The Economic Development of Small Nations: the Experience of North West Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The peculiar problems of small countries are the subject of much discussion in the literature on current developmental experience but have not been much analysed in a historical context. Yet the question of how such countries responded to the challenges offered by the industrial revolution in Europe raises many interesting issues. In this paper I have tried to put forward some general ideas that may form the basis of future research, looking at the development of a group of such countries in North West Europe–Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland. ‘Small’ is here defined in terms of population. In 1910/11 there were 7.4 m people in Belgium, 5.9 m in the Netherlands, 5.5 m in Sweden, 3.8 m in Switzerland, 2.8 m in Denmark and 2.4 m in Norway. The rate of growth of output per head (1870–1914) ranged from 2.3 per cent per annum for Sweden and 2.1 per cent for Denmark, the highest rates in western Europe, to 1.3 per cent for Switzerland and 1.4 per cent for Norway, among the lowest.¹ Growth in Belgium averaged 1.7 per cent but this kind of rate was experienced there for some three decades before 1870, considerably longer than in the other countries under discussion.