ABSTRACT
The two decades between 1850 and 1872 were the golden years of the nineteenth-century industrial economy, the years in which England was the ‘workshop of the world’ and had no serious industrial rival. During these years the skeleton of the railway network was fleshed out, the iron, coal and textile industries continued to prosper, while new industries such as engineering and chemicals developed into largescale concerns. Agricultural production levels rose and farmers too enjoyed this period of prosperity. This was a time of economic well-being, a time when the position of the rich and the well-off was consolidated and when a few of the benefits of industrialism first began to seep down to the poor masses. There were some bad patches, such as the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, which revealed inefficiency in the army and suggested that British overlordship was not gratefully accepted everywhere, but these were small shocks and did little to affect the overall optimism of the period.
