Industry and Empire by E J Hobsbawm

Author:E J Hobsbawm
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141926209
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-12-01T21:00:00+00:00

Nevertheless, when we compare the inter-war depression with the period before 1914, we are inclined to judge it a little less severely. It is hard to find anything positive to say about the Indian summer of the Edwardians, that season of almost deliberately missed opportunities which made certain that the decline of the British economy would be a catastrophe. It had not even achieved that most modest of objectives, the stability of the standard of living of the poor, though it had made the rich a great deal richer (cf. pp. 144–5). On the other hand – perhaps just because economic catastrophe left very much less scope for complacency – the inter-war years were not entirely wasted. By 1939 Britain looked a great deal more like a twentieth-century economy than she had done – in comparison with other industrial states – in 1913. By the four criteria listed in Chapter 9 Britain was no longer a Victorian economy. The importance of scientific technology, of mass-production methods, of industry producing for the mass market, but above all of economic concentration, ‘monopoly capitalism’ and state intervention was very much greater. The inter-war years neither modernized the British economy nor made it internationally competitive. It remains old-fashioned and undynamic to this day. But at least certain foundations for modernization were laid, or rather certain major obstacles to it removed.

The reason why the inter-war catastrophe had not more fundamental consequences is threefold: the pressure on the economy was not desperate enough; for political reasons, state management and planning, such as was to transform the French economy after the war, was used very sparingly; and virtually all economic changes initiated in this period were defensive and negative.

The pressure on the economy was inadequate, partly because the peculiar international position of Britain's somewhat blunted the impact of the sharpest spur to action, the great slump of 1929–33. Since the traditional basic industries of Britain were already depressed after 1921, the effect of the slump was less dramatic: those who are already low do not fall so far.* Moreover, while the export industries were battered, the rest of the economy benefited abnormally from the disproportionate fall in the cost of primary products – food and raw material – from the colonial and semi-colonial world. Again, because the Victorian economy had relied so very little on production for the domestic mass market, the scope for a shift into home sales was considerably greater. Britain was in crisis, but she was not faced in the starkest and least avoidable form with the alternative: compete or die.

Second, the state refrained from adequate intervention. Its capacity to intervene effectively was demonstrated in both world wars, but especially the Second. When it did, its achievements were sometimes little short of sensational, as in British agriculture, which it transformed between 1940 and 1945. The necessity for its intervention was evident, for several of the basic industries – notably railways and coalmines – were so run down as to be quite beyond the scope of private restoration, and several others were clearly not capable of rationalizing themselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.