The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

David Edgerton’s books have a clear style and this one continues in that vein: it is iconoclastic, deeply researched and idiosyncratic. Here, however, the landscape is broader and the argument more sweeping, yet the telling detail and examples are still there. It would be hard for anyone to come away from reading the book having learned nothing. This is, then, an important book. It builds on some of the themes, such as that of the warfare state, found in his earlier work, but here they form elements of a challenging and deeply provocative (in a positive sense) reinterpretation of Britain’s development over the course of the twentieth century. Given that this was his objective, he has clearly succeeded, and the book will be required reading for many years to come. The underlying argument, and its constituent elements, contrive first to question and then overturn many accepted nostrums of the history of Britain. By the end one is almost punch-drunk from the scale of the revisionism presented and the number of canards laid to rest. As Edgerton himself wonders, how is it that these conventional narratives have remained so enduring and popular for so long? The main argument is about how much Britain changed over the course of the twentieth century. It began the century as cosmopolitan, liberal and imperial, only after 1945 became a nation, one with a national, technocratic, productionist and protectionist outlook, and then, during the 1980s, reverted to an international perspective, but very different from that at the start of the century. This novel chronology rebuts a plethora of myths about Britain which remain unquestioningly presented in the historiography. Some rebuttals, such as the depiction of Britain as a warfare state rather than as a welfare state and the emphasis on the scale of British research and development, are themes from Edgerton’s earlier works. Others are familiar from the work of other historians of contemporary Britain, such as the rejection of declinism; the questioning of a post-war consensus; and that the Thatcher governments did not roll back the state as commonly assumed. Yet others are recognisable in the existing historiography but have not previously been presented so stridently or to a wider popular audience—that the welfare state was a product of the inter-war period as much as the post-war Labour government and that Britain did not miss the boat of European integration because of some imperial illusion, are examples. Finally, there are the novel critiques: that Margaret Thatcher was elected not on the back of a crisis and a Britain that was increasing ungovernable and with an overloaded state, but at a particularly opportune moment given the modernisation already undertaken by the state; and that her governments did not unleash a new entrepreneurial culture, instead dismantling an entrepreneurial state

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