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.

For good reason, the introduction to this volume of essays in honor of Patrick O’Brien must begin with the narrative of O’Brien's singular contribution to the establishment of globalization as a major field of study in the social sciences and humanities. As his LSE colleague, Tirthankar Roy, expressed it: “Patrick's biggest contribution to building global economic history as a field was to start and then lead the GEHN [Global Economic History Network] since 2002.” O’Brien's other LSE colleague, Gareth Austin, takes the narrative a little further back:

The first meeting of the seminar was held in February 1996, during which O’Brien stated the focus of the Institute's seminar series “not as research, but as a conversation among specialists in different fields.” With funding from the Renaissance Trust, O’Brien led the seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research until his retirement as the convener in 2000. Following his retirement from the Institute, he was immediately recruited by LSE, where the inspiration from the seminar conversations he led had given rise to the establishment of the first graduate teaching program in global history in the United Kingdom (M. Sc in Global History). The first students were admitted to the program in 2000, just as O’Brien was transitioning from the Institute to LSE.

Once in LSE, O’Brien expanded his focus. The first major development was the establishment of an intercontinental research network – the Global Economic History Network (GEHN). The idea of the GEHN and the leadership of its research and worldwide conference activities, all came from O’Brien, funded by a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust in Britain. At full strength, GEHN included 49 scholars from several disciplines and with specialization in the economic histories of several parts of the world, and affiliated to universities in Britain, Holland, Italy, Germany, the United States, Turkey, India, and Japan.

The contribution of British imperialism to the globalization process needs to be examined within the broader context of the role of the state in the long-run development process from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Development economists and economic historians generally acknowledge the importance of the market in long-run economic development. But very few admit the role of the state in positively shaping the growth and direction of the market. Patrick O’Brien is one of a few economic historians who assign a major role to mercantilist policies that shaped the direction of the development process in the Atlantic world during the age of mercantilism, 1650–1850. In a series of articles, he argues strongly that a successful application of mercantilist policies, barked effectively with military might, was what distinguished Great Britain from her European rivals in the competitive development process in the Atlantic world between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth century.

We have argued elsewhere that the process of establishing the integrated global economy went through two main stages: the first saw the establishment of the nineteenth-century integrated Atlantic economy; the second was the extension of the Atlantic economy to incorporate the economies of the rest of the world. The state played a critical role in both stages. In the first stage, mercantilist West European states (especially Great Britain) played a central role; the second was led by the British free trade state. This chapter focuses specifically on the second stage, with some brief references to the first for context. The chapter is divided into three sections. For purposes of clarity of communication, the first section discusses conceptual issues of what constitutes globalization as a historical process and the relevance of the concept to West African history. The second examines in detail the process through which the free trade British empire integrated the economies of British West Africa into the global economy. The conclusion of the chapter is drawn up in the third section.

Conceptual Issues on Globalization as A Historical Process

Historians studying globalization as a historical process have a problem of conceptual clarity. If we do not identify precisely the defining elements of globalization from the onset of investigation, it is difficult if not impossible to present a coherent and focused study of the long-run historical development of the phenomenon. A few years ago, Frederick Cooper questioned the relevance of the concept of globalization to African history.

The comparatively poor performance of the economies of sub-Saharan Africa in the current global economy has been a challenge to scholars and policy makers alike. Economic historians, economists, and political scientists have struggled to understand the puzzle of sub-Saharan African economic development with little success. Without helpful guidance from economic historians and economists, policy makers have often applied ill-informed policy prescriptions with disastrous outcomes. For a while, economic historians seem to have abandoned sub-Saharan Africa out of frustration (Hopkins 2009). Happily, there appears to be a turnaround; economic historians are returning to sub-Saharan Africa as the growing popularity of globalization has helped to focus attention, once again, on long-run historical processes as a source of knowledge for the understanding of contemporary situations (Inikori 2007a). We have begun to see imaginatively articulated articles seeking to explain long-run development processes in sub-Saharan Africa.

This welcome development, however, appears unconnected, or at least not seriously connected, to a major historiographical development with much potential for a clearer understanding of the long-run development process in western Africa. As part of the growing globalization discourse, Atlantic world history is now one of the fastest growing fields of historical scholarship (Bailyn 2005; Canizares-Esguerra and Seeman 2007; Coclanis 2005; Eltis, Lewis, and Sokoloff 2004; Inikori 1979, 2002a; Mancke and Shammas 2005; McCusker and Morgan 2000; O’Rourke and Williamson 1999; Solow 1991). Studying the Atlantic basin as a unit of historical analysis enables us to overcome the myopic view of long-run development processes in the major regions of the Atlantic basin as self-contained and isolated phenomena (Davis 1973, xi). The relational framework of Atlantic world history gives us a clear view of the interconnections between the long-run development processes in the individual subregions of the Atlantic basin. Recent research seeking to explain long-run economic development processes in western Africa has yet to fully incorporate this relational framework of Atlantic world history. Like mainstream European economic historio-graphy (Inikori 2009b), the highly imaginative recent works generally lose sight of the fact that long-run economic development processes in western Africa during the formative centuries, 1450–1850, were essentially part of an integrated historical process in the Atlantic basin. If we are not fully conscious of this fact, we are unlikely to accurately identify the causal factors in the process, properly understand how they operated and interacted with other factors, and assign to them their correct causal weights.

The development of markets and the market economy was central to the process of socioeconomic development in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In the main, the process was propelled by the plantation and mining zones located in the New World. Large-scale specialization in commodity production for Atlantic commerce in these zones created markets, which stimulated a second round of large-scale specialization in the production of goods and services for Atlantic commerce in other regions across the Atlantic. The third round in the causal linkages that produced generalized market development and the geographical spread of the market economy in the Atlantic world occurred within the domestic economies in the region. Wherever specialization in the production of goods and services for export to Atlantic markets occurred, a domestic market was created for producers within the domestic economy, as long as all or the bulk of the specialized export producers' needs were not imported from elsewhere. The process in respect of colonial North America has been described by Shepherd and Walton:

THE FIRST RECORDED SHIPMENT of captives from western Africa over the Atlantic by Europeans occurred in 1441 (Blake 1977, 5). These were victims of raids by the Portuguese in the small coastal communities of Senegambia.Subsequently, persistent Portuguese demand for captives stimulated supply, on the basis of which trade in captives developed and the Portuguese gave up forceful capture, to be resumed later in west-central Africa after the establishment of their colony of Angola in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Vansina 1992, 558–59). The Portuguese chronicler Azurara records that by 1448 nearly one thousand captives had been shipped to Portugal from western Africa (Blake 1977, 16–17). The colonization of the Americas by European powers in the early sixteenth century and the concomitant phenomenal growth of demand for slave labor there catapulted the trade to heights that completely dwarfed all trade in humans ever recorded in history, especially during the plantation revolution in the Americas, between 1650 and 1850. From the 1440s to the 1860s, millions of people, variously estimated by recent research at between 12 million and 20 million (Inikori and Engerman 1992; Inikori 1998; H. Klein 1999; Eltis 2000), were shipped against their will by Europeans and European colonists.

Why was demand for slave labor in the Americas exclusively focused on Africa? Why did the export of captives from Europe come to an end just as the demand for slave labor was about to explode? What conditions in Africa sustained the supply of so many export captives for so long a period of time? What did the individuals and communities do to protect themselves from capture and sale for export? What did the governments in Africa do to protect their subjects? What role did the shift of European demand from the predominance of African products to the predominance of captives play in the evolution of state institutions and the direction of foreign policy in the states of Africa? What factors explain state involvement in the export trade in captives?

Despite the impressive research of the past three decades these overlapping questions are not adequately addressed in the literature. They help to define the focus of this chapter, which specifically addresses the role of the state in the struggle of communities and individuals in Africa against the Atlantic slave trade.

THE EVOLUTION OF FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS – comprising banking houses, discount houses, the stock exchange, and insurance houses – constituted an important part of the development of the English economy between 1650 and 1850. The combined operation of these institutions structured the credit economy in England during and after the Industrial Revolution. Their importance in the development process can be viewed from different angles. Being part of the service sector of the economy, their independent contribution to the growth of national income and employment over time can be examined in its own right. Crafts has estimated that government and defense, and housing and services contributed 27 percent of British national output in the eighteenth century, and 26 percent in the period 1801–31. C. H. Lee takes a broader view of the service sector to include trade, transport, insurance, banking, financial and business services, professional and scientific services, public administration, and defense – in short, the residual of the national income after taking out the contribution of agriculture, mining, industry, and construction. Under his broad conception of the service sector, Lee computes that the contribution of the respective sectors to the estimated overall employment growth rate of 1.73 percent per annum between 1755 and 1851 was 54.9 percent for industry (including manufacturing, mining, and construction), 22.0 percent for agriculture, 19.1 percent for services, and unclassified, 4.0 percent.