Chapter 11 Britain's "informal empire"

Manipulating and controlling free trade has been the essence of British economic strategy for the past 150 years.Britain's geniuses had the chameleon-like ability to find ways to adapt this policy to the vastly different international economy.However, the core of the policy retained Adam Smith's idea of ​​"absolute free trade", which aimed to use free trade as a weapon against the economic policies of other sovereign nations. In the late 19th century, British authorities began to debate bitterly about how to maintain their global empire.From the middle and late 1870s, there was a wave of "anti-imperialism" around the world.In this context, the British government is committed to adopting a smarter and more effective form to continue to maintain its world hegemony, which is the so-called "informal empire".While maintaining its colonial occupation of India and key areas of the Far East, British capital began to flow into other countries in large quantities, especially Argentina, Brazil and the United States, forming various forms of financial dependence. Colonial occupation is more effective.

The concepts of special economic relations with "vassal states," "spheres of influence," and "balance-of-power diplomacy" all arose in the late 19th century and were all related to the "informal empire" concocted by Britain. Since Britain defeated the Spanish fleet in 1588, Britain has deliberately kept a distance from the European continent by using its special island environment.This saves the cost of maintaining a large conventional army to defend her interests, allowing her to concentrate on dominating the seas.Whoever wanted to rule the Continent, from Russia to Spain, Britain could immediately create or fund a coalition against her to maintain the balance of power on the Continent.The plunder of world wealth gave Britain the ability to do so.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the process of reorganizing Europe in the wake of defeating Napoleon, Britain refined its cynical foreign policy of the so-called "balance of power".According to this policy, the parties were allocated to both sides of the "balance point" according to the size of their forces, and the fulcrum or center of the balance was strictly limited to London.In this regard, the British Foreign Office has always been secretive. This is the trick of the United Kingdom to transform the economic strength of its opponents into its own absolute advantage.

After 1815 the "geniuses" of British foreign policy devoted all their skills to balancing the alliance.If necessary, they can make surprise adjustments of European or global strategic forces according to their wishes.British diplomacy pursued a cynical creed that Britain would never enter into emotional or moral relations with other countries as partners respecting mutual sovereignty, but only its own "interests".Britain's alliance strategy is strictly limited, that is, which factors can best satisfy Britain's own "interests" in a specific period of time.To this end, Britain adjusted the hostile relationship with France caused by the dispute over African interests. After the "Fashoda Incident" in 1898, the UK transformed this hostile relationship into a "treaty-friendly" relationship, and changed the decades-old policy of preventing Russia's expansion and support for the Ottoman Empire (known in history as the Anglo-Russian "Great Game"), all of which indicated a dramatic shift in alliance relations.

In the final decades of the 19th century, the main flow of British money was to carefully selected countries with capital deficits, such as Argentina.The purpose of capital export is to finance, build, and then operate the railways and transportation facilities of these countries, often with the generous consent of the local government.British capital was also used to develop the shipping lines and ports of these countries.Thus, the economies of Argentina and other British vassals were effectively captives of the British economy, with their trade and financial terms being worked out by London merchants and banks.These vassal states discovered that although they could achieve the goal of supporting the British Empire by occupying Buenos Aires militarily and expropriating them violently, relatively speaking, the current method made the other party give up their fundamental economic sovereignty more completely. .

In the 1880s, Argentina transported its products, especially beef and wheat, to ports for export via newly built railways.Exports thus tripled, but her debts to London banks increased by 700%.The country was a debt vassal state of the British Empire, in what one commentator called "imperialism built on cheapness".The purpose of British policy was clear, not to develop a strong sovereign industrial state's own industry and economy from these vassal relations, but to exercise control with as little investment as possible to ensure that other competitors could not obtain the raw materials they coveted or other economic wealth.

During this period, British troops occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to defend the sea route from Britain to India.Britain must not allow Suez to fall into the hands of arch-rival France.The British military occupation completely destroyed the ruling structure of Egypt. After 1882, the British army was stationed in this strategic location linking London and India for a long time. Likewise, the original intent of the British occupation of South Africa was to defend the southern shipping lanes to India and to flank British trade shipping lines, thereby preventing flanking attacks by foreign adversaries.During the 1840s and 1850s, British control of South Africa was informal.The British closed the Boer Republic's gates to the Indian Ocean in stages, beginning its annexation with Natal in 1843, keeping the Boers out of the Bay of Dragua.Also interfered and hindered the Union of Boer Republics under the leadership of Pretoria in 1869.The purpose of this is to ensure British hegemony in the entire South African region in the easiest way.Securing Britain's monopoly over trade control was a major goal of British imperialism in the 19th century.

During this period, the British Secret Intelligence Service also developed a distinctive style.Unlike France or other countries, after Waterloo, Britain formed some kind of delicate combination among the main bankers and financiers in the City of London, government cabinet ministers, and leaders of major strategic industrial enterprises.The combination was facilitated by a descendant of the City of London Commercial Bank, Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro, who was a director of the Bank of England from 1928 until his death in 1963.During World War II, Hambro was the head of the Special Operations Team (SOE), the British secret intelligence service. This organization belongs to the government's Economic Operations Department. Its main task is to implement wartime economic operations against Germany. Training the intelligence elite who would become the leaders of the postwar CIA, including William Casey, Charles Kindleberger, Walter Rostow, Robert Rosa, and later Kennedy Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Wall Street elite , Brown Brothers partner Harriman.

The traditional intelligence agency is provided by spy agencies stationed in foreign capitals, while the British secret intelligence agency weaves together the vast British banking, shipping, industrial and government forces like a network.Because these are conducted in secret, gullible and unsuspecting foreign economic organizations have no defense whatsoever.In the period of free trade after 1846, this implicit combination of private commercial power and government was the secret of British hegemony.British foreign policy is based on carefully nurturing its own "interests" rather than maintaining good-neighbourly relations with allies, allies or alliances that can be changed overnight if need be.