How the UK Invented the Nation State but is Bad at Being One; or, a review of David Edgerton’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Nation’

In much writing about the history of the United Kingdom’s past century and a half, the question of decline, either as a theme or object of enquiry, has been prominent. This is only natural, given the decline in the country’s relative economic position during that period and it is far from something unique to the British: the entirety of the French academy and public life more or less exists to debate the nature and timing of the wounding and recovery of French national dignity. Tied to this is an exceptionalism (that, again, is not unique to the United Kingdom) which provides an explanatory framework for understanding the British nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like all exceptionalisms, of course, the British one can obscure as much as it illuminates.

One of the things about British exceptionalism, which makes it close to unique, is the way that it often appears as a negative framing: put simply, the belief is that Britain (be that British business, the British economy or what have you) has been uniquely bad at things for the past however-many years, taken over in finance, industry, living standards and geopolitical influence by the Americans, the Germans, the Australians, the Chinese or whoever else.

This thesis became particularly popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was popularly held that British decline had reached its apogee. Two of the most influential purveyors were Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett, especially their respective books ‘English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit’ (1981) and ‘The Audit of War’ (1986). Both authors locate the true ‘Golden Age’ of British power as belonging in the 18th century, perhaps some time in the half century before the American Revolution. The hard-headed, commercially-minded leadership of the 18th century then gave way, partly as a result of a profound religious reformation occasioned by the American and French Revolutions, to a kind of nostalgic society of gentility that privileged the arts over education. This then created a kind of self-inflicted economic decline as business leaders, now fundamentally anti-commercial, failed to invest in the necessary research and development of the industrial sector. Barnett, in particular, broadened out his story to argue that Labour’s post war welfare state diverted energies away from the required overhaul of manufacturing capacity.

Described like that, it’s not hard to see how this narrative found favour with the government of Margaret Thatcher, who felt herself under siege in government by public school-educated classicist civil servants and Tory ‘Wets.’ Certainly these narratives did have the virtue of flattering the people at the top of the government (many of them, like Thatcher, petit bourgeois science graduates) while also providing a background for the radical governing program they were undertaking. But it is important to say that they were also, by a certain way of looking at it, making a factually true point.

In 1860, the United Kingdom had the largest GDP of any nation in the world but, in 1916, the United States had a larger GDP than the entire British Empire put together. (In both cases this uses figures put together by subsequent economic historians.) Now, the United Kingdom is either the 5th or the 9th largest economy (depending on what list you read and whether you’re looking at nominal or PPP GDP). That is a fairly obvious sign of decline.

But this isn’t necessarily a sign of absolute decline. Certainly there has been relative decline but that’s got nothing to do with British policy-makers or businessmen, unless you are of the opinion that Britain should have taken steps to forcibly prevent the industrialisation of European and Asian countries, a policy that, even if it were practically feasible, would have serious moral problems with it. The fact is that the United States has a substantially higher population than the United Kingdom and so, all things being equal, will have a higher GDP.

The same is true of China, which now has a far higher geopolitical footprint than the UK despite having living standards nearly 20% lower than Britain. The only way to have done this would have been to pursue a policy of radically expanding the British population. Vox founder Matt Yglesias has a recent book out arguing that the United States should take steps to expand its population to 1 billion people (perhaps I’ll review it in a year) but, while that might be feasible for them, that seems an altogether more difficult task to undertake in the UK. The fact is that the UK could have the most efficient workforce and the most cutting edge industrial and management practices and still no longer be the largest economy in the world. And if you want proof of this proposition I suggest you look at the relative economic rankings of countries like South Korea and Germany.

So what is the story of the British economy and nation in the 20th century? In his recent book, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, the historian David Edgerton, never shy of a provocation, effectively asserts that, in 1900, there wasn’t really one. What there was instead was a hub for a vast network of international trade. And, importantly, this wasn’t simply a matter of Britain being an imperial metropole: the majority of food imports came from Europe and Argentina became one of the richest countries in the world off the back of beef exports to the British market. Most of Britain’s trade was outside the Empire.

Central to this settlement was a belief in free trade but this never quite went unchallenged. From the end of the 19th century onwards, the Conservatives began a drift towards imperial preference that would finally be formalised in 1932 under the pressure of the Great Depression. Labour, in this telling, emerges as a new pro-free trade party than took up the mantle of the Liberals, who had been fatally undermined by the failure of Irish Home Rule.

This distinctive approach to nation-building is reflected in how Britain waged war, reliant on a technologically advanced navy and eschewing the vast conscript armies favoured by the other European powers. This was changed by the two World Wars, firstly by normalising conscription and secondly by simply shattering the viability of an imperial-global economy.

In the third quarter of the 20th century Britain decisively turned inwards economically, radically altering the structure of the economy. Partly this built on the imperial preference of the previous decade but it was also something very new. Edgerton, again enjoying the provocation, argues that the Britain which emerged in the postwar years was as meaningfully a post-colonial state as any of the other countries that emerged in the rest of the world during this period.

With imperial preference obviously being less viable, the postwar British governments organised the country along explicitly national lines. The country became more industrial (and successfully industrial) than ever before. Car production, for example, increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s, peaking in 1972. At the same time, a conscript army was maintained in peacetime alongside expanded military expenditures. Britain, finally, had become a normal European nation state.

A fall in British manufacturing has undoubtedly occurred but this came from the 1970s onwards, when the country suffered under the dual effects of the 1970s energy crisis and the opening up of the economy to the European Economic Community. Margaret Thatcher’s response to this was to embark on her transformation of the economy. While she is very widely regarded as a radical, the scale of this undertaking is, Edgerton argues, poorly understood.

Superficially, the Thatcherite revolution saw a return to Britain as a hub for global trade. But there is a crucial difference. In 1900, international British capital owned a whole bunch of stuff around the world, operating out of a hub in London. Now, London was just a place where money was traded. Edgerton’s chapters on the Thatcher and New Labour periods are unsparing and tips his political hand but this is not really a problem. He is rightly scathing about the damage done by Thatcherism and the false narratives of decline that were created to justify its policies. Former British national champions like General Electric, Imperial Chemical Industries and Rover were not brought down by a lack of innovation in the postwar years but by spivvy Thatcherite MBAs who only knew business insofar as they could swing their dicks making acquisitions and sucking value out of their companies for the short-term betterment of themselves and shareholders.

Edgerton’s book will provide both warm and cold comfort for its readers of all political persuasions. If you’re a Brexiteer and searching for a history of the small, national country of the 1950s, you will find that there’s little left to preserve. This government might talk the talk of Britain leading the way in modern tech companies but one suspects that them walking the walk might look a lot like them shovelling millions of pounds of government cash to their cronies. If you’re a committed Remainer then the story of Britain’s successive reinventions of the previous century does suggest that assertions that leaving the EU will inevitably be a calamity may be wide of the mark.

This is a challenging history of Britain that doesn’t give you an easy national story to get hold of but it is all the more interesting and urgent for all that.