ABSTRACT
Much of the debate about economic performance in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain has concentrated on the country’s overcommitment to a narrow range of staple export industries catering for relatively low income markets and the subsequent retardation in the development of potential growth sectors such as vehicles, chemicals and electrical engineering. The consequences, whatever the precise sources of the relative decline,2 were faltering growth relative to Britain’s principal competitors in terms of real GDP per worker and total factor productivity and a declining share in the world market for manufactured goods. The statistical data upon which such generalizations depend are both fragile and contentious. Moreover, as Pollard’s survey of British growth performance before 1914 reminds us, the ‘economic decline’ debate remains inconclusive and unsatisfactory, not least because of ‘the fluid nature of the counter-factual assumptions which underlie the notion of blame or failure’.3 From the perspective of this chapter, it is worth recalling that the analyses of economic growth upon which much of this now familiar debate rests have been premised on the nation state as an economical ly homogeneous entity capable of investigation. McCloskey’s determination to raise industry case studies of
entrepreneurial activity, focusing on the opportunities and confines of contemporary costs, resources and market structure, provides a good example of the well documented alternative approach.4 Yet, as Pollard and Lee in particular have claimed, too little attention has been focused on growth and structural change at the regional level . The obvious manifestations of regional industrialization, such as the boom in cotton manufacture in Lancashire, shipbuilding on the Tyne and the Clyde, and the growth of woollen textiles in West Yorkshire, have customarily been represented merely as adding ‘a little local colour’ to the overall picture of industrial transformation.5 But British economic performance in this period can, arguably, only properly be understood if it embraces a regional perspective. When thus perceived, it will defy any easy classification into ‘success’ or ‘failure’, or even sustain the primacy of industry in any explanation of national development.
