British papermaking engineering, its growth and the origins of its decline, 1800-1939: a comparative approach

"British industrial and economic pre-eminence during Industrial Revolution was over, at least partially, in the late nineteenth century. The reasons of this, often called controversially British climacteric, underlined in the literature are many. Mokyr has pointed out that the United Kingdom was defined by a highly skilled stock of human capital which was able to translate ideas from home or abroad (the papermaking case) to innovations that could have commercial use. These “Glorious Times”, the United Kingdom was world’s leader in technological matters. The falling behind process from late nineteenth century has a complex explanation with multiple factors to be accounted (economic and business structure of the British economy, markets, education, etc.) and it has been the origin of a controversy. Literature underlines the British technological lead at least up to the 1860s. Kison and Michie have called the period between 1870 and 1913 as “the age of maturity” and “the age of uncertainty” that between wars. Tom Nicholas has underlined how some factors were inevitable, such as the characteristics of the advancing countries with larger markets, but other are directly linked with structural factors “such as the lack of competition in product markets and the relative absence of creative destruction as disciplinary mechanisms to promote the efficiency of firms”. British papermaking engineering was the main supplier of machines in the World markets during an important part of the nineteenth century. Besides that, the domestic market was really huge and in continuous expansion for decades, mainly linked with more standardized types of paper (newsprint). British workshops began to lose ground in the late nineteenth century. Global markets were increasingly supplied by US and German works. The main reasons of that were the stagnation of the British papermaking industry. Lost the domestic market dynamism, the exports fell down, but not completely. From this point of view, papermaking engineering is a good example of the British industrial decline. However, this scenario fits with the explanation by Saul, according to whom the British engineering industry had a performance which cannot be described as a poor as a whole"