Great Britain 1920-1970 [antikvár]

Great Britain 1920-1970 THE YEARS IN OUTLINE Between 1913 and 1970 the world economy was subjected to a series of disturbances of unparalleled severity. These disturbances affected the progress of every country, not least that of Great Britain, and they broke up the continuity both of development and of policy. In 1913, before the First World War, Britain was the most influential, seemingly the most stable, and probably the wealthiest in terms of income per head of all the countries of the world. This position was based largely on a few staple industries, notably coal, engineering and textiles, in which Britain was one of the two or three main suppliers in international markets; her chief competitors were usually Germany and France. Production in these industries was to a remarkable extent for export — the proportion of U.K. manufacturing output as a whole devoted to exports was about twice as high as that in Germany and France — and the three main staples accounted for almost two-thirds of the value of total exports of domestic produce. These enormous exports of coal and of certain kinds of manufactured goods enabled Britain not only to import large quantities of food and raw materials from all over the world, as well as manufactured goods from Europe, but also to export capital in very large amounts indeed, chiefly to different parts of the Empire but also to Latin America, the United States, Japan and many other countries. The effect of the war was to impoverish all the European participants and to weaken if not destroy the foundations on which the old patterns of trade had been established. Britain's economic development, along with that of several other western European countries, was set back by five or ten years. Industrial development in the United States and Japan, on the other hand, was accelerated, while many G.B.-A2 [5]