The Affective Pull of Mores

The concept of economic institutions developed so far is cold and impersonal; to be fruitful for the study of persons, there is need to consider the warmth, the vitality, the personal meaning of institutions. A great deal of help to this end is offered by the way of thinking. We shall make full use of their suggestions, but shall feel free to offer some modifications.

The life of society is expressed through a group of interrelated social institutions. The institutions have a psychological basis, but it is not enough to say that society has habits. Habit is a convenience, but it has no necessary continuity; it can be made or broken. Institutions are a convenience to those who use them. But most social institutions take on a moral hue; one lives by and swears by them. It is right to spend less than one earns, wrong to dress solely with reference to keeping warm. If one has a fancy for idols it is correct to exploit them as works of art, and wrong to prostrate oneself before them. To maintain one's place in society one must do certain things and love to do them; one must not do other things, which are prohibited, and must not want to do them. The mores, the affectively toned rules of social living, have become axiomatic among all who pretend to share fully in the life of the group. It is characteristic of social institutions in their moral form (their form as mores) that they cannot be frontally attacked or directly questioned. They are right; that is all there is to it. The rightness of the mores, according to Sumner and Keller, springs from the fact that the prosperity of the group is conceived to depend upon observing them.

Our emphasis here will be upon the interrelations between four fundamental groups of mores. The first are the self-maintenance mores, the mores that sustain and preserve the group and enable it to carry on in the face of obstacles. The term comprises a much broader field than is covered by the word "economic." It includes not only hunting, fishing, mining, forestry, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, but also science and the art of war; for these are a primary means of enabling the group to survive against obstacles. The self-maintenance mores likewise constitute a "prosperity policy"; they represent the core of the customs that act as bulwarks against danger. Things like stealing, forgery, and ideological attack upon the group's way of living are therefore all in the same general category, and are responded to affectively in similar fashion. The introduction of new ways of earning a living involves grave moral questions because the prevailing ways are morally right.

The self-perpetuation mores comprise courtship, marriage, family, sex relations generally, and the early training of children. These mores, like all the others, have to do with society as a whole, not simply with the biological aspects of self-perpetuation. The self-perpetuation mores take care of the capacity of the social group to perpetuate itself as a social group, not simply as a biological stock; therefore courtship can be morally right or wrong, and the early rearing of children can be right or wrong. The problem of society is whether the early rearing of children does provide continuity in the mores. If it does not, it is immoral. The educator who wishes to give the individual child "freedom" may easily scandalize the group. The self-perpetuation mores, however, agree with our hypothesis about a certain type of "economic determinism," for they tend to change as self-maintenance changes; they must fit with the "prosperity policy." The status of women and the pattern of the family must conform to definite economic meanings.

The self-gratification mores have to do with the deriving of satisfaction from all the surpluses of energy and time. This may seem casual and unorganized, but it is not. The use of fire to cook food not only saved energy in digestion; it introduced culinary amenities, substituted postprandial reflection for stupor. In the caves of Spain and France, men painted not only for ulterior purposes but for their own gratification; the stone ornaments and monoliths of Switzerland and Brittany lead us to infer that the people were interested in order and beauty, as well as in utility. The arts and sciences have always been intellectual and emotional satisfiers. But these, too, have their moral value; it would be a grave error to infer that in his leisure time a person may develop the arts and sciences as freely as he wishes. Many a creative artist has been denounced because he used his freedom to rhyme, paint, or compose solely in accordance with a creative impulse that was contrary to the mores of society. It is not only that the arts must not challenge the mores; if the impulse takes a strange form, it is perverse. But the dependence of the arts on the self-maintenance mores is direct and obvious; they use the techniques and the subject matter provided by the economic, arts, the ways of the dominant military, religious, or political group, and they must gratify first of all those who sit in high places. The arts have always reflected he way in which society maintains itself. Modern art, for example, moves in the functional direction, rejoicing in its close articulation with the general self-maintenance pattern; in particular, the characteristically modern forms of architecture, interior decorating, and photography take delight in our modern technological culture.

Finally, there are the self-regulation mores, for even the rather rigid system of mores based on self-maintenance does not provide complete safety. It has always been necessary to have men-at-arms, policemen, laws, penalties. There is always a system of coercion, and this system naturally expresses what supports it.

Some of the mores do not fit easily into this fourfold scheme. Religion, for example, falls into several categories: it has much to do with marriage and the family, with the arts, and with the self-regulation mores. And of course some of us may prefer to group social institutions in terms of six areas of life, as do the Lynds, or nine, as does Wissler. All these "areas" or "categories" of activity involve abstraction from the flowing interdependence of behavior, and it must be granted that many acts supported by strong moral feelings --like maintaining personal honor--are not objectively classifiable. But the rough crude generalization remains: the mores prescribing how life is maintained affect the form of the other mores.

But since the mores are affectively laden, and since we know that perception and thought are anchored in terms of the fundamental values, it may be reasonable to suspect that the figure in the figure-ground pattern of life will tend to consist of the self-maintenance mores of the group. Our task is to demonstrate that ultimately the individual personality is in a broad way guided and controlled by these mores. Obviously, the only possible validation lies in the study of simple and straightforward examples. First, however, by way of clarifying the hypothesis, let us take a composite example, ridiculously abstract like a composite photograph; we shall use a hypothetical tribe of primitive woodsmen which from time immemorial has used a stone axhead for chopping down trees. Men need wood for barricades, stockades, agricultural instruments, household tools; they sell timber to their neighbors. This group constitutes a relatively simple patriarchal society, for it takes a boy many years to acquire enough of the axman's prowess to achieve power and status in competition with the older males, and women cannot compete at all. We find polygamy, a polytheistic religion, a crude art form--in general, a very primitive society whose life is, in Thomas Hobbes' words, "dull, nasty, brutish, and short." Now into this community come white men with steel axheads. This is a mystery; these instruments are at first nefarious and diabolical. But the white man shows how the steel axhead can in a few minutes bring down a tree that a strong man would require hours to cut down with the stone axhead. Some hearty soul tries the new thing himself. The tree actually comes down without benefit of any further magic, and he who has felled it does not suddenly die, but rejoices in the fact that he has accomplished far more than his fellows in the same amount of time. Before very long it comes about that the people have rationalized or excused the new process; those whose eyes have witnessed such a demonstration will soon be chopping down trees with steel axheads.

The consequences upon the whole institutional pattern are terrific. The first effect is that the energy of the group is enormously extended; a large part of their activity can go into other things than chopping down trees. They have time and energy for other economic exploits; for the beautiful as well as for the practical arts; for the invention of better carpentry, as well as for conversation, the amenities, philosophy; time and opportunity to enlarge their sphere and travel farther into the jungle, making roads and going where they never went before.

Economic Determinism

IN STUDYING the way in which the raw material of human nature undergoes socialization, we have to begin at some one definite point. There may be a value in looking first at the most obvious feature of a society, namely, its economic base; and we may proceed to define two hypotheses: (1) that the economic problem confronting a society shapes all the phases of its group life, and (2) that individual personality is shaped by this group life. This would give us a simple economic determinism for personality. These hypotheses, we shall find, will need much modification; we begin with them for the sake of their simplicity. But it must be made clear that there is no attempt to define the origins of any cultural pattern, or to find, in the course of ceaseless social interaction, something that "comes first" and is uncaused. Rather, the question is whether a radical alteration in economic activities does clearly lead to radical alterations in other aspects of society, and whether, as a result of this, personality is transformed--whether directly, as through new kinds of work, or indirectly, as through alteration of the mother-child relationships. It is emphasized that while we gratefully use, in the next few chapters, a number of studies of primitive peoples, no ethnologist is to be held accountable for the interpretations offered here.

One example is only a starter, however; we must proceed to a more cautious analysis of what is involved. In the Madagascar group we saw that the economic situation itself--the availability of an area for wet-rice cultivation--seemed to offer an explanation for new economic institutions; institutions responded to physical realities. We must examine a broader collection of data to see whether this simple causal relation can be confirmed; we must at the same time consider whether other institutional patterns must perforce yield to the oneway action of economic behavior; and finally, we must determine whether personality can be viewed as the end result of such a causal sequence.

Let us get our terminology clear, and make the distinctions which are imperative if an analysis is to be carried through. By "economic determinism" we mean any system of thought in which the main outlines of social life are derived from the economic organization of the group. A prominent but by no means the only version of the thesis is the conception of Marx and Engels that social life is a reflection of the way in which the dominant social group, at a given stage in the productive arts, maintains its economic status; social change, for example, is forced upon the entire social group as a result of technological changes and inventions which enhance or challenge the power of the ruling class. It is generally conceded, as Marx maintained, that a changing economic pattern causes changes in other aspects of the life pattern; science, the fine arts, philosophy, and religion are transformed as a result of a change in the productive arts. At the same time it is important to emphasize, as did Marx and Engels, that these other "derived" institutions have their own effect upon the productive arts. There is constant interaction (suggested by the Hegelian concept of dialectic), the economic forces being primary but being constantly modified by the influence of the derived institutions.This defines roughly in what sense economic determinism is valuable as an avenue of approach to personality. Three points must be stressed:

1. The economic situation can limit the possibilities of personality growth in particular directions. If life is a constant struggle against cold and scarcity of food, as it is for the Central Eskimo, the situation is unfavorable for the rise of the philosophies and sciences of a leisure class, or a theology based upon the concept of universal goodness, the "cup runneth over" idea of life. In relation to the subsistence problem which the Eskimo faces, these concepts would be functionally meaningless. Similarly, there can only be certain kinds of personalities when there are such economic limitations.

2. We may go beyond this purely negative statement and say that the economic situation will indicate the likely directions in which the various social patterns will evolve. When, for example, we consider that the Indians of the western part of the Great Plains, such as the Dakota and Sioux, were a buffalo-hunting people, and that during the short period of his adult life the male had great prestige as a buffalo hunter and warrior against other buffalo-hunters, we see why the old man and the boy, the woman and the girl are secondary, why there is a forced habit of honoring the qualities which only a few of the people can have. We therefore expect to find an aristocratic society based upon the appropriate hunting and war-making arts. Since surplus wealth is possible, there can be a genuine leisure-class philosophy, as witness the beautiful and intricate philosophy and theology developed by the Dakotas.

3. In defining the role of the economic arts, we shall use a principle: the same geographic problems may take entirely different forms by virtue of different social attitudes, different ways of "phrasing the situation." Suppose, for example, that great schools of fish appear offshore. Among some primitive peoples the right procedure, if a person sees a school of fish, is to run quietly home and tell his closest relatives, who promply make a big catch. Among other tribes with the same food problem, anyone who notices a school of fish noises the fact abroad like a town crier, and the whole community go out with their nets; the fish are corporately caught and corporately devoured. In the first group we are dealing with competitive personalities, and in the second with cooperative personalities; in each generation such personalities result from the pattern of life in childhood. If, then, we look closely at economic determinism, we find that it is not a question of the economic situation, but a question of the economic behavior of the group. Economic behavior does not result solely from the economic situation, but from a complex which includes non-economic factors. It would consequently be meaningless to say that the economic situation alone determines the personality pattern; the economic situation is one of several factors that shape the personalities who express and are expressed in the culture. But we must be clear as to what these other factors are; we shall pursue them through several chapters.

With the above qualifications, we find, then, much value in the concept of economic determinism. But by this phrase is meant determinism not through the economic situation, but through the economic institutions--the social inventions shared by the group in dealing with an economic situation. The economic situation--including climate, soil, forests, fish, game, etc.--constitutes a vital stimulus but does not forecast the response. Social change does not follow directly from changes in the food supply or from disaster or war; it follows from the way in which such a crisis articulates with the prevailing pattern of needs and attitudes.

We may ask how economic institutions originate if they do not derive directly from the economic situation. Their origin is legion. In addition to the economic situation there are many biological, cultural, and personal factors. An example of a biological factor is the fact that a physically diminutive people who can live on a very limited caloric intake will not develop quite the same institutions as a people large in stature who need half again as much food; another biological example is the fact that a people with a long life span will have proportions of old and young differing from those of a people with a shorter span. An example of a cultural factor operating to define the role of the economic situation is the fact that when groups with different traditions are brought into a common area and faced with common problems, they understand their economic predicament in the light of their own traditions. Under such conditions, there will be a deep unconscious residue of attitude from an earlier period. The personal factor is seen in the fact that, within each group, biological variability and the varying impress of different institutions will have yielded differences in personality, and these will lead to various individual ways of coping with each economic problem.

Though we cannot begin with the economic situation and proceed, as through a funnel, to a final description of personality, we shall often have to give the economic situation the place of figure in the figure-ground pattern of all situations; it will tend to become the anchorage point in a world of problems. In the same way, economic institutions will often be the figure as we confront institutional life as a whole. In consequence, so far as personality is anchored upon a response to social institutions, it will tend to be anchored upon attitudes related to economic goals--goals reached through economic behavior.

Sea Power and National Power - Commerce History

In its narrowest sense, sea power means military power at sea, in other words, navies. But no one can study the history of nations in relation to the sea without realizing that the nations that have been maritime forces have usually not depended on naval power alone -- a condition that Admiral Mahan recognized when he pointed out, in 1890, that sea power consisted of merchant ships, naval vessels, plus bases from which they could be serviced. As a matter of fact, one condition recognized as fundamental to a nation's being a sea power has been that a great and powerful navy is dependent for its financial support on a large and active merchant marine engaged in a flourishing commerce. The only great nation that has attempted to support a navy without a corresponding merchant marine has been the United States.

For a nation to emerge as a sea power and to retain that status, however, more than ships and bases to serve those ships is involved. A nation's strength on the sea is conditioned by its "national" status and by its ability to absorb imports and to produce for export. The Dutch attained commercial supremacy at sea at a time when their country was little more than a loose federation of seven provinces, and the rich burghers who sat in the provincial legislative bodies were so fearful of central power that they failed to provide for the protection of their commerce. In addition to the Dutch, the early trading nations were the Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French -- all of whom emerged as nations before the other peoples of western Europe. Germany, Italy, and Japan did not assume importance on the sea until late in the nineteenth century. It is not surprising that one of the first peoples to evolve as a nation -- the British, with their commercial policy, their fleets, and their ability to absorb imports and to produce for export -- should have developed as the great maritime and great national power. For almost a century, her navy policed the seas, keeping the sea lanes open not only for her own merchant ships but also for the ships of any nation that were, in the words of His Majesty's Navy, pursuing "their lawful occupations."

National powers may be defined as nations whose policies dominate world affairs economically and politically. Throughout history, world powers have almost always been sea powers. This was true of the ancient world. In more recent times, the only countries not powerful on the sea that could be termed world powers were Austria-Hungary and Imperial Russia, although the "Russo-Japanese War...revealed Russia as far less formidable than her size and the multitude of her peoples had caused men to suppose." 10

Immediately before World War I, the national powers were AustriaHungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States. The peace of Europe between 1815 and 1914, or rather the absence of a major war, had rested on a balance of power

...which presupposed the existence of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia as dominant elements -- and all of this flanked by an England instinctively conscious of her stake in the preservation of the balance among them and prepared to hover vigilantly about the fringes of the Continent, tending its equilibrium as one might tend a garden, yet always with due regard for the preservation of her own maritime supremacy and the protection of her overseas empire. In this complicated structure lay concealed not only the peace of Europe but also the security of the United States. Whatever affected it was bound to affect us. And all through the latter part of the nineteenth century things were happening which were bound to affect it: primarily the gradual shift of power from Austria-Hungary to Germany. This was particularly important because Austria-Hungary had not had much chance of becoming a naval and commercial rival to England, whereas Germany definitely did have such a chance and was foolish enough to exploit it aggressively...

Earliest steamships to cross the Atlantic

The Great Britain, launched in England in 1844 for the Great Western Lines, represents a landmark in the history of the ship, for she was the first iron-hulled, double-bottomed, screw-propelled Atlantic liner. As everyone knows, the wooden-hulled paddle-wheeler, the Clermont, which steamed up the Hudson River on Aug. 17, 1807, was the first steamship to engage in commercially successful operations. The wooden, paddle-wheel steamboat, ideal for navigation on rivers and protected waters of sounds and bays, had been an American invention; the oceangoing steamship was born in the tempestuous seas around the British Isles.

After several experimental voyages, effective steamship service was begun between Europe and North America in 1838, the year in which the Great Western (1,340 gross tons) and the British Queen (1,862 tons) were launched. The British soon added subsidized lines to carry the mails, including Cunard, the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. During the 1850's, an American, E. K. Collins, also offered transatlantic service with his steamships, the Arctic, Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific.

Although good shipbuilding timber had been in short supply in the British Isles for generations, the iron hull made rather slow progress. The admiralty was ready to accept steam (the Royal Navy had acquired three steamships, the Comet, the Meteor, and the Lightning, between 1820 and 1823), but regarded iron-hulled ships with skepticism, because officials considered them more vulnerable to solid shot than wooden vessels. This stand of the admiralty limited experimentation with iron ships to nonsubsidized operators, or at least to nonsubsidized operations, for the Peninsula and Oriental urged the use of iron for ship construction as early as the 1840's. The leaders, however, were such free operators as the Great Western Railway Lines. Iron gained over wood rapidly after 1846, when the Great Britain was stranded off the coast of Ireland and remained on the beach all winter with little damage. Furthermore, the screw propeller had been invented. It was recognized as much more suitable for the rough-and-tumble workaday trade of oceangoing traffic than the cumbersome yet delicate paddle wheels, but its vibrations made wooden hulls leak. In 1854, Lloyd's organized a special committee to draw up rules for the classification of iron ships, both sailers and steamships.

The screw propeller was soon followed by the compound engine, with a great saving of fuel. Next came the surface condenser, which made it unnecessary to carry large quantities of fresh water for the boilers. These changes increased the cruising range of ships, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say their carrying capacity. To save on the coal for bunkers, all early steamships carried auxiliary sails, a practice that was continued up to the 1880's. One of the earliest steamships to cross the Atlantic was the Sirius, which loaded 95 passengers and 450 tons of coal at Cork in 1848 and arrived in New York eighteen and a half days later, after having scraped the coalbins and supplemented her coal bunkers with the ship's fittings and furniture. By the 1870's, the British were producing iron steamships of 2,000 gross tons, capable of 7 knots and requiring 40 tons of coal per day.

By the 1860's, the iron steamship had come into its own, and though British shipyards were turning them out as fast as possible, they could not keep up with the demand. By then, approximately 30 percent of the British ships were iron, and 50 percent of those being constructed were iron, many of them iron sailers. This was due in part to limitations of manpower, for a man who had sailed before the mast was not necessarily equipped to serve as a crewman on a steamship, and the navy, by then building only iron steamships, had first call on the services of trained personnel. To meet the demand for vessel tonnage to carry an everexpanding overseas commerce, British shipyards turned out thousands of iron sailers. The first of these was the bark Ironsides, launched in 1838 for trade with Brazil, and the last big year was 1892. British steamships were naturally used on the busiest routes such as the North Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and to South America, while the iron sailers were used in the Australian wool trade, the grain trade, and so forth. As soon as British yards could furnish replacements, the iron sailing ships were sold abroad -- to Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and others then building up their merchant marines.

Prior to 1880, very little steel was used in vessel construction because of the cost. In fact, after the Bessemer process for producing steel plate was perfected, Germany led with the steel ship for a time, but by the 1890's, Britain had turned from iron to steel. At the beginning of that decade, the world's merchant fleet was composed as follows: iron, 10 million gross tons; wood, 7 million tons; and steel, 4 million tons.

The decline of the American merchant marine is contemporary with the development of the steamship. From the vantage point of the 1950's, it is apparent that American shipowners, the American public, and the government had little understanding of the revolutionary changes taking place in the shipping industry. Although the Federal government had subsidized steamships to the extent of 14 million dollars by 1858 only ships that had been making money were the nonsubsidized transatlantic sailing packets and the California clippers. Present profits blinded shipping men to future prospects and to warnings that they might have heeded. On Mar. 31, 1860, they could have read in the Scientific American:

Three years ago we directed attention to the great increase of foreign screw steamers, and showed clearly how they were rapidly taking away the trade that has been formerly carried by American ships.... To-day nearly all the mail and passenger, besides a great deal of the goods, traffic, is carried by foreign ships, the great majority of which are iron screw steamers.... We have not a single new Atlantic steamship on the stocks, while in Great Britain, there are 16,000 tons of new iron steamers building for the American trade.

From about 1800 to 1840, the United States, a new nation, had been able to challenge Britain's commercial supremacy. (An American steamship, the Savannah, which sailed from Savannah, Georgia, on May 22,1819, was the first ship to use steam in an Atlantic crossing.) As Morison points out, England won it back "in fair competition by the skill of her engineers and the sturdy courage of her shipbuilders. Civil war turned the Yankee mind to other objects; the World War revived the ancient challenge."

The nineteenth century Communications

The nineteenth century witnessed other changes, which, though not caused primarily by British instigation, assisted in the growth of the commerce that Britain was dedicated to promoting. Transportation by land and water and communication between widely separated areas became speedy and cheap. In 1869, the two coasts of the United States were linked by a transcontinental railroad, and railway construction in Argentina, Australia, and India soon proceeded at a rapid pace. Agricultural surpluses produced hundreds of miles inland could be moved to seaboard rapidly and cheaply. Between 1866 and 1895, the first transatlantic submarine cable was laid and the telephone and wireless introduced. International correspondence became inexpensive and reliable when the Universal Postal Union was founded in 1874.

Such communications greatly assisted the growth of trade and naturally that of the country whose overseas commerce was already the largest. Britain's commercial supremacy, however, was completed with the introduction of the steamship.

Commerce History Peace and Security

Peace and security are great promoters of commerce among nations and also of the productivity which makes that commerce possible. Between 1815 and 1914, the English people were not engaged in any great war. Both the Crimean and Boer wars were localized conflicts in which hostilities were far removed from the British Isles. Free of the fear of invasion, the British devoted themselves to social, economic, and political changes and reforms in which they far surpassed the rest of the world. In 1815, no country in Europe was in a position to work out such reforms.

At the conference table where the peace of 1815 was formulated, the geographical boundaries of three European countries were extended in recognition of their part in helping to defeat Napoleon -- Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. None of these was then even a minor influence on the sea, though the way was prepared for Prussia later to force her will on surrounding Germanic provinces, to seize France's Alsace-Lorraine district, and as Imperial Germany to challenge Britain's mastery of the sea. France was left an empire with minor adjustments of her boundaries to reduce them in general to pre-Napoleonic dimensions, and her sugar islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, Pondichéry, and the old French factories were restored to her.

Lying between or around these powers or potential powers of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France were the small countries of Europe. Because Castlereagh, whose voice was the deciding one on British policy, thought a strong Dutch kingdom would be a bulwark against French ambitions, the Kingdom of the Netherlands was created to include Belgium, and to the Dutch were restored their rich islands in the Far East and Surinam and a few West Indies islands in America. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were free, though Norway was joined to Sweden in a voluntary union. To the south, Italy remained as she had been since the end of the Roman Empire -- a country disunited.

To complete the trading map of the world in 1815, Africa was the Dark Continent, as yet little noticed by the countries of Europe except as a source for slaves. The Near or Middle East, still a part of the Turkish Empire, had lost all importance as a link between East and West, waiting for the Suez Canal and petroleum to plunge it back into the vortex of world affairs. India was still governed by the British East India Company; China, a slumbering giant, was yet to be torn by the opium wars; and Japan, a hermit nation, permitted extremely limited trade through the port of Nagasaki to the Dutch. In America, the United States was free, developing a flourishing trade that complemented more than it rivaled Britain's commerce, while Canada remained secure as a British colony. To the south, the vast regions of Central and South America were on the verge of revolt.

Such was the trading world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. History certainly favored the British in their bid for commercial supremacy.

History of the Market and Surpluses

By 1800, the Industrial Revolution was well under way in the British Isles, and from the very beginning of the industrial era, Britain needed certain imports. Her industrial development was founded on abundant supplies of cheap coal, good coke, and iron ore; on a large and efficient body of laborers; and on large numbers of skilled artisans. To produce the machines, engines, locomotives, and steamships that the British manufactured at relatively low cost, the heavy industries imported high-grade ores from Sweden to mix with their low-grade ores. The wool-textile industry early outstripped domestic supplies, and its growth depended on imports. The entire cotton industry of Lancashire was developed because supplies of cotton were available, chiefly from the United States.

Over the years, the only basic commodity in which the British have been self-sufficient is coal. All of her cotton and petroleum are now and have always been imported from overseas. By the 1930's, nine-tenths of the wool and timber and one-third of the iron ores used by British industry arrived by ship. Ships also brought to the United Kingdom four-fifths of her wheat, two-fifths of her meat, and all of her rice, tea, coffee, bananas, and citrus fruits.

The basic foodstuffs to feed Europe's industrial workers and the raw materials for the factories came primarily from the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries were, for the most part, closely tied to Britain economically, culturally, and politically. The largest stream of overseas trade was fed into world commerce not by the regions of colonial exploitation but from areas of settled government and efficient economic production. Trade with Europe developed these areas, for agricultural exports provided an excellent way of paying interest on and eventually amortizing debts to Europe.