ABSTRACT
In 1960s a great deal of academic effort has gone into research purporting to show that the seeds of the relative decline of Britain in the world were sown during the period from the 1870s to 1914. The British cotton industry reached the peak of its spectacular career in 1913. There was no other cotton industry in the world to rival it and in the record year of 1913 exports of cotton cloth totalled over 7,000 million linear yards. One of the foremost arguments of the critics of British industrial performance during the past hundred years has been the poor state of technical education as compared with Germany, although France, Switzerland and the U.S.A. are held up as examples to backward Britain. Professor S. B. Saul has shown that the British engineering and machine tool industries were reasonably efficient and innovative before 1914, although they did perhaps depend too much on the production of locomotives and textile machinery.
