ABSTRACT
The aim of this book is to analyse and dispute a widely-held theory of Britain’s ‘economic decline’ since the mid-nineteenth century, and to offer an alternative view which has important implications for our understanding of British society and culture in the modern period. The most common view of modern British economic history may be put concisely, but not inaccurately, as follows: Britain was the first nation to experience an industrial revolution, which began around 1760 and, by 1850, had transformed Britain into the ‘workshop of the world’, the pre-eminent industrial and manufacturing power of the time. After Britain’s short-lived mid-Victorian economic zenith (1850-70) Britain experienced a relentless period of economic decline, now lasting for over 120 years, wherein it not merely lost its industrial hegemony but was surpassed by virtually every other western nation and, recently, by many on the rim of east Asia. Moreover, this unrelieved period of relative economic contraction became steadily more severe, with each generational era witnessing, roughly speaking, a less impressive performance in relative international terms than the one before.
