For most of the twentieth century, as David Edgerton shows in his vital and decisive book, “United Kingdom” was a technical term used by statisticians, diplomats and the army, but seldom in a wider context. It was not until the 1960s that historians seeking to foster a progressive national consensus began presenting the “United Kingdom” story in terms of an emancipatory and cohesive welfare state, while underplaying the extent to which it was a bundle of semi-unified nations. Most subjects of Elizabeth II associated the phrase “United Kingdom” with broadcasts of the Eurovision Song Contest: “Royaume-Uni, nul points”. The first three country code top-level domain names allotted in 1985 – .us, .uk and .il – and the spread of email traffic and internet shopping finally brought “uk” into common currency among people living in the British Isles.
As to the noun “Britain”, it became the standard usage in politics and historical writing only after 1945. It was – and is – used promiscuously to denote both “Great Britain” (established by the Act of Union of 1707 between the kingdoms of England and Scotland, and thus covering the largest of the British Isles) and the “United Kingdom” (established by the Act of Union between Great Britain and the second largest of the British Isles, Ireland, in 1801). Cabinet ministers appear behind government logos which used to be emblazoned “GREAT Britain”, but to which have now been added – as a sop to Theresa May’s allies in the sectarian Democratic Unionist Party – the diminutive words “and Northern Ireland”.
The simultaneous use of these irreconcilable national tags is a classic example of Doublethink: the partisan use, in Orwell’s words, of “constant deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty”. It is hard to be, as Edgerton is, a revisionist historian in an Age of Post-Truth. In previous books he has controverted slipshod orthodoxies about industrial retardation, technological innovation and the failure of traditional elites. Now he has to convince generations who think that public policy and historical truth alike are a domain of “alternative facts”. Historians of the Left and Right, when they write about national identity and divine pre-eminent exceptionalism in the political institutions of the Anglosphere, provide what their readers hope is true. Edgerton is a mixture of forensic accountant, crime-buster and naysayer who doesn’t do group think. He provides the history of the gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty.
The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is exhaustive in its coverage and invaluable for its pitiless shredding of myths. Its multifarious themes often have resounding contemporary significance: the economic nationalism of the Labour Party perhaps foremost. Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister of 1945–51, is usually awarded a starred first by progressive historians. Edgerton thinks him overrated and misunderstood. Attlee’s government, he shows, fostered nationalism. It introduced peacetime conscription, under the euphemism of National Service, strove to make the nation more self-sufficient in agricultural production, protected manufacturers with tariffs, controlled the use of capital overseas, and introduced the British Nationality Act of 1948. The expensive process whereby the Attlee government took companies owned by private shareholders into public ownership was called “nationalization” rather than “socialization”. The controlling body of the state-owned coalmines was called the National Coal Board so as to sound patriotic rather than syndicalist. Labour’s vaunted welfare programme, which extended previous Tory provisions for the housing and health care of the working class so as to benefit the entire nation regardless of financial need, was named the National Health Service to chime with the contemporary mood. The old Poor Law system was replaced in 1948 by National Assistance. New versions of nationhood were strenuously promulgated by the Labour government of this period.
The pin-up boy of the Labour Left, Aneurin Bevan, was an economic nationalist, who wanted the nation to become self-sufficient in its agricultural and industrial needs, and therefore compelled neither to export nor import. “This great nation”, Bevan told the House of Commons in 1951, had since 1945 “assumed the moral leadership of the world”. He was an early propagandist for global Britain: “There is only one hope for mankind, and that hope still remains in this little island. It is from here that we tell the world where to go and how to go there”. The rebarbative “Build it in Britain” speech delivered by the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in July 2018 expressed a Bevanite economic nativism. It envisaged restrictions on the free international movement of capital and the exclusion of foreign enterprise in order to rebuild the UK industrial base to meet national requirements and to foster economic self-reliance. The Bevanite fantasy of British moral primacy on the planet leads, in Edgerton’s account, towards Tony Blair’s determination for war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For at least two decades after 1945 the “United Kingdom” had proportionately the world’s largest and perhaps most uniform urban working class. Yet neither Labour nor Tory governments projected a proletarian “United Kingdom” image either in the colonies or overseas generally. Labour, Edgerton shows, consistently presented itself as a national rather than socialist party. Its manifesto for the general election of 1945 promised to “put the nation above any sectional interest”. “Socialism” was mentioned once, “socialist” twice, “Britain” fourteen times, “British” twelve times, and “nation” or “national” nearly fifty times. Similarly, Labour presented itself in its general election manifesto of 1950 as “the true party of the nation”.
During the 1930s the Labour Party had opposed tariff protection as a device to prop up failing capitalism. After 1945, without explicit declarations, it relinquished free trade for economic nationalism with deleterious consequences, which Edgerton analyses with painstaking authority. For nearly thirty years, until British admission into the European Economic Community in 1973, the London government regulated the national economy by tariffs, quotas, import surcharges, Bank of England controls on capital exports, and draconian curbs on the cash that business travellers and holidaymakers could spend abroad. Consumers were badgered to “Buy British” even when products were of poor quality. As Prime Minister Harold Wilson and one of his backbenchers, Robert Maxwell, promoted the ludicrous “I’m Backing Britain” campaign of 1968. As Brexiteers and Corbynite protectionists prefer to forget, controls over imports before Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973 were complex, chaotic, liable to sudden change and never reduced import bills by large margins. It was a system that brought the UK close to insolvency and necessitated the International Monetary Fund rescue of 1976.
Seven years after British entry into the EEC, the launch of the Austin Metro motor car in 1980 was disfigured by a xenophobic television advertising campaign with the slogan “A British Car To Beat the World”. The advert described Britain being “invaded by the Italians, the Germans, the Japanese and the French. Now we have the means to fight back!” Metros landed on a beach from Second World War landing craft, were driven through villages with bemedalled old soldiers saluting and Union flag bunting, while the foreign cars retreated over the Channel to the resounding tune of “Rule Britannia”. This motif was resurrected for the launch in June 2018 of Vauxhall Motors’ Astra model. Under the slogan “True Brit”, the marketing campaign bears the patriotic colours of red, white and blue, and avows a “confident British attitude” to the future.
As Edgerton shows, the progressive Left has been more insidious in forming this mindset than the blimpish Right. Some quarter of a century after the events of 1940–41, the history of the Second World War underwent a process of virtue-signalling nationalization. A key theme of A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945 (1965) was that of a nation “coming of age” by self-sufficiency in fighting a “people’s war”. Angus Calder in The People’s War (1969) celebrated the native-born population achieving formidable national resilience by turning inwards. Calder demoted the British Empire in his story and exaggerated United Kingdom isolation. “Calder and many other historians of the left take 1940 not 1945 as the key moment in which the new nation is born”, writes Edgerton. “Although the nation is to be interpreted in terms of class, what was important was nation trumping class.” “Alone” became a word of lusty and emotive power at the core of a central national myth which privileged British destiny over that of other nation states. The glorification of “standing alone” in 1940 continues to pervert the United Kingdom’s sense of its place in the world and of foreigners’ obligations of respect and gratitude to its citizens.
The wearisome protests of historical exceptionalism and institutional distinctiveness are linked to another governing theme of Edgerton’s book: exaggerations of British inventive genius and the consequent tactical errors in research and development spending. Hark to Margaret Thatcher in her first speech as party leader to the Conservative Party conference in 1975. “We are the people who, among other things, invented the computer, refrigerator, electric motor, stethoscope, rayon, steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbon fibres. Oh, and the best half of Concorde.” The false pride in supposedly being “the single inventor of . . . key parts of the atomic bomb, not to mention parliamentary democracy and the welfare state” is punctured by Edgerton. Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb and the PLUTO petrol pipeline, long celebrated for triumphant ingenuity, “were technical extravagances rather than necessities”, he judges. The sorry tale of the Bloodhound, Skybolt, Blue Streak and Trident missile systems is recounted with devastating fairness. The government decision to build numerous advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactors (AGRs) and to persevere with a financially exorbitant but profitless development programme was “the crassest techno-nationalism trumping respect for efficiency”.
There was ardent faith that unique British technical genius would renew and invigorate the national economy. Edgerton debunks the myth that the Westminster government failed to support its aircraft manufacturers sufficiently. The Ministries of Supply, Aviation and Technology backed numerous aircraft projects. “Far from the home sales being a springboard for export success, they were often the only sales, to an unwilling customer. The nationalized British airlines had to be forced to take on, or were indeed given, every large British aircraft produced.” Despite the Comet IV, the Britannia, the VC10 and Concorde, the nationalistically named airlines formed under Attlee’s Civil Aviation Act of 1946 preferred US aircraft for most long-haul flights. No one dared to challenge the insistent propaganda that British high-tech inventiveness would yield lucrative exports. To oppose huge R&D expenditure on first-tier national projects was to hobble the export drive. “But the exports never came – no large hovercraft, no AGR, no Concorde was ever sold abroad”, writes Edgerton. “By the late 1960s, in private, within government, this was already known to be likely, but this truth was too scandalous, too unpatriotic to utter.”
Another strength of Edgerton’s book is to recognize the problem of the “six counties” (Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone) as central to British nationhood. The Irish Free State in 1922 and its successor, Eire, in 1937 were the first new nations to emerge from the British Empire. The fatal misjudgement was to keep two-thirds of the counties of the province of Ulster, those with a Protestant majority, out of the Irish Free State, retaining them as an awkward appendage of the UK. Ulster’s Catholic majority counties (Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan) were released to the Irish Free State. In the truncated province, the Protestant majority gerrymandered constituencies, limited Catholic suffrage in municipal elections, and enforced gross discrimination in housing and employment. There was an independent parliament of Northern Ireland until 1972–3: the Protestant majority also sent MPs to Westminster, where they voted with the Tories and won a reputation for bone-headedness.
The greatest crisis in the post-war UK – at least until David Cameron’s reckless throw in calling an ill-defined and ill-managed referendum on UK membership of the EU – was the bloody fighting which erupted in the six counties in 1969 and soon spread to the mainland. Robert Tombs allows just three paragraphs to the “Irish troubles” in the 900 pages ofThe English and their History (2014), for the story scarcely suits his narrative of UK institutional purity and EU contamination. Edgerton rightly recognizes this as a war and not mere trouble: there were more British army deaths in it than in the three fighting services in the Falklands; proportionate to population, more civilians were killed than in the Blitz. “No other rich country in the capitalist world saw similar levels of domestic political violence after 1945; no part of a rich country was so intensively policed or so subject to special laws.” The Royal Ulster Constabulary and the army collaborated with Protestant paramilitary killing sprees. The mainland police, who thought themselves the envy of the world, brutalized and framed innocent men after bombing atrocities in Birmingham and Guildford, and brought a tarnish to their reputed integrity which has increased over four decades. Appeal Court judges damaged the standing of the entire judiciary by upholding obviously wrongful convictions in a shameful kow-towing to state authority. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery – a brigadier in the Territorial Army – volunteered to write his whitewashing report of the Parachute Regiment’s shooting of civilians in the Bogside, which resulted in fourteen deaths in 1972. The six-counties war transformed notions of public safety, and was far more important an influence on national life than the Suez debacle in 1956 or the short and remote campaign in the Falklands, which Edgerton also covers with pungent originality.
Time and again John Major emerges as the undervalued and quietly heroic prime minister of the post-war UK. His brave and deft initiation of the negotiations which achieved an Irish peace agreement in 1998 are but one example. By contrast, Edgerton is scornful of Blair and Gordon Brown. He lambasts New Labour’s defence review of 1998, which sought to define new roles rather than to eliminate unaffordable ones. New Labour devised “a story of British exceptionalism to justify a newly global orientation of British armed force”. The UK was “reinvented . . . as a global contender”. It was implied that 10 million UK citizens living abroad needed to be defended – “presumably from the Americans, French, Australians and Spaniards among whom they lived”. The spin “even claimed dependence on foreign oil, when the UK was still a major oil producer”. Blair’s frenzy to establish global leadership, in alliance with a Republican President in the United States, resulted in the deaths and chaos of British military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. “These extraordinary failures destroyed the last vestiges of a belief that the British state and its agencies told the truth if not the whole truth”, writes Edgerton. “They also showed that the British state machine had lost the capacity for rational and critical examination of policy.” The extent of the failure of the state machinery, and of the valuelessness of national sovereignty if human dross preponderates in Parliament and on the front benches, has been agonizingly clear during the Brexit negotiations.
Edgerton’s book can well be read in tandem with the Oxford scholar Richard Jobson’s deeply researched, carefully considered and disheartening monograph Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party: Prisoners of the past (2018). Edgerton has a knack for producing paradoxes that astound and convince. He delights readers, too, with the abrupt inversions of conventional orthodoxy and the playful defiance of virtuous solemnity that make the writings of Norman Stone so memorable. When Edgerton shifts into forensic accountant mode, examining the cost-effectiveness of R&D expenditure or tracking hidden deficits, his prose hammers like a pile-driver rather than tapping lightly. The remorseless accumulation of brutally emphatic evidence resembles a pachyderm trampling any forest that gets in his way. A collateral benefit of David Edgerton’s book is that it enables readers to draw their own and striking parallels or spot unexpected similarities: the messianic sanctimony of Blair suddenly seems Bevanite; the radical patriotism, conspiratorial slyness, artful self-presentation and destructiveness of Tony Benn set this reader thinking of Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation marks the apotheosis of England’s foremost revisionist historian. The book is masterly in its championing of historical truth-telling, with the power both to sadden readers and to make them furious.
As so often in the past, a ghostly British empire is summoned up in moments of crisis. Remainers blame what they see as the imperialism of the Brexiters – and of the electorate – for Brexit itself. They often complain that the empire also thoroughly distorted the British economy of the past.
Some Brexiteer ideologues claim that selected former white dominions (“CANZUK”, they call it – Canada, New Zealand and Australia) are itching to reconnect with the mother country. They also believe that the British economy was once profoundly imperial.
That both sides of the argument can agree about the role of the British Empire in British economic life is, in truth, a tribute to the propagandistic power of the imperialists of the past.
From the beginning of the 20th century, propaganda was put out by imperialists, and later by imperialist governments, showing that the empire was, and should be, an integrated economic whole. In this image, the United Kingdom specialised in manufactured goods, from cottons to ships, while the empire grew food and extracted raw materials.

Meat and dairy products came from Australia and New Zealand, good bread-making wheat from Canada, tobacco from southern Africa, tea from India and Ceylon, sugar from the Caribbean. And then there were gold and diamonds from South Africa, teak from Burma, copper from southern Africa, iron ore from Sierra Leone, rubber and tin from Malaya, wool from Australia.
The imperial economy was a world economy in miniature, trading in sterling, shipping in British hulls. It all made perfect sense – an ordered, self-sufficient British world.
So powerful was the propaganda that some historians have come to believe it. A certain species of right-wing historian gingerly put forward the argument that in 1940 Britain should have left Europe to Hitler and carried on its cosy imperial life uninterrupted. Others argued that the British betrayed that economic system by joining the Common Market and breaking its deep historical relations with empire.
In a more critical vein, from both left and right, historians have held that captive imperial markets made British industry flabby. British exporters could sell any old rubbish to the empire and get paid good money for it. This argument is often part of a wider story which suggested that running the empire was a more attractive career for public school boys and Oxbridge graduates than domestic industry, with the consequence, again, that industry was weakened. Britain was imperial and as a result got stuck in a Victorian or Edwardian industrial rut.
The problem with all these views was that an imperial economic system was essentially an aspiration of imperialists – but it was not the reality. They never succeeded in making a self-sufficient British empire, nor creating a system of imperial free trade. They were thwarted by the realities of geography, of raw material availability, and markets, by the protectionism of parts of the empire and by the objections of the British politicians and people.
What, then, was the reality of British trade? The United Kingdom was, in truth, distinguished by its policy of radical free trade, at least before 1914. It left its economy open to all, indiscriminately. Not surprisingly its greatest trading partners were in Europe.

And of course, the British imported from non-British Africa and from non-British Asia, too. In fact, in the early 20th century, imports from foreign countries were nearly always more important that those from “British countries”.
Exports were also European and global, more than imperial. The largest export by bulk was coal. Britain was the Saudi Arabia of 1900 – the largest exporter of energy on earth till 1939. Its coal, being close to the sea, was transported cheaply not only to the whole Baltic and Mediterranean, but further afield, too. Uruguay and Argentina were powered by British coal. The British Empire, on the whole, was not.
Much the same applied to British manufactures. British cotton goods went all over the world, as did British railway equipment.
The reality of trade is much understated in most accounts. The fact that Britons stood on the edge of the European continent and had huge volumes of easily extractable coal under their feet mattered much more than is usually recognised – either now or at the time – than any policy decision.
In the Edwardian years the Conservative Party became the party of “tariff reform” – of protection, arguing that the UK should follow the global norm. In short, to break the bounds of mere geography and geology.
The idea was to put up tariffs around the British economy, to protect it, to create a negotiating lever to force others to reduce tariffs and, crucially, to allow reduced tariffs for imperial producers (“imperial preference”) to help create an imperial economy. For British exports (unlike imports) typically faced import tariffs, in both British and foreign countries.
However, in 1906 and in 1910, and in some later elections, the British electorate voted for the free trade candidates. They backed the Liberals, who celebrated free, global trade. The public were against tariffs, and thus against economic imperialism.
Indeed, the UK only cast clear votes for a protectionist policy – for policies that would make the boundaries of empire more important in defining British trade – in 1931. Even then, Empire Free Trade (the policy of the hard right of the day) did not stand a chance. Even in its pomp the mother country could not force its imperial territories to fully open themselves to British trade. No one, whether British or Australian or Canadian, or even the government of India, put empire before nation.

For example, the British government of India gave Lancashire preferences over the Japanese textile industry, but it still protected the Indian industry against the mother country with tariffs. Nor did the UK get it all its own way in trade agreements with nations that depended on British markets. The UK had leverage as the largest food importer in the world but, even so, countries like Argentina successfully imposed tariffs against British manufactures.
The Second World War had a dramatic and long-term effect on British trade. The German armies threw the British out of the continental economy – there was no longer European iron ore or timber or food coming to the UK. There was no longer a European market for British coal. The UK did not, as national mythology suggests, turn inward and dig for victory. Rather it was forced to turn further away. It continued to be supplied from overseas foreign and British countries, and now on a very large scale from the United States as well. Spam replaced Danish bacon.
In the years after the war, however, the British economy did turn inward. This protected national economy sought to import as little as possible. It also sought to buy in sterling rather than the very expensive and difficult-to-obtain dollar. This made UK trade more imperial than ever before, if we take empire to include the white dominions. These rich countries, which supplied the UK with food, were far more important (as they had long been) to British trade than the remaining African, Asian and Caribbean colonies.

This uniquely imperial moment in British economic history was not one the British were comfortable with. As Alan Milward made clear in his magisterial official history of British attempts to enter the Common Market, the UK wanted to return to global free trade, and to break free from the new national and imperial orientation.
This was not easy – it meant opening up the USA and Europe to British trade. The USA remained deeply protectionist, but Europe was more promising. The UK proposed a giant western European Free Trade Area (Efta). This proposal got nowhere with the six members of the nascent Common Market. The UK did manage to create a tiny Efta in 1960 – but in 1961 it asked to leave it to join the European Economic Community.
Entering the EEC was seen as – and was – a liberalising, not a protectionist, move. It was also not necessarily an anti-imperial move, either, since many imperialists wanted to strengthen what little remained of the British Empire by linking it to the European economy. French, not British, resistance kept the UK outside the EEC until 1973.
By the time it joined, the United Kingdom was no longer a distinctively different nation from the continental norm. No longer free trading, it had already pulled back from the small remaining bits of empire. It had moved towards becoming self-sufficient in food, which meant less trade with Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The idea that the UK was part of an essentially imperial, or global, economy until it was forced into the EEC is quite wrong.
After 40 years in the EEC/EU the economy has changed radically again. To assume that in some deep sense the UK that is leaving the EU is the UK of 1914 or 1950 or even 1973 is bonkers. Once the UK was the world’s largest coal exporter, today it imports coal.
Today the UK is a net importer of manufactures, on a huge scale, whereas in 1973 it was still a net exporter.
Today it is a service economy, with a net surplus of services (though they account for less than one half of exports).
Once the world’s largest food importer, it is a country which exports beef, lamb, and wheat and barley.
Once the greatest exporter of capital, it now depends on the capital of others.

It is, as it was bound to be, not only changed, but relatively diminished as a world player – a large Canada, not a small United States.
But why is it that the UK appears to remember an imagined overwhelmingly imperial past? It is partly a leftover from Tory imperial aspirations. But the belief in the centrality of empire to the British past is also characteristic of much of the anti-imperialist centre-left.
A long line of anti-imperialists blamed empire for all sorts of economic, social and ideological ills, from British militarism to domestic racism to economic decline and now Brexit. It has proved very much more difficult to criticise the native sources of these problems. Blaming the empire, as much as harking back to it, is a form of escapism.
It has led to a serious misreading of Brexit as imperialism. In fact most Brexiter thought is radical liberal, dreaming of a return to unilateral free trade. Boris Johnson and others pepper speeches with references to cheap imported food, clothes and shoes for British workers. On the other hand, much of the campaign for Brexit recalled the nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s: take back national control, fund the National Health Service, keep out immigrants – Europeans as well as non-Europeans – a time when Labour was the anti-EEC party.
Brexiter fantasies about British power are evidently important, but they are not about empire. They focus on delusions of a global champion of free trade, an innovation superpower, a tier-one global military power, which will lead the world into the fourth industrial revolution, as it led it into the first.
That the empire and its domestic consequences are now firmly part of our understanding of British history is only to be welcomed. But empire did not exhaust the UK’s relations with the rest of the world, not least in trade, nor can it explain everything we might not like. Our present problems are due to very much more recent and more powerful factors than nostalgia for a world that never existed.
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