In China, the most significant source of informal control was the Shanghai Municipal Council, which although theoretically under lease from the Chinese government, was effectively unaccountable to them and saw most positions filled by Britons backed by British diplomatic influence.
Several unequal treaties were signed between China and Western powers, and concessions were established in Chinese port cities, such as the Shanghai International Settlement.
[6] Black claimed that the British military intervention in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White Army was motivated in part by a desire to establish an informal empire of political influence and economic ties in Southern Russia, to deny Germany access to these assets and block their passage to British colonies in Asia.
[8] South American governments were often willing partners in the extension of British commercial influence, but military action was sometimes taken against those who tried to apply protectionist policies (see for example, the Anglo-French blockade of the River Plate).
[12] British historian David Reynolds has claimed that during the process of decolonisation, it was hoped that as an alternative to the declining formal empire, informal influence, marked by economic ties and defense treaties would hold sway over the former colonies.
Reynolds suggested that the establishment of the Commonwealth was an attempt to maintain some form of indirect influence over the newly independent countries.
[13] U.S. foreign policy from the late 19th century onward, under Presidents such as Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and New Deal leaders, has been described as "informal empire".
[14] 20th century U.S. policy of establishing international influence through friendly regimes, military bases and interventions, and economic pressure, has drawn comparisons with the informal empires of European colonial powers.
[20] The decolonisation of Africa led to the conversion of many former colonies into client states under a French informal empire known as Françafrique.
[27][31] Russia and Britain had competing investments in the industrialisation of Iran including roads and telegraph lines, as a way to profit and extend their influence.
However, until 1907 the Great Game rivalry was so pronounced that mutual British and Russian demands to the Shah to exclude the other, blocked all railroad construction at the end of the 19th century.
[32] The Russian Empire had also acquired several concessions in China including the Liaodong Peninsula (chiefly Port Arthur and Dalian) and the Chinese Eastern Railway.
[34] Scholar Sally N. Cummings argues that while "Russian imperialism was never primarily commercial" and "was less often able than the British to control an informal empire beyond its state borders", several imperialistic relationships existed with elements of indirect rule.
Academically the idea is seen as emerging with Richard Pipes' 1957 book The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, but it has been reinforced, along with several other views, in continuing scholarship.
[40] The informal empire would have included Soviet economic investments, military occupation, and covert action in Soviet-aligned countries.
[41][42] After the Sino-Soviet conflict (1929), the Soviet Union regained the Russian Empire's concession of the Chinese Eastern Railway and was held until its return in 1952.
The Comintern influence over Asian communist parties was seen as a potential stepping stone to extend the Soviet informal empire.
By the start of the Cold War it evolved into a "coded power language" that was once again international, but applied to the Soviet informal empire.
At times the USSR signaled toleration of policies of satellite states indirectly, by declaring them consistent or inconsistent with socialist ideology, essentially recreating a hegemonic role.
With Gorbachev's relinquishing of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1989, the informal empire reduced in pressure to a more conventional sphere of influence, resembling Finlandization but applied to the erstwhile East Bloc states, until the Soviet fall in 1991.
This model become advocated by some scholars studying the late Soviet Union's sphere of influence and comparing it to conventional historiography on the Ottomans.