ABSTRACT
An important cause of the economic crises which convulsed inter-war Europe was the fact that European capitalism had exhausted the dynamic technological and growth potential of the products and processes which it had developed and exploited with such spectacular success in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To a large extent Europe fell victim to its own past achievements. European markets for cotton, woollen and linen textiles, processed foods and drinks, footwear, steel, coal, ships, railway construction and railway equipment were approaching saturation point and the ageing textile, coal, steel, shipbuilding and railway industries were facing problems of over-capacity which could only temporarily be assuaged by the exceptional demands generated by the two World Wars. In principle there was still considerable scope for the further development of industries such as these in Eastern Europe, except in the already industrialized regions of the Czech Lands. In practice, however, financial difficulties and constraints, the growth of Western protectionism and the relatively small size and low purchasing power of the East European ‘national’ markets limited their potential. Certainly it was impossible to replicate the easy profits and the largely unimpeded export-led expansion experienced by several of the Western industrial pioneers during their heyday. The once lucrative nonEuropean markets for Europe’s ‘traditional’ industrial products were under threat from the gathering pace of industrialization and rising levels of protectionism in Asia, Latin America and Australasia.
