ABSTRACT
The British development trajectory has been regarded as the standard route of industrialisation, and the status of ‘normal’ is often given to the British development because industrialisation began there first. However, a different conclusion of this early development is that exactly because Britain was the first industrial nation, it could not provide a usable model for other countries to reproduce. The preconditions of the organisation of society and of capital and labour were quite different in Britain than elsewhere.1 The discourse there about the situation economically, technologically and organisationally by 1890 was, in many respects, different from the discourse in Germany or Sweden.
