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

全球经济目前正在经历长期的结构性变革，贸易格局正在发生变化，新的经济增长区域迅速崛起，国与国之间的关系日益密切。然而，这并不是全球化第一次重新定义国际经济中的权力流动。拟议的网络旨在为思考英国未来全球经济方向的历史和当代方式提供一个至关重要但明显缺乏的桥梁，通过研究英国的一系列观点是如何在不同的和不断变化的国家经济未来概念背后被精心策划的，从而开辟了新的领域，并阐明了海外市场在过去不同时期被想象的不同方式。评估和概念化，以及这对我们今天看待这些相同市场的可能性和潜力的方式的影响和后果。该项目旨在为政府和政府间组织的政策制定者提供英国主要现代贸易关系长期发展的第一个相互关联的分析。为了做到这一点，网络将融合文化，经济和政治的观点，为了提供一个更深入的和历史为基础的理解政府和其他经济参与者在英国如何想象三个关键市场-帝国/英联邦，欧洲和中国。在20世纪上半叶，许多英国人指望大英帝国推动一种公认的现代形式的经济一体化，而在1945年之后，欧洲和远东也出现了类似的希望和抱负，尽管并非总是出自同一群人之手。经济学家约瑟夫•熊彼特（Joseph Schumpeter）将想象力的概念置于这一创业过程的核心。商人要想成功，最重要的是要具备这种品质：“以一种事后证明是正确的方式看待事物的能力，即使当时还不能（这样）建立起来。”就像社区是想象出来的一样，经济也是想象出来的——对未来及其可能性进行计算并对其抱有信心是投资者和企业家的关键品质。虽然在主流经济学文献中有些被忽视，但熊彼特的见解在现代市场营销学科中得到了强烈的反响。因此，该网络还寻求将一系列历史观点与社会科学领域学者的专业知识结合起来。反过来，这不仅会对英国政治经济史产生新的见解，也会对全球化时代企业家精神的社会心理产生新的见解。在今天的全球金融危机之后，国家如何建立、保护甚至恢复竞争性经济优势的问题在媒体、制造业、商业和决策圈中显得尤为突出。作为“深刻历史”的练习，拟议的网络将产生新的见解，了解由于欧洲内部贸易协定，争夺非洲和中国的领土，以及德国和美国日益激烈的工业竞争导致英国对保护主义关税的需求不断增长，对国际市场的看法是如何重新配置的。它将进一步探讨在当今全球化的世界中，英国与英联邦、欧洲和中国的经济关系对其身份至关重要的程度和方式。

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.