In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of empire, and their speculative transnational financing was made possible by allying with London’s financial sector and the world of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. This article surveys the rise, financialization, and imperially inflected internationalization of the British property development sector in this period, showing how property companies capitalized upon post-war Britain’s developer-friendly urban renewal order, internationalist financial sector, and inherited imperial advantages even as many of the formal political structures of empire were being dismantled. In the post-war decades, the remnants of empire as a commercial world system provided Britain’s property developers with vital stepping stones towards the fully globalized forms of financialized real-estate development that shape cities around the world today.

中文翻译：

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英国房地产开发行业的全球崛起，1945 年至 1975 年

1945 年之后的三十年里，英国房地产开发行业规模呈爆炸式增长，并开始在全球范围内开展业务。这个时代世界上最大的房地产公司是英国人，他们在世界各地的城市建造办公楼、购物中心和酒店。这些海外房地产开发与帝国先前存在的政治和经济地理紧密重叠，它们的投机性跨国融资是通过与伦敦金融部门和“绅士资本主义”世界结盟而成为可能的。本文调查了这一时期英国房地产开发行业的崛起、金融化和受帝国影响的国际化，展示了房地产公司如何利用战后英国有利于开发商的城市更新秩序、国际主义金融部门以及继承的帝国优势帝国的正式政治结构正在被拆除。战后几十年，作为商业世界体系的帝国残余为英国房地产开发商提供了重要的踏脚石，迈向完全全球化的金融化房地产开发形式，塑造了当今世界各地的城市。