ABSTRACT
Britain's industrial superiority inevitably affected the next phase of industrialization. A list of causes of all the industrial revolutions launched between 1820 and 1870 has to include both the example of Britain and the international activities of British businesses. Even before the 1840s the British role should not be exaggerated, for it obviously combined with the emergence of new business interests in Western Europe and the United States and with shifts in government policy. France, Western Europe's richest and most populous country in the eighteenth century, faced several drawbacks in attempting to imitate the British achievement. German industrialization got under way later than the French version. Along with the German version, United States industrialization formed the great new economic success story in world history between 1850 and 1900. Unlike France and the United States, Germany contributed almost no new inventions to the early industrialization process and remained highly dependent on foreign technologies into the 1870s.
