The Economics of Empire
Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs. Vol. H. Problems of Economic Policy 1918-1939. Part 1. By W. K. Hancock. (Oxford University Press. 1[59.) PROFESSOR HANCOCK'S work is one of a number of volumes which together will make up the comprehensive Survey projected by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He has set him- self the arduous task of disentangling the economic factors which have governed the relations between Britain and the Dominions in the twenty years between the last and the present war. Already this country had passed beyond the period of Empire- founding when the British people, wanting trade, had invested their money overseas and sent settlers on a large scale in expectation of the profits they would earn. Migration till then had seemed to be an end in itself. But Professor Hancock points out that in the 'twenties the Mother Country was becoming aware that there were limits to migration from the point of view of her own interests as well as of the Dominions. Her own population would soon be decreasing, and she could not afford an endless drain upon the fittest of her youth. There were new problems of inter-Imperial trade, problems of the young and growing Australian industries, of an economics which in the Dominions were always " geared to export," while the Home Country was still requiring its dividends, though
increasingly incapable of absorbing the exports needed to provide them.
The author takes us through the period of transition from Free Trade to Protection and Imperial Preferences, a period in which Britain's trade with the Empire suffered less than her trade with the world, and ended in the decision that the Empire must be called in to redeem losses elsewhere. He surveys the negotiations of Ottawa not without irony, and calculates the gains and the losses. The gains were not what had been anticipated. At the end he reaches the period of disillusionment • concerning the ideal of Imperial self-sufficiency, when both Britain and the Dominions began to realise the necessity of " a new attempt to shape and adjust the Imperial pattern of their trade policies to a wider world order." It is a book well worth study in view of the new relations between the countries of the Empire created by the present war.
A. R. BARNARD.
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