"For the most part, the answer seems to be things turned out pretty badly. Its heyday as common currency for the British Empire in the later part of the 19th and early 20th century was interrupted by the First World War."

What I've always loved about you "experts" who deride the gold standard is how you cherry-pick everything. For example, "things turned out pretty badly" in the "lat[t]er part of the 19th" century. Really? England was the banker for the world in the 19th century and from 1815 to 1914 was a period of huge worldwide economic expansion AND was a period of unprecedented PEACE. I'm sure that it's just an AMAZING COINCIDENCE that the world employed a gold standard at that time.

The gold standard is NOT a monetary standard that can provide the kind of massive military expenditures on the scale of WWI. The war ruined the gold standard because of the deficit financing that both sides engaged in so as to prosecute the war. It's RIDICULOUS to damn a system that neither side was abiding by. The gold standard isn't perfect but the economic turmoil that resulted from the war was NOT a result of the gold standard; it was the result of deficit financing by a de facto fiat standard. Get it right, please.

By the end of the war, the West had foolishly opted to adopt a fiat standard instead of trying to tweak the gold standard. Titanic wars, deficit spending, perpetual inflation, increasing government interference in your lives is NOT the fault of the gold standard.