When I wrote post #41, I deliberately put quotes around the word fake because I know there are complexities associated with the use of the term and left it at that as I wanted to focus on the dial. I never meant to suggest or imply that those Liverpool movements housed in US cases, for example, were anything but the real McCoy. In general I would agree with Bernhard, that a "fake" watch refers to an inferior product being passed off as a superior one in order to obtain either a higher price or market share or both. There is certainly an attempt to deceive foolish customers who all too often soon part ways with their money.
Let me come back to the dial and limit my discussion to English watches made before, say, 1870 or so. During the period prior to 1870 were there any other parts of the movement imported from abroad, such as any of the wheels, the fusee, its chain, jewels, clicks, the frame, etc? If so, then some of my basic assumptions about English fusees are challenged. If not, then the dial has a certain singular status (hmmm . . . alliterative) different from the other parts of the movement.
What about the case? These movements were of standard sizes on the Lancashire scale. One merely had to fit the case to the movement by, for example, properly positioning the winding hole peculiar to a particular movement (I'm alliterative today--unintentionally so). And we know this was done after the case was assayed. The assay marks only tell us the quality of the silver, that it met British standards, not the country of origin. I could imagine the Swiss making sterling cases (in both senses of the word), those cases then being assayed in Birmingham, London, elsewhere, before being fitted to a movement.
John