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In 1937, the best trading year for Britain between the world wars, the volume of her visible exports amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. … - Correlli Barnett
" "In 1937, the best trading year for Britain between the world wars, the volume of her visible exports amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. The British share of world trade in manufactures fell from nearly 24 per cent in 1921–5 to 18.6 per cent in 1936–8, whereas Germany's share actually rose from 17.4 per cent to 19.8 per cent, and Japan's from 3.4 per cent to 7 per cent. As a consequence of this slow defeat and retreat in world markets for manufactures Britain was compelled to look more and more to her invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services, plus the income from the vast overseas investments built up during the Victorian age) in order to pay for the imports essential to the nation's life and work. Even at the height of her nineteenth-century dominance as a manufacturing country Britain had relied on such invisible exports to keep her balance of payments in equilibrium – indeed to enable her to earn the surpluses to invest overseas. But the percentage of imports that had to be covered by invisible earnings rose from 19.2 per cent in 1870–4 to 44.4 per cent in 1935–9. Even so, Britain by these latter years was incurring an overall balance of payments deficit. Like some ageing industrialist who finds that the shrunken profits from the family firm are no longer enough to pay for his accustomed way of life, Britain had to resort to spending capital. In other words, in the run-up to the Second World War Britain was gradually selling off her foreign investments and using up her gold reserves.
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About Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".
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Correlli Douglas Barnett
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Additional quotes by Correlli Barnett
With regard to Blunt, we should remember that the 1920s and 1930s marked a high tide of romantic idealism, or high-minded priggishness, among the public school-educated British élite. Common-room Communism was not the only form of mandarin prize-assery to flourish; there were the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Anglo-German Group and Anglo-German "Link", and numerous other groups or ad-hoc committees devoted to various "good causes". There was "Bloomsbury"; E. M. Forster as the grand guru of intellectual wetness. A web of personal relationships and inter-connecting memberships linked the different sects into what may fairly be described as "the Establishment". Blunt and co, having pushed romantic idealism to the point of treachery, simply take the cigar as the prizest, or most misguided, asses of them all.
So the new or re-vamped public schools did not set out to equip their pupils to lead great industrial enterprises or a great industrial nation, but to turn them into Christian gentlemen able to govern the Empire and ornament the ancient professions like the Church and the Law. The eighteenth-century dissenting academy tradition of blending the arts and science into a practical preparation for a working life withered away. The prestige of the public schools as an avenue into gentility and the upper class seduced businessmen and engineers alike into sending their children to them. The public schools not only failed to educate a technical élite, they served to starve industry of the nation's highest available intellectual talent and the socially most prestigious groups. Industry and technology became what modern research confirms it still is in Britain—low in status, and hence, in a continual vicious circle, low in reward and low in human calibre compared with our rivals. By the 1850s an immense gulf had opened, from both sides, between industry and such education as there was—between the "practical man" despising education on the one hand, and the public schools on the other concentrating on the classics, religion and games.
It remained only for Britain during the war to pour out the rest of the investments and the gold on the purchase of war supplies from the United States, while at the same time cutting visible exports to a third of the 1938 level for the sake of war production, and the basis of Britain's economic existence for the last hundred years had been comprehensively destroyed.
In 1945 Britain was therefore left by this nemesis of free trade with none of the advantages of being highly dependent on foreign trade, and all the vulnerability. In the immediate postwar era, and for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, she would have to depend almost entirely on visible exports in order to secure the life and work of the nation and to rebuild her old prosperity.
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