.C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 259. 190 Notes and References 191 1 New Rules for an Old Game 1. Cd 8462 of 1917. Dominions Royal Commission, Final Report of the Royal Commission on the Natural Resources, Trade and Legislation of Certain Portions of His Majesty’s Dominions. 2. B.J. Eichengreen, Sterling and the Tariff, 1929–32 (Princeton, 1981), p. 38. 3. W.C. Hancock, Problems of Economic Policy 1918–1939 Part 1 (Oxford, 1940), p. 109. 4. Cmd 3897 of 1931. Committee on Finance and Industry [Macmillan Committee], Report, para. 46. 5. PRO CAB 47/1. CID Advisory Committee on Trade Questions in Time of War. Reports and Proceedings 1924–1938. Reports – Advisory Committee on Trading and Blockade. Fifth Annual Report Covering Note by Chairman, 29 April 1929. 6. Hancock, Problems of Economic Policy, p. 111. 7. Cd 8462. Dominions Royal Commission, Final Report, para. 327. 8. Hancock, Problems of Economic Policy, p. 100. 9. Cd 8462. Dominions Royal Commission, Final Report, para. 333. 10. Hancock, Problems of Economic Policy, p. 101. 11. Cd 8462. Dominions Royal Commission, Final Report, para. 369. 12. Cd 9032 of 1918. Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy, Interim Report on Certain Essential Industries, para. 7. 13. Ibid., para. 12. 14. Cd 9035 of 1918. Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy, Final Report of the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy after the War, para. 123. 15. Hancock, Problems of Economic Policy, p. 99. 16. Cd 9182 of 1918. Currency and Foreign Exchanges, First Interim Report of the Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges after the War [Cunliffe Committee], Introduction. 17. Ibid., para. 15. 18. Ibid., Introduction. 19. PRO CAB 27/71. War Cabinet Finance Committee. Minutes of Meetings, 24 July 1919–31 July 1922. Minutes of Third Meeting, 20 August 1919. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., Minutes of Eleventh Meeting, 22 October 1919. 22. Ibid. 23. D.E. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy 1924–1931: the Norman Conquest of $4.86 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 24. 24. CAB 27/71. War Cabinet Finance Committee, Minutes of Ninth Meeting, 17 October 1919. 25. PRO CAB 4/12. CID Paper 599B. Note by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. War and Financial Power, 26 March 1925. 26. J.R. Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: the Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919–26 (Ithaca, 1989), p. 34. 27. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 28. Ibid., p. 34. 192 Notes and References 29. A contemporary, P.J. Grigg, observed that ‘Hawtrey was “Director of Financial Inquiries” at the Treasury, which meant that he was a sort of economic consultant’. Grigg, principal private secretary to successive chancellors in the 1920s, noted that Churchill ‘used to accuse us of giving Hawtrey too little scope. I remember his demanding from time to time that the learned man should be released from the dungeon in which we were said to have immured him, have his chains struck off and the straw brushed from his hair and clothes and be admitted to the light and warmth of an argument in the Treasury board room with the greatest living master of argument.’ P.J. Grigg, Prejudice and Judgement (London, 1948), pp. 81–2. 30. CAB 47/1, p. 76. Advisory Committee on Trading and Blockade, Fifth Annual Report, April 1929, p. 27. 31. Ibid., p. 62. Fifth Annual Report, Covering Note by Chairman. 32. Ibid., p. 29. Advisory Committee on Trading and Blockade. Third Annual Report, December 1926, p. 9. 33. H. van B. Cleveland, ‘The International Monetary System in the Interwar Period’ in B.M. Rowland (ed.), Balance of Power or Hegemony: the Interwar Monetary System (New York, 1976), p. 18. 34. D.H. Aldcroft, The Interwar Economy: Britain, 1919–39 (London, 1970), p. 244. 35. Ibid., pp. 243–44. 36. B.J. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: the Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1992), p. 32. 37. Ibid., p. 37. 38. I.M. Drummond, The Gold Standard and the International Monetary System 1900–1939 (Basingstoke, 1987), p. 9. 39. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, p. 7. 40. Cleveland, ‘The International Monetary System’, p. 17. 41. Drummond, Gold Standard, p. 21. 42. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, p. 31. 43. R.G. Hawtrey, The Gold Standard in Theory and Practice 2nd edn (London, 1931), p. 1. 44. K. Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (London, 1985), p. 177. 45. In other words: ‘The symbolic character of the monetary unit has emerged into the foreground, while its relation to some actual physical material has receded.’ Cmd 3897. Committee on Finance and Industry [Macmillan Committee] Report, para. 20. 46. Cd 9182. Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges [Cunliffe Committee], First Interim Report, para. 31. 47. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, pp. 198–201, dissents from the view that world gold stocks in the 1920s were too low in total, but acknowledges that progressive maldistribution of reserves, especially in favour of the USA and France, meant that gold in circulation was inadequate to satisfy demand worldwide, enforcing reliance on the risky gold exchange standard. 48. PRO T 185/1, p. 26. Committee on Currency and Foreign Exchanges after the War [Cunliffe Committee], Proceedings. 49. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, p. 194. Notes and References 193 50. C.H. Feinstein, P. Temin and G. Toniolo, ‘International Economic Organi- sation: Banking, Finance and Trade in Europe between the Wars’, in C.H. Feinstein (ed.), Banking Currency and Finance in Europe between the Wars (Oxford, 1995), p. 12. 51. F.C. Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cul- tural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca and London, 1984), p. 112. Costigliola’s work is amongst a number by American authors which earn a blistering rebuke from R.W.D. Boyce for adopting a position which ‘seriously misrepresents British policy’ in the 1920s, by neglecting the fact that British policy makers ‘remained committed to multilateralism and strenuously resisted a retreat into Imperial protectionism’. Boyce contends that Ameri- can work fosters the view that ‘anything Britain did in the international arena is regarded as self-evidently designed to regain Britain’s “financial leadership”, while any American initiative is seen as a contribution to an “open world economy”’. Costigliola is actually more even-handed than this attack implies. R.W.D. Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads, 1919–1932: a Study in Politics, Economics and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987), p. 375, fn 1. 52. Costigliola, Awkward Dominion, p. 56. 53. For example, see B.D. Rhodes, ‘Reassessing “Uncle Shylock”: the United States and the French War Debt, 1917–1929’, Journal of American History 55 (1969), pp. 787–803. 54. Cleveland, ‘The International Monetary System’, p. 43. 55. S.V.O. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation: 1924–31 (New York, 1967), p. 92. 56. Hawtrey, The Gold Standard in Theory and Practice, p. 125. 57. D. Williams, ‘London and the 1931 Financial Crisis’, Economic History Review Second Series 15 (1962–63), p. 518. 58. Aldcroft, The Interwar Economy, p. 269. 59. Williams, ‘London and the 1931 Financial Crisis’, p. 519. 60. Ibid., p. 524. 61. Aldcroft, The Interwar Economy, p. 270. 62. Williams, ‘London and the 1931 Financial Crisis’, p.