Money and the End of Empire: British International Economic Policy and the Colonies 1947 1958. By Allister Hinds. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 221. $67.95.

The role of economic change in the break-up of the British empire has been endlessly debated. Inevitably it has been a key part of explaining the dissolution of British world power in the twentieth century. But what exactly did change and what effects did that change produce? The crude answer is to point to the relative decline of British wealth and output when measured against those of the emergent superpowers after 1945. One difficulty with this line of argument was that the smallest and poorest of the European colonial powers, Portugal, held on to its empire long after the largest and richest, Britain, had begun the process of withdrawal. Perhaps then it was less a question of means than of motive. Perhaps the British chose to abandon their empire, rather than struggle to retain it, because their colonial possessions no longer matched the interests of the metropole. To historians armed with the concepts of neocolonialism and dependency theory it seemed obvious that as metropolitan capitalism mutated towards multinational enterprise, the utility of the colony as an exclusive zone of national exploitation declined and the risk of driving the local elites into anticapitalist radicalism became unacceptably high. Better an accommodation in which political independence was traded for an economic regime favorable to the multinational company and its branch plants. But as historians began to test the role of business in the making of colonial policy, they found surprisingly little evidence that business interests could command a hearing let alone shape decisively the terms and timing of the colonial handover.