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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 swimming against the tide of British historiography, a reflection perhaps of his insider-outsider status. He was born into an Anglo-Argentine family in Uruguay in 1959, and the fragment of autobiography contained in the Acknowledgements indicates a liberal-imperial expat upbringing split between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, magnets for pre-First World War British capital export to Latin America. ‘Without realizing it, I knew the land of my father (born 1903) from the design of railway stations, visiting Royal Navy warships, Senior Service cigarettes, the airmail edition of the New Statesman.’ His arrival in Britain in 1970 at the age of eleven—‘out of time, as if a leftover from an older order of things’—opened up a world both familiar and strange. Rather than the dull and decrepit nation castigated by journalists and opposition politicians, he saw ‘so much to admire and to be amazed at’. Edgerton dates an interest in British history to reading Keith Middlemas’s Politics in Industrial Society (1979), presumably while an Oxford undergraduate. Middlemas dissected a succession of crisis-averting brokerage arrangements between Whitehall and co-opted business and trade-union organizations between the 1920s and 60s—a ‘corporate bias’ falling just short of a stable corporatist system. Edgerton remembers it as ‘an extraordinary rethinking’ which ‘shifted attention from open parliamentary politics to behind-the-scenes secret orchestration of the interests of capital and labour by the state: it was here that one needed to understand real politics, and the real nature of the state’. He completed his PhD in 1986 under the supervision of Marxist historian of science Gary Werskey at Imperial College London. Werskey’s The Visible College (1978), a collective biography of five Communist Party and left Labour scientists of the 1930s—physicist J. D. Bernal, geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, zoologist Lancelot Hogben, mathematician Hyman Levy, biochemist and historian Joseph Needham—argued that the historiography of the cpgb had incorrectly seen the typical Party intellectual as a ‘politically inexperienced poet’. In fact, the modernizing ethos of the Old Left’s scientific cadres would carry through to Wilson’s Labour. Edgerton treads a similar path to Werskey, incorporating not just committed intellectuals of the left but also of the right, such as aero-designer Sir Roy Fedden, who blisteringly attacked the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the post-war welfare state. Published in 1991, Edgerton’s first book was England and the Aeroplane. By studying the centrality of the aeroplane to English history and culture, Edgerton argued that British militarism through to the Second World War was a ‘liberal militarism’. That is, it placed a premium on labour-saving machines and technology against the Continental pattern exemplified by conscription and mass standing armies. ‘The commitment of England to the aeroplane exemplifies a commitment to armed force, science, technology and industry.’ What was important about Ukania changes from this vantage point: not ‘a welfarist nation lacking interest in technology, but a warfare state which gives a remarkably high priority to technological development’—a proposition he would further develop in Warfare State (2005) and Britain’s War Machine (2011). Far from being ‘an island alone’ after the fall of France, the uk was a technological colossus with an Empire and a global trade network behind it. Churchill’s begging of Roosevelt for American military hardware through Lend-Lease wasn’t symptomatic of the weakness of the country’s industrial base but ‘an attempt through a division of labour to maximize the exploitation of common resources’. Standing somewhat aloof from his other work, Edgerton’s most popular book, The Shock of the Old (2006), offered a ground-clearing global history of technology, eschewing invention and early adoption to look at ‘technology-in-use’—well-established devices such as the steam engine and the rickshaw accorded as much priority as the computer and the hydrogen bomb. Rise and Fall gathers together and systematizes much of this previous work. Yet there are important new additions to the story Edgerton tells. His primary goal is to account for the rise of a ‘national-developmental’ British state shortly after the Second World War. This structure was then dismantled, its death throes coming in the miners’ strike against Thatcher. The narrative isn’t organized around any of the conventional turning-points: 1914, 1945, 1979. Instead, Rise and Fall divides Britain’s twentieth century down the middle, at 1950, the last full year of the post-war Labour government. Thematically organized, each of the opening nine chapters roams between Edwardian England and the Attlee years, surveying the structures of parliamentary and imperial rule, the development of social welfare, patterns of international trade, the military-industrial complex, currents of intellectual life, and ruling- and working-class culture. They stress the exceptional character of the fin-de-siècle uk in all instances where the comparison is to national advantage. Britain was remarkable for its openness to trade, a ‘place of plenty’ in a world of general scarcity. Mountains of goods could enter the country without tariff or duty, trade with an unprecedentedly populous Empire forming merely a part of a larger commercial nexus. The country had a ‘rich, confident and distinct’ ruling elite, including not a few productive capitalists and technically educated public servants, as well as the world’s largest proletarian society. Coal exports made it the ‘Saudi Arabia of 1900’. The manufacturing sector had plenty of forward momentum, the scale of research-and-development broadly equivalent to Germany, if not the us. Innovators were somewhat thin on the ground, but not entirely negligible. The picture that Edgerton subsequently gives of Britain at mid-century is of an unfamiliar place. Contrary to popular understanding, post-war Britain remained a warfare, not a welfare, state. Rise and Fall pushes back against the depiction, which it associates with A. J. P. Taylor, of 1939–45 as a ‘People’s War’ in which Labour’s management of the home front pushed the country leftwards, allowing for the creation of a welfare state under Attlee. Far from witnessing ‘the takeover of the state and nation by a mobilized people’, the war economy was run by the likes of newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook and department-store executive Lord Woolton. Labour’s earliest years had been marked by a decidedly liberal global-economic outlook. Down to the early 1930s, it could proclaim that it had ‘no confidence in any attempt to bolster a bankrupt capitalism by a system of tariffs’. Yet in 1945, the incoming Attlee government accepted protectionism as well as conscription. This had nothing to do with any sort of broad political consensus. ‘Butskellism’ was vastly overstated, with the Conservatives more market-oriented than Labour, whose focus was on state planning. But in strategic-technical fields, ‘parliamentary politics was not relevant—a deeper state and administrative culture was in control’. The largest increase in state expenditure between the 1930s and early 1950s was not on social services or the creation of a National Health Service but on the armed forces, including the continuation of national service. Edgerton traces the strengthening imprint of a national-economic unit resulting from the sell-off or destruction of two-fifths of British business assets held abroad; Labour’s nationalization of major industries, placing the state in charge of half of domestic investment; and the erection of tariffs and other controls which reduced the country’s trade-to-gdp ratio. Truman’s abrupt termination of Lend-Lease in 1945 left the country economically isolated. The export drive mounted by Stafford Cripps, Attlee’s appointee to the Board of Trade, encouraged ‘a more national and technocratic conception of the economy’. However, the British nation was not just an economic space, but a distinct political-cultural formation emerging out of the broken shell of an imperial past. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the imperial slate was wiped more or less clean. Post-war counterinsurgency operations elsewhere were trifles by the standards of the American onslaught in Vietnam; Indian Partition isn’t even worth mentioning. Ukania belonged to the Empire as much as running it, and decolonization therefore left behind a successor state, ‘one of the new nations’. Rise and Fall contrasts the 1951 Festival of Britain—the Dome of Discovery, a vast inverted saucer of aluminium filled with examples of Britain’s technical might, squatted beside the Skylon, a gigantic shard of steel appearing to float above the South Bank—with the imperial spectacle staged in Hyde Park a century earlier. The Victorian Great Exhibition had spawned a series of smaller ‘Empire shows’ through to the late 1930s. By 1951, however, much had changed in the official presentation of Britain. Not only had the Empire been downgraded, but taking centre stage for the first time was the nation: still dynamic, but now looking inwards upon itself rather than out towards its dominions overseas. The second half of Rise and Fall is the story of this British nation reaching its peak and then disintegrating. The governments of the 1950s and 60s presided over the most manufacturing-intensive nation after West Germany, and a society becoming ever more affluent. Wilson’s first conference speech as Labour leader, in which he famously recast British social democracy in the ‘white heat’ of the scientific revolution, was less a rage of despair at the country’s business class (in his words, ‘Gentlemen in a world of Players’) than a ‘celebration of the machine, of science’, reflecting a fairly widespread commitment to ‘a technocratic vision of the country’. If confidence and investment ultimately lapsed in the 1970s, it was because the ‘reckless futurism’ of preceding years hadn’t yielded the hoped-for economic gains. The Concorde project is read as a damning indictment of misplaced techno-chauvinism; Britain during the post-war boom was at times too modern by half. For Edgerton, the increasing cross-border flow of goods and capital facilitated by entry into the eec in 1973, and Thatcher’s financial-liberalization measures a decade later, ultimately washed the British nation away. Whereas uk Ltd had a real existence, uk plc does not. It was the leftovers of the national economy that enabled the Thatcherite counterrevolution. State-owned industries were shuttered or sold off, British Telecom going in 1984 and British Gas in 1986, with the welfare state sustaining otherwise devastated industrial communities. The Conservatives didn’t revive British capitalism but brought international capital to Britain, while globalized supply chains flooded the high street with imported consumer durables. But Edgerton is dubious of descriptions of the Thatcher order as neoliberal. As he says, ‘there was little original or new, or liberal, about it’. The defeat of the miners in 1985 marked the end of British economic nationalism. The num had demanded that British power stations burn British coal; Whitehall resorted to large-scale coal imports instead. ‘For all the complaints about social-democratic state intervention, there had never been state intervention this strong until Thatcher.’ Edgerton is devastating in his contempt for her New Labour progeny, who claimed to make ‘hard choices’ but opted instead ‘just to follow the previous government’. He notes in passing how Blair and Brown’s fancies of a post-industrial ‘global Britain’ lapped into Eurosceptic currents. During Blair’s first term in office, the closing state festival of the century occurred downriver in north Greenwich. The Millennium Dome—a cupola with twelve Skylon-esque spikes sticking out, in a postmodern amalgam of 1951—was ‘perfectly emblematic of the new economy’, Rise and Fall concludes, seeming to ‘look to the future whilst plagiarizing the past’. All of this adds up to a richly narrated analysis, from a historian with a singular vision and an original cast of mind. Rise and Fall is not only impressive in its depth, but also in its scope. Although Edgerton is predominantly a historian of technology, his narrative fluently and perceptively ranges across both cultural and political developments. His trademark iconoclasm offers bracing correctives to many of the nostalgic myths told across the political spectrum. To take stock of Edgerton’s account, it is instructive to analyse the object of criticism. He uses the term ‘declinism’ to locate a once-influential strand of British historiography, flourishing both on the left and the right, preoccupied with ‘the explanation of relative decline, by what is taken to be national failings’—typically located in the belief system of a ruling stratum centred on the landed gentry, incapable of developing a modern economy. This, for Edgerton, is an ‘inverse Whiggism’, which, rather than telling of a nation pushed forward by the inexorable tide of progress, depicts one whose elite culture doomed it to failure. The conservative military historian Correlli Barnett’s monumental Pride and Fall sequence comes in for the heaviest criticism. The first volume, The Collapse of British Power (1972), contended that the seeds of Britain’s decline were planted in the 1930s as a result of imperial overstretch and strategic miscalculation. The uk was already, against the self-perception of the nation, a second-rate power. The Audit of War (1986) demonstrated how the weaknesses of the economy—inept industrial management, intransigent trade unions, over-reliance on imported technology, the cult of the ‘practical man’ over the qualified expert, a misperception of the Empire as a source of strength rather than the drain on resources that it really was—became glaring during 1939–45. The War was won in the East, by the Soviet Union, not on the beaches of Normandy. Barnett brought another deficiency of the official culture into sharp relief in Lost Victory (1995), as do-gooding ‘New Jerusalemers’ in the Attlee administration frittered away scare supplies by putting ‘parlours before plant’. Finally, The Verdict of Peace (2001), running from Korean War rearmament to the Suez debacle, charted ‘the gulf between British pretensions and British resources’ at its widest, as continued world-power deliria ran up against Cold War subordination to the us. The country had become ‘a satellite posturing as an equal’. Closely argued from the state archives, Barnett’s writings stand apart from the broader historical-cultural analyses that Edgerton also folds into the declinist camp. Martin Weiner’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) identified a cultural shift in the late-Victorian era as the rentier aristocracy reshaped the industrial bourgeoisie in its own image. The forward momentum of the economy was checked by a ‘pattern of industrial behaviour suspicious of change, reluctant to innovate, energetic only in maintaining the status quo’. Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins’s British Imperialism (1993) also noted the hostility toward provincial industry that the landed aristocracy transmitted to the gentlemanly elite at large—an argument anticipated in these pages by Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson, who took the economic turmoil of the Macmillan and Wilson years as a starting point to study the peculiar malaise of Britain’s ‘archaic society’ over the longue durée, noting the exceptional continuity of a ruling bloc of aristocrats and City financiers. These bodies of work have provided foils for Edgerton time and again, but the distinctive content of each tends to be glossed over in his polemics. Declinism, he claims, was ‘the last refuge of great-power delusions’—‘fix those national failings, the implication went, and the United Kingdom would once again be a top dog’. Rise and Fall doesn’t dispute that other capitalist economies grew faster than Britain. However, the process at work was convergence, not national collapse. The post-war decades saw the creation of not just a British developmental state, but of others elsewhere: perhaps the most celebrated example, Japan’s powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Relative decline ought to have been an ‘expected and welcome’ sign that ‘everyone was getting richer, and the poor faster than the richer’. For Edgerton, the notion that Britain’s own economic performance was held back by an anti-technocratic elite is patently absurd. There were plenty of technicians, professionals and academics in the state apparatus—‘we find them everywhere’—even if they complained about lacking power and status. True, the official state historian on the British war effort, Margaret Gowing, found the country’s technological layer to be ‘extremely thin’, but her account was just as ‘distorted’ as everyone else’s. In sum, ‘declinism took to explaining what never happened with explanations which didn’t work.’ How convincing is this? Call it decline or call it something else, a change comes over Britain’s circumstances in the middle decades of the twentieth century: it has to promise India independence to prevent it siding with the Japanese; it becomes massively dependent on the us; it loses its dominant share of the world market. Edgerton relies on a distinction between absolute and relative decline, but in a capitalist inter-state system, falling behind spells failure. Corelli Barnett, for instance, said in a 1995 interview with Richard English and Michael Kenny that he was ‘more interested in competitiveness than decline’. Edgerton’s mortification at the industrial disintegration and privatizations of the 1980s, of which he writes pungently in Rise and Fall, has been displaced into a frenzied attack on those who suggest that the rot was already apparent during the post-war ‘golden age’, just as Middlemas mounted a defence of Bevanite tripartite consultation at the very moment it was being torn apart by Thatcher. Rise and Fall offers some necessary correctives to misty-eyed accounts of the ‘spirit of ‘45’ and the welfare state established under Attlee. But a paean to a thrusting, self-reliant British nation creates new myths, tenable only when one ignores the state’s continuing imperial reflexes, not least those wrapped up with the pound sterling; the stirrings of financialization in London and of separatist nationalism on the Celtic fringe; and loss of sovereignty to Washington. It was the 1947 convertibility crisis, foisted on a cash-strapped Attlee government at American insistence, which accelerated Cripps’s export drive. Militarily, Edgerton concedes, the moment of the British nation passed with the demise of its independent nuclear deterrent in the late 1950s. Taken comparatively, the data hardly bears Edgerton’s conclusions out. Figures from the World Bank on the annual gdp growth of Britain, France and (West) Germany show Britain lagging behind the others until 1983, where it races ahead with growth of 4.2 per cent, against 1.2 and 1.6 per cent for France and Germany respectively, a position it maintained into the 2000s, the main factor being the deregulation of Britain’s international-facing financial sector. Here lies the most telling absence in Rise and Fall: Edgerton relegates the role of the City of London in the national economy virtually to a footnote. In a book of over 600 pages, the City’s resurgence in the 1980s is treated in just two. The Eurodollar market of the 1960s and 70s barely warrants a mention—even the import of meat from the River Plate and Chicago in the interwar years gets fuller treatment. Also missing from Edgerton’s account are the ‘stop-go’ balance-of-payments crises of the post-war decades, which saw one government after another place the burden of adjustment on domestic industrial growth. Both governing parties saw the defence of sterling as the fundamental priority, Wilson’s Labour being no exception, despite standing for Edgerton as a symbol of British national-productivism. As Tom Nairn pointed out in nlr in 1965, ‘the rôle of world banker has proved the toughest, most resistant sector of imperialism, still important enough to govern the evolution of British society.’ Edgerton noted in the 2013 edition of England and the Aeroplane that ‘decline is definitely passé’, citing among other revisionist texts Alan Booth’s The British Economy in the Twentieth Century (2001) and George Bernstein’s The Myth of Decline (2004). But the financial crisis of 2008 and implosion of British politics following the 2016 Brexit vote, has perhaps seen the beginnings of another turn, heralded by Pat Thane’s Divided Kingdom (2018). Edgerton himself has joined the naysayers, arguing in a Guardian op-ed last year: ‘Where once there was a ludicrous declinism seriously underestimating British power, now a daft revivalism seems to be at the core of buccaneering Brexiter thinking.’ Leave voters have been sold a pup. ‘There is no British national inventive effort, nor British national industry, nor even a national arms industry’, and ‘the explaining of realities will have to begin’. He might have added that industrial decline has gone further than convergence alone can explain. By the eve of the eu referendum, uk manufacturing output per head had fallen to 26th in the world, and manufacturing as a proportion of national output to 118th, a calamitous performance papered over by the parallel upsurge of the City. Britain in the twenty-first century is the most economically divided country in western Europe. A bloated and financialized South East offers a stark contrast to the deindustrialized rustbelt of the Midlands and North of England. The result of all this is not a stagnant economy, but an increasingly regionalized one. Decline there was post-Thatcher, but not in the City. The Leave vote and Corbyn’s rise to the leadership of the Labour party were both powered by deep popular discontent with these inequalities. Meanwhile, Scottish nationalism is firmly back on the agenda. In these circumstances, the idea of a cohesive ‘British nation’ is something of a chimera. The question of the real relations to which it referred, squeezed between a continued commitment to British imperialism and the weight of its American counterpart, remains unanswered.