ABSTRACT
Following a short post-war boom between April 1919 and May 1920, Britain’s industrial economy suffered a collapse which was more pronounced than that experienced by the rest of the international economy. Between 1920 and 1921 industrial output fell by 10 per cent and was particularly rooted in the staple, primarily export-oriented, industries of Britain: cotton textiles, coal, iron and steel, mechanical engineering and shipbuilding. The staple industries, which formed the traditional backbone of British industry, lost over 1 million workers between 1920 and 1925, and these losses were never recovered before the Second World War.1 These industries experienced a structural crisis as they failed to adjust to the changed post-war economic world, and consequently they entered a phase of slower growth or absolute decline. Yet these were the indus tries which were previously at the heart of British economic success. They had been the carriers of successive technical paradigms and their decline in the interwar decades was bound to raise questions of a political and social dimension, as well as issues concerning their profound economic difficulties.2 Socio-political questions of course centred on the problem of mass unemploy ment, which was given added prominence by the regional pattern of the staple industries, therefore concentrating the loss of jobs in particular localities. As Heim points out, “The most striking feature of regional development in inter war Britain was its highly uneven character. Decline and expansion occurred simultaneously but were concentrated largely in different regions.”3 Thus, mass unemployment was not spread evenly across all sectors of the national economy,4 and this suggests that the period between the wars was characterized by structural diversity which manifested itself in major problems of economic instability.
