preview

Essay about World War I's Affect on British Industry and Economics

Decent Essays

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 produced immediate changes. It is often said that war is the 'locomotive of history' - that is what drives it along. Certainly the First World War helped to produce major changes in Great Britain especially socially and economically. World War I produced major economic changes. British industry had been to a large extent transformed by the mobilization of millions of soldiers and by an unprecedented switch to war production. Under a positive perspective, the economy had shown a new production capacity. Although total output had decreased, due to the smaller workforce, productivity definitely increased. There had been much state-sponsored modernization. Electric power was used more than …show more content…

In return they were promised that the old arrangements would be resumed after the war. It was only a voluntary agreement, but in July 1915 the Munitions of War Act legally banded unions and the government and it outlawed strikes. In many ways, trade unionists made important gains during the war. The fact that government controlled so much of the industry led to a national, as opposed to local, wage agreements. However, after the war had ended, privatization was introduced again, and the staple industries were the ones who suffered more. This was followed by a wave of strikes. This industrial unrest worried the government which a feared a Bolshevik-type revolution. Social changes were also quite prominent during the First World War. Women were challenging the stereotypes by which a male-dominant society sought to control them. They wanted equality, and the touchstone of this was the vote. Two different groups of British women fought for women suffrage: the suffragists and the suffragettes. The suffragists used believed in peaceful, law abiding protests, while suffragettes used more violent methods to get their view across to the Parliament. Both groups fought for the rights of women tirelessly; even stating at one point that the “Suffrage movement is like a glacier- slow but unstoppable;” determined to eventually reach their goal of equality. However, with the outbreak of the

Get Access