Today commercial real estate is a $4.3 trillion industry. It is the 3^rd largest industry in the global economy. Real estate makes up more than 60% of global assets, outstripping the combined value of all other financial assets such as stocks and bonds. These facts have profound implications for cities all over the world. The rise of the commercial real estate sector has utterly transformed urban landscapes, urban economies, and urban society. Entire scholarly fields within urban geography and urban studies are dedicated to critiquing processes such as gentrification and financialization which are intrinsically linked to the rise of real estate. However we have very limited historical understanding of this momentous process. Contemporary urban studies naturally focuses on the present, and relies on thinly sketched versions of the past which at best stretch back to the 1980s.

This talk explores the rise of real estate in the world in the preceding period (1940s to 1980s) and it highlights the critical role played by British real estate companies and British finance capital in the growth and globalisation of the real estate industry. The largest real estate companies in the world were British in this era and they built skyscraper office blocks, sprawling suburban malls and modernist hotels in cities all over the world. By the early 1970s British real estate developers were active in North and South America and the Caribbean; in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa; in Australasia; South East Asia; and Continental Europe. This remarkable global reach was unprecedented, and it was tied directly to the inherited advantages of empire as a commercial world system. This talk will examine this unknown history of transnational real estate development and its crucial linkages with the late stages of the British empire.