Module description
Britain dominated the global economy for most of the nineteenth century; success was built upon its agricultural prosperity, its international trading position, a technological superiority in industrial production, and the emergence of London as the world’s financial centre. While an advanced understanding of this leading position constitutes the core element of this module, the decades between c.1850 and 1914 also witnessed anxiety about the onset of depression and a questioning of British business methods. A wider understanding of economic developments elsewhere, of the workings of the gold standard, and of the patterns of growth and decline which occurred in different sectors of Britain’s economy, particularly from the 1870s onwards, will all be examined and contemporary accounts of such changes set against more recent historical research.