The British Empire Economies in the Great Depression

Abstract

To some extent it is possible to generalise about the economic experience of the British Empire¹during the nineteen-thirties. By 1929, almost every I part of the Empire had become integrated into the international economy, exporting primary products and manufactures and importing manufactures, capital,and labour. Thus all were in varying degrees dependent upon the levels of economic activity and of prices in the industrialised countries of the North Atlantic area. When prices and outputs collapsed in the metropolitan areas, the effect in the dependent economies of the Empire was immediate, varying in intensity from painful to catastrophic. To a remarkable extent, the economic history of the Empire in the thirties is an account of price-raising devices — commodity control, protection, preferential tariffs, and the manipulating of marketing arrangements. During the early thirties, in most parts of the Empire the depression appeared primarily as a problem of prices. Dominion governments, Indian proconsuls, and colonial administrators, like their mentors in Britain and the United States, sought ways of raising the price level. Only if prices rose would trade and government revenue recover. In Canada and Australia, which were much the most industrialised and urbanised parts of the Empire, urban unemployment was also recognized and was seen to be a problem of the depression. But in neither country were there adequate statistics for its measurement.² Only for prices, imports, exports, and government receipts were current data quickly available. Hence, perhaps, the concentration upon these items as indices of depression.