Technology and Victorian Economic Domination of the 19th Century World

Abstract

This essay explains how superiority over steam transport, telegraph communications, and military technologies, especially when they were integrated, was an important foundation of Britain's economic domination of the world in the long nineteenth century (up to 1 914). Despite obvious possibilities presented by the use of new technological innovations for the expansion of the British Empire, considerable continuity characterized the diffusion and application of technologies in imperial activity during the first half of the century. Once the pace of the dynamics of expansion accelerated in the second half of the century, the State in the form of the British Government began to realise the benefits of adopting the latest technologies such as the railway and the telegraph in the service of the Empire, not only or economic, but also for political and military reasons.