Abstract
Of all international institutions the Commonwealth is notoriously the most difficult to classify. This is as true of its economic as of its more overtly political activities. Where many studies of international economic organisation are concerned with integration, a study of the Commonwealth must necessarily concern itself with a process of disintegration — the dismantling of the British Empire — and with the creation of an institutional framework to manage and reflect this process. However useful its members find the contemporary Commonwealth it is no longer the centre of their universe, or the repository of their major international hopes.
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Notes and References
The subsidised flow of surplus labour to the dominions was encouraged by the Empire Settlement Act. See W. David McIntyre, The Commonwealth of Nations: Origins and Impact 1869–1971 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 318–21.
Nicholas Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs: Problems of External Policy, 1931–39 (London: Oxford University Press for the RIIA, 1952) pp. 9–33.
The best account of the period after Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931 is Ian Drummond, The Floating Pound and the Sterling Area, 1931–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Two such arguments are to be found in Guy Arnold, Economic Co-operation in the Commonwealth (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967);
Derek Ingram, The Imperfect Commonwealth (London: Rex Collins, 1977).
Philip Bell, The Sterling Area in the Postwar World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 3–17. Bell notes the importance of stable exchange rates in both the pre-World War II sterling bloc and the post-World ar II sterling area.
Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 245.
D. J. Morgan, The Official History of Colonial Development, 5 vols, The Origins of British Aid Policy, 1924–45, vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1980).
RIIA, The Problem of International Investment (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the RIIA, 1937) p. 134.
Judd Polk, Sterling: Its Meaning in World Finance (New York: Harper Brothers, for the Council on Foreign Relations, 1956), pp. 42–54.
For a full account of the Anglo-American discussions at the time see Richard Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective, new expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
See Nicholas Mansergh, Documents and Speeches on British Commonwealth Affairs, 1931–1952, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press for the RIIA, 1953), vol. I, pp. 562–85;
Nicholas Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs: Problems of Wartime Co-operation and Post-War Change, 1939–1952 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 164–89;
Commonwealth Economic Committee, Commonwealth Trade, 1950–1957 (London: HMSO, 1959);
Commonwealth Economic Committee, Commonwealth Trade with the United States, 1948–1957 (London: HMSO, 1959).
For a discussion of the formulation and operation of the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement see Michael Moynagh, ‘The Negotiation of the Cornntonwealth Sugar Agreement, 1949–1951’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 15 (1977): 170–90;
Vincent A. Mahler, ‘Britain, the European Community and the Developing Commonwealth: Dependence, Interdependence and the Political Economy of Sugar’, International Organization, 35 (1981), 467–92.
An account of economic relations in the Commonwealth up to the founding of the Secretariat can be found in J. D. B. Miller, Survey of Commonwealth Affairs: Problems of Expansion and Attrition, 1953–1969 (London: Oxford University Press for the RIIA, 1974), chapters 12, 13 and 20.
Arnold Smith (with Clyde Sanger), Stitches in Time: The Commonwealth in World Politics (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981), p. 45. In Smith’s memoirs chapters are generally delineated by political events to which the major portion of the book is devoted.
Commonwealth Secretary-General,. Report of the Commonwealth Secretary-General, 1981 (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1981) pp. 70–8.
Report of the Commonwealth Technical Group, The Common Fund, (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1977), p. 7.
ODA, British Development Co-operation With the Least Developed and Poorest Countries (London: HMSO, 1981), p. 18.
Coverage of both the Lomé Convention and the role of Commonwealth countries in the ACP is given in Allen Frey-Wouters, The European Community and the Third World: The Lomé Convention and its Impact (New York: Praeger, 1980).
For discussion of the problems of Caribbean integration in relation to Britain and the EEC see Anthony Payne, The Politics of the Caribbean Community, 1961–1979 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980);
W. A. Axline, Caribbean Integration: the Politics of Regionalism (London: Frances Pinter, 1979).
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© 1984 A. J. R. Groom and Paul Taylor
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Kilgore, A., Mayall, J. (1984). The Residual Legatee: Economic Co-operation in the Contemporary Commonwealth. In: Groom, A.J.R., Taylor, P. (eds) The Commonwealth in the 1980s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05691-0_11
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