In 1887, the British parliament passed the Merchandise Marks Act to protect British industry from knock-off products which purported to be made in the UK but were in fact made cheaper – and in many cases better – in Germany.

The British were, understandably, worried about the emergence of an industrial superpower in the guise of the newly united Germany. In 1870, Britain, the “workshop of the world”, was the world’s largest economy and unmatched military hegemon, displaying unsurpassed industrial and innovative capacity. The British Empire was at its zenith.

At the time of unification in 1871, German goods were poorly regarded, seen as poor quality copies of British originals. German industrialists visited England, allegedly as tourists, but in reality, were on espionage missions.

This industrial spying contributed to a rise in the quality of German manufacturing over the 1870s, culminating in the British passing the Merchandise Marks Act to protect British manufacturing. But that didn’t stop the Germans.

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Between 1895 and 1907, the number of workers deployed in German machine building doubled from 500,000 to one million, decreasing emigration from Germany by 84.6 per cent between the 1880s and mid 1890s. By 1914, Germany was producing twice the amount of steel as Britain and more Nobel Prize-winning scientists than Britain and the United States........

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