ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how British co-operation evolved during the last few decades, moving from seemingly terminal decline in the 1980s to major reform in the 1990s and commercial recovery and growth in the 2000s, followed by crisis and reform between 2013 and 2016, before yet another period of stabilisation and recovery. By 1980, most of the global system of depots and productive facilities built up by the British co-operative wholesales in the previous century had been dismantled. The history of the wholesales’ overseas procurement certainly bears out much of the criticism, from the willingness to trade with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1930s, to deeply flawed relations with producer co-operation in Ireland. The experience of British wholesales in international procurement and trade is a powerful case study in how large global player developed its international networks during an earlier phase of globalisation and adapt those networks to the dramatic retreat of globalisation between 1929 and early 1950s.
