ABSTRACT
Britain was left with a lop-sided industrial structure with the slower-growing staple export industries acting as a drag on economic growth. Steel is an industrial sector, with obvious linkages to other industrial sectors, and for Perez it played the role of the key factor during the upswing phase of the third long wave. In the Perez model the technological style stretches from the peak of one long wave to the peak of the next. The style concerned would have made its first appearance in the early 1870s, and would have begun to assert its influence in the late Victorian period. Perez's notion of a structural crisis concerns the lack of complementarily between the emerging technological style and the established mode of development, leading to a crisis of the whole system. London became the acknowledged centre of the world's financial system, supported by the gold standard and a whole cluster of financial institutions which specialized in the financing of international trade.
