Through two World Wars and the Great Depression, this book explores the turbulent history of colonial Indian industry in the period immediately prior to independence. Focusing on five major industries in Bengal - coal mining, iron-smelting, jute manufacturing, paper making and tea plantation – the book looks at the impact of the war efforts on production, employment and capital: some industries experienced rapid growth due to additional investment, others suffered due to the dislocation of markets. Moreover, by drawing lessons from the war economy (especially the dearth of various essential commodities including war materials), the colonial government took up various measures in the inter-war period to promote India’s domestic industries for the first time. Additionally, the book also argues that many of the expatriate firms in India became financially weak because of the Depression which paved the way for the ‘Indianisation’ of corporate houses. These elements were significant factors in the decline of British industrial hegemony in India and aided the de-colonisation process which followed. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those with wider interests in decolonisation, industrial history and the first half of the twentieth century.

Sakade challenges the narrative that the focus of British manufacturing went "from Empire to Europe" and argues rather that, following the Second World War, the key relationship was in fact trans-Atlantic. There is a commonly accepted belief that, during the twentieth century, British manufacturing declined irreparably, that Britain lost its industrial hegemony. But this is too simplistic. In fact, in the decades after 1945, Britain staked out a new role for itself as a key participant in a US-led process of globalisation. Far from becoming merely a European player, the UK actually managed to preserve a key share in a global market, and the British defence industry was, to a large extent, successfully rehabilitated. Sakade returns to the original scholarly parameters of the decline controversy, and especially questions around post-war decline in the fields of high technology and the national defence industrial base. Using the case of the strategically critical military and civil aircraft industry, he argues that British industry remained relatively robust. A valuable read for historians of British aviation and more widely of 20th century British Industry.

Over the last twenty years, there has been an increasing number of factors that have placed the manufacturing strategies of companies and countries in a global context. This book reviews and addresses the global manufacturing strategy area through research in the four major economic areas of the world: Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia. International Manufacturing Strategies: Context, Content and Change is the result of a single major research project undertaken in twenty countries, focusing on the manufacturing strategies and practices in each, and uses research data to focus on factors specific to industrial countries or regions and those which are common across the group of countries or the entire sample The core of this book is a set of chapters reviewing individual countries. Each country is reviewed in a format with an overall common approach: the socio-economic background; the distinctive results for that country from the research and the link between the two. Most will be illustrated by a small case study of a company. Following this is an integrating review of the findings from various countries, the different trajectories followed, and the impact on external variables and the socioeconomic context on those. The final part of the book is devoted to new ideas and developments in functional areas and in manufacturing strategy that have been developed from the analysis conducted during the research.

This survey of the rise and decline of English watchmaking fills a gap in the historiography of British industry. Clerkenwell in London was supplied with 'rough movements' from Prescot, 200 miles away in Lancashire. Smaller watchmaking hubs later emerged in Coventry, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The English industry led European watchmaking in the late eighteenth century in output, and its lucrative export markets extended to the Ottoman Empire and China. It also made marine chronometers, the most complex of hand-crafted pre-industrial mechanisms, crucially important to the later hegemony of Britain’s navy and merchant marine. Although Britain was the 'workshop of the world', its watchmaking industry declined. Why? First, because cheap Swiss watches were smuggled into British markets. Later, in the era of Free Trade, they were joined by machine-made watches from factories in America, enabled by the successful application to watch production of the 'American system' in Waltham, Massachusetts after 1858. The Swiss watch industry adapted itself appropriately, expanded, and reasserted its lead in the world’s markets. English watchmaking did not: its trajectory foreshadowed and was later followed by other once-prominent British industries. Clerkenwell retained its pre-industrial production methods. Other modernization attempts in Britain had limited success or failed.

This book revisits the historically different paths to economic development that Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States followed at different time periods since the early modern period. Addressing the questions of how economic growth came about in these four countries and why sustained economic growth was achieved only by the two latter economic powers - Great Britain and the United States, it clearly highlights the long-term economic impact of the individual economic systems each country had developed. This discussion draws on two important variables in economic systems: whether its primary activity is agriculture, commerce, or manufacturing, and whether its productive system expands or simply reproduces. From this interpretive framework, the book suggests that the existing literature has not yet paid sufficient attention to the enduring impact on a nation’s long-term economic performance of their differing economic systems - simple agricultural reproduction system (Spain), expansive commercial reinvestment system (the Netherlands), and expansive industrial reproduction system (Great Britain and the United States). The book also demonstrates why sustained economic growth was viable only within an expansive industrial reproduction system, and what conditions Great Britain and the United States had to fulfill to create such an economic system in their specific historical contexts. It concludes by reflecting on the policy implications of the findings on current discussions concerning economic development within the global economy.