The decline of Britain as an industrial power is one of the most important, and certainly debated, events of the modern era. Not surprisingly, as in its wake, the face of the international order was irrevocably altered. The aim of the present work is in some small way to make a contribution to the understanding of this pivotal moment in history. It does this by attempting to explain the relative decline in the late Victorian and Edwardian era of the important, but little studied, British paper industry; in particular to determine to what extent the industry's change of fortune at this time can be attributed to its own failings. Over the last nine chapters a wide range of information from various sources has been collated and analysed in an attempt to put together an answer to this question. For the most part the general picture that emerges from this book is one of an industry that up until at least the end of the nineteenth century was performing satisfactorily well in an environment that, it must be said, was becoming increasingly unfavourable to it.

One disadvantageous feature of this environment was the prevailing set of national commercial policies. The combination of Britain's free trade and foreign protectionism actively handicapped the British manufacturer not only by reducing the foreign markets into which he could tap, but also by enabling foreign producers, especially the Germans, to penetrate the British home market with surplus production often sold below cost.