Exceptionalism and Industrialisation

The French administrator who thus wrote to the Compagnie des Indes in 1768 was pointing to one of several advantages of British merchants over their European rivals: they paid lower prices for Asian commodities because the English East India Company, in firm control over Bengal since the battle of Plassey (1757), could most effectively perform the familiar state functions of privatising gains and socialising costs and losses.

What the French administrator possibly ignored, and could not easily foresee, is that Britain's far stronger foothold in India was, had been and would remain one of the pillars of her trading system. Another distinctive pillar was the long-standing trade and common commercial practices with the thirteen colonies that would become the United States after 1776–83. A third British advantage arguably stemmed, despite a slow start and temporary losses in the late 1800s, from the profitable exports to rival Empires through the Free Ports that were successively opened in the British West Indies since 1766.

The significance of these and other British trades lay not so much in their comparative size as in the effective coordination that their number, their geographical spread, and their commodity composition made possible.