ABSTRACT
Great Britain’s foreign trade in the nineteenth century has often been described as a strategic factor in her economic growth, the changing rates of which are supposed to have been closely connected with those of the volume of trade. An analysis set out in an earlier chapter shows that this view needs to be considerably qualified, inasmuch as demand from overseas markets was only an engine of growth during short periods of Britain’s economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has been also shown that only the cotton industry depended on exports to dispose of the bulk of its production, though other industries gained in efficiency through having the wider outlets provided by foreign markets 1 .
