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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Series Preface -- Introduction -- PART I: ECONOMICS AND POLITICS IN THE RISE OF EMPIRES 1760-1830 -- 1 'The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760-1830' -- 2 'Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas: I. The Old Colonial System, 1688-1850' -- 3 'The Industrial Revolution and British Imperialism, 1750-1850' -- 4 'Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe' -- THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE 'NEW IMPERIALISM' -- 5 'The Imperialism of Free Trade' -- 6 'A French Imperial Meridian, 1814-1870' -- 7 'The Portuguese Empire, 1825-90: Ideology and Economies' -- 8 'Dilemmas of Empire 1850-1918: Power, Territory, Identity' -- PART II: MODERN EMPIRES AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS -- DEVELOPMENT, UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND GLOBALIZATION -- 9 'The "Reversal of Fortune" Thesis and the Compression of History: Perspectives from African and Comparative Economic History' -- 10 'Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link' -- 11 'Crises of Accumulation, Coercion & -- the Colonial State: The Development of the Labour Control System 1919-29' -- MODERN EMPIRES AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: METROPOLITAN ECONOMIES -- 12 'Colonial Trade and Economic Development in France, Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries' -- 13 'The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain' -- 14 'The Economics of Japanese Imperialism in Korea, 1910-1939' -- PART III: POLITICS OF EMPIRES -- 15 'British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire' -- 16 "When Men are Weak": The Imperial Feminism of Frieda von Biilow' -- 17 'Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914' -- PART IV: TECHNOLOGIES OF RULE: POLITICS, GOVERNANCE AND MILITARISM.

The Business of Decolonization provides a fresh perspective on the end of the British Empire in Africa. It examines the transfer of power in the Gold Coast (Ghana) from the viewpoint of British companies and businessmen, investigating their involvement in nationalist politics and their place in British imperial policy during decolonization.

This article discusses political liberalism at the end of Empire in British Africa through analysis of British ideas about institution building below the level of parliamentary democracies. It suggests that while processes of institution-building have largely been discussed through the prism of development, they also constitute fruitful sites for the exploration of British ideas about the nature of politically-liberal systems. I argue that new articulations of an imperial liberalism during decolonisation had an energising effect on some Britons within domestic institutions whose expertise was called upon to assist with the development of successor institutions in emergent states. As they engaged in a process of institution-building, these individuals acted in ways that were not only determined by Western liberalism, but also by distinctive British ideas of the appropriate relationship of institutions to the state. I suggest, however, that while their approach to institution building in emergent states reflected deep rooted convictions about the kind of institutions that were essential to the operation of politically liberal systems, these ideals were in tension with more self-interested concerns which could in practice compromise efforts to replicate British institutions.

Recent studies have shown convincingly that no 'neocolonialist' conspiracies were hatched to perpetuate British commercial dominance in the former colonies after independence, and that relations between individual firms and policy‐makers were frequently troubled. In acknowledging the force of this general proposition, however, there is a risk of neglecting the still significant place of commercial considerations in state policy making. By relocating the relationship of trade and empire in the 1950s in an examination of a hitherto neglected dimension of British taxation policy, this article demonstrates that the Conservative government sought to assist British business with colonial interests at a time when these firms faced new uncertainties.