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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
With hindsight, economic historians now acknowledge that 1848 divides the economic and financial history of the world into separate epochs. Before 1848, international trade was rising faster than ever before and was connecting all regions of the world into new patterns of trade. But it was only after 1848 that enough price competition arose for the same international commodities around the world that a truly global market emerged (O'Rourke and Williamson 1999; Williamson 2011). Financial innovations appeared hand in hand with the revolutionary adoption of steam power for both land and water transport systems combined with the new information technology of the telegraph. The exclamations made in the 1850 edition of Fortune's Epitome of the Stocks and Public Funds about the rise of securities marketed on the London Stock Exchange over the 1840s, dominated by the railroad booms in Britain and the US, were modest compared to the ecstatic remarks made by his successor, R. L. Nash, in the 1876 edition of Fenn's Compendium of the English and Foreign Funds:
Upon this question of indebtedness hangs a world of vitality and progress with which the future well-being of mankind is signally identified; and it would be a very narrow view of a very mighty question if we could regard it in any other light. Humanly speaking, we are only at the commencement of a new era … [T]here can be no question – that with this modernized system of credit the world has acquired light, health, progress, and prosperity; that every man has more of the world's goods than could have been boasted of a century ago; that every man is better educated; that every man is a better citizen; and that if these are the results of indebtedness, we may fairly leave the solution of the problem to the future with that confidence which experience well earned amply justifies.
(Nash 1876, p. xiv)Essential features of the international crises, 1847–1849
The financial crisis of 1847 helped initiate a number of far-reaching policy changes in Britain especially, and then in Europe generally, with repercussions that were even more important in the future for the rest of the world as modern capitalism spread globally.
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