ABSTRACT
Globalisation ought not only be approached as a material reality, the increasing and increasingly intense connectedness of various parts of the globe, but also as a cultural phenomenon constituted through sets of ideas about the integration of the globe.1 Such ideas are not only at the heart of the culture of globalisation, hence important in their own right, but also the way in which globalisation is imagined can play an important role in shaping actual exchanges of goods, finance, people, and ideas. Thus, when assessing the impact of the Great War on globalisation, it is necessary not only to consider the war’s impact on patterns of connection and exchange, but also to chart the war’s impact on ideas about economic, and indeed geopolitical, governance. To this end, this chapter considers the impact of the Great War on conceptions of global political economy in Britain and the British Empire. It explores how the war reshaped the ways in which global trade was imagined. Since international businesses lie at the intersection both of the material realities and cultural imaginaries of globalisation, the article focuses on debates on trade and tariff policy after the war amongst businessmen, re-examining the development of what J. A. Hobson called the ‘new protectionism’. It argues that new protection not only signified a significant defeat for British free trade ideology, but also involved a significant re-ordering of spatial understandings of global commerce as the pre-war political economy of tariff reform transformed to accommodate Britain and her empire within a broader global liberal alliance.
