edgerton intro
Introduction
Objectivity is not the same thing as conventional judiciousness. A celebration of the virtues of our own society which leaves out its ugly and cruel features, which fails to face the question of a connection between its attractive and cruel features, remains an apologia even if it is spoken in the most measured academic terms.
Barrington Moore Jnr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966)
The past, it has been said, is another country, but twentieth-century British history is a familiar place. We know how it looked, how it changed, how it thought. We know its heroes, its villains and its storylines. This book offers an unfamiliar when, why and who of British history, reflecting transformative historical research of recent years. This research, in social and cultural history, but also in economic, political, imperial and military history, has not only widened the scope of recent British history, but perhaps most significantly also refreshed and revised accounts of core themes. We can now write our history not just as observers of the theatre of government but as analysts peering behind the scenes in Westminster and Whitehall, and indeed beyond. We can distance ourselves from national sentimentalities about people, politics and parliament. We need not follow the politicians and pundits of the past or present in focusing on the rise of the welfare state, or the empire, or economic decline or more recent revival. We can address ideas from the outside rather than writing from within them, and can discuss national stories we do not take at face value. Above all we can engage with the question of power in its many dimensions, both power within the United Kingdom, and the power of the United Kingdom. In other words, we can study the history of the United Kingdom as we might study that of Germany or the Soviet Union. As well as making the past foreign we need to take account of foreigners in our national history. While this point would be obvious in the historiographies of Germany and Russia, it bears making for the UK.1 The United Kingdom did not just forge itself – it was made as other nations were, and other nations had a great impact on its making. If the United Kingdom was distinctive in 1900, and it was in astonishing ways, it was made over the century into a nation much like other rich nations. In making the United Kingdom’s national past different, at times unsettlingly so, I hope to make it less suitable for the political purposes it currently serves.
This book tells the history of the United Kingdom around a core theme of the twentieth-century rise, as well as the fall, of something I call the British nation. The United Kingdom, just like Ireland and India, Canada and Australia, had its own post-imperial, indeed anti-imperial, nationalism, though one which could not speak its name. This nationalism, which flourished from 1945 to the 1970s, manifested itself in, for example, the internal rebuilding of the nation. A British nation was created, by which I mean a distinctive economic, political, and social unit within the borders of the United Kingdom. Yet as well as rising, this British nation also fell. The many barriers between the British nation and other nations were pulled down from the 1970s, a process which in part meant a return to the situation existing at the beginning of the century. Rise and fall refer to these processes and not to the rise and decline of British power, or the rise and fall of the British Empire, or the British economy, which concerned an entity different from the British nation in my sense. Indeed, as I show, it is a mistake to conflate nation, empire, power and economy: each had different dynamics. Untangling them is a central concern of the book, and it does so by highlighting the rise and fall of a very distinct object. This British nation is something a history of the United Kingdom should necessarily be centrally concerned with, but it has been curiously invisible, for reasons to be discussed.
The British nation, as I define it, was not a natural state of affairs. The British nation was created: it emerged out of the British Empire, and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War. Leaving behind empire went hand in hand with the development of a peculiar kind of nationalism which entailed the rejection of imperial citizenship and imperialism. Leaving behind economic liberalism meant creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply. None of this was the product of a choice by the British elites, who favoured free-trading and/or imperialist projects, but who were thwarted by many brute realities. Taking serious note of this British nation, and in that light at what came before and after, provides richer explanations for many well-known elements of the story of the United Kingdom, from its politics, to its economics and foreign relations, to the evolution of its welfare state and more. It also allows previously marginalized aspects such as the warfare state and the history of its capitalism into the picture in fresh ways.
The term ‘British nation’ requires some more explanation. It was used in the early nineteenth century, meaning the political nation within the United Kingdom, and less so in the early twentieth century, when its meaning partially extended to encompass a broader empire.2 For the remainder of the twentieth century it was barely used, even as a term of art. In my account, ‘British nation’ refers unambiguously to the United Kingdom as a whole rather than to a larger entity such as the British Empire, or a smaller one, such as England and Wales. It is important to note that ‘United Kingdom’ was itself a term barely used in political and historical discourse through most of the century. It was the preserve of statisticians, diplomats and the military. But its use is now required in historical work in recognition of legal and economic realities. I don’t use the term ‘Britain’ except when actors did, which was often. After 1945, especially, ‘Britain’ was the standard usage in politics, and in histories, apparently shifting its meaning between Great Britain and the United Kingdom without warning.
The national moment was a time of what might be called a developmental state, one of many features of the nation which have been supposed not to exist (among the others in older accounts are militarism and technocracy). This was the time (and not the nineteenth century) when the United Kingdom was at its most industrial. It was also the moment when it was refashioned by the state to look much more like its continental neighbours, with conscription and development of national agriculture, and protected industry. Ideologically it generated national rather than imperial histories, a nationalist critique of cosmopolitan capitalism and a powerfully nationalist declinism. Thinking of this period in this way is a more explanatory alternative than the common references to Keynesianism, the welfare state, decline, social democracy and consensus. It allows us to rethink the politics of the Labour Party, which I see as much more national productionist than welfarist after 1945. It also allows us to rethink the story of racism and immigration, and of emigration. It also points to the need to think of foreign policy in new ways, from the Suez invasions to going into the Common Market. I see the former as a national not an imperial war, and entry to the EEC not as moving from liberalism and empire to protectionism and subsidy, but from economic nationalism to a European economic liberalism.
Making the national aspect explicit allows us to notice the vital non-national features of earlier and later periods. Recognizing its temporary existence allows us to also write what might seem paradoxical – a non-national national history. For while nationalism has not been important in histories of the United Kingdom, a certain methodological nationalism which assumes away the nation and nationalism overtly, but covertly makes both central, has been.3 Taking seriously the nationalism of the national period allows us to see that in the first decades of the twentieth century cosmopolitanism, and imperialism, were central. This allows a reasoned account of the very great differences then existing in its economic structure and military posture compared with the nations and empires of continental Europe. These differences are of vital importance in understanding British power in two world wars – it was based on its position as a great trading enterprise, as well as an imperial one. British power at its peak was not national power, but rather a form of global and imperial power.
Turning to the end of the twentieth century, I suggest we can only understand the move to economic liberalism from the 1970s, and especially the 1980s, if we recognize the significance of previous nation-building. Thatcherism relied on the previous successes of national development to make it workable, whether self-sufficiency in food or the expanding welfare state. The great transformation of the economy from the 1980s followed from its reintegration with the external world to such an extent that it no longer made sense to talk of a national economy. In addition, the United Kingdom ceased to have a distinctly national capitalism and became instead a major financial centre, now largely for the capital of others. The re-emergence of sub-national nationalist parties from the 1970s made a specifically British nationalism politically incoherent as well. New Labour more than the Conservatives embodied this new non-nationalist politics and economics.
The central concern with the rise and fall of the British nation, and what came before and after it, is supplemented by considering three main sub-themes: the stories of British capitalism, of militarism and the state, and of political economic ideas. These are not there to provide colour or context, but are central to the story itself. My aim especially in telling very material stories of capitalism and militarism is to suggest fresh ways of thinking about British history more generally, rather than to provide material examples to supplement existing stories. British capitalism, to be understood not just as the market system, or the political doctrine of liberalism, but as the private ownership of capital, was at the core of the economy through the century. This capitalism was never merely abstractedly financial, though it has often been treated as such. The story of British capitalism was one of particular metals and textiles, of factories and farms, of managers and workers, of plants and of animals, from pit ponies to continental cattle breeds, both in the United Kingdom and overseas. British capitalism, as well as geology, made the United Kingdom the largest exporter of energy in the world down to 1939, as well as the largest exporter of manufactures. British multinational enterprises operating overseas supplied the United Kingdom, the largest importer in the world at the beginning of the century. Ships of many types, and ports, docks and warehouses were as central to it as factories. British capitalism, its global, and especially European reach, was a source of strength, not weakness. Although it became relatively less important, it was into the 1960s at least one of the three great capitalisms of the world, and far more successful than its many critics contended. But in the recent past it is hardly possible to speak of British capitalism, and to the extent it exists, it is hardly confined to or even dominant within the United Kingdom.
The success or otherwise of British capitalism was the central issue in British politics through the century. More than this, throughout, but especially before, 1945, British capitalist families supplied many members of the political class including prime ministers. The two main political parties into the 1920s were parties of capitalists, as was the dominant political party of the rest of the century. The Conservative Party was in office for nearly seventy of the 100 years of the century, and at least thirty years in each half of the century. The politics of capital – whether of the free trade versus protection or national or global orientations of who was in charge of the economy – were the central political fights of the twentieth century. There was a politics of returns on investments, not mainly of investments in the empire, but in the British national debt. Capitalism was also, of course, a matter of class, and this book discusses business, politics and the politics of labour very much within this context. The Labour Party was a party which, while it wanted to do away with class distinction, was created and maintained by the organized employees of a class-divided society and needs to be understood as such. Its relationship to power was structurally different from that of the other main parties.
The second theme is not so much war as the warfare state. The United Kingdom was long distinctive in its approach to warfighting, opting for machines over men. Its distinctive liberal militarism was a thoroughly modern way of war, one which, like British capitalism, needs to be understood in its material manifestations, not least great battleships and long-range bombing aircraft and atomic bombs. Only from 1945 did it conform to the European pattern of conscription in peacetime. The warfare state was always strong, and at the core of the state, and shaped the United Kingdom, the rest of the empire and much of the world so as to emerge victorious, with allies, in two world wars. The Dunkirk/Blitz Churchillian moment of 1940 and 1941 was not, in my account, the birth of the nation, but the last moment of the British Empire, and the global United Kingdom, as a great power, a period which ended with the Japanese conquest of Malaya in early 1942. The warfare state was also central to the internal story of empire – it was kept by force, kept going in part to preserve military bases and lost by an inability to use enough force to keep it. British imperial power flowed out of the barrel of a British gun, not the Anglican Bible or textbooks of liberal political economy. The empire was not lost or given up; it was taken away. In matters military the national moment was brief, its life that of the short-lived independent national nuclear bomb. It gave way to a policy of dependence on the USA, from as early as the late 1950s, though the fiction of an independent bomb and defence policy was maintained. Yet the post-national period saw the creation of a new expeditionary force and new claims for the need for a global military capacity – bizarrely and tragically British arms returned East of Suez from the 1990s. The warfare state, like the story of British capitalism, makes clear that empire needs to be kept in proportion. The empire was far from the only foreign entanglement – Europe was generally more important.
The third theme is ideas. We need to recover the nature and power of the key animating ideas, not least the powerful assumptions that undergird national histories – the idea of the centrality of governments, rather than the state, of Westminster rather than Whitehall, of ‘political’ ideas rather than economic or scientific ones. The key set of ideas discussed in this book are summed up by the term ‘political economy’, which I take to be the central language and conceptual scheme for understanding and acting in the twentieth-century United Kingdom. It is an abstract, universalist language which hid as much as it illuminated, yet was the language not only of politics, but of thinking about international relations, and indeed of thinking about the nation. The most important form was liberalism, with its cosmopolitanism, its economism and its internationalism. It was hugely influential in shaping even British militarism, whose central ideas owe more to British liberalism than to jingo Tories or US imperialists. Liberal political economy was the language of the key public intellectuals from Beveridge to Hayek and beyond. It is also important because of what it made difficult to think about or describe. One cannot get a full enough picture of the economy from within the conventions of liberal political economy, Keynesianism included. Political economy even rendered the empirical manifestations of a capitalist economy invisible – its abstractions had no need for the discussion of particular capitalists or particular firms. The British left, steeped in political economy, itself notably failed to write an account of actual British capitalism, of British militarism, of the British state, and instead, in nationalist mode, criticized British capitalism for not being British enough and the nation for being subservient to the militarism of others. Social democratic political economy was weakly developed, at least until the 1970s, as was Marxist political economy. The language of class has been important, but not class analysis.4
Much more unfamiliar is the idea associated with a key theme in the book: British nationalism. It was a peculiar nationalism because it had little overt presence. I associate it mainly but far from exclusively with Labour, though only after 1945. This is in contrast to the more common view in which Labour is seen as a weak carrier of social democracy, which is itself the main threat and alternative to liberalism. But nationalism too was a great challenge to both liberal and imperial orthodoxies and was, I suggest, at least as important as weak forms of socialism in the British case. I think, for example, that the actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour Party. Although explicit nationalist political economy was a rarity, it was to become implicit in much economic commentary, concerning everything from the balance of payments to research policy. As economic practice it was very important.
Nationalism was also important in history-writing. Like historians in other post-imperial formations, whether Hungary or Australia, or Ireland, British historians from the 1960s especially created national histories of the twentieth century, which downplayed and/or criticized the imperial context in which the proto-nation existed. Many national histories tended to criticize the United Kingdom for not being national enough, and were both national-celebratory and declinist. They also downplayed the fact that the United Kingdom was and is a country of countries, a nation of nations – England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These national histories, mostly written by the centre-left, especially those from the 1960s, tended to tell the story of the nation in terms of the rise of the welfare state. Other key concepts deployed in national histories were such notions as appeasement, consensus, Keynesianism, post-war settlement, people’s war, decline, welfare state, affluence, permissiveness, reconstruction and indeed neo-liberalism. Such ideas have powerfully constrained the writing of histories, much more so than they constrained or explained the actions of historical actors. We no longer need to think with such clichés, but rather with new principles which help us understand the power they once had.
This book thus has a much greater focus than most on the right rather than the left, on capitalists rather than workers, on liberals, imperialists and nationalists rather than socialists, on warfare rather than welfare, on the material rather than particular assumptions about the material. The consequence is not ignoring the welfare state, the Labour Party and social democracy, and the empire – all staples of histories – but rather that they are put in a new light. For example, Lloyd George’s people’s budget, so called, funded the building of battleships and not only the emergent welfare state. The Great War led, in the 1920s, to the creation, by Conservatives, of a comprehensive, specifically working-class welfare state. This was extended by Labour in the 1940s, as a national welfare state, and transformed in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1940s welfare had a lower priority, for the Labour government, than warfare and production, understood very nationally. Peak welfare in terms of generosity arrived in the 1970s, and in many respects very much later, and came into its own only with the decline of the warfare state, and indeed the weight of industrial production. The empire was an alternative to globalism, a controversial one, desired by a fraction of capital and the Conservative Party in particular. Empire was an economic, political and racial project, which very largely failed. The British economy was in fact at its most imperial in the 1940s and 1950s, long after the ideological or military heyday of empire.
Much recent historical work on the United Kingdom has stressed the significance of imperialist ideas, seeing nationalism as indivisible from imperialism. In fact nationalism needs distinguishing from imperialism. If we do so we can see the significance of nationalist critiques of imperialism, from both the right and the left. Many on the left have for a long time attacked British imperialism and its domestic consequences long and short term from a national perspective. They have blamed militarism, economic decline, racism, global pretensions and more on it. Some external force, it seemed, had corrupted the true beneficent nature of the British, whose mission to, say, rid the world of nuclear weapons was being thwarted. Even on the left, there has been a deep reluctance to criticize close to home. Overplaying the significance – economic, ideological and political – of empire has been at the expense of understanding non-imperial, indeed national, sources of inequality, racism, economic problems and militarism too. Blaming empire and imperialism has let the guilty get away scot free!
In histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom we have to take into account what I call anti-histories. Anti-history is a history of opposition to things which the commentator values, leading to the disappearance from history of what such histories intended to promote. Thus the national project was invisible partly because the nation was not nationalist enough in that it was always too imperial and too liberal for nationalist critics, especially of the left. Promoters of military power wrote the military out of British history, putting in its place a peculiarly powerful liberal pacifism and/or imperialist illusions. Declinism rendered positive economic growth and change invisible and emphasized backwardness and immobile continuity from the nineteenth century. Successful British capitalism was buried in mountains of evidence of what supposedly thwarted it, like aristocratic culture, cosmopolitan finance and empire. It is said, by those who wanted the United Kingdom to join the Common Market, that it resisted European integration because of the strength of imperial, global and US orientations, such that it was not possible to explain why it was it applied as early as 1961. C. P. Snow and many followers insist on the thesis that science was smothered by the condescension of an elite of novelists and poets. We need to take account of this particular form of historiography from below, in which the realms of elite practice – of soldiers, scientists, politicians, and economists and politics – generated their own sets of historical stories. They have been very influential in telling stories now so tangled that things that never happened were routinely explained by imaginary argument and evidence. Instead of being a history of absences, this book makes power present.
Although it is rightly observed that most history is the history of elites, for twentieth-century British history this is perhaps not the case. Paradoxical as it might seem, British labour is better known than British capital, the working class than the ruling class, trade unions than businesses. The reason is clear – histories reflect visibility in the public sphere. Welfare, trade unions, and labour had to operate publicly, in a way which British capitalism, given its power, never did. Thus the welfare state has been much more visible than the warfare state, the welfare sociologist more visible than the defence intellectuals. Very clearly men were much more visible than women reflecting separate spheres which were public, and the other private in orientation. British capitalism was less visible than nationalized industries. Socialists have been more present than reactionaries, Labour figures more than Conservative ones. Liberalism as ideology is much more visible than capitalism as practice. The state has been more visible than the private sector, the state pension more than the occupational pension, the ordinary old-age pension more than the military pension. The imperial, extra-European orientation has been more visible than the orientation towards Europe. Immigration by non-white people has been more visible than that by white people, or the very important white emigration. Indeed, one of the threads running through the book is a concern with what was public and what was private, what was open and what was closed, visible and obscured. The mere visibility of ideas and of things is no guide to their significance; the visibility of arguments no guarantee of their plausibility.
This, then, is a history in many dimensions – cultural, political, economic and military – which is sceptical of the standard analytical apparatus used to understand British history. The very ideas which structure historical accounts, how they conceptualize the nation, the economy, war, knowledge, need to be challenged, it suggests. It is sceptical, too, when it comes to many key claims. It is a history full of paradox and contradiction, of ideas often out of kilter with reality. However, the main point is to tell a coherent story at a time when the old apparent certainties have crumbled, one which is more consonant with what we now know and what we now need. That includes more description of what for earlier generations would have been obvious, and a stronger analytical grip than older narrative histories allowed. I hope that by the end of this book the reader will find it obvious that just as no British historian would dream of writing a history of the Soviet Union or Germany without ideology, militarism, nationalism, I. G. Farben, the Wehrmacht, Magnitogorsk and the Dnieper dam, no British historian of the United Kingdom should ignore British militarism and nationalism, Imperial Chemical Industries and the Royal Air Force. If there was a German iron cage of modernity there was assuredly a British one too. But I also hope the reader will reflect on how and why histories without one have made so much sense to generations of readers.
History has played and continues to play a powerful role in British public life. The past is appealed too as explanation of the present, as legitimation for this or that policy, the place where a true national essence is revealed. The issue is not that historical perspective is lacking in policy and politics, it is very obviously present. The issue is the kind of history that is in play. I hope that for those in public life, for those concerned with politics and policy, this book will help liberate us from the conventional framings of British history and all they imply for political action. For I show again and again that history was not destiny, things changed, radically so, over time. Not only are there many pasts, there are also many histories. The histories of this or that episode, the national as a whole, are not the same in every book. History, like politics and policy, is, or rather should be, a contended matter. In any case the time is long overdue for a good rattling of the cage of clichés which imprison our historical and political imaginations.
Objectivity is not the same thing as conventional judiciousness. A celebration of the virtues of our own society which leaves out its ugly and cruel features, which fails to face the question of a connection between its attractive and cruel features, remains an apologia even if it is spoken in the most measured academic terms.
Barrington Moore Jnr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966)
The past, it has been said, is another country, but twentieth-century British history is a familiar place. We know how it looked, how it changed, how it thought. We know its heroes, its villains and its storylines. This book offers an unfamiliar when, why and who of British history, reflecting transformative historical research of recent years. This research, in social and cultural history, but also in economic, political, imperial and military history, has not only widened the scope of recent British history, but perhaps most significantly also refreshed and revised accounts of core themes. We can now write our history not just as observers of the theatre of government but as analysts peering behind the scenes in Westminster and Whitehall, and indeed beyond. We can distance ourselves from national sentimentalities about people, politics and parliament. We need not follow the politicians and pundits of the past or present in focusing on the rise of the welfare state, or the empire, or economic decline or more recent revival. We can address ideas from the outside rather than writing from within them, and can discuss national stories we do not take at face value. Above all we can engage with the question of power in its many dimensions, both power within the United Kingdom, and the power of the United Kingdom. In other words, we can study the history of the United Kingdom as we might study that of Germany or the Soviet Union. As well as making the past foreign we need to take account of foreigners in our national history. While this point would be obvious in the historiographies of Germany and Russia, it bears making for the UK.1 The United Kingdom did not just forge itself – it was made as other nations were, and other nations had a great impact on its making. If the United Kingdom was distinctive in 1900, and it was in astonishing ways, it was made over the century into a nation much like other rich nations. In making the United Kingdom’s national past different, at times unsettlingly so, I hope to make it less suitable for the political purposes it currently serves.
This book tells the history of the United Kingdom around a core theme of the twentieth-century rise, as well as the fall, of something I call the British nation. The United Kingdom, just like Ireland and India, Canada and Australia, had its own post-imperial, indeed anti-imperial, nationalism, though one which could not speak its name. This nationalism, which flourished from 1945 to the 1970s, manifested itself in, for example, the internal rebuilding of the nation. A British nation was created, by which I mean a distinctive economic, political, and social unit within the borders of the United Kingdom. Yet as well as rising, this British nation also fell. The many barriers between the British nation and other nations were pulled down from the 1970s, a process which in part meant a return to the situation existing at the beginning of the century. Rise and fall refer to these processes and not to the rise and decline of British power, or the rise and fall of the British Empire, or the British economy, which concerned an entity different from the British nation in my sense. Indeed, as I show, it is a mistake to conflate nation, empire, power and economy: each had different dynamics. Untangling them is a central concern of the book, and it does so by highlighting the rise and fall of a very distinct object. This British nation is something a history of the United Kingdom should necessarily be centrally concerned with, but it has been curiously invisible, for reasons to be discussed.
The British nation, as I define it, was not a natural state of affairs. The British nation was created: it emerged out of the British Empire, and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after the Second World War. Leaving behind empire went hand in hand with the development of a peculiar kind of nationalism which entailed the rejection of imperial citizenship and imperialism. Leaving behind economic liberalism meant creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply. None of this was the product of a choice by the British elites, who favoured free-trading and/or imperialist projects, but who were thwarted by many brute realities. Taking serious note of this British nation, and in that light at what came before and after, provides richer explanations for many well-known elements of the story of the United Kingdom, from its politics, to its economics and foreign relations, to the evolution of its welfare state and more. It also allows previously marginalized aspects such as the warfare state and the history of its capitalism into the picture in fresh ways.
The term ‘British nation’ requires some more explanation. It was used in the early nineteenth century, meaning the political nation within the United Kingdom, and less so in the early twentieth century, when its meaning partially extended to encompass a broader empire.2 For the remainder of the twentieth century it was barely used, even as a term of art. In my account, ‘British nation’ refers unambiguously to the United Kingdom as a whole rather than to a larger entity such as the British Empire, or a smaller one, such as England and Wales. It is important to note that ‘United Kingdom’ was itself a term barely used in political and historical discourse through most of the century. It was the preserve of statisticians, diplomats and the military. But its use is now required in historical work in recognition of legal and economic realities. I don’t use the term ‘Britain’ except when actors did, which was often. After 1945, especially, ‘Britain’ was the standard usage in politics, and in histories, apparently shifting its meaning between Great Britain and the United Kingdom without warning.
The national moment was a time of what might be called a developmental state, one of many features of the nation which have been supposed not to exist (among the others in older accounts are militarism and technocracy). This was the time (and not the nineteenth century) when the United Kingdom was at its most industrial. It was also the moment when it was refashioned by the state to look much more like its continental neighbours, with conscription and development of national agriculture, and protected industry. Ideologically it generated national rather than imperial histories, a nationalist critique of cosmopolitan capitalism and a powerfully nationalist declinism. Thinking of this period in this way is a more explanatory alternative than the common references to Keynesianism, the welfare state, decline, social democracy and consensus. It allows us to rethink the politics of the Labour Party, which I see as much more national productionist than welfarist after 1945. It also allows us to rethink the story of racism and immigration, and of emigration. It also points to the need to think of foreign policy in new ways, from the Suez invasions to going into the Common Market. I see the former as a national not an imperial war, and entry to the EEC not as moving from liberalism and empire to protectionism and subsidy, but from economic nationalism to a European economic liberalism.
Making the national aspect explicit allows us to notice the vital non-national features of earlier and later periods. Recognizing its temporary existence allows us to also write what might seem paradoxical – a non-national national history. For while nationalism has not been important in histories of the United Kingdom, a certain methodological nationalism which assumes away the nation and nationalism overtly, but covertly makes both central, has been.3 Taking seriously the nationalism of the national period allows us to see that in the first decades of the twentieth century cosmopolitanism, and imperialism, were central. This allows a reasoned account of the very great differences then existing in its economic structure and military posture compared with the nations and empires of continental Europe. These differences are of vital importance in understanding British power in two world wars – it was based on its position as a great trading enterprise, as well as an imperial one. British power at its peak was not national power, but rather a form of global and imperial power.
Turning to the end of the twentieth century, I suggest we can only understand the move to economic liberalism from the 1970s, and especially the 1980s, if we recognize the significance of previous nation-building. Thatcherism relied on the previous successes of national development to make it workable, whether self-sufficiency in food or the expanding welfare state. The great transformation of the economy from the 1980s followed from its reintegration with the external world to such an extent that it no longer made sense to talk of a national economy. In addition, the United Kingdom ceased to have a distinctly national capitalism and became instead a major financial centre, now largely for the capital of others. The re-emergence of sub-national nationalist parties from the 1970s made a specifically British nationalism politically incoherent as well. New Labour more than the Conservatives embodied this new non-nationalist politics and economics.
The central concern with the rise and fall of the British nation, and what came before and after it, is supplemented by considering three main sub-themes: the stories of British capitalism, of militarism and the state, and of political economic ideas. These are not there to provide colour or context, but are central to the story itself. My aim especially in telling very material stories of capitalism and militarism is to suggest fresh ways of thinking about British history more generally, rather than to provide material examples to supplement existing stories. British capitalism, to be understood not just as the market system, or the political doctrine of liberalism, but as the private ownership of capital, was at the core of the economy through the century. This capitalism was never merely abstractedly financial, though it has often been treated as such. The story of British capitalism was one of particular metals and textiles, of factories and farms, of managers and workers, of plants and of animals, from pit ponies to continental cattle breeds, both in the United Kingdom and overseas. British capitalism, as well as geology, made the United Kingdom the largest exporter of energy in the world down to 1939, as well as the largest exporter of manufactures. British multinational enterprises operating overseas supplied the United Kingdom, the largest importer in the world at the beginning of the century. Ships of many types, and ports, docks and warehouses were as central to it as factories. British capitalism, its global, and especially European reach, was a source of strength, not weakness. Although it became relatively less important, it was into the 1960s at least one of the three great capitalisms of the world, and far more successful than its many critics contended. But in the recent past it is hardly possible to speak of British capitalism, and to the extent it exists, it is hardly confined to or even dominant within the United Kingdom.
The success or otherwise of British capitalism was the central issue in British politics through the century. More than this, throughout, but especially before, 1945, British capitalist families supplied many members of the political class including prime ministers. The two main political parties into the 1920s were parties of capitalists, as was the dominant political party of the rest of the century. The Conservative Party was in office for nearly seventy of the 100 years of the century, and at least thirty years in each half of the century. The politics of capital – whether of the free trade versus protection or national or global orientations of who was in charge of the economy – were the central political fights of the twentieth century. There was a politics of returns on investments, not mainly of investments in the empire, but in the British national debt. Capitalism was also, of course, a matter of class, and this book discusses business, politics and the politics of labour very much within this context. The Labour Party was a party which, while it wanted to do away with class distinction, was created and maintained by the organized employees of a class-divided society and needs to be understood as such. Its relationship to power was structurally different from that of the other main parties.
The second theme is not so much war as the warfare state. The United Kingdom was long distinctive in its approach to warfighting, opting for machines over men. Its distinctive liberal militarism was a thoroughly modern way of war, one which, like British capitalism, needs to be understood in its material manifestations, not least great battleships and long-range bombing aircraft and atomic bombs. Only from 1945 did it conform to the European pattern of conscription in peacetime. The warfare state was always strong, and at the core of the state, and shaped the United Kingdom, the rest of the empire and much of the world so as to emerge victorious, with allies, in two world wars. The Dunkirk/Blitz Churchillian moment of 1940 and 1941 was not, in my account, the birth of the nation, but the last moment of the British Empire, and the global United Kingdom, as a great power, a period which ended with the Japanese conquest of Malaya in early 1942. The warfare state was also central to the internal story of empire – it was kept by force, kept going in part to preserve military bases and lost by an inability to use enough force to keep it. British imperial power flowed out of the barrel of a British gun, not the Anglican Bible or textbooks of liberal political economy. The empire was not lost or given up; it was taken away. In matters military the national moment was brief, its life that of the short-lived independent national nuclear bomb. It gave way to a policy of dependence on the USA, from as early as the late 1950s, though the fiction of an independent bomb and defence policy was maintained. Yet the post-national period saw the creation of a new expeditionary force and new claims for the need for a global military capacity – bizarrely and tragically British arms returned East of Suez from the 1990s. The warfare state, like the story of British capitalism, makes clear that empire needs to be kept in proportion. The empire was far from the only foreign entanglement – Europe was generally more important.
The third theme is ideas. We need to recover the nature and power of the key animating ideas, not least the powerful assumptions that undergird national histories – the idea of the centrality of governments, rather than the state, of Westminster rather than Whitehall, of ‘political’ ideas rather than economic or scientific ones. The key set of ideas discussed in this book are summed up by the term ‘political economy’, which I take to be the central language and conceptual scheme for understanding and acting in the twentieth-century United Kingdom. It is an abstract, universalist language which hid as much as it illuminated, yet was the language not only of politics, but of thinking about international relations, and indeed of thinking about the nation. The most important form was liberalism, with its cosmopolitanism, its economism and its internationalism. It was hugely influential in shaping even British militarism, whose central ideas owe more to British liberalism than to jingo Tories or US imperialists. Liberal political economy was the language of the key public intellectuals from Beveridge to Hayek and beyond. It is also important because of what it made difficult to think about or describe. One cannot get a full enough picture of the economy from within the conventions of liberal political economy, Keynesianism included. Political economy even rendered the empirical manifestations of a capitalist economy invisible – its abstractions had no need for the discussion of particular capitalists or particular firms. The British left, steeped in political economy, itself notably failed to write an account of actual British capitalism, of British militarism, of the British state, and instead, in nationalist mode, criticized British capitalism for not being British enough and the nation for being subservient to the militarism of others. Social democratic political economy was weakly developed, at least until the 1970s, as was Marxist political economy. The language of class has been important, but not class analysis.4
Much more unfamiliar is the idea associated with a key theme in the book: British nationalism. It was a peculiar nationalism because it had little overt presence. I associate it mainly but far from exclusively with Labour, though only after 1945. This is in contrast to the more common view in which Labour is seen as a weak carrier of social democracy, which is itself the main threat and alternative to liberalism. But nationalism too was a great challenge to both liberal and imperial orthodoxies and was, I suggest, at least as important as weak forms of socialism in the British case. I think, for example, that the actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour Party. Although explicit nationalist political economy was a rarity, it was to become implicit in much economic commentary, concerning everything from the balance of payments to research policy. As economic practice it was very important.
Nationalism was also important in history-writing. Like historians in other post-imperial formations, whether Hungary or Australia, or Ireland, British historians from the 1960s especially created national histories of the twentieth century, which downplayed and/or criticized the imperial context in which the proto-nation existed. Many national histories tended to criticize the United Kingdom for not being national enough, and were both national-celebratory and declinist. They also downplayed the fact that the United Kingdom was and is a country of countries, a nation of nations – England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These national histories, mostly written by the centre-left, especially those from the 1960s, tended to tell the story of the nation in terms of the rise of the welfare state. Other key concepts deployed in national histories were such notions as appeasement, consensus, Keynesianism, post-war settlement, people’s war, decline, welfare state, affluence, permissiveness, reconstruction and indeed neo-liberalism. Such ideas have powerfully constrained the writing of histories, much more so than they constrained or explained the actions of historical actors. We no longer need to think with such clichés, but rather with new principles which help us understand the power they once had.
This book thus has a much greater focus than most on the right rather than the left, on capitalists rather than workers, on liberals, imperialists and nationalists rather than socialists, on warfare rather than welfare, on the material rather than particular assumptions about the material. The consequence is not ignoring the welfare state, the Labour Party and social democracy, and the empire – all staples of histories – but rather that they are put in a new light. For example, Lloyd George’s people’s budget, so called, funded the building of battleships and not only the emergent welfare state. The Great War led, in the 1920s, to the creation, by Conservatives, of a comprehensive, specifically working-class welfare state. This was extended by Labour in the 1940s, as a national welfare state, and transformed in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1940s welfare had a lower priority, for the Labour government, than warfare and production, understood very nationally. Peak welfare in terms of generosity arrived in the 1970s, and in many respects very much later, and came into its own only with the decline of the warfare state, and indeed the weight of industrial production. The empire was an alternative to globalism, a controversial one, desired by a fraction of capital and the Conservative Party in particular. Empire was an economic, political and racial project, which very largely failed. The British economy was in fact at its most imperial in the 1940s and 1950s, long after the ideological or military heyday of empire.
Much recent historical work on the United Kingdom has stressed the significance of imperialist ideas, seeing nationalism as indivisible from imperialism. In fact nationalism needs distinguishing from imperialism. If we do so we can see the significance of nationalist critiques of imperialism, from both the right and the left. Many on the left have for a long time attacked British imperialism and its domestic consequences long and short term from a national perspective. They have blamed militarism, economic decline, racism, global pretensions and more on it. Some external force, it seemed, had corrupted the true beneficent nature of the British, whose mission to, say, rid the world of nuclear weapons was being thwarted. Even on the left, there has been a deep reluctance to criticize close to home. Overplaying the significance – economic, ideological and political – of empire has been at the expense of understanding non-imperial, indeed national, sources of inequality, racism, economic problems and militarism too. Blaming empire and imperialism has let the guilty get away scot free!
In histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom we have to take into account what I call anti-histories. Anti-history is a history of opposition to things which the commentator values, leading to the disappearance from history of what such histories intended to promote. Thus the national project was invisible partly because the nation was not nationalist enough in that it was always too imperial and too liberal for nationalist critics, especially of the left. Promoters of military power wrote the military out of British history, putting in its place a peculiarly powerful liberal pacifism and/or imperialist illusions. Declinism rendered positive economic growth and change invisible and emphasized backwardness and immobile continuity from the nineteenth century. Successful British capitalism was buried in mountains of evidence of what supposedly thwarted it, like aristocratic culture, cosmopolitan finance and empire. It is said, by those who wanted the United Kingdom to join the Common Market, that it resisted European integration because of the strength of imperial, global and US orientations, such that it was not possible to explain why it was it applied as early as 1961. C. P. Snow and many followers insist on the thesis that science was smothered by the condescension of an elite of novelists and poets. We need to take account of this particular form of historiography from below, in which the realms of elite practice – of soldiers, scientists, politicians, and economists and politics – generated their own sets of historical stories. They have been very influential in telling stories now so tangled that things that never happened were routinely explained by imaginary argument and evidence. Instead of being a history of absences, this book makes power present.
Although it is rightly observed that most history is the history of elites, for twentieth-century British history this is perhaps not the case. Paradoxical as it might seem, British labour is better known than British capital, the working class than the ruling class, trade unions than businesses. The reason is clear – histories reflect visibility in the public sphere. Welfare, trade unions, and labour had to operate publicly, in a way which British capitalism, given its power, never did. Thus the welfare state has been much more visible than the warfare state, the welfare sociologist more visible than the defence intellectuals. Very clearly men were much more visible than women reflecting separate spheres which were public, and the other private in orientation. British capitalism was less visible than nationalized industries. Socialists have been more present than reactionaries, Labour figures more than Conservative ones. Liberalism as ideology is much more visible than capitalism as practice. The state has been more visible than the private sector, the state pension more than the occupational pension, the ordinary old-age pension more than the military pension. The imperial, extra-European orientation has been more visible than the orientation towards Europe. Immigration by non-white people has been more visible than that by white people, or the very important white emigration. Indeed, one of the threads running through the book is a concern with what was public and what was private, what was open and what was closed, visible and obscured. The mere visibility of ideas and of things is no guide to their significance; the visibility of arguments no guarantee of their plausibility.
This, then, is a history in many dimensions – cultural, political, economic and military – which is sceptical of the standard analytical apparatus used to understand British history. The very ideas which structure historical accounts, how they conceptualize the nation, the economy, war, knowledge, need to be challenged, it suggests. It is sceptical, too, when it comes to many key claims. It is a history full of paradox and contradiction, of ideas often out of kilter with reality. However, the main point is to tell a coherent story at a time when the old apparent certainties have crumbled, one which is more consonant with what we now know and what we now need. That includes more description of what for earlier generations would have been obvious, and a stronger analytical grip than older narrative histories allowed. I hope that by the end of this book the reader will find it obvious that just as no British historian would dream of writing a history of the Soviet Union or Germany without ideology, militarism, nationalism, I. G. Farben, the Wehrmacht, Magnitogorsk and the Dnieper dam, no British historian of the United Kingdom should ignore British militarism and nationalism, Imperial Chemical Industries and the Royal Air Force. If there was a German iron cage of modernity there was assuredly a British one too. But I also hope the reader will reflect on how and why histories without one have made so much sense to generations of readers.
History has played and continues to play a powerful role in British public life. The past is appealed too as explanation of the present, as legitimation for this or that policy, the place where a true national essence is revealed. The issue is not that historical perspective is lacking in policy and politics, it is very obviously present. The issue is the kind of history that is in play. I hope that for those in public life, for those concerned with politics and policy, this book will help liberate us from the conventional framings of British history and all they imply for political action. For I show again and again that history was not destiny, things changed, radically so, over time. Not only are there many pasts, there are also many histories. The histories of this or that episode, the national as a whole, are not the same in every book. History, like politics and policy, is, or rather should be, a contended matter. In any case the time is long overdue for a good rattling of the cage of clichés which imprison our historical and political imaginations.
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