#35
The Rise of Germany
and
the Fall of Britain
The next several chapters of my blog will contain several articles: some with a
mixture of facts gleaned from European events prior to the start of the Great
War and some with fictional interpretations that "read between the lines".
Great Britain, the inventor and
exporter of the Industrial Revolutions that have created the modern world, too
soon fell behind competing nations. First, it lost its lead in cotton, then in
steel, and finally in electrical and chemical technologies. Acccording to Eric
Hobsbawm:
The
saddest case was perhaps that of the iron and
steel industry, for we see it
losing pre-eminence at the
very moment when its role in the British economy was
greatest, and its dominance in the world most
unquestioned. Every major innovation
in the manufacture
of steel came from Great Britain or was developed in
Britain: Bessener's converter (1856), which first made the
mass-production of
steel possible, the Siemens-Martin
open-hearth firnace (1867), which greatly
increased
productivity, and the Gilchrist-Thomas basic process
(1877-8), which
made it possible to use and enire new range
of ores for steel manufacture. Yet,
with the exception of
the converter, British industry was slow to apply the
new
methods -- Gilchrist-Thomas benefited the Germans
and the French far more than
his countrymen -- and they
utterly failed to keep up with subsequent
developments. Not
only did British production fall behind that of Germany and
the USA in the early 1890s, but also British productivity. By
1910 the USA
produced almost twice as much steel alone as
the total steel production of
Great Britain.
The same
sad decline in leadership observed in textiles and steel repeated itself later
in chemical and electrical industries.
Historians
have long debated the puzzling question why Victorian Britain, the inventor and
pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, so quickly fell behind other nations. As
the British economic historian Hobsbawn states the problem:
It
was no doubt inevitable that British pioneer industries
should lose ground
relatively as the rest of the
world industrialized, and that their rate of
expansion
should decline; but this purely statistical phenomenon need
not have
been accompanied by a genuine loss of impetus
and efficiency. Still less was it
predetermined that Britain
should fail in industries in which she started with
the
arguable disadvantages neither of the older pioneer, or of
the late-comer,
but substantially at the same time and point
as the rest.
Hobsbawm and others
have offered several interlocking explanations, one of which involves the
fundamentally anti-technological bias of British education, a bias that derives
from the influence of the most socially prestigious Public Schools in England. According to this convincing explanation, the
education provided by the institutions that produced the majority of Great
Britain's political and governmental leaders was both anti-technological and
anti-scientific. Since it set standards for state-sponsored secondary
education, it did terrible damage to both the country's education and its
economy.
A second
related explanation for economic decline appears in the fact that,
proportionate to its population, England produced so many fewer educated people
than either Europe or North America. A third explanation: the pioneers who had
done so well with first-generation approaches, technology, and general
attitudes saw little need to change to improve until too late. Fourth, Hobsbawn
claims that since the British middle class made money so easily in the first
years of the Industrial Revolution, they simply did not work as hard as their
rivals in other countries.
Hobsbawn's
most contentious (if appealing) explanation involves England's dependence upon
her colonies. According to him, British industry survived economic downturns,
including several depressions, and well as economic competition by selling to
the captive markets provided by its colonies. The very factor, in other words,
that allowed England initially to take the lead and then prosper in hard times
eventually produced noncompetitve attitudes and practices that ended up
creating stagnation and unemployment.
George P. Landow, author.
Reader:
What do you think Great Britain felt about Germany’s amazing economic growth?
