The Timing of the Climacteric and its Sectoral Incidence in the UK, 1873–1913

The behaviour of the British economy in the forty years before the First World War has attracted the attention of an impressive array of British economists with an historical bent: Robertson, Cairncross, Phelps Brown, and Arthur Lewis, to name only the most eminent. However, it was not a British economist but an American one who was responsible for the renaissance of interest in the subject in the years immediately after the Second World War. Walt Rostow’s British Economy of the Nineteenth Century was published in 1948, based largely on unpublished work done by its author before the war. (The oldest of the present writers vividly remembers how his interest in quantitative economic history was first aroused by an oral version of parts of the book given by Walt Rostow in lectures in front of a blazing open fire in the hall of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946–7.) It raised new questions and offered new answers on the period 1873–1913. It also marked the first step in the post-war quantitative-theoretical movement in the writing of economic history.