ABSTRACT
The international economy played a major role in promoting the spread of modern industrial technology in the period before 1914. In so far as the international diffusion of technology depended on the mobility of goods, people, money and ideas, it is apparent from author's knowledge of the nineteenth-century international economy that mobility in this sense was greatly enhanced before 1914 by innovations in transport and communications and international finance. To begin with, if the diffusion of modern industrial technology was limited before 1913, it was partly because the supply of capital and labour available for international transfer was limited, and because not all of the countries desiring to import these productive resources were equally well-placed to attract them. The role of international investment banks in promoting the flow of industrial technology between countries during the period 1850 to 1914 can be touched on briefly here because it is dealt with fully in.
