BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

that his acceptance of a low salary for an unrewarding job also betokened an oppressive political
and economic system. 27
27 J. J. Finlay, “The Genesis of the German Clerk,” Fortnightly Review 66 (September
1899): 533-34.
The Anglo-German trade rivalry should be viewed not as an isolated competition for
markets but as bound up psychologically with the colonial, arms and naval races and with British
reactions to German Weltpolitik. 28 Ross J. S. Hoffman has contrasted the relative pacifism of late
nineteenth-century trade journals with contemporary alarmism prognosticating an inevitable
Anglo-German war for commercial supremacy. Beyond being numbered among the many
contenders vying for access to Britain’s global trade networks, Hoffman argued, Germany’s
economic advances challenged British pride in commercial acumen and free trade idealism. 29
Not only had tariff barriers caused a dramatic forty percent decline in the value of British exports
to Germany between 1870 and 1889, the flap over trade-mark fraud and resulting Merchandise
Marks Act of 1887 increased hysteria by virtue of the number of cheap goods requiring the
“Made in Germany” stamp that afterwards poured into England. 30 Even if the erosion of British
overseas markets, assisted by subsidized shipbuilding and the general carving up of China that
began with the German seizure of Kiaochow, did not shake British dominance of a vibrant
entrepot and re-export trade, Germany’s rapid industrial expansion and export of advanced
industrial products like beet sugar, chemicals, machinery, ironware and electrical equipment did
28 Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness, 225.
29 Great Britain and the German Trade Rivalry 1875-1914 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1933), 277, 279, 303-4.
30 Ibid., 30-31, 45, 49-50. Some cheap imported German cutlery had been marked
“Sheffield,” after the city in South Yorkshire reputed for fine knife manufacture.
230