(FORTUNE Magazine) – BY PAST STANDARDS, 1987 was a quiet year for Britain's Margaret Hilda Thatcher. The woman called the Iron Lady fought no wars, faced down no major strikes, and enacted no groundbreaking legislation. Yet what she did accomplish was worth shouting about. In June, Thatcher's Conservative Party won an unprecedented third straight victory. She thus secured her hold on the Prime Minister's office until 1992 and ensured that the ''ism'' known as ''Thatcherism'' -- currently the West's longest-running political act -- will continue to influence world business. Throughout the 1980s Thatcher, along with Ronald Reagan, has been the leading exponent of the notion that economies work best when the market's invisible hand replaces the bureaucrat's clumsy one. Growing global acceptance of that proposition has, in turn, been the dominant political trend of the decade (see Politics & Policy). Thatcher's singular contribution to shrinking the economic role of the state is privatization. Over the past eight years she has raised more than $31 billion by selling state-owned industries to private investors. Half of that came within the past 12 months through sales of British Gas, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, the British Airports Authority, and the government's 32% stake in British Petroleum. Her example has inspired politicians in over 100 countries to adopt similar schemes. Says Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, a London research organization: ''For years after World War II, our experts provided the training Third World leaders used to lead their countries into state socialism. Now Britain is teaching them how to do just the opposite.'' To a large extent, executives at, say, newly privatized Nippon Telegraph & Telephone or France's Saint-Gobain owe their freedom to Maggie. In the wake of Black Monday, the global drive to privatize will slow but not stop. Falling share prices may prompt politicians everywhere, including Thatcher, to reconsider their excessive enthusiasm for targeting sales at small investors. But the case for privatization as a way to increase economic efficiency while reducing strain on government budgets remains unaltered. And though the stock market's collapse may have terminally tainted Reaganomics and its what-me-worry approach to budget deficits, Thatcherism's insistence on old-fashioned fiscal rectitude looks better than ever. Since 1980, when she defended a decision to raise taxes in the midst of a recession by insisting that ''taxation is the only moral way to pay for higher spending,'' Thatcher has trimmed Britain's budget deficit from 6% of gross domestic product to 1%. Over the same period, only Japan and Canada among the industrialized economies have grown faster. In fact, with its economy rising this year at an inflation-adjusted rate of about 3.5% annually, Britain is at the head of the pack. MOST SIGNIFICANTLY, the grocer's daughter from Grantham, Lincolnshire, a passionate fan of ''Victorian values'' and ''the enterprise society,'' has proved that forceful political leadership can profoundly change a country's social and economic climate. Today in Britain, small business startups are booming again, and profit is no longer a dirty word. Britain's industrial competitiveness may still trail that of its major trading partners, but manufacturing productivity is climbing at a healthy 3.5% annual clip, up from just 0.75% in the sobering Seventies. Endless labor disputes -- the ailment at the heart of the postwar ''British disease'' -- have been largely banished by Thatcherite legislation that among other things forces union leaders to poll members before calling strikes. Thatcher's detractors charge that she has foisted a hard, new materialism on cozy old Britain. Right, reply her admirers, and not a moment too soon. ''She has restored Britain to a prominent place on the world map,'' says Lord Hanson of Hanson Trust, Britain's 12th-largest industrial company. Conservative historian Paul Johnson, who sees the Thatcher years as ''a real watershed'' in Britain's history, observed recently that British industry and society is ''becoming leaner, harder, fitter, and, thank God, more ruthless.''