ABSTRACT
A basic reason concerns the heavy, and largely unavoidable, dependence which economic historians place on national income accounts. But those with large urban estates and industrial interests such as the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Bute, became fabulously rich. This is an issue to which we shall return since it bears directly on the nature of economic performance in the century before the First World War. Urbanization on this scale meant that by the 1880s Britain was becoming a far more integrated economy than it was at the beginning of the Victorian era. Whilst Samuel Smiles was preaching the fundamental virtues of thrift and sobriety, Marx was developing his theory of dialectical materialism which claimed to reveal the iron laws of history. A Royal Commission had investigated the agricultural depression without coming to any clear conclusions, though the evidence it amassed did reveal marked variations in experience.
