ABSTRACT
The late Victorian British economy attracted a good deal of attention in the 1980s. Those who believed American economic and political hegemony was threatened in the waning twentieth century saw analogies with Britain’s supposed earlier circumstances (Elbaum and Lazonick 1986:1). British ‘ungovernability’ during the preceding decade, when relative decline accelerated, persuaded even scholars and observers unconcerned with the American analogy that they should look for the historical roots of Britain’s failings (Barnett 1986). Not quite matching Edward Gibbon’s tale of Roman imperial degeneration over a millennium, their narratives are nonetheless prone to tell a story of continuous British economic decadence over a century or more.
