production relations throughout four periods of world orders. This analysis is important as a background for the following chapter, which clarifies how the societal ‘need’ for particular types of human capital at various points in history is grappled with at the national level, in conjunction with the restructuring of capitalism.
foreign policy. Nonetheless, the British aristocracy’s political decisions became inherently committed to the support and beneficence of the economic system of liberalism. Pax Britannica was thus a bourgeois hegemony, led by the aristocracy.
During this period, the aristocracy managed the drastic improvement of transportation between and within countries, and facilitated trade and unprecedented resource imports/exports as well as the export of ideas and influence. Gold mining was on the increase, paper currencies were circulated more frequently, and techniques for credit were introduced, meaning that the mobilisation of capital also accelerated significantly.
Britain in particular extended its external relationships through emigration, trade and capital investment, and countries with peripheral status were the centres of production for these industries while the ‘bourgeois’ states flourished. ‘Catching up’ became the tune of modernisation and a goal for peripheral states. Any resulting social unrest was seen as a scientific necessity for development and eventual prosperity. Ricardo (1951) and Say (1953) promoted this lassez-faire, free enterprise, free market notion of the ‘liberal utopia’. For a liberal utopia to become established, these philosophers took for granted that some social groups would have to suffer. The poor would have to support the idea of riches despite poverty- stricken groups’ obvious exclusion. ‘Lacking wealth oneself, one must wish wealth for others: an indigent has infinitely greater possibilities for earning his living and becoming well off if he lives among a rich population, than if he is surrounded by poor people like himself’ (Say 1953: 195).
The hegemonic liberal world order of Pax Britannica thus came to fruition via British-led establishment of mechanised industry and via the expansion of trade in the 1800s and early 1900s. Perhaps the best known theorist to have conceptualised how this might occur is the Scottish economist Adam Smith. His work The Wealth of Nations (1776) opposed any government intervention in economies, advocated no restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers on commerce, and no tariffs. ‘Free’ trade is the predominant characteristic of liberal capitalism. Thus the role of the state during the hegemonic liberal world order was increasingly geared toward the reduction of controls and diminishing state regulation for this purpose. Likewise ‘free’ enterprise and ‘free’ competition were two complimenting ideals for this economic order. In countries where Britain or America established some form of tangible relations of trade or investment, the ‘core’ nation was not necessarily directly in command of
the internal activities, but relied on local governments to enforce the
‘rules’ of open markets and liberal practice.
Britain maintained positive relations by way of favourable trade agreements with countries who were most compliant with liberal trade practices. Cox shows that this early liberal expansion project was spherically hierarchical, that the world of liberal states in the 1840s to 1870s was constructed with Britain at the heart, and a secondary interior circle (Figure 3) included consenting (and in various ways, coerced) nations. ‘Inner circle’ countries were the participants in industrial growth and trade expansion, countries who were originally protectionist but who were quickly converted to the principle of free trade, and until 1914, to the reception of the gold standard.
Figure 3. Hierarchy of Liberal States 1840s–1870s (Cox 1987: 144–5)
Pax Britannica: Social Forces Engendered by Production Relations Both forms of state and production relations were affected during this time period in what Cox calls ‘penetrated’ areas, as a result of the political/economic influence and leadership of expansive nations (1987:
144, 146). In penetrated areas, or those areas at the periphery of expansive nations, traditional institutions were uprooted and replaced, or otherwise adapted to British and European industry requirements. During Pax Britannica, vocational education became increasingly separated from
‘classical’ education. States rebuilt infrastructures of society in order to integrate previously ‘unnecessary’ functions that in sum protected growth of the liberal economy. British and European expansive states thus
directed coercion abroad through requiring unprecedented tax policies, restructuring property laws, and the elites prioritised financing and investing in communications facilities and transport. This state leadership was accompanied in Asia, Latin America and the Mediterranean by the agency of local bourgeoisies, who functioned as organic intellectuals to the hegemonic economic doctrines, and who were the intermediaries of capital between the penetrated areas and expansive countries.
Production relations remained static in this time period only in areas of traditionally local tributary or peasant-lord production methods, where pressure was applied to increase surplus of goods to be traded for other goods. In several areas, production relations began to resemble those of the expansive countries, an enterprise-labour-market process. Cox points out evidence of this transformation in for example the United States, where after the Civil War, slave production was replaced by the enterprise- labour-market plantation production of cotton. Egypt saw the destruction of the peasant agriculture as British and European factories demanded cotton at rates exceeding the traditional production rates, and land holdings were redistributed accordingly. Since India was actually ruled by Britain, its traditional production methods and land ownership were dramatically changed. The Indian artisan was ruined; British cotton textiles led to sudden unemployment of masses of labourers. And finally in Africa, mining enclaves owned by expansive countries were placed in various units, enclaves that required an organically directed labour force. Organic intellectuals were thus needed within penetrated areas to enforce introduced modes of production.
The works of Irving Fisher (1906), Alfred Marshall (1890), Adam Smith (1776), and Johann Heinrich von Thunen (1875) each maintain a particular view of the role that people play in the capitalist system. These elite, ideologically Western intellectuals perceived human beings them- selves as capital. For Smith, the aggregation of abilities and skills of residents were as much a factor of capital determining a nations’
prosperity as trade relations. T. Paul Schultz (1971: 26, 27) of the Chicago School of Economics writes that if labour is a ‘produced means of production’, then workers are not equal in their abilities and skills and must compete to become capitalists through
… the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value.
This knowledge and skill are in great part the product of investment and, combined with other human investment, predominantly
account for the productive superiority of the technically advanced countries.
This portrayal of workers originated with intellectuals of Pax Britannica who marvelled at Britain’s rapid expansion, but their ideas have not disappeared and are evident in neoliberal economic theory.
Despite the ‘hegemonic’ nature of the time period, workers were originally excluded from ‘access to … power in the state’ and were not represented by the state. This lack of representation occurred at several levels of the employment stratum. I would ask, how, then, could workers be portrayed as a ‘consenting’ force to Cox’s vision of global hegemony?
At this time, workers were ostracised from government involvement in the same way that manufacturers and agricultural workers were excluded from decision making. Uprisings against this oppression included the 1830 Swing Riots, which were violently countered by the government. However the government finally permitted some extent of involvement of middle class workers in state affairs via the Whig reforms. The working class remained alienated from decision making and subordinate to supposed market forces, and the peril of workers’ uprising posed an increasing threat to the bourgeois hegemony. Tory member Sir Robert Peel intervened at a strategically intelligent moment and provided a ‘solution’
to the potential for ongoing uprisings. He made a proposal for concessions and worker appeasement, and introduced a bill to reduce working hours. Peel downplayed class divisions by avoiding the direct association of the propertied class to the state (50–1). This ingenuity led to the minimisation of uprisings and a hegemonic consensus across groups in Britain. Cox (1987: 147) writes that ‘class conflict in the expansive centre was not polarised—the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary force since the old-regime aristocracies had learned to rule in their interests, and the workers had not yet become a coherent challenge’ (147).
Across Europe and the wider world, British troops, intellectuals and bureaucrats aided the development of organic intellectuals who would sustain production relations and social norms during the world order of Pax Britannica. ‘British-ness’ had become the desired form for fashion, work ethics, and sports. British ‘domination’ spread across five continents.
Sterling enjoyed international currency status. But Cox’s theorised
‘hegemony’ could not last forever, and colonial uprisings began to emerge in Algeria, Egypt, and India, where the supposed consent to ultimately coercive trade relations and national requirements made of workers and
the formation of organic intellectuals were not fully established. British leadership came to an end at the turn of the century, and the period of
‘mixed imperialisms’ began.