3 - Continental emulation

Summary

It is something of a commonplace that the Crystal Palace Exposition in 1851 marked the apogee of Britain's career as the ‘workshop of the world’. True, the historian can detect premonitory indications of successful emulation by other nations, even evidence of foreign superiority in special areas of manufacture. But then, there is little the historian cannot detect if he sets his mind to it, and such harbingers of trouble hardly alter the general picture. This little island, with a population half that of France, was turning out about two-thirds of the world's coal, more than half of its iron and cotton cloth. (The figures are approximate, but they furnish orders of proportion.) Her income per capita, which cannot be compared precisely with that of the continental countries, all ingenious efforts to the contrary, was correspondingly higher than that of her neighbours. Her merchandise dominated in all the markets of the world; her manufacturers feared no competition; she had even—in a move that marked a break with hundreds of years of economic nationalism—removed almost all the artificial protections of her industrialists, fanners, and shippers against foreign rivals. What other country could follow suit? She was, in short, the very model of industrial excellence and achievement—for some, a pace-setter to be copied and surpassed; for others, a superior economic power whose achievements rested on the special bounty of an uneven Providence, hence a rival to be envied and feared. But all watched and visited and tried to learn.