The international textile trade in 1913: the role of intra-European flows

Abstract

This article analyses the textile trade using an international, multilateral and multifibre approach. Its main contribution is to present new data on international textile trade in 1913, which reveals how, within European countries, there was a clear dominance of German exports, followed closely by those from France and Britain. The scenario that emerges is quite different to that obtained from an analysis of intercontinental trade, where British hegemony was still very evident in 1913. The fact that, when looking only at the intra-European textile trade, Britain lags behind Germany and is almost on par with France, indicates that we are dealing with very different markets to those emerging on aggregate data, in which analysis can be reduced to a single country.