A Concise Economic History of Britain [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE 1964 IMPRESSION Economic history is the record of economic acts and decisions. It is concerned with the decisions and acts which arise out of men's need to make the least wasteful and most effective or, as we say, the most economic use of their resources. Necessity compels them to apply what resources they have, whether these are vast or scanty, part of the material world or part of their own person, to the purposes of life as they see them. It demands that they shall allot those resources as best they can, according to the customs, the techniques and the values which they know, among competing and often conflicting ends. This is the unchanging basis of economic history at all times and in every kind of society. How men in Great Britain have handled their economic resources and the social income derived from them, forms the subject of modern British economic history. Between 1750 and 1850, the peoples of the British Isles became, not suddenly but none the less decisively, the first great industrial community that the world had ever seen. They stumbled through the door, one might say, which led mankind into a new age and a new organization of society, at that time equally unknown both in its potentialities and its dangers. They bore in their own persons the hardships, the shocks and the triumphs of that astounding transition. During many years of the nineteenth century, in the long Victorian age, they led the countries of the West industrially and those of them who were in a position to do so, at all levels of society, saw to it that they were suitably rewarded. For in a world full of uncharted possibilities, with resources waiting to be mobilized, they displayed all the virtues and many of the failings of pioneers—the will to work, to face the unknown and achieve the impossible, the speculative fever, the readiness to leave to late-comers the bill marked social cost. But the pioneering age was relatively soon over. Between 1870 and 1914, the notable advantages which British industry had possessed in early Victorian days over those of all other countries were abolished by the swift industrial growth of great nations in Central Europe and North America. Foreign competition was not the only problem in