The characteristic, and apparently decisive, peculiarities of the British situation may all confidently be traced to the insular position of the country. Owing to the isolation so given to the Island the British community was notably in arrears in early modern times, as contrasted with the more cultured, populous and wealthier peoples of the Continent; and this backward state of England in the earlier period of the era of handicraft is no less marked in respect of technology than in any other. As is well known, England borrowed extensively and persistently from its Continental neighbours throughout the era, and it was only by help of these borrowed elements that the English were able to overtake and finally to take the lead of their competitors. Similarly, the British commercial development also comes on late as compared with the Continent; so much so that the British had substantially no share in the great expansion of business enterprise that has been called the Age of the Fuggers. This late start of the English, coupled with their peculiar advantage in being able to borrow what their neighbours had worked out, conduced to a more rapid rate and shorter run of industrial advance and expansion in the Island, and so, among other consequences, hindered the rounded system of handicraft, industrial towns, and gild organisation from attaining the same degree of finality, and ultimately of obstructive inertia, that resulted in many of the Continental countries. Again, owing to the same geographic isolation that long held England culturally in arrears, the English community lay, in great measure, outside of that political “concert of nations” that worked out the exhaustion and collapse of industry and business on the Continent. Not that the English took no interest in the grand whirl of politics and princely war that occupied the main body of Christendom in that time. The English crown, or to use a foreign expression, the English State, was deeply enough implicated in the political intrigues of late mediæval and early modern Europe; but as modern time has advanced the English community has visibly hung back with an ever growing reluctance. And whatever may be conceived to be the share of the English crown in the political complications of the Continent, it remains true that the English community at large, during the mature and concluding phases of the era of handicraft, stood mainly and habitually outside of these princely concerns.[127] In effect, after the handicraft era was well under way, England is never for long or primarily engaged in international war, nor, except for the civil war of the Commonwealth period, in destructive war of any kind. Hence the era runs to a different outcome in England from what it does elsewhere. It ends not in the exhaustion of politics, but in the industrial revolution. The close of the handicraft system in England comes by way of a technological revolution, not by collapse.