Much of Britain's early industrial success came from having coal, iron ore, and water power all close to each other. That's a rare situation worldwide. That closeness allowed starting up a high-volume iron industry. Once railroads came in, and heavy low-value materials could be moved cost-effectively, such centralization wasn't necessary.
Iron-making goes way back, but mostly it was powered by charcoal made from wood. Most of the labor was in digging out ore and cutting wood. Once coal was used to make coke, the process worked much better.
(This is all pre-steel. Steel is another story. Steel production in volume only began in the 1880s, and Britain led only for a few years until passed by the US.)
The article avoids the most interesting period of the decline and fall of our economy which is post-WW2, a period in which America played a substantial role
WW1 was the critical period. Part of the reason Britain was so insistent on high levels of reparations from Germany is because they needed the money to pay their war debts to the US, which they ultimately defaulted on at the start of the Depression.
Also Britain sacrificed its industry in favor of the banking sector (there were of course other more complicated factors) by refusing to devalue their currency like France did.
1915 was peak coal in England , 2004 peak gas and 2008 peak oil in the north sea.
Not that coal disappeared shortly after 1915. It was going relatively strong until the mid 60s and dropped to 1/3 of the peak in the 80s. In terms of production tonnage
The UK coal industry employed over a million people in the early 20th century.
At the onset of WW2, the UK was still a technology superpower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission
The war proved ruinous to the UK in a way WW1 wasn’t because of the destruction visited by the Luftwaffe, and the UK squandered its lion’s share of the Marshall Plan on maintaining Imperial pretenses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/marshall_01.sht...
I agree with you and I think we’re both right. WW2 made things much worse for Britain, and Britain was still in a very strong position in 1940 compared to the other European powers (along with leading the world in multiple key technical endeavors) but WW1 was when things started going downhill for them. If you went back to 1900 or even 1910 it would have probably been unthinkable that Britain would default on a foreign debt or allow a foreign rival to match the Royal Navy, and yet Britain did both of those during the interwar period—the latter of which was agreed to with a formal treaty, negotiated and signed in that foreign rival’s capital city!
Ah. I'm biased by my younger age and more interest in WW2
The word colony appears just once. Britain's economy was built on extracting resources from her colonies around the world. Surely what was happening in India, African continent, and elsewhere had some bearing on rise/fall of their economy? Perhaps they got spread too thin trying to administer so many colonies with so few people? Perhaps colonies started exerting more and more resistance?
The British empire reached its territorial peak in about 1921. This article is more about its domestic economic decline during the late 19th century.
The insistence on explaining every successes of the UK/Europe with its colonies is politically orientated, not factual. It seems to be a common trope in India, I'd say intended for domestic political consumption.
The industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy were not caused by the colonies.
Likewise, the decline of the UK's economy was not caused by the loss of colonies.
Hence a single mention in the article, which discusses many reasons and potential reasons of the decline relative to the US and Germany (Germany never had a significant colonial empire and what it had was lost at the end of WWI).
> The industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy were not caused by the colonies.
Perhaps not directly, but the influx of gold and silver from Spanish and Portuguese colonies to Europe would later pump up the economy of other countries - such as England and Netherlands - that would eventually lead to things such as the industrial revolution.
I'd say that rejecting that much of Europe's success during that time was a direct consequence of extracting a large amount of resources from oversea colonies is a common trope in Europe, perhaps for internal political consumption.
A mountain of gold does not create the industrial revolution.
I am not going to discuss further since, obviously, this is not a discussion but low value political argument...
Edit:
I would argue that European colonialism and the industrial revolution are both consequences of deep changes and innovations across all domains that started during the Renaissance (which means 'rebirth' in French) and that propelled Europe far ahead everyone else, hence global subjugation on the one hand, and the scientific and industrial revolution on the other.
You are not going to discuss further because you lack arguments.
Portugal and Spain, the first order beneficiaries of the mountains of gold and silver (among other resources) they extracted from America in 17th and 18th century were too busy playing colonialism to do anything else. Other nations in the region that did trade with them reaped the opportunity of having very wealthy neighbors that were happy to just spend their newfound wealth.
Your argument was essentially "nahh, extracting a ridiculous amount of resources from massive overseas colonies had nothing to do with Europe's success".
Africa is poor despite being incredibly rich in natural resources, and they could easily feed themselves yet import > 70% of their calories.
At which does this stop being the fault of colonialism?
Let's pretend that Europe never exploited Africa for literal hundreds of years, and messed it up politically with borders that barely make any sense.
> The insistence on explaining every successes of the UK/Europe with its colonies is politically orientated, not factual.
And where do you think the capital to fund all the investment came from? Colonization mostly benefited the elite at the expense of the state and majority of the people, but those are also the people able to invest.
Now, if you meant that beyond the colonies we should not discount the role of obscene profits from slavery, foremost the royal family, then yes, I agree with you.
Not mentioned more because it probably just wasn't that important.
Spain had a very extensive colonial empire. So did, in fact, Turkey.
They didn't manage to build anything modern over it.
Putin's Russia rules over 17 million sqkm which were once conquered by the tsars, and it is an economic backwater.
> ...once conquered by the tsars, and it is an economic backwater.
By some metrics, perhaps.
But consider (per Wikipedia) -
> The mineral-packed Ural Mountains and the vast fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal), and timber reserves of Siberia and the Russian Far East make Russia rich in natural resources, which dominate Russian exports. Oil and gas exports, specifically, continue to be the main source of hard currency.
> Russia has been widely described as an energy superpower;[33] as it has the world's largest natural gas reserves,[34] the second-largest coal reserves,[35] the eighth-largest oil reserves,[36] and the largest oil shale reserves in Europe.[37] It is the world's leading natural gas exporter,[38] the second-largest natural gas producer,[39] the second-largest oil exporter[40] and producer,[41] and the third largest coal exporter.
The UK has always been a poor country except for a few hundred years when they were propped up by enslaving other people and looting them.
Yes, the British empire has been very poor except when it was rich.
MC Hammer has been very poor except when he was rich.
Coincidently that followed a visit to Cardiff in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-OuTWswP_U
Well, that and the Industrial Revolution.
Didn't the industrial revolution take off in Britain in order to more cheaply/efficiently process the raw material "brought in" from India for making fabrics?
No. Britain has always had domestic wool, and they imported a lot of their cotton from America before the Civil War put an end to that.
The US Civil War put a damper on the trade volume for a period of time, it came back stronger afterwards.
So successful was the transition of slave labor into sharecropping and tenant farming during and after the war that cotton production actually expanded dramatically.
By 1870, American cotton farmers surpassed their previous harvest high, set in 1860. By 1877, they regained and surpassed their pre-war market share in Great Britain. By 1880 they exported more cotton than they had in 1860.
During the US Civil War cotton volumes went down and mills, mill workers in Lancashire and Cheshire experienced widespread poverty ...
However for a well placed elite few, cotton profits from trade climbed dramatically ..
Despite cotton shortages in England, merchants would sometimes re-export the materials that did arrive to other ports in Europe. Notably, they also re-exported materials from the South to the North, because the Union also struggled from being cut off from direct trade with the Confederacy. As a result, during the war, cotton grown in the Confederacy could be shipped out of a southern port to Britain to evade the Union blockade, sold in Liverpool, and then shipped back across the Atlantic to a northern port, evading the Confederate cruisers.
Liverpool's docks also benefitted as profitable wartime enterprises emerged, particularly the increased trade of commodities such as ships and armaments. The Union's merchant marine, nearly the world's largest in 1860, was devastated throughout the war in part by the Confederate warships supplied through Liverpool. In addition, as a result of the war, cotton speculation and brokerage, rather than trade in cotton itself, became immensely profitable for a number of merchants.
Interesting; I was under the impression that the British just found new sources of cotton. From the American perspective this story is mostly told as a losing bet from the Confederate side—the South believed that Britain was so dependent on Southern cotton that they would intervene on their side of the war. Given the intensity of British public opinion against slavery this seems like a bad bet, but if the Confederates had better judgment they probably wouldn’t have started the war in the first place.
IIRC (I don't have historic trade complexity to hand, I once did for a project some years ago) the British did cultivate new sources (eg India) after experiencing a volume lull for some time.
Over a longer arc the cloth trade itself grew in volume and demand for raw fibre increased, absorbing the post Civil War US production again.
You're correct that public sentiment opposed slavery and that unionised mill workers in England supported a ban on non use of "slave cotton".
What also occurred, as often happens in war, is that a profitable black market trade grew and lined the pockets of many middle men, at the expense of growers who had reduced profits and embargos to deal with and for mill workers who saw less actual work as bale numbers plummeted.
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We've seen how the enslaving and exploiting thing worked out.
We're just hitting the Find Out stage of the running a world economy on fossil fuels thing.
Oh well. 200 years ain't a bad run.
That doesn't really make sense historically. "The UK" is a modern concept relatively speaking, the Act of Union didn't pass until long after the slaving and looting got going.
England was not as overwhelming over Scotland demographically in the past as it is today, and the Scots were eager participants in the colonial venture. In fact, the Act of Union was motivated by the failed Darien Scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme#Consequences_of_...
> That doesn't really make sense historically. "The UK" is a modern concept relatively speaking
It makes perfect sense; you just have to acknowledge that to anyone outside England, "England" and "the UK" are identical in meaning.
> you just have to acknowledge that to anyone outside England, "England" and "the UK" are identical in meaning.
I'd love to hear the results of you trying that argument in the rougher parts of, say, Glasgow or Swansea. I suspect if you tried it on the wrong person you'd be picking up your teeth with a broken hand.
Do you think that makes it less true?
In the modern context, /shrug/.
When talking about history, absolutely, because we're talking about three or four different countries at the time, with different kings, governments, alliances, economies and so on.
Yes. I gave you an example of people outside England who don't think England and the UK are synonymous ie it is a direct refutation.
If you had said "Outside the UK" there might be room to say it's a matter of opinion, but since in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the vast majority of people would not say England and the UK are the same, your statement is just flat out obviously wrong.
But Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland aren't outside England. See the original comment.
It’s surprising how many people get them mixed up even in the UK.
England is one country of the United Kingdom. Scotland, England and Wales make up the island of Great Britain, the largest of the British Isles. The UK also includes Northern Ireland. Hence: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island.
I was confused too, thought that Great Britain referred to the archipelago as a whole (excluding Ireland) rather than the largest island.
I've seen it stated variously that Little Britain is either Ireland, or Brittany.
For a long time I've felt that one of the traditional titles of the Russian czars, "Czar of all the Russias", was cooler than the titles I was aware of for other rulers. I was surprised to find the seal of an English queen on Wikipedia which clearly showed a Latin title translating as "Queen of all the Britains".
The switch from "King of Britain" to "King of the Britains" seems to have occurred during the reign of George III, judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm . None of those include an "all", but I'm sure it was present in the seal I saw.
"Britanniarum omnium"? Present from what I can tell on coins rather than the Great Seal. Also medals and maybe some other things.
England in the Early Middle Ages was rich enough to attract Vikings both to plunder and settle, and Normans to conquer it.
In the High Middle Ages, it was capable of maintaining pretty expensive wars on the continent without going bankrupt.
The UK as a whole exists only since 1707, and by that time, it was already a major power. Did it have a numerous poor population? Yes, much like the US now does. But that is not the same as being a poor country in the sense that Somalia or Timor Leste are.
Can you name a single non-tiny country that became rich prior to the 1900s using any other means?
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That is entirely orthogonal to the matter at hand. But go ahead, expose your bias and take a guess.
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I have no bias against the UK if that's what you're implying. In fact, I very much like English literature etc. I am just stating the fact that they have historically been a very poor society with a large divide between the haves and have-nots.
That holds for every society historically as the period we are living in is, relative to the history of civilisation, one of incredible wealth and abundance.
The question is - is our current level only an historical blip?
post isnt about "every country" .
And that is why I don't find China's policy to "steal" IP as offensive as to some western people and hope my country to emulate some. That's how the rich got rich and hoping honesty and hard work will bring you up is naive.
The UK spawned a bunch of successful countries. Since it lost control, some have been wildly successful and all have developed. So there's something about them and their way of operating that worked. Part of that has to be location - the Dutch were in the wrong place and got stomped on by Spain to their detriment but I think they had the same attitude to enterprising/adventuring/financing - perhaps even more so.
As a colonial myself the bit about exploitation is just so much cheap envy/sour grapes/whatever. All over the world people get exploited by someone and get conquered by someone. A "country" is just a lot of bits that someone conquered. In the ancient world I don't think anything was great but it was probably better in the end to be conquered by the Romans than many others. In the same vein the British weren't the worst and got a bit smarter over time. What they really did was open the world to trade, of course in just as unfair a manner as any other colonial power ... but it was both good and bad for them. Initially they had the industrial revolution, but they couldn't stop the same thing happening elsewhere once they turned on the flow of trade.
Now a university degree isn't a guarantee of a great job - because many people have one. Similarly many countries have industrialised economies with an educated population now. Europeans or any other formerly advantaged country find it harder to command high prices for their own products while enjoying the products of less advanced countries at a discount.
Countries with large scale like the US and China can make the incredible investments needed to make the next advancements. Countries like Britain can only do it when they team up as in the EU. The Brexiters are essentially luddites who cannot see this writing on the wall - they desperately believe that scaling up is something they can avoid. They want to retain control of something that shrinks until it is nothing because they are scared utterly **tless of the changes that might happen if they aren't in control. It's like trying to climb back into the womb.
With you until the last paragraph. It's unclear what you mean by "investments needed to make the next advancements", but be aware that the UK is back in the EU Horizon Research programme. It rejoined that part only a year or so after leaving, something the Remain campaign and the EU's negotiators insisted would be impossible, and the Brexit campaigners said would be an obvious and common sense move for the EU. Turned out the latter were correct, the Remainers were wrong and the EU itself was bluffing.
That said, it's not very likely that teaming up with the EU makes any difference. The UK was a full member during a time of economic stagnation. The EU is not outperforming it.
>Countries like Britain can only do it when they team up as in the EU. The Brexiters are essentially luddites who cannot see this writing on the wall
The UK remains one of the world powers and the Pound Sterling one of the reserve currencies thanks to their familial ties with the Five Eyes and the Commonwealth Realm, and select friends like Japan.
Island country and continent countries bloody hating each other is a tale older than history. If anything, it's the EU (namely France and Germany) who need to figure out how to get countries fully on board with them.
> The UK remains one of the world powers and the Pound Sterling one of the reserve currencies
With every passing year this becomes less true.
The UK is in managed decline, the entire world knows it; its only brits themselves who see themselves as exceptional.
(I’m British, living in Sweden).
Sad but true. The saddest bit IMO is the lack of even ideas for how to reverse it. Subsequent governments just rearrange the deck chairs and distribute blankets on the increasingly tilted deck.
The current decline of universities' financial situation may be another terrible blow. One thing in which the UK is genuinely a top performer worldwide is higher education. But 3/4 are expected to go into the red this year, and the universities are increasingly stuffing their courses with whoever can pay their fees, regardless of ability.
Yeah I was against Brexit as it was a huge upheaval that made trade with our main trading partners harder but small independent countries can do very well if they are open to trade and are run sensibly. Look at Singapore for example.
The problem with that line of thinking is that Singapore benefitted immensely from its geographical locations and from being an excellent port in a complicated region.
England can hardly benefit from the same.
There are other smaller countries that do well. Norway, Australia, Japan, Switzerland etc. The UK has the #2 (or sometimes #1) financial center, ~4 out of the world's top 10 universities, #2 in Nobel prizes after the US, the most books published per capita etc. There's potential there if they sort the bad bits.
What Britain doesn't have geographically is more than compensated with what they do have politically. Again: The familial ties and friends.
The era we live in right now is Pax Americana, the United States is top dog. But so long as the United Kingdom remains aligned (those familial ties!) that means both and all of us are top dog. Same story with solid friends like Japan who also enjoys top dog status.
It is a cold hard fact that Britain is no longer a superpower, it's also a cold hard fact that Britain wouldn't be a power period were they by themselves. Fortunately for them though, we are family.
Countries like France and Germany only kind of sort of enjoy the benefits of Pax Americana because they are two-faced and greedy or worse. France suddenly getting kicked out of that nuclear sub deal with Australia and replaced by America and Britain was a brutal demonstration of an unseverable family blood and bond.
As an aside, the British Isles are an "excellent port" in a "complicated region". America does appreciate having two giant and unsinkable carriers (USS Britain and USS Japan) next to potential hotspots in the world.
Good reminder of why most US "allies" should be very wary of that alliance.
> and all have developed
Isn't that true of pretty much every country, even the few that were never colonized by European powers?
I mean, Afghanistan developed since its independence in 1919, but that's hardly attributable to some sort of intrinsic Britishness.
Same for Egypt, with its 1922 independence, or Libya in 1951.
Just like how Vietnam developed after independence from France.
While we've seen how Japan developed without being part of any colonial system. ("it was probably better in the end to be conquered by the Romans than many others" rejects the idea that it might have been better to not be conquered at all.)
> A "country" is just a lot of bits that someone conquered.
The modern definition of a "country" also requires a permanent population and a government, along with recognition by other countries. Note that this definition is of fundamentally European origin.
Further note the difficulty of using your definition for "Northern Cyprus" and "Sealand", much less the "Sovereign Military Order of Malta".
Japan was a colonising state, Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan
I was commenting on 'spawned a bunch of successful countries .. and all have developed' by pointing out the meaningless of "developed". Every country has developed over the last 100 years - those which were British colonies, those which were French colonies, and those which were not colonized.
That Japan and Ethiopia carried out atrocities to expand their respective empires during that time is completely besides the point.
Apparently, the 'high order bits' for a nation to gain economic supremacy are boring things like raw materials, land, size of work pool... and less so lofty things like culture, demographics, system of government...
Well, in an epoch where these things matter. I can imagine we're entering an epoch where access to battery tech/resources, GPUs and cheap energy is what matters. Plus good teaching universities...
That's probably more the case now that there aren't any new resource-rich continents to colonize.
Maybe in the distant future, some country will claim a passing asteroid full of rare metals and gasses, and become the economic superpower of its era.
except gpu etc are the tulip equivalent. only matters as speculation between the already richm
the new fortunes are all based on rent today. including colonialism. every south America and Africa country privatized all their infrastructure to American or European companies in the last 10 years. telephone, water, power, transportation, banking.
Most economic growth seems to be driven by technology, both physical like machines and intellectual like legal and financial systems. For most of the world's history there wasn't much economic growth, things were much like they were a thousand years before. The UK got rich through the industrial revolution, but then other countries copied that which didn't make the UK poorer in absolute terms but did in relative terms as the rest of the world caught up.
There's a graph of that here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/...
A lot depends how you move along the curve. (graph is from this article https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...)
The next thirty years of the curve should be interesting with AI and all that.
What about slave labor? Looks like significant economic advantage in US favor, at least until 1865.
If so, the South would have been more economically developed than the North.
In the correct circumstances, slave labor can be a considerable advantage. In other circumstances...not so much. Maintaining a slavery-based society is, socially, a huge hidden cost. (That's everything from shouting down objecting moralists to putting down slave rebellions.) And for socioeconomic reason, slave labor societies often trap themselves in a relatively crappy local maximum. Such as the American South's plantation-based and agriculture-dominated system.
In a fair world, where there is equal access to basic things required for living life (food, health services, education), the UK has no business being a top economy. They don't have the land area, nor the population, nor the natural resources. They were propped up by the colonialism for a bit but now are fast going back to be a small inconsequential country.
Well in a fair world why do some countries get to have lots of land area and resources and some don't ? Because they "got there first"? Why should Saudi Arabia or Canada be extremely wealthy?
The "fair world" positioning of their comment makes little sense. It reads as if they believe that a economy should be based solely on resource extraction and if a country doesn't have plentiful resources in their borders, then they don't believe the country should be a "top economy".
You have it the wrong way around. Look at the US. They have it because they "got there LAST", took their diseases with them and wiped out the natives.
Yeah, luck plays a part too. Saudi Arabia got lucky with oil, without which it was just warring desert tribes. I happened to see pictures of UAE Sheikhs before the discovery of oil, and they were not very royal, to say the least.
Canada has a ton of natural resources, they ought to be wealthy.
So cultural, scientific and technical achievements should either bring zero economic benefits to a country or you believe in your fair world these things are evenly produced per capita/land area?
That gives a temporary (relative) advantage but without any fundamental advantage, your competitor would copy and catchup.
Only if your competitor has the same education, culture, etc.
>In a fair world, where there is equal access to basic things required for living life (food, health services, education)
>They don't have the land area, nor the population, nor the natural resources.
These two parts framing the idea about how the "UK has no business being a top economy" were complete non-sequiturs.
The UK is a large island nation with full access to the world's oceans. This is also the main geographical advantage that the US has. This is an extreme advantage. Look to Ukraine for proof.
> They don't have the land area, nor the population, nor the natural resources.
If those are the determining criteria, how do you explain Singapore?
Singapore's "natural resource" is location, location, location.
It secured early the role of small secure island for trade transfer and is now a massively automated transit hub for a huge regional population.
In world history choke points and traffic funnels have frequently been acquired, captured, secured for profit, control and influence.
The poster clearly speaks of «top economy» in terms of absolute GDP (and related), not per-capita; just observes that some powers are non-proportional. Of course history is magnitudes more complex than a sketchy model.
Their only determining criteria is essentially internal natural resources, which excludes any advanced industries. You could also add Israel and Taiwan to the list of advanced resource poor countries.
Singapore is a tax haven first and foremost. Same reason why Luxembourg is wealthy. Their wealth was built on questionable origins, no matter how much they boast about governance.
Singapore is nowhere close to being as tax-haveny as Luxembourg, any of the Caribbean islands administered by a foreign power, the Isle of Man, or the Channel islands.
Singapore saw a sustained ~8-10% real GDP growth from almost immediately after independence. It relied on manufacturing, reprocessing, and assembly to get there. Only in the past ~20 years has it really shifted to being a financial economy—and even then, it still has a pretty strong manufacturing base.
There's multiple degrees of tax haven and Singapore definitely belongs in this list. Their economy would take a hit if they would give up on the shell companies. I'd argue is even more of a tax haven nowadays due to the relocation of the business from Hong Kong.
It is not a fair world unfortunately.
Regardless, is it so bad if the UK becomes an inconsequential country? I feel like Brexit only happened because people here thought the UK was somehow special or important.
I’d agree nationalism played a big role, but I’d also argue that was being driven by a right wing press that had used Europe as a scapegoat for decades to explain away economic disparity. Meanwhile there are legitimate complaints about the EU, its opaque democracy and extensive bureaucracy.
Land area, population, and natural resources have next to nothing to do with wealth or GDP.
The UK will never be a small inconsequential country in any of our lifetimes.
It takes more than systemic fair basic access for the population to make GDP results proportional to general resources.
Imagine there's no countries.. And no religion too. You may say I'm a dreamer...
The UK does have some natural resources, also they have an Island, from my memory of playing Risk that's worth something. Can be defended and not easily invaded. The UK was a place of importance well before modern colonialism, that's why the Romans and the Vikings visited.
Culture also plays a role. It's possible the UK will become less consequential but they'll probably still have some weight for some time. Their colonial past still plays some role in terms of their relationships with various countries, connections also matter.
That's a bizarrely simplistic and reductive view. And, of course, entirely wrong.
Resources help with economic performance, but can also be a hindrance (see "Dutch disease"). Colonies were often acquired for prestige, but turned out an economic loss. They certainly did not play a part in the economic development of Germany, and countries like South Korea or Taiwan have very successfully grown their economies after being colonies.
What matters for long term economic growth is political stability and institutions that protect investments and limit corruption.
I think simplistic and reductive views is what people are capable of adopting unless they really make an effort and invest time in understanding. Most of the time most people will take the simplistic view.
> Most of the time most people will take the simplistic view
Are you aware that we call that a social cost and condemn it? Why are you stating a tautology, "good work requires effort"?
> hindrance
...The mismanagement of inflationary gold extraction from the Americas by Spain...
> What matters for long term economic growth is political stability and institutions that protect investments and limit corruption
...and especially, actively valuing competence...
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I don't get why so many such analyses get so focused on the textile industry, as if it was the only thing that mattered. It was the time of the rise of electricity, chemistry, and internal combustion engines. And England was an especially slow adopter - the traffic in London was entirely based on horses into the 20th century, long after many major cities adopted electric trams.
Reading about urban life in Berlin during the 1920s was kind of wild. It is so surprisingly relatable.
They transitioned from manufacturing to financial engineering.
It can be argued that financial engineering is what enabled their trading operations to begin with. Long distance voyage was an extremely risky venture and only a ruling king/queen had money and risk appetite to finance it. The joint stock corporation enabled spreading of that risk across thousands of investors and East India Company was one of the first joint stock corporation. What's more one could sell their equity holdings in exchange for cash so one wouldn't have to wait for years before getting return on investment.
We tend to forget the financial engine along with changes to contractual laws to only focus on daring voyages, military etc.,. But of course all of that had to be financed.
In the 19th century?!
Yes. The square mile has been a financial centre since the 16th century (possibly earlier): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
The OP claimed that the cause of the decline was a "transition from manufacturing to financial engineering", seemingly oblivious that the article was discussing the 19th century.
You seem to be implying that the presence of finance institutions in the 16th century supports the OP's thesis. That predates the industrial revolution, so obviously mere presence of financial institutions is not any kind of sign can't mean there's a "transition from manufacturing to financial engineering". If anything, those financial institions are a prerequisite for a rapid industrialization.
Of course UK has been a major financial hub (banking and insurance) for centuries. Look at the history of the Rothchilds for instance. You can not be a naval power without a finance sector. It is way too risky and expensive.
Of course they had financial institutions. The OP was making a far bigger claim than that: "They transitioned from manufacturing to financial engineering".
Sorry, but if there is one claim you can't make about 19th century Britain, it's that they transitioned away from manufacturing.
After WWII there were several phases of deindustrialization in the UK.
- 45-55 the postwar boom took hold, manufacturing switched from weapons to electrical equipment (GEC), lighting (Thorn) cars (Rover, Austin…) and so on
- 55-65 wealth spread to the working class finally and the 30s slums were cleared (council houses and high rise flats). all this domestic growth hid the rise in other countries - far east, india and so on - which ate into traditional manufacturing export markets with low costs. the consumer was happy with low cost imports, better housing, and service industries - the Beetles - took off
- 65-75 poorly conceived loss making statist interventions to try to defend uncompetitive domestic primary industry coal (NCB), steel (British Steel) and secondary manufacturing (British Leyland), shipping … these were easy for unions to capture and bled the nation dry
- five years of economic disaster ushered in Thatcher, killed the unions, released the City and by 1985 services had eclipsed industry once and for all
In this potted history, the economic transformation of the UK from manufacturing to services was total by the late 90s. Similar economies … France, Germany have chosen a more managed mixed economy placing more value on job security and wide employment. Let’s see how that works out for Starmer and Reeves.
But again, the article is talking about the 19th century. The 1800s. How are these data points from the latter half of the 20th century relevant?
The London Stock Exchange was founded in 1773.. Amsterdam saw its first stock market appear in the early 1600s. But the modern stock exchanges only emerged later during this era in London and New York.
So just to be clear, are you claiming this as proof of Britain deindustralizing in the 19th century?
Perhaps.
Banks became more important for financing industrial growth, as entrepreneurs and business owners needed more capital. The Bank of England was created in 1694 to fund wars, and was given a monopoly on joint stock banking in 1708.
https://www.thoughtco.com/development-of-banking-the-industr...
Once the great minds of the country understood that there are easier ways of multiplying their wealth (trade, colonisation, wars..), one can imagine the shift in their priorities - from investment in engineering to financing agents of wealth creation.
The author's confidence in their conclusions hints at naivete at best
This website is produced by think-tank members who have an angle that the UK is in decline and needs to take specific (neoliberal lassez-faire) economic policy steps to regain its position in the world ie its a piece of political astroturf disguised as historical analysis. The same crowd also produced ukfoundations.co which is a similar sort of thing. For some reason people post their stuff on here from time to time.
Oh that explains a lot
(2022)
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The island itself does not have much in terms of resources. And it does not have a large competitive population like China or India. And it does not have the economic attractiveness like the US. And it no longer has a colonized commonwealth to exploit. Sure, London has fame, culture, and some economy. But it does feel like the last piece of a dying empire. I am often surprised when I watch videos of suburbs or rural areas in England, because it simply looks poor and trashy. Maybe that is true in most countries, but I somehow expected something different and … British?
