Following the Brexit vote, this book offers a timely historical assessment of the different ways that Britains economic future has been imagined and how British ideas have influenced global debates about market relationships over the past two centuries. The 2016 EU referendum hinged to a substantial degree on how competing visions of the UK should engage with foreign markets, which in turn were shaped by competing understandings of Britains economic past.

The book considers the following inter-related questions:

-          What roles does economic imagination play in shaping peoples behaviour and how far can insights from behavioural economics be applied to historical issues of market selection?

-          How useful is the concept of the official mind for explaining the development of market relationships?

-          What has been the relationship between expanding communications and the development of markets?

-          How and why have certain regions or groupings (e.g. the Commonwealth) been unimagined- losing their status as promising markets for the future?

David Thackerayis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, UK.

Andrew Thompsonis Professor of History at the University of Exeter, UK, and Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Richard Toyeis Professor of History at the University of Exeter, UK. 

1 Introduction;David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson and Richard Toye.-Part 1- Markets of the future.-2 Imagining the opium trade: Britains justification for the first Anglo-Chinese War;Hao Gao.-3 Business in the borderlands: American trade in the South African marketplace, 1871-1902;Stephen Tuffnell;4 Imagining New Zealands economy in the mid-twentieth century;Glen O Hara.-Part 2- Imagining global trade.-5 Racing round the world: geographical board games and Britains global expansion, 1780-1850;Paul Young.-6 British free trade and the international feminist vision for peace, c.1846-1946;Marc-William Palen.-7 What was a British buy? Empire, Europe and the politics of patriotic trade in Britain, c.1945-63;David Thackeray and Richard Toye.-8 How self-service happened: the vision and reality of changing market practices in Britain;Lawrence Black and Thomas Spain.-Part 3- Rethinking decolonisation.-9 Less than an empire and more than British: foreign investor competition in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960s;Stephanie Decker.-10 Information after imperialism: British overseas representation and Francophone Africa (1957-1967);Andrew Smith.-11 Constructing colonial capitalism: the public relations campaigns of Hong Kong business groups, 1959-1966;David Clayton.-12 Un-imagining markets: Chambers of Commerce, globalisation and the political economy of the Commonwealth of Nations, 1945-1975;Andrew Dilley.-13 Commercial preferences: Economics and Britains European choices, 1945-2016;Piers Ludlow.