The period between the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958 and Britain’s accession to the trade bloc at the start of 1973 is known as one of comparative economic decline for Britain. Its principal European competitors, France and West Germany, grew faster than Britain as they reaped the benefits of EEC membership. By the early 1970s their GDP per head exceeded Britain’s for the first time since the 17th century. It is also a period in which the share of Britain’s trade with its empire and Commonwealth fell, with the share of its trade with the EEC roughly doubling between 1958 and 1972. Although economic historians have long seen Britain’s sluggish export performance in this period as an important factor behind its economic decline, and other problems such as its recurrent balance of payments problems under the Bretton Woods system, none have yet analysed in detail exactly how the composition of its trade changed between 1958 and 1972, nor how this could inform the debate among economists about Britain’s postwar economic underperformance.

This project examines the pattern and causes of the geographic reorientation of Britain’s export markets from the Commonwealth to the European Economic Community between 1958 and 1972. Economic historians have so far largely ignored the period between 1958 and 1972 for detailed studies of British trade, even though this is the key period of reorientation from imperial trade networks towards the EEC. The paper will collect and make use of industry- and trade-partner-specific annual export and tariff data to (i) analyse how and why British trade with the Commonwealth declined using a structural gravity model and (ii) reconstruct revealed comparative advantage figures for Britain against its trade partners using the method used by Varian (2020), developed from Balassa (1965).

The results will be used to shed new light on several questions related to postwar economic decline: which industries saw their trade networks shift from the Commonwealth to the EEC fastest, whether this process was different for nationalised and non-nationalised sectors of the economy and whether changing tariff policies or other factors were primarily responsible for the decline in the share of the Commonwealth in Britain’s manufactured exports.