Because historians are yet to establish a generally agreed upon conception of what constitutes globalization as a historical process, there is a general problem of communication in demonstrating the contribution of British imperialism to the process, the subject of this book. It is tempting to assume, after several decades of celebrating globalization since the 1990s (starting with the media), that historians and other scholars interested in globalization as a historical process would agree on the main focus of investigation – integration and hierarchy. It may be frustrating to observe that the assumption is not altogether correct. The chapters in this book coherently focus on integration and hierarchy as the central location for the assessment of the contribution of British imperialism to globalization as a historical process. This book is not about the general history of British imperialism, with the multiple issues it entails. Its focus is less expansive than that. What was celebrated as globalization by the media in the 1990s was the very tight integration of markets across the globe compelling division of labor among the world economies so integrated. This had observable economic, political, social, and environmental consequences – the snapshot observation. The analytical task for the chapters in this book is the long-run historical process, with all the complexities, that produced the snapshot observation, with specific reference to the contribution of British imperialism. The long-run process entailed the development of markets and market-based economies across the globe and the subsequent integration of the local and regional markets into the world market. When the chapters in the book show how the operation of the empire stimulated the development of markets and the geographical expansion of market-based economies, it should be understood that those chapters are demonstrating the contribution of the empire to the long-run process that created the global economy. The second stage of the contribution is when imperial policy acted to integrate the local and regional markets created into the world market.

Given this focus, what is important for the assessment of imperial contribution is not just the geographical extent of the British Empire during the long nineteenth century, which must not be underestimated, but the free trade policies pushed by the empire at home and in the colonies from the mid-nineteenth century.