edgerton ft review

Did Britain really spend the 20th century in decline? David Edgerton’s unsentimental history challenges the received wisdom of the country’s inevitable downfall Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson signs a souvenir for a guest at the Queen’s Award for Industry in 1969 © Alamy Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Share Save David Kynaston JULY 11 2018Print this page79 For decades, the conventional wisdom of historians and commentators alike has been that Britain during the 20th century was largely a story of economic decline. Indeed, assumptions about Britain’s post-Victorian backwardness (in comparison with, say, France or Germany at different times) have become so hard-wired that most accounts marginalise the world of business and economic practicalities, concentrating instead on more uplifting, reader-friendly terrain — the fortunes of the welfare state or the rise and rise of popular culture. Edgerton’s approach is wholly different. “The anti-Gosford Park view of Britain” is how the American-Canadian political commentator David Frum has neatly characterised The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, an ambitious new survey of the last century by British historian David Edgerton that feels like the summation of a lifetime’s reading and reflection. Long, dense, often combative, always closely argued, it is also appropriately effortful: this is a book about men — the index boasts hundreds of them, but only 35 women — doing big, bold, effortful things. Sir Weetman Pearson, a civil engineering contractor, finds oil in Mexico and creates the Eagle Oil Company, subsequently bought by Shell (and whose family-led conglomerate would later come to own the Financial Times); David Thomas (later Lord Rhondda), a mining magnate, builds up the huge Cambrian Combine; Edward Brotherton, turning waste products from gas works into a fortune, becomes the ammonia king; Neville Chamberlain, a future prime minister, spends 17 years as managing director of Hoskins & Co, makers of ships’ berths. At one level, albeit only implicitly, Edgerton’s book is a celebration of action men. Oscar Wilde would have hated it. At the core of the book lie two fundamental propositions. The first is that Britain for much of the 20th century, so far from being technologically retarded, anti-scientific and generally hostile to what the American academic Martin Wiener in 1981 characterised as “the industrial spirit”, was instead a formid­ably sophisticated politico-socio-economic machine dedicated to the needs of capitalism, commerce, material progress and warfare. Take almost at random a few of Edgerton’s sharply pointed depictions of pre-1940 Britain, up to half a century after supposed economic decline had set in. We see the ruling class not only “rich, confident and distinct”, but also “spectacularly successful” as it “bestrode the world, not merely the empire”; an educated elite richly peopled with scientific, medical and technocratic expertise; the City of London “as much about commodities as money, as much about shipping as stocks and shares”. He writes, too, about the transformative power of electricity and the prevalence of management techniques, including methods of work measurement, well in advance of almost anything outside the US. Edgerton’s other key proposition is that out of the unique circumstances of the 1940s — a lengthy and ultimately successful war, followed by Labour coming to power to preside over postwar reconstruction — there rose to dominance what he calls “the British Nation”. This embraced the United Kingdom as a whole — but not the rapidly disappearing British empire — and lasted until the 1970s. Its distinctive qualities included, he argues, a commitment to the developmental state — that is, Whitehall taking a proactive role in growing new sectors of the economy — most notably through the “white heat” of technology pursued by Harold Wilson’s Labour government of the 1960s; a turning away from economic liberalism; a general emphasis on the virtues of “Britishness”; and, of symbolic as well as substantive importance, becoming almost self-sufficient in food. “It is very doubtful whether Keynesianism or welfarism were at the centre of politics, let alone state practices,” Edgerton declares at one point. “The economy was discussed in terms of exports and imports, investment, planning, production, at least as much as in terms of budget deficits or surpluses.” Indeed, he adds, “welfare policy was not the main focus of politics or policy, even rhetorically, even for the Labour Party”. All this is undeniably stimulating. Does it convince? Very broadly, yes, above all in the sense that over the 20th century the whole phenomenon known as “declinism”, taking for granted the inevitability of economic decline, was in many ways an ahistorical, cultural construct — whether on the part of the disappointed right or the condescending, even snobbish, liberal left. To look long and hard at the objective reality, as Edgerton has done across a huge range of productive activities, is to see things very differently. We see the ruling class not only ‘rich, confident and distinct’, but also ‘spectacularly successful’ Arguably, though, what he never quite confronts is whether modernity — an unblinking, unsentimental welcome for the new — ever really “took” across British society as a whole. My own work on the postwar period strongly suggests that it did not, perhaps above all in relation to the urban environment, and that the British temper remained in some obstinate, implacable way deeply resistant to change. Perhaps it still is, given the plausibility of interpreting the Brexit vote of 2016 as a forlorn cry against the often bewildering pace of change over the past half-century. Edgerton’s closing chapters, mainly covering the 1970s to 2000 but with a sneak look beyond, outline what he views as the fall of the British nation. He includes entry to what was then called the European Economic Community, and in due course membership of the single market, as a move from economic nationalism to a European economic liberalism; Britain’s re-integration with the world economy, through a mixture of Thatcherism and globalisation; the City of London’s re-invention as an international financial centre; and, amid steep manufacturing decline, New Labour’s year-zero shedding of its old-style, intolerably dowdy “national-productionist agenda”. My impression is that Edgerton, for all his keen appreciation of technological advance, largely finds these trends regrettable. And the book ends, harshly enough, with a burst of potshots — the “astonishing banality” of attempts by Gordon Brown, New Labour chancellor and later prime minister, to define Britishness; Tony Blair “making money working for some of the vilest torturers and dictators on Earth”; an all-but-state funeral for Margaret Thatcher as “forgotten former miners celebrate bitterly” in “old and distressed pit villages”. Yet of Brexit, not a word, despite its apparent potential to restore the illiberal fortunes of “the British Nation”. Perhaps, on this at least, Edgerton is undecided.