ABSTRACT
THE ten years beginning with 1919 and ending with 1929 saw the three companies sharing to the full in the crowding difficulties of the post-war world, a world painfully groping towards some stability, some permanent and workable economic and social shape. Most of the familiar fingerposts of a century had been removed, or at least bore new names ; unfamiliar ones pointed in strange directions. There were lost markets to be regained, if possible. There were new ones to be developed. The finance of international trade no longer conformed universally to the old dependable ordinances of the Bank of England and the London money market. Countries which had been the natural areas of reception for engin éering exports were beginning to make machines for themselves. The agreeable and convenient balance was altering rapidly between the workshop of the world and its customers who paid for British manufactures in primary products. The period opened with a shortlived boom of the kind when war's shortages can be made up with anything that is available or offered, and closed with the depression that persisted until nearly the middle thirties. The economic change acted upon labour and labour's new sense of solidarity reacted upon the economy. A combination of the residual reasonableness of the British character, and an ability among Britons to compose their differences before they went too far, enabled the Kingdom and the Commonwealth to survive ; a great part in that survival was played by the resources of wealth, invention, and competitive capacity tinctured with a sense of social responsibility, possessed by the majority of British industrialists.
