Discusses two views of the fall of the British cotton industry, the Fatalist school which viewed it as the result of poor responses to random acts, & the Casualist school, which finds it the inevitable result of cause & effect.
At one time, and for more than 100 years, the cotton industry in Great Britain was the most powerful in the world, and indeed was one of the backbones of both the British Empire and World Economic Development in the 19th Century. One school of historians argue that the decline of the cotton industry in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s was a trick history played on the managers of the British cotton industry (McCloskey & Sandberg, 1971, 102; Bellamy, 1962, 106). This analysis will refer to them as the Fatalists, and assert that their belief is that life (both social and economic) is nothing more than a series of random acts, some more important than others. To the Fatalists, the study of history is the study of mankind’s and (…)