The Development Of The British Economy 1870 1914

History is the essence of innumerable lives and as such beyond our understanding. We can only, as people say, form an idea of it. To sort out in every generation our ideas of history and to test them against the evidence available is the task of the historian. Unless this is done, human society remains without true knowledge of its past and presumably indifferent to its future. The concern of this book is with the economic characteristics and transformations of British society in the thirty or forty years before 1914, within the lifetime of men and women who had already reached middle-life when the First World War broke out.

The industrial revolution of Britain is recognized today as a model for industrialization all over the world. Now with a new introduction by the author, this book is widely renowned as a classic text for students of this key period.

Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter-intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses.

Textbook on the economic development of the UK during the period from 1914 to 1967 - covers historical aspects, the economic recession, industrial development, labour relations, agriculture, transport and telecommunications, foreign trade, the wholesale trade, the retail trade, trends in monetary policy and fiscal policy, budgeting, the balance of payments, economic policy, labour force, unemployment, trade unions, social change and welfare, etc. References.

First published in 1978, Professor O’Brien’s Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780-1914 is an original and pioneering exercise in comparative and quantitative economic history. It finds a controversial place in the debate on the question of French retardation in the 19th century and as a brave and important contribution towards the understanding of economic growth in Western Europe. The author attempts to comprehend and evaluate the economic performance of France through explicit comparisons with Britain, while considering British economic history from a French perspective. Challenging the orthodox view that France lagged behind Britain in economic terms, the book argues that there were two paths of economic growth to the 20th century, with France’s path seen as a more humane and no less efficient transition to industrial society.