London
Capital of the British Empire; financial center of pre-1914 world economy
Also known as: London
Capital of the British Empire and the unrivalled financial center of the pre-1914 world economy — the operational hub of the The Milner Group and its successors (T&H 8).
Quigley's Framing
London is, in Quigley's analysis, the city in which the entire Anglo-American institutional architecture is operationally headquartered: the Bank of England and the City for finance, Whitehall and the British Foreign Office for government, Fleet Street for the press, the West End club system (Brooks's, the Athenaeum, the Beefsteak) for informal coordination, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House for foreign-policy formation. The interconnection of these institutions in a few square miles is, for Quigley, the physical fact that makes the Milner Group's coordination possible.
Strategic Role
T&H treats London's role as the financial center of the pre-1914 world economy as a structural fact more important than any specific political decision: the gold standard, the bills-on-London trade financing system, and the international clearing functions of the City made London the central node of the late-nineteenth-century world economy. The slow loss of that role after 1914 — first to New York, then increasingly to Wall Street as a system — is read as the deeper material story underlying the political shift of leadership from the British Empire to the United States.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 8 Quigley
London was the unrivalled financial center of the pre-1914 world economy.
- anglo-american-establishment Quigley
The interconnection of Whitehall, the City, Fleet Street, and the West End clubs in a few square miles is the physical fact that makes the Milner Group's coordination possible.