ABSTRACT
In the course of the debate on the working of the Atlantic economy no critic has been able to refute the existence of an inverse relation between long swings in construction in Britain and the United States and in British home and foreign investment, at least in the period 1870-1913. There has indeed been ample confirmation.1 Where disagreement enters is in the interpretation of the nature of the mechanism by which the economies of the two countries reacted on each other. Contributors to the discussion can be divided into two broad schools-those who accept the reciprocal character of British and American long swings as systematic rather than fortuitous, and those who argue that the operative forces were in the domestic sphere and not in any interacting process. The line taken by this second group is seen in the work of H.J.Habakkuk (1968:103-42) and S.B.Saul (1962).
