World Business, Commonwealth: Where Else to Turn

COMMONWEALTH

Since Britain appeared to be shut out of the Common Market, at least for now, its businessmen were already engaged in looking where else to turn. For some, among whom the noisiest was Lord Beaverbrook, the best alternative was to whip the Commonwealth into a kind of super common market. Composed of 16 nations that are threaded together by a complicated system of preferential tariff agreements, the Commonwealth has a population of 715 million, accounts for 23% of the world's trade. The Commonwealth, India's Nehru once mused, is "a rather strange and...