Swimming with the coelacanth: the UK and export controls of technology and knowledge in the Cold War

Export controls, such as through the lists of embargoed goods drawn up by the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) from the 1950s until the 1980s, were a means by which the West sought to put economic and strategic pressures on the communist East. This paper explores a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls provoked by the recent scholarship of Mario Daniels and John Krige, who place knowledge control as a central aim, by focusing on the perspective of the UK to the US-led system. The paper argues that British companies, civil servants and politicians worked within the export control system established by the United States but strained against its restrictions on trade; that the UK nevertheless had to balance a host of other demands, including encouraging trade, preservation of sterling, regulation of transborder movement of goods, widely understood; and that while the UK recognised the framing of export controls as a matter of knowledge control, the framing was not central to the complaints made against the system.