Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.

In April 1959, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, Henry Luce, spoke vehemently to the World Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, encouraging business leaders “to unite [their] energies on something which is really fundamental—fundamental to civilization and economic progress. That something is the advancement of the rule of law.” Together with lawyers, business leaders had “the responsibility to see that the rule of law prevails in every corner of the business world.” Luce insisted that international trade needs “legal certainty” and business leaders would do better by focusing less on “certain rules and regulations” and more on “basic and universal rules under which all business could prosper.” One of the proposals he asked the audience to endorse was German banker and politician Hermann Abs's Magna Carta (a formative proposal to enact what is known today as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS).

This article assesses the “business of development” in the post-colonial age, when bilateral and multilateral aid regimes offered businesses new opportunities. It uses the case study of Britain and the European Economic Community (EEC), from Britain's accession to the EEC in 1973 to the early 1980s, to demonstrate that the British government viewed multilateral aid instruments, in particular the European Development Fund (EDF), as offering commercial opportunities for British firms. Based on records of the EEC, business associations, and the French and British states, the article analyzes business-state relationships between national governments, corporations, and supranational institutions. As the UK government tried to redirect EEC aid toward places where its firms had the most to gain, it met the opposition of other member states and European institutions as well as the disinterest of its own businesses.

It is common for historians to focus their attention on turning points in the past. The risk with this is that it overstates how dramatic change was and the extent of stasis and stability in between those turning points, at its most extreme form in notions of punctuated equilibriums. We need to remember the importance of continuities across those turning points and transitions in order to understand the roots of change and have a more nuanced picture of the nature of change. This is as valid for the relationship between firms, governments, and global governance frameworks as it is for any other historical subject.

The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade and capital flows, protect national sovereignty, and promote peace through interdependence. In short, these institutions represented the solution to the failures of interwar international governance—more specifically, the failure of the League of Nations to stem macroeconomic instability or the Second World War.