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British Mercantile Attitudes towards Imperial Expansion

It is now common usage among historians to refer to Britain's 'informal empire' in the nineteenth century.' British imperialism, it is said, operated in distant non-colonial areas many of which never became part of the Empire of formal rule. In Africa, the Levant, South America, and the Far East, so the argument runs, British officials promoted the spread of free trade by active political intervention. This 'Imperialism of Free Trade' was the governing principle and the unifying factor in a century of British policy no less in the 'informal empire' than in the Empire of formal rule. Emphasizing an underlying continuity in British attitudes and policy, the concept has obvious attractions as an explanation of British overseas expansion in widely different circumstances and diverse regions throughout the nineteenth century. But its apparent solution to some of the thorny problems in the historiography of nineteenth-century British imperialism has not allowed the 'Imperialism of Free Trade' to escape severe criticism.2 The notion that British governments were prepared 'to establish and maintain British paramountcy by whatever means best suited the circumstances of their diverse regions of interest'3 seems to have exaggerated accepted conventions of what was and, equally important, what was not a legitimate function of the Foreign Office in the mid-nineteenth century.4 The assumption that large parts of Africa, the Levant, South America, and the Far East were in a dependent economic relationship as primary producers for British industry and major consumers of British manufactures does not appear to be substantiated by the statistics of British trade with those regions for most of the nineteenth century.5 On these and other grounds the 'Imperialism of Free Trade' cannot be accepted without reservations. I do not propose here to assess the damage suffered by the concept of 'informal empire' in recent criticism. Instead, I wish to examine another crucial assumption