Achieving Economic Growth

The economic history of Western Europe since the start of industrialisation has been remarkably patchy. Britain experienced a long period of rapid growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, but then slowed down between 1850 and 1900. Germany and the Netherlands did much better during the second half of the nineteenth century than the first, and better still during the early years of the twentieth century, leading to World War I. The 1930s were a particularly interesting and important period, with France languishing, Britain doing far better than previously, and Germany surging ahead at an astonishing pace. There have been decades when most of the main economies were growing very quickly, as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. After the post-war boom, in the 1970s, growth slowed everywhere in Western Europe. Britain’s poor record for most of the twentieth century began to be emulated by everyone else.