The Effect of the American Export Invasion on the British Boot and Shoe Industry 1885–1914

Recent articles have drawn attention to the general significance of the American export “invasion” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novack and Simon have concentrated on the origins of the invasion and on the attitudes of American businessmen, and to a lesser extent of others, to it. Elsewhere, Saul has considered the impact of intensified American competition upon British industry, underlining the need to reexamine the process of industrial transformation particularly during the two decades pre-ceding World War I. In the latter connection, the fundamental changes that occurred in the British boot and shoe industry, both in terms of rapidity and extent, make a case study of its history during this period especially rewarding, culminating, as it did, in a “Victory for British Boots”—the title of an article in The Economist in 1913. While the fact of successful response on the part of the industry is well known, the circumstances under which the trans-formation took place and the various elements which together produced the effective industrial counterattack have received less attention. In this article an attempt is made to remedy these deficiencies, to explain why the industry responded so successfully, and in particular to examine the role of American shoe machinery makers in this process, for in terms of control they virtually monopolized the supply of boot and shoe machinery in Britain toward the end of our period.