Trade, Regulation and Empire State-building in Britain: The Board of Trade’s Role in Building the British Regulatory State

The book adds the notion of an imperial-corporate state to widely used concepts of fiscal-military and mercantilist state-building. Challenging the adequacy of the many theories which emphasise taxation and currency in state-building, this study stresses the importance of micro-economic interventions. It unpacks the distinctive character of the British state’s system of micro-economic governance by tracing one central department’s evolution and its relations with other departments, British businesses and infrastructure, and with the governance structures operating between state, company-states, colonies, and domestic business. Three sub-periods of the Board of Trade’s history are distinguished, each marked by a distinctive relationship with the domestic and imperial economies and by characteristic approaches to regulatory oversight.

The book will be of interest to academics and students in business, economic, and political history, and all those interested in the structure of the British state, its legacies of running empires, its relationship with industrial policies and industrialisation, and how it developed its regulatory shape.