Gentlemanly Capitalism Research Articles

The Global Rise of the British Property Development Sector, 1945–1975

Abstract In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of empire, and their speculative transnational financing was made possible by allying with London’s financial sector and the world of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. This article surveys the rise, financialization, and imperially inflected internationalization of the British property development sector in this period, showing how property companies capitalized upon post-war Britain’s developer-friendly urban renewal order, internationalist financial sector, and inherited imperial advantages even as many of the formal political structures of empire were being dismantled. In the post-war decades, the remnants of empire as a commercial world system provided Britain’s property developers with vital stepping stones towards the fully globalized forms of financialized real-estate development that shape cities around the world today.

Honourable Businessmen: Respectability and ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ in Spain, 1840–1880

AbstractRevolution can lead to the complete political and social reconfiguration of a society. Such readjustment is often especially significant amongst the society's elites, as when ancient aristocrats had to converge with a newly emerging bourgeoisie. This article argues that over the course of the nineteenth century there was a steady process of negotiation that saw the evolution of a new form of elite, one defined by a new characteristic: respectability. This change saw successful businessmen, particularly magnates or tycoons, climbing to the top of the social ladder, as the culmination of a process that began in the eighteenth century. To illustrate this thesis, I discuss the case of Spain. I draw upon the lives of a large and diverse range of great Spanish bankers, industrialists, and businessmen. Traditionally, historiography has studied such men individually and from an economic history perspective. Here, a global, cultural approach is adopted. The chronology of the events described is not straightforward. Although the men studied are not all from a single birth cohort or even the same generation, I consider that they lived through the same social processes. The years between 1840 and 1880 were a period of intense industrial and business development in Spain during which modern economic practices were introduced. For the purposes of this article, I first situate the concept of respectability within the Spanish historiographical context, before analysing the discursive strategies that Spanish business magnates used to turn themselves into legitimate members of the county's new social elite. Finally, I study the three main symbolic tools that they employed to demonstrate their respectability and prove their status.

Gentlemanly Capitalism and the Baghdad Railway, 1888 –1914: ‘Cosmopolitanism’ vs. ‘Patriotism’

According to the interpretation of Cain and Hopkins, British imperialism was driven by a social stratum they dub ‘gentlemanly capitalists’. This refers to the financial and service sector based in south-eastern England. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on Cain’s and Hopkins’s approach by exploring how far it can shed light upon the stance of British business and political elites towards the German-dominated Baghdad railway project in the Ottoman Empire. Represented by Deutsche Bank, German interests started to construct railway lines in Anatolia from 1888 onwards. In 1903, they secured a concession to build a railway connecting Ankara with the Persian Gulf (the Baghdad railway). For the British, this raised the question of whether it was better to oppose or participate in that project. The latter option was pursued by a group of London-based financial interests. However, a competing group consisting of British railway and shipping interests vociferously opposed the plan of a German-French-British joint venture as inimical to British interests, thereby forcing the British government to reverse its previous support for the project. This was followed by years of abortive British-German-Ottoman negotiations. In 1913-14, a compromise was found: The British traded their acceptance of a German-controlled Baghdad railway against a number of concessions involving the Persian Gulf, railways, shipping and, crucially, oil. On the British side, the main winners of this agreement were the very same railway and shipping interests that had wrecked the previous plan. All the financial, railway and shipping interests involved in this affair can indeed be characterized as ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ in the vein of Cain and Hopkins. However, the findings of this article also show that the ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ were not as coherent a group as Cain and Hopkins would have it: There was a deep split between the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of some financial circles and the more narrow ‘patriotism’ of the railway and shipping interests.

‘Ungentlemanly capitalism’: John Hay and Malaya, 1904–1964

ABSTRACT John Hay was one of Britain’s leading colonial capitalists, building his career from the 1900s to the 1960s in Malaya’s plantation industry. He became the leading spokesperson for the British rubber growers, and played a major role in the formulation of international restriction schemes during the 1930s. Hay was a remarkable entrepreneurial talent, consolidating his corporate power through the premiere Malayan agency house, Guthrie & Co. This in itself challenges the notion that Britain’s myriad of ‘free-standing’ companies, which were typical of direct investment in the Empire, represented a relatively weak and unsustainable form of multinational enterprise. But Hay’s dominance of the Malayan plantation sector also questions the notion of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ as the driving force behind the expansion and sustenance of the British imperial system. Hay’s network of colonial corporate influence did not extend into the corridors of ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ power in Whitehall and the City, where he often had frosty relations. Ultimately, it was the financial sector in London that brought about Hay’s forced resignation from Guthrie in 1963. Examining questions of class, ethnicity, personality, ideology and strategy, the article focuses on why Hay did not develop better relations with commercial, financial and official elites, issues that would also engender tensions with the post-colonial political and business leadership of Malaya/Malaysia.

King Caz: Cazenove, Thatcherism, and the 1980s financial revolution.

This article shows how elite stockbrokers Cazenove and Co. responded to the 'Big Bang' deregulation of the financial sector in 1986, using social networks and inherited practices to navigate an ostensibly technical and modernizing revolution. The Thatcher administration's reform of the London Stock Exchange was an economic enterprise intended to end restrictive practices and open the City to competition. A more open meritocratic financial sector marked the 'death of gentlemanly capitalism' and coalesced with a political agenda for entrepreneurialism and popular capitalism. Yet this case study shows how Cazenove's culture drove its strategy, that privilege and hierarchy were sustained by influential cross-sector networks, and that there was resistance to change, even though technological change and new financial instruments were embraced as part of a strategy which mixed innovation with tradition. Essentially, elite networks persisted in the 1980s deregulated economy, as established relationships were used to optimum effect and became more important after Big Bang. A more mutually supportive relationship between finance and industry than has hitherto been imagined is also demonstrated. By showing how a modernizing revolution was navigated using social networks and traditions, this article restores the role of culture to financial history. It also contributes to a body of work in twentieth-century British history which challenges the perception that neoliberal ideas were consistently applied under Thatcherism and complicates the notion of a coherent Thatcherite project.

19世紀イギリス国民経済と海外拡張の再検討 : 「ジェントルマン的資本主義」の概念を中心にして(研究動向)

19世紀イギリス国民経済と海外拡張の再検討 : 「ジェントルマン的資本主義」の概念を中心にして(研究動向)

Understanding the British Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding the British Empire Aaron Windel Understanding the British Empire. By Ronald Hyam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 576 pp. $116.00 (cloth); $40.97 (paper). This volume brings together essays drawn from throughout the career of Cambridge University historian of the British Empire Ronald Hyam. The book’s title, Understanding the British Empire, suggests two meanings. As an intended capstone on almost sixty years of study in varied themes related to imperial history, the book admirably serves as an overview of the history of the British Empire. But these essays also offer readers glimpses of how Hyam has understood the field of British imperial history writing through its many methodological twists and turns over the past half century. The volume includes eighteen essays, many of which were published previously as book chapters or as journal articles. Nearly all show the author’s preference for political history. Some are from the realm of high politics, as with chapters on Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts in which Hyam offers somewhat sympathetic views of the controversial statesmen. Other chapters find angles of vision on the imperial state from much further down, from the vantage point of minor officials. A great share of the research represented here comes from deep excavations of government documents that over Hyam’s career have yielded valuable clues into the dreams and perceived duties of empire builders and forgotten colonial servants alike. There is more to this volume than political history. The essays range widely to offer insights on the history of British Christian missions abroad, to the question of whether economics was a constitutive factor behind the growth of the empire, and to the role of sexuality in British imperial policy and in the lives of members of the colonial service. While most of the essays work from the metropolitan center outward, some offer case studies drawn from locations in the empire itself. Chapters related to the history of Britain’s relationship with Africa are the most developed of these. The author includes helpful reflections at the head of each chapter to put these in the context of their original publication and sometimes [End Page 714] to answer critics. Hyam’s work on sexuality in the 1980s was somewhat controversial then, and in his chapter preambles in a section titled “Sexuality,” he concedes some points to critics who contended that he focused too narrowly on the testimony of male imperialists. Critics aside, the chapter reprinted here on the official prohibition of concubinage in the empire in 1909 (by an order of the colonial secretary that Hyam publishes here for the first time as an appendix) remains a fascinating account of how sexual scandal could be a vector for debate and reform of colonial practice. Other essays appear for the first time. One surveys the Colonial Office career of John Bennett, who, while not remembered in most histories of the end of the empire, was a constant dissenting voice in the Colonial Office. As early as 1947, and thus much earlier than most, Bennett was calling for rapid decolonization. Hyam assembles a composite of Bennett’s politics by reading the minutes and marginal notes found in Colonial Office records. Through the lens of Bennett’s career, Hyam is able to show how the internal machinery of imperial government was rife with class-based tensions and personal rivalries and how these could make a difference in which policies were promoted or abandoned. The collection offers frequent glimpses of what Hyam views as wrong turns in recent interpretations of the history of the empire. The volume is peppered with what seem like parting shots at writers who have helped to take British imperial historiography first down a Marxist path and later through the linguistic turn. For instance, Hyam chastises the historical anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff for indulging the “speculations of Edward Said” in their work on missionaries in Africa (p. 183). In a new essay, “The Myth of ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism,’” Hyam takes aim at the influential economic argument proposed by P. J. Caine and A. G. Hopkins that the large landholders had forged an alliance with London merchants and bankers in the seventeenth century and thus...

Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleRevisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism*Jan RügerJan RügerBirkbeck, University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 83, Number 3September 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660841 Views: 493Total views on this site Citations: 12Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, Holger Nehring The Cold War in European museums – filling the ‘empty battlefield’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 28, no.22 (Aug 2021): 180–199.https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2021.1954054Christian LEKON Gentlemanly Capitalism and the Baghdad Railway, 1888 –1914: ‘Cosmopolitanism’ vs. ‘Patriotism’, Journal of Universal History Studies 4, no.22 (Dec 2021): 118–140.https://doi.org/10.38000/juhis.1004940Paul K. MacDonald, Joseph M. Parent The Status of Status in World Politics, World Politics 73, no.22 (Mar 2021): 358–391.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000301Jesse Tumblin The Quest for Security, 14 (Oct 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595742 INTRODUCTION, Camden Fifth Series 56 (Apr 2019): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960116318000246 INTRODUCTION, Camden Fifth Series 51 (Aug 2016): 1–23.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960116316000038Brett Holman The Phantom Airship Panic of 1913: Imagining Aerial Warfare in Britain before the Great War, Journal of British Studies 55, no.11 (Jan 2016): 99–119.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2015.173JAMES PERKINS THE CONGO OF EUROPE: THE BALKANS AND EMPIRE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH POLITICAL CULTURE, The Historical Journal 58, no.22 (May 2015): 565–587.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X14000260Samuel R. Williamson July 1914 revisited and revised, (Mar 2014): 30–62.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107336995.004Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson Strategic rivalries and complex causality in 1914, (Mar 2014): 65–86.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107336995.006Keir Waddington “We Don't Want Any German Sausages Here!” Food, Fear, and the German Nation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Journal of British Studies 52, no.44 (Nov 2013): 1017–1042.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2013.178T. G. OTTE DÉTENTE 1914: SIR WILLIAM TYRRELL'S SECRET MISSION TO GERMANY, The Historical Journal 56, no.11 (Feb 2013): 175–204.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X1200057X

The ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ Thesis and Adam Smith

The ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ Thesis and Adam Smith

The “Gentlemanly Capitalism” Thesis and J. A. Hobson

The “Gentlemanly Capitalism” Thesis and J. A. Hobson

‘The rules of the game’: London finance, Australia, and Canada, c.1900–14

It is often asserted that, between 1865 and 1914, economic dependence on British capital subjected settler societies to an unofficial imperialism wielded by the City of London. This article argues that both advocates and critics of such models, particularly in the recent controversy over ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, pay insufficient attention to the City itself. Using the Edwardian City's connections with Australia and Canada, it illustrates the range of financial intermediaries involved and explores their perceptions of political economy in these countries. It concludes that the City's influence (or ‘structural power’) was limited by its internal divisions and hazy conceptions of political economy.

An Analysis of the British Colonialism in Southeast Asia in the 19thCentury: Based on the Theories of the “Official Mind” and “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”

An Analysis of the British Colonialism in Southeast Asia in the 19thCentury: Based on the Theories of the “Official Mind” and “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”

The Colonial in the Attic: Imperialism, the Victorian Domestic Novel and Gentlemanly Capitalism

The Colonial in the Attic: Imperialism, the Victorian Domestic Novel and Gentlemanly Capitalism

The Colonial in the Attic: Imperialism, the Victorian Domestic Novel and Gentlemanly Capitalism

The Colonial in the Attic: Imperialism, the Victorian Domestic Novel and Gentlemanly Capitalism

Revolutions without a Revolutionary Moment: Joint Stock Democracy & the Transition to Capitalism in Upper Canada

The transitions to capitalism and responsible government are two revolutions without a revolutionary moment in Ontario's history. This article examines the contribution of the corporation to both in the years before the Rebellion of 1837. It contrasts the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of chartered corporations under the oligarchic control of the Family Compact with a series of unincorporated joint stock companies managed by reformers, and by a small religious group, the Children of Peace, in particular. Tracing the overlapping boards of management of these joint stock companies with reform political organizations reveals the economic impetus for the emergence of a culture of deliberative democracy. These joint stock companies were developed to help preserve the freehold property of farmers, and hence their political voice. The irony of the capitalist and democratic revolutions in Ontario was their co-operative joint stock nature.

Revolutions without a Revolutionary Moment: Joint Stock Democracy & the Transition to Capitalism in Upper Canada

Abstract The transitions to capitalism and responsible government are two revolutions without a revolutionary moment in Ontario's history. This article examines the contribution of the corporation to both in the years before the Rebellion of 1837. It contrasts the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of chartered corporations under the oligarchic control of the Family Compact with a series of unincorporated joint stock companies managed by reformers, and by a small religious group, the Children of Peace, in particular. Tracing the overlapping boards of management of these joint stock companies with reform political organizations reveals the economic impetus for the emergence of a culture of deliberative democracy. These joint stock companies were developed to help preserve the freehold property of farmers, and hence their political voice. The irony of the capitalist and democratic revolutions in Ontario was their co-operative joint stock nature.

From Free-trade Imperialism to Structural Power: New Zealand and the Capital Market, 1856–68

For Cain and Hopkins, the ‘structural power’ of gentlemanly capitalism was the most important means by which by British imperialism affected settler societies from the mid-nineteenth century. Like similar borrowers, self-governing colonies encountered this most directly by their participation in the London capital market. The potential consequences were illustrated by the failure of New Zealand's provinces to meet the market's standard of credit-worthiness during the early 1860s. At the same time as imperial supervision of provincial borrowing fell away, the Stock Exchange's refusal to list provincial loans made them unmarketable in the City, swiftly leading to the provinces' disappearance as separate borrowers in London. The episode vividly demonstrated gentlemanly capitalism's ability to define the ‘rules of the game’ as far as dependent borrowers were concerned. More fundamentally, however, the market was asserting the minimum requirements of credit-worthiness necessary for its own survival.

Gentlemanly Capitalism Revisited: A Case Study of the Underpricing of Initial Public Offerings on the London Stock Exchange 1946-86

The tender, or auction, method achieved substantially lower underpricing than the traditional fixed-price offer for firms going public on the London Stock Exchange between 1946 and 1986. Yet, relatively few firms adopted this more efficient method. Employing a new IPO data set, I estimate that this reluctance to adopt tenders imposed a material cost upon issuing firms of up to £4 billion in real proceeds forgone, excluding privatisations. This missed opportunity is attributable to a lack of competition in IPO underwriting in the period before Big Bang.

The strategies and limits of gentlemanly capitalism: the London East India agency houses, provincial commercial interests, and the evolution of British economic policy in South and South East Asia 1800–50

This article explores the development of the London East India agency houses during the first half of the nineteenth century, and their evolving commercial and political relationships with merchants and manufacturers in the British provinces. It outlines the emergence of pressure groups in Britain concerned with influencing British economic policy in India and the Far East, and their role in shaping policy as the East India Company receded in importance following the Charter Acts of 1813 and 1833. What emerges is a complex picture of collaboration between interest groups in London and the provinces. This challenges and refines aspects of the gentlemanly capitalism thesis of Cain and Hopkins, which emphasizes both the supremacy of London‐based financial and mercantile interests in the formation of British policy towards the empire, and the separateness of City‐based ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ from provincial mercantile and industrial interests.

Social networks and the transnational reach of the corporate class in the early-twentieth century

This paper explores the character, density and likely importance of connections between directors of a sample of 12 early-twentieth century British multinational companies. Drawing on the notion of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, a reconstruction of multiple and interlocking directorships for 1899–1900 and 1929–1930 indicates that a complex network existed that comprised links, respectively, to 255 and 497 companies. We explore the social, cultural and political characteristics of the directors of our sample and argue that the ways in which members of this group interacted with each other would have influenced business attitudes, facilitated transfers of knowledge and promoted interdependencies, thereby shaping commercial behaviour. We argue that the directors of early multinationals formed the kind of definable ‘power geometries’ within the wider corporate elite that have been identified amongst today's business elites. Our results indicate that a distinct and increasingly dynamic multinational corporate community existed in the early 1900s, which was in many respects like its modern counterparts. A key finding is that the complexity of dyadic connections between directors and their personal networks of contacts increased markedly between 1899–1900 and 1929–1930.