Narrates how big business guided policy and expanded the state in early twentieth-century Britain.

During World War I, British businessmen streamed into government service. When Britain faced unprecedented economic challenges after the war’s end, civil servants turned to the same businessmen with whom they had worked. The result was a durable public-private network of both bureaucrats and executives: the business state.

In this book, Ian Kumekawa throws light on the previously obscured and hidden world of the business state and the economic thinking of its administrators. He breaks new methodological ground by treating the state and business together as a single entity. Twentieth-century states, he argues, were porous networks in which lines between business and governance were not clearly defined. In liberal democracies, the term “business-friendly” has long been understood as synonymous with laissez-faire. The Business State explores the historical limits of that assumption by focusing on Britain, the self-identified small, liberal state par excellence. In doing so, the book shows how a liberal democracy was effectively co-opted by private interests and explores how actively assisting big business became not just acceptable—but a political necessity.

Ian Kumekawa is a historian and lecturer based at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The First Serious Optimist: A.C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics and Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge.

Introduction: Forging the Imperial Business State

Part One: Expansion
1. “A Game in Which No Points Can Be Thrown Away”: State Trade Promotion in Interwar Britain
2. “A Few Millions Were Neither Here nor There”: Credit, Exports, and an Empire of Commerce
3. Leveraging Empire: Industrial Stabilization at the Bank of England

Part Two: Consolidation
4. Imperial Seeds, British Forests: Empire, Business, and British State Forestry
5. Selling Empire, Projecting Britain: The Empire Marketing Board
6. Protecting Business, Protecting the Empire: Tariffs and the Business State
7. “To Encourage and Assist”: The Business State Rearms

Conclusion: Afterlives and Implications

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
List of Archives Used
Notes
Index