Imagining Markets: Empire, Europe, China in Britain's economic future since the 1870s

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The global economy is currently undergoing long-lasting, structural change, with shifting trading patterns, the rapid rise of new regions of economic growth, and tightening relations between countries. Yet this is not the first time that globalisation has redefined power flows in the international economy. The proposed network aims to provide a vital and yet noticeably lacking bridge between historical and contemporary ways of thinking about Britain's future global economic orientation, breaking new ground by examining how a range of opinion in Britain has been and continues to be orchestrated behind different and shifting conceptions of the nation's economic future, and illuminating the different ways in which overseas markets have, at various times in the past, been imagined, evaluated and conceptualised, as well as the implications and consequences of this for the way we view the possibilities and potential of these very same markets today. This project seeks to provide policy makers in governmental and intergovernmental organisations with the first interconnected analysis of the long-term development of Britain's key modern trade relationships.In order to do this the network will fuse together cultural, economic and political perspectives, in order to provide a deeper and historically grounded understanding of how governments and other economic actors in Britain have imagined three crucial markets - the Empire/Commonwealth, Europe, and China. In the first half of the twentieth century, many in Britain looked to its empire to promote a recognisably modern form of economic integration, while, after 1945, similar hopes and aspirations were invested in Europe and the Far East, albeit not always by the same people. The economist Joseph Schumpeter put the concept of imagination at the heart of this entrepreneurial process. It was this quality which, above all, businesspeople required if they were to succeed: 'the capacity of seeing things in a way which proves afterwards to be true, even though it cannot be established [as such] at the time.' In the same way as communities are imagined, so too are economies- making calculations about and placing faith in the future and its possibilities are key qualities of investors and entrepreneurs. Although somewhat neglected in the mainstream economics literature, Schumpeter's insight has found a strong echo in the modern discipline of marketing. Thus the network also seeks to combine a range of historical perspectives with the expertise of scholars working in the social sciences. This, in turn, will yield new insights not only into the history of Britain's political economy but also into the social psychology of entrepreneurship in the age of globalization.In the wake of today's global financial crisis, the question of how nations can establish, protect or even recover a competitive economic advantage looms large in the media, manufacturing, business and policy-making circles. As an exercise in 'deep history', the proposed network will generate fresh insights into the ways in which perceptions of international markets were reconfigured as a result of intra-European trade agreements, scrambles for territory in Africa and China, and growing demand in Britain for protectionist tariffs arising from intensifying industrial competition from Germany and the United States. It will further explore the extent to and ways in which Britain's economic relationships with the Commonwealth, Europe and China remain vital to its identity in today's globalised world.