ABSTRACT
We too had many pretty toys when young: A law indifferent to blame or praise, To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays; Public opinion ripening for so long We thought it would outlive all future days. Owhat fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out. All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, And a great army but a showy thing; What matter that no cannon had been turned Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king Thought that unless a little powder burned The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting And yet it lack all glory; and perchance The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance. W. B. Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen Are not Yeats’s words a fitting elegy for the last upswing before a global war? And it is clear that the period to which his nostalgia refers is, near enough, that between 1896 and 1914. He is not the only one, of course, to speak favourably of that time; it is known in French history and reminiscence as l’Âge d’Or, the Golden Age. Peaceful it clearly was (bar a little imperial slaughter), but was it prosperous enough also to be clearly identifiable as a long wave upswing? It would be unfair to measure from 1896, for that is a trough of a short, Juglar cycle; but even if we go from the Juglar peak of 1892 to the peak of 1913, we can see, from Table 10.1, that there does seem to have been an upswing, by comparison with 1872–92: the growth of world industrial production quickened from 2.95 per cent to 4.1 per cent. These average figures conceal some large variations among countries: France follows the long wave impeccably – L ’ Âge d ’ Or was not called that for nothing (Table 10.2) – but the British economy moved in the wrong direction, its growth slowing in the last two decades before the First World War to a baffling crawl (Tables 9.3 and 10.5). The general pattern, so far as there is one, resembles neither of these cases. Agricultural production continued to grow at much the same rate as it had since mid-century, not slackening in the great depression and not quickening now. Industrial production grew rather quickly in a number of countries in 1892–1913; but in most of those the acceleration had come quite early in the ‘great depression’. US growth actually slowed down somewhat, comparing 1873– 92 with 1892–1906 – and if the latter period is extended to 1912 the slowdown is quite marked (Figure 10.1, Table 10.3). The fact that world industrial production grew more quickly after 1892 can be treated partly as a trick of the averaging process: in the later period the fast-growing countries, through their fast growth, had relatively large economies compared to the earlier period, and so have to be given a heavier weighting when working out the world average growth rate. 1 US GNP 1890–1950, with rainfall peaks and troughs https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315002330/96f0ae00-db50-42be-a6b2-e988738b7df7/content/fig10_01_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: Mitchell (1983); Currie (1988) Growth rates of world industrial production, 1892–1951 (% per annum)
|
Short period (peak-to-peak) |
Long period |
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1892–99 |
4.6 |
(1872–92 |
3.0) |
|
1899–1907 |
4.0 |
1892–1913 |
4.1 |
|
1907–13 |
3.7 |
||
|
1913–24 |
0.8 |
1913–37 |
2.1 |
|
1924–29 |
5.8 |
1924–37 |
3.2 |
|
1929–37 |
1.5 |
||
|
1937–51 |
3.0 |
1929–51 |
2.5 |
|
Short period (peak-to-peak) |
Long period |
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1892–99 |
2.0 |
(1875–92 |
0.7) |
|
1899–1904 |
1.3 |
||
|
1904–12 |
2.2 |
1892–1912 |
1.9 |
|
1912–24 |
0.7 |
||
|
1924–29 |
3.0 |
1912–37 |
0.8 |
|
1929–37 |
–0.5 |
1924–37 |
0.9 |
|
1937–50 |
1.4 |
1929–50 |
0.7 |
|
Short period (peak-to-peak) |
Long period |
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1892–99 |
3.1 |
(1873–92 |
4.6) |
|
1899–1906 |
5.1 |
1892–1906 |
4.1 |
|
1906–12 |
2.2 |
1892–1912 |
3.5 |
|
1912–18 |
3.0 |
||
|
1918–23 |
3.1 |
1912–37 |
2.1 |
|
1923–29 |
3.3 |
||
|
1929–37 |
–0.2 |
||
|
1937–51 |
4.4 |
1929–51 |
2.7 |
|
Short period (peak-to-peak) |
Long period |
||
|---|---|---|---|
|
1889–99 |
2.4 |
||
|
1899–1907 |
1.0 |
||
|
1907–13 |
1.2 |
1899–1913 |
1.1 |
|
1913–25 |
0.3 |
||
|
1925–29 |
2.0 |
1913–37 |
1.1 |
|
1929–37 |
2.0 |
1925–37 |
2.0 |
|
1937–51 |
1.7 |
1929–51 |
1.8 |
