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Britain led the way for much of the world with industrial privatization during the 1980s. Yet the historical origins of the process have rarely been discussed. This study shows how a common set of problems raised by basic industries, such as railways, gas, water, electricity, and telecommunications, have triggered varying responses of public policy over the last two centuries. In this original analysis, James Foreman-Peck and Robert Millward provide a coherent and thorough history of the network industries, which continue to play an important role in the British economy.

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This work has a split personality. More than 75 percent is devoted to "network technology industries" (utilities, power, railways, and communications) during the period 1820-1940. The authors present a history of causes leading to increased public ownership, and they statistically test the comparative performance efficiency of different ownership modes. The balance of the work deals with the great wave of nationalizations that began in the 1940s and the subsequent swing to privatization in the 1980s. The industries considered here were mostly either troubled or considered strategic to Britain's defense or economic future. Assessment of performance efficiency is mostly via international comparisons that are insufficient to be persuasive and are not comparable to tests made on the "network" industries. Although suffering from some repetitiveness, the treatment of the "network" industries is a good history of Britain's difficult road to achieving service performance adequacy and acceptable pricing in this sector. The section on the later nationalizations and privatizations elaborates the multiplicity of factors involved in each swing. This is informative but, in general, does not fully recognize the pervasive drag nationalization placed on the British economy. Accordingly, the review understates the importance of economic inefficiency in forcing reprivatization. Extended bibliography. Graduate; faculty. J. Murdock; emeritus, University of Missouri--Columbia