ABSTRACT
In recent years some historians have cast a good deal of new light on the economic relations between the United Kingdom and the self-governing Dominions between 1918 and 1939. These fresh treatments have largely taken the form of ‘pure’ economic history; the most celebrated among them, however,—those by the Canadian historian, Ian Drummond-are only loosely connected with the broad sweep of imperial historiography.1 It may, therefore, prove worthwhile to approach at least a fragment of this aspect of Anglo-Dominion history from the standpoint of Ronald Robinson’s concept of collaborative bargain-making as the true stuff of empire; and in particular his classic remark that it was the white colonist who was ‘…the ideal, pre-fabricated collaborator…[with the result that in] white colonies…collaboration proved both stable and effective’.2
