INTRODUCTION

Ever since André Siegfried published his resounding Crise britannique au XXe siècle in 1931-an ominous year in Britain’s twentieth-century history-the issue of the ‘British decline’ has been a recurring theme in both academic circles and the media, (de)generating into strong opposition between pessimists stressing Britain’s disappointing performance as well as loss of stature and optimists defending its growth record and technical achievements. This volume attempts to re-examine the most strident charges made against the late Victorian economic make-up as well as Britain’s path of industrialization after the First World War. It originated in an international conference on the ‘Roots of the British “Decline” in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Period’ that Jean-Pierre Dormois convened at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes & Edouardiennes at the University of Montpellier in September 1995. The Montpellier meeting was the most recent in a series of historical symposia on the performance of the modern British economy that began with the conference on the ‘New Economic History of Britain’ at Harvard in 1970 and continued with the ‘Anglo-American Conference on the Decline of the British Economy’ at Boston University in 1983 and the symposium on ‘British Culture vs. British Industry?’ at the University of Glasgow in 1986. The published proceedings of each of these meetings possessed a unity of viewpoint that made them landmarks in the field of British economic history. The Essays on a Mature Economy that Donald N.McCloskey assembled from the Harvard colloquium demonstrated the applicability of the economist’s theory and statistical methods to historical problems, but they were also a monument to the proposition ‘that British performance was better than…{had} been commonly believed’ (McCloskey 1971, p. 5). The contributors to Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick’s The Decline of the British Economy agreed that after 1870 Britain had not performed as well economically as it should have, and the explanations they elaborated had a common source in the institutional analysis of Alfred D.Chandler, Jr (Elbaum and Lazonick 1986; Chandler 1980 and 1990; and Chandler and Daems 1980). The papers Bruce Collins and Keith Robbins collected in British Culture and EconomicDecline complemented one another by their scepticism towards Martin Wiener’s thesis about the adherence of British

industrialists to a gentlemanly ethos and by their commitment to an international perspective on British culture and industry (Collins and Robbins 1990; Wiener 1981).