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Forging a British World of Trade explores the politics of culture, ethnicity, and market in the Empire-Commonwealth between the 1880s and 1970s, focusing on efforts to promote an economic system centred on trade between the UK and the old Commonwealth. This chapter situates the themes of the study within the existing historiography on British World networks. In recent years British World studies have received significant criticism both for the focus of their research and its absences. A key part of the problem here is that studies of the British World too often neglect key questions of uneven cultural and power relations. No one idea about the optimal future of British World collaboration was ever hegemonic. We should not discard the British World as a category of analysis, but rather explore how British World economic networks competed over time with alternative national, regional, and international ideas of trade community.

This chapter opens with an overview of the nature of middle-class West Indian understandings of Britishness, and suggests the impact of Caribbean British identity on West Indian societies in the twentieth-century colonial period. West Indians’ idea of Britishness, which combined a focus on respectability with expectations of racial and geographical inclusiveness, allowed them to form strong bonds with native Britons (persons born and bred in the British Isles) and create a place for themselves in the colonial world. As empire declined they would struggle to unravel Caribbean society from the Britishness they considered a vital part of their own identity. This introduction explores these ideas in the context of recent literature on the British World, colonial Caribbean society, decolonization, and the meaning of imperial culture, outlines the geographical and analytical parameters of the book, and provides working definitions of significant terms used in the text.

This concluding chapter considers how West Indian understandings of Britishness, as well as the institutional and migratory pathways through which they were reinforced, may have influenced both Britain and the Caribbean in the post-colonial era. It suggests that continuing bonds between Caribbean peoples and native Britons had an important and complex impact on the newly constituted independent societies in the Caribbean as well as on post-war domestic British culture. It comments on related literature on colonial relationships to Britishness, particularly that dealing with the concept of respectability as developed by colonials of color in other parts the British World. It encourages further explorations of British identity amongst these peoples, as well as amongst white West Indians and the working classes in the context of British royalty, generational and ethnic factors, the English language, and religion.

This chapter situates the emergence of a modern understanding of parliament within the context of, what historians call, the British World. It argues that a desire amongst British colonists to adopt Westminster-style parliaments in the colonies gave the issue of parliamentary inefficiency a transnational significance. The rapid population and economic growth that characterized these imperial locations from the mid-nineteenth century accentuated the slowness of the ‘ancient rules’ of parliamentary law-making and an imperial network of news and newspapers circulated throughout the Empire the complaints over parliamentary inefficiency that were emerging in Britain. Colonists thus came to see the deficiencies of their own legislatures as part of a wider political problem within the British World.

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on Robert Feke's portraits of wealthy Boston merchant Charles Apthorp (1698–1758), his wife Grizzell, and their oldest daughter. Feke's portraits of Charles and Grizzell speak to the ambivalent complexity of the colonizing efforts of the British Empire. On the surface, these portraits do exactly what they were meant to do: celebrate mercantile success and refinement in ways easily recognized around the British Atlantic World. However, they also remind us of particularly American, and sometimes troublingly dark, aspects of the imperial experiment. Colonists lived in a geographic space at risk of encroachment by the French Empire. In city and country, colonists employed forced labor and dispossession to further their settlement, practices that put them at constant risk of conflict with enslaved people and Native Americans. For all their wealth and costly goods, theirs was not the same provincial world inhabited by their counterparts across the Atlantic.