Distance, Empire, and British exports over two centuries

We introduce a new dataset on British exports at the bilateral, commodity-level from 1700 to 1899. We then pit two primary determinants of bilateral trade against one another: the trade-diminishing effects of distance versus the trade-enhancing effects of the British Empire. We find that the impact of gravity fell by a factor of roughly three between the 1780s and 1850s. The impact of empire on British exports was extremely large throughout, but the impact of 18th century mercantilism was much higher than that of empire in the liberal late 19th century.