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The first thing we know about science and technology in general is that it is growing at an ever accelerating pace. But the first thing we know about British science and technology is that it is declining. We have known this for over 100 years. It is surprising that any of it is left at all. This “declinism” has painted a composite picture which shows British science and technology as weak in comparison to most comparable countries; which shows British higher education dominated by the arts, and latterly by the social sciences; which shows British government and big companies dominated by arts graduates; which shows British businesses to be very reluctant to invest in research and development (R&D), and so on, ad nauseam. This picture is more than something we merely know: it is part of the very fabric of British intellectual life. It is a fact beyond dispute that Britain is an anti-scientific, anti-technological and anti-industrial culture. These beliefs, which are, incidentally...

When Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, he was probably the best-known historian in the English-speaking world. His books have been translated into every major language (and numerous minor ones), and many of them have remained continuously in print since their first appearance. Though his work centered on the history of labor, he wrote with equal fluency about the crisis of the seventeenth century and the bandits of Eritrea, the standard of living during the industrial revolution and Billie Holiday’s blues. For range and accessibility, there was no one to touch him. What he gave his readers was above all the sense of being intellectually alive, of the sheer excitement of a fresh idea and a bold, unsentimental argument. The works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography? Historians lead for the most part pretty dull lives: if they make it big enough to warrant a biography of their own, it is unlikely to feature anything more exciting tha...

the economies of the us, Europe and Japan are still struggling to emerge from their post-2008 recessions, to date China has continued on its path of upward growth, apparently undaunted by the global financial crisis. In 2009 the prc overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter of goods, with 34 firms in the Fortune 500. The market capitalization of Chinese firms in the ft 500 was second only to that of American firms, while in the banking sector, the top three positions were occupied by Chinese institutions. Indeed, it has been suggested that the prc has used the financial crisis to embark on a buying spree of western companies. In the autumn of 2009, Fortune ran a cover story under the banner, ‘China Buys the World’, with the sub-heading: ‘The Chinese have $2 trillion and are going shopping. Is your company—and your country—on their list?’footnote1 In fact, Chinese companies face enormous competitive challenges in operating on the international stage. Contrary to the belie...

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation aims to dispel the myths which, David Edgerton claims, envelop his subject, chief among them the notion that Britain’s relative decline after 1945 had its roots in the anti-industrial culture of a gentleman-amateur governing elite. Today, a much diminished Ukania cannot possibly go it alone, Edgerton insists. Post-war Britain, on the other hand, was sufficient unto itself, and far more successful than standard accounts allow. The record of one of the capitalist world’s most prodigious economies lies ‘buried in mountains of evidence of what supposedly thwarted it’. Despite a largely positive critical reception for Rise and Fall, neither the historian David Kynaston writing in the ft nor the journalist and commentator Neal Ascherson in the lrb could quite reconcile its depiction of a technological forcing house with their impressions of the period. A historian at King’s College London, Edgerton has spent much of his career self-consciously swimmin...

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won what appeared to be a resounding victory in Lower House elections for the second time in two years. But a closer look reveals that these ‘victories’ were rather odd. The ldp could not secure even 20 per cent of the votes of Japan’s total electorate in either contest. The party had actually commanded a higher share back in 2009, when it lost control of the Lower House and was obliged to turn over the reins of government to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. That was the only time voters had ever interrupted Japan’s so-called one-party democracy, known locally as the 1955 system for the year in which the ldp was founded. (The ldp had also briefly been forced into opposition in 1993 because of defections from the ranks of its own legislators.) The ldp’s return to power in 2012, with a lower share of the electorate than that which got it kicked out in the first place, is generally ascribed in Tokyo to a boycott by the...