ABSTRACT
The international economy played a major role in promoting the spread of economic growth in the nineteenth century. The flows of trade, capital and labour, which linked countries together economically, not only provided the means whereby the benefits of economic growth, in the form of higher real incomes, could be transmitted from country to country, but they were also the mechanism through which the technological and social innovations that are the essence of modern economic growth could be diffused. As a result, the economic growth of most countries came to depend as much on their ability to take advantage of the opportunities for trade and for the acquisition of new knowledge and additional factors of production presented by the international economy as on the quantity and quality of the economic resources domestically available to them. It is for this reason that any discussion of the nineteenth century international economy must include an examination of its function as an ‘engine of growth’.
