How would British economy looks like without ww1?

Thomas1195

Banned
Basically none of British private firms had their own in-house R&D operations. Public research in non-defence sectors in Britain, unlike Germany, was also non-existant before ww1.

Britain's lag was quite serious, in applying technology, in business practices, in policies, in education. It seems that they still stuck in Victorian era.
 
How fast would deindustrialization happen? If it happens too fast there'll be huge problem with unemployed workers in cities, it's still too early for the millions of well paid service sector jobs we have today - no webdesigners, no programmers, no consultants or mass media entertainers etc. They cant go back to grandpas farm.
 
Not that fast, Britain still has to protect itself and its Empire so there will be military orders for ships and munitions. The cotton textile industries weren't hard hit until the 1920s and 1930s and the linen and woollen industries only really went into decline in the 1950s. Aluminium production would still have to start (for military/air force) requirements and Russia and China aren't going to effectively shut themselves out of world markets for long periods. Coal mining could have deindustrialised a lot more quickly than it did, mechanisation was delayed to protect jobs. Road transport and air transport would have grown more slowly and organically. Britain was actually quite good at engine and vehicle (and aeroplane) manufacture pre-nationalisation so this would still have grown during the period. Manufacture of white goods took off in the 1920s. And don't forget that a lot of surplus capital that might have funded new industrial developments was soaked up by Government debt OTL.
 

hipper

Banned
Basically none of British private firms had their own in-house R&D operations. Public research in non-defence sectors in Britain, unlike Germany, was also non-existant before ww1.

Britain's lag was quite serious, in applying technology, in business practices, in policies, in education. It seems that they still stuck in Victorian era.

With no in house R&D and no public research how did firms like parsons pick up their workdwide patients, also Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce may disagree about how Britain lagged in applying technology.
 
For at least the first 20 yeas after the non-World War One the UK would have a considerably smaller National Debt. The table below (which I made for another thread) shows that in the last full financial year of peace the Total National Debt Service was 12.4% of expenditure. From 1922-23 to 1931-32 the cost of servicing the National Debt was at least 3 times what it had been before World War One. For the rest of the 1930s it was "only" double what it had been before World War One.

IMHO it is likely that the British Government would be taxing and spending considerably less from 1914 until at least 1940.
Revenue and Expenditure 1913-40-1.jpg
 
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If there was no World War One it is highly unlikely that 1939-45 world war would have happened. Although the cost of servicing the National Debt from 1945 to 1960 was less as a proportion of the size of the debt and as a proportion of expenditure than it had been between the world wars it would still provide the TTL Chancellors of the Exchequer with a useful amount of "pocket money." [Note that the revenue in 1957-58 should be £5,678.7 million due to a transcription error made by me.]
Revenue and Expenditure 1934-60 - 80%.jpg
 

Thomas1195

Banned
With no in house R&D and no public research how did firms like parsons pick up their workdwide patients, also Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce may disagree about how Britain lagged in applying technology.
They are mostly just individual technicians working independently, while in Germany and the US you have large labs employing lots of professional scientists and engineers.

Henry Ford, Carnegie, Edison, Krupp or Robert Borsch would prove that their British equivalents had lagged behind them.
 

hipper

Banned
They are mostly just individual technicians working independently, while in Germany and the US you have large labs employing lots of professional scientists and engineers.

Henry Ford, Carnegie, Edison, Krupp or Robert Borsch would prove that their British equivalents had lagged behind them.

Parsons Turbines revolutionised the marine engineering industry and the electricity supply industry. He formed a large company which supplied marine turbines and electricity generators around the world. Hardly an individual technician.

Royce is an interesting case which you may want to ponder. Originally manifacturing Dynamo's he moved upmarket due to American and German Competition. He succeeded in making an engineering company of the highest quality.

So in answer to your question there are three responses of the British economy to worldwide competition absent World War One

First they will concentrate on areas where they have competitive advantage
Secondly they will move upmarket to areas of higher technology
Thirdly foreign firms with new methods and technology will set up in the UK these firms will become British owned due to avaiibility of capital and British management skills. I refer you to Siemens UK and Ford UK as examples of these processes.
 
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Thomas1195

Banned
Thirdly foreign firms with new methods and technology will set up in the UK these firms will become British owned due to avaiibility of capital and British management skills. I refer you to Siemens UK
Normallu they only opened assembly plants in Britain, while keeping R&D in their home countries.

Their R&D base was in Germany. A Siemen lamp factory (don't remember the name) had been closed during 1920s because ww1 cut off its link to German R&D.

Only during the interwar period, some British firms like ICI began to set up their own R&D divisions.

How so exactly?
You can easily search for a fact that Carnegie's company produced more steel than the whole Britain combined.

For Germany, you can do some research on the position of their chemical firms like Bayer and BASF before 1914. Many of which eventually became a part of the giant IG Farben.
 

Deleted member 94680

You can easily search for a fact that Carnegie's company produced more steel than the whole Britain combined.

That doesn't answer the question I asked, which was about R&D. Steel production is another issue. But, once again, do you have a link for that?

For Germany, you can do some research on the position of their chemical firms like Bayer and BASF before 1914. Many of which eventually became a part of the giant IG Farben.

So you make an unsubstantiated claim and I have to do the research? I don't think that how's this site usually works, is it?
 

hipper

Banned
Normallu they only opened assembly plants in Britain, while keeping R&D in their home countries.

Their R&D base was in Germany. A Siemen lamp factory (don't remembter the name) had been closed during 1920s because ww1 cut off its link to German R&D.

Only during the interwar period, some British firms like ICI began to set up their own R&D divisions.

I'm making a point about innovation and capital Carl Wilhelm thought the UK was a better place than Germany to develop high tech industry in the 19th Century, why do you think that was?

The personal history of Sir William Siemens


Anne, William, and his brothers

In 1859 he married a Scot, Anne Gordon, and on the day of his engagement he took British citizenship and changed his name from Carl Wilhelm to Charles William. In 1883 he was knighted by Queen Victoria for services to science. He died Sir William Siemens, a few months later and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London.


The Company


Siemens Factory

The steel works he built in Landore, South Wales, was largely geared to experimenting, and he developed the process known as the regenerative principle, whereby the hot fumes leaving a furnace are led back to heat the furnace itself.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
I'm making a point about innovation and capital Carl Wilhelm thought the UK was a better place than Germany to develop high tech industry in the 19th Century, why do you think that was?
Because he moved to the UK before 1870.

After 1870, it was clear that German education system was far superior.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
How so exactly?
More specific example: Fritz-Haber process:

Haber, with his assistant Robert Le Rossignol, developed the high-pressure devices and catalysts needed to demonstrate the Haber process at laboratory scale.[6][7] They demonstrated their process in the summer of 1909 by producing ammonia from air, drop by drop, at the rate of about 125 ml (4 US fl oz) per hour. The process was purchased by the German chemical company BASF, which assigned Carl Bosch the task of scaling up Haber's tabletop machine to industrial-level production.[3][8] He succeeded in 1910. Haber and Bosch were later awarded Nobel prizes, in 1918 and 1931 respectively, for their work in overcoming the chemical and engineering problems of large-scale, continuous-flow, high-pressure technology.[9]

Ammonia was first manufactured using the Haber process on an industrial scale in 1913 in BASF's Oppau plant in Germany, reaching 20 tonnes per day the following year.[10]


Such cooperation between firms and scientists helped develop the laboratory process at an industrial scale.
 
When talking about (for example) steel production, how is this calculated? I don't think there was a chap at each steelworks weighing the steel as it came out of the furnaces, so more likely a formula was used to calculate the amount - and the British used very conservative formulae compared to Germany or America, so I think it likely that if you applied US or German methodology to British production the figure for steel production would be a lot higher.

Also, I don't think quoting Edison as an example supports any claim of US advantage: Edison basically poached other people's ideas and passed them off as his own. Louis Le Prince invents the movie-camera (and then disappears under mysterious circumstances) and next thing Edison produces a camera and claims to have invented it. The Englishman Joseph Swan invents the light-bulb, but Edison buys him out and then takes credit for the invention. Of course, Edison was just the most egregious example, but throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th the US was stealing British intellectual property - not just in the field of technology but in the arts as well: British authors from Dickens to Tolkien saw their work pirated in America.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Also, I don't think quoting Edison as an example supports any claim of US advantage: Edison basically poached other people's ideas and passed them off as his own. Louis Le Prince invents the movie-camera (and then disappears under mysterious circumstances) and next thing Edison produces a camera and claims to have invented it. The Englishman Joseph Swan invents the light-bulb, but Edison buys him out and then takes credit for the invention. Of course, Edison was just the most egregious example, but throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th the US was stealing British intellectual property - not just in the field of technology but in the arts as well: British authors from Dickens to Tolkien saw their work pirated in America.
Edison was excellent at bringing these inventions into practical applications and mass production. Other good examples are Bell, Tesla and Westinghouse.

Also, Carnegie pioneered vertical integration in steel production (although it was a production practice rather than an invention).
 
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