The Problem

IN this book we are primarily concerned with finding out how economic historians have been analysing the two decades or so which followed the boom of the early 1870s and ended in the middle of the 1890s, a period which they have characterised as the ‘Great Depression’. We shall be asking ourselves three major questions. First of all, what sort of depression are we thinking about; what indicators can we employ and how do they move? Secondly, how do we explain these movements and to what extent are they interconnected? Finally, how far in fact can we justify picking out these years as a period with an economic meaning and unity of their own? Our procedure will be to take various indicators in turn and to look at these problems in terms of each as we go along.