The argument of this book has been that the fate of the world-system in which the British Empire was embedded was largely determined by geopolitical forces over which the British themselves had little control. The distribution of wealth and power within and between the two ends of Eurasia, in East Asia and Europe, created the openings and then closed off the freedoms that the British had exploited with striking success since the early nineteenth century. Once the politics and economics of both these great regions had turned against them, and wrecked the fine balance of naval and military power on which the defence of their interests depended, they had little chance of surviving at the head of an independent world-system. Perhaps they might have hoped to ride out the storm. But the strategic catastrophe of 1938 to 1942, and its devastating impact on the central elements of their system, were together so crushing that recovery (after 1945) was merely short-lived remission.

Of course, the British were not just victims of blind fate, benign or malign. They had taken a hand in prompting the geopolitical changes from which they had gained, although (as at Trafalgar) perhaps more to ward off an imminent danger than to create a main chance. The peculiar trajectory of the British economy before 1800, and the accompanying emergence of a ‘polite and commercial society’, were essential foundations.