Technological Divergence in a Continuous Flow Production Industry: American and British Paper Making in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Era.

The relative economic decline of Britain since the last quarter of the nineteenth century has often been attributed to its firms' continued prediction for small-scale batch production and highly skilled labor. Britain's loss of leadership in paper making in the second half of the nineteenth century was most apparent in the level of output it and its main competitor, the U.S., produced. While in 1860 both the U.S. and Britain shared the honor of the being the world's biggest paper producers, each with around 100,000 long tons of paper and board per annum, by 1914 the United States had shot out ahead; in that year manufacturing some 4,705,400 tons to Britain's 1,110,000. This changing fortune of the British industry in the late nineteenth century was clearly recognized by contemporaries. Many of these observers noted that, in addition to the advantages that nature had bestowed on the American industry in terms of cheap and accessible supplies of wood and energy. The idea that the U.S. had established a lead in paper-machine technology by 1900 also appears to be supported by the different types of data available from the period.