Transition in the Nineteenth Century: The British Climacteric 1860–1900

An important thesis was proposed in Chapters 3 and 4, namely that the world economy is in a state of transition and that industrialisation in developing countries has been causing relative prices to shift, which has brought about economic restructuring in the industrialised countries. The central argument in this chapter is that this process has happened before. During the second half of the nineteenth century the economic rise of the US, Germany, Russia and France posed the same kind of threat for Britain that developing countries are posing a century later for the OECD bloc. Naturally, the precise details are not the same but the parallel is striking.