The Rise and Fall of the British Nation
Metadata
- Author: David Edgerton
- ASIN: B078SKFJMK
- ISBN: 1846147751
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B078SKFJMK
- Kindle link
Highlights
In making the United Kingdom’s national past different, at times unsettlingly so, I hope to render it less suitable for the political purposes it currently serves. — location: 759
highlighting the rise and fall of a very distinct object. — location: 768
OOO
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. — location: 785
This was the time (and not the nineteenth century) when the United Kingdom was at its most industrial. — location: 788
Ideologically it generated national rather than imperial histories, a nationalist critique of cosmopolitan capitalism and a powerfully nationalist declinism. — location: 790
It allows us to rethink the politics of the Labour Party, which I see as much more national productionist than welfarist after 1945. — location: 792
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. — location: 795
British nation as a middle term
The central concern of this book, 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. — location: 811
Only from 1945 did the United Kingdom conform to the European pattern of conscription in peacetime. — location: 835
British imperial power flowed out of the barrel of a British gun, not the Anglican Bible or textbooks of liberal political economy. — location: 841
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. — location: 844
Free traders pointed out repeatedly that most of the United Kingdom’s trade was with countries outside the empire, not least in Europe. Most imports of meat, wheat, sugar, fruit, came from ‘foreign countries’ rather than ‘British countries’. For most raw materials, the empire was not very important at all – cotton came largely from the southern USA, while bulky imports, such as iron ore and timber, came mainly from Europe and its immediate environs. — location: 1061
When the wartime coalition went to the polls in 1918, it noted that ‘One of the lessons which has been most clearly taught us by the war is the danger to the nation of being dependent upon other countries for vital supplies on which the life of the nation may depend. — location: 1087
‘Labour is firm against tariffs and for Free Trade,’ they said, and looked to new international labour legislation to make ‘sweating impossible’. — location: 1091
The Labour Party too shifted its position in favour of protection, slowly and silently. Thus it was that by the late 1940s both major parties, which now dominated politics, were in practice protectionist, a change of great significance, but usually invisible precisely because it ceased to be a matter of contention. — location: 1184
However, the unwillingness of British imperial territories to open their own markets to national British production meant that empire free trade remained a pipe dream. — location: 1190
For the policy of the protectionists, in all parts of the British empire, was nation first, empire second, foreigners third. — location: 1191
In the 1940s and 1950s British trade was more imperial than it had ever been. — location: 1213
Thirdly it helps underscore the point that imperialism was in a crucial respect not an orthodoxy but a challenge to it. — location: 1225
They found that race and nation trumped empire. — location: 1326
‘alone’ was regularly used in histories to describe ‘Britain’ in 1940–41. The national ‘alone’ was not a myth of 1940, but a post-war creation, part of a general process of nationalizing the history of the war. Churchill deployed the ‘island nation’ rhetoric in 1945 not in 1940. — location: 1338
But just as for the British there could never be any such thing as British imperialism (as opposed to the British empire), so there could be no such notion as British nationalism (as opposed to the nation). Nationalism was in British understanding an ideology which threatened the empire, and indeed the nation, not something a British nation could itself have. — location: 1391
V lazy and confusing
Nationalism was, in the official British liberal view, what brought disaster to Europe twice over. Prussians and Nazis were nationalists; to be British was to be anti-nationalist. It was a matter of pride that the British did not go in for the displays of nationalism or imperialism newer, vulgar, nations needed. British stamps and coins had the figure of the sovereign but needed no further identification. British schoolchildren did not salute a flag, or recite patriotic poems. — location: 1405
It was not until 1914, after the powers of the House of Lords had been trimmed, and when the Liberal Party was dependent on the support of the Nationalists in the House of Commons, that the Home Rule Act was passed. The leader of the Conservative Party and senior army officers openly stated they would not accept the verdict of the imperial parliament. This was the other great issue of Edwardian politics – the constitution – meaning the place of Ireland in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords in parliament and the established churches. This was, according to the brilliant young journalist George Dangerfield (writing in the 1930s), one of the three extra-parliamentary rebellions which destroyed British liberalism. This ruling-class rebellion is much less remembered than those by workers and women. — location: 1412
‘Republicanism’, like nationalism, thus became a concept which was for many anti-British. — location: 1425
The politics of free trade, empire, protection, the constitution, religion were the politics of elites, elites which controlled state and society. — location: 1458
Though the numbers differ, it seems clear that the absolute number of working-class Labour MPs was higher after 1945 than the 1922–35 average, at about the level of the temporary 1929 peak, a period of fewer Labour MPs, but a higher proportion of workers among them.49 The difference now was that they were in a majority governing party, and installed for the long term. These working-class members of parliament, as well as the teachers and other middle-class occupations, were not part of elite or state culture. Most Labour MPs were not familiar, through quotidian contact, with power or the secrets of the state, its experts, its ways and its means. Political culture and state culture were now separate spheres. — location: 1615
After 1945 there was a class-aligned politics which was national in new ways. The direction of the nation, the definition of the national interest were the object of politics, and there was a national economy, and a national society, to direct. — location: 1634
Liberals took pride in the Royal Navy as an institution which kept the seas open not just for British vessels, but for all the shipping of the world. — location: 1675
The structure and nature of British armed force was notable in that it was made up of professionals and focused on the navy. In this the United Kingdom was quite distinct from the major European powers, who all conscripted young men to varying degrees for peacetime military training and duties, turning peasants into citizens. For British liberals, such a notion was abhorrent – military service was not seen as a civic duty but an unjust impost on youth, and a danger to freedom. In any case, the United Kingdom did not have the vast reserves of young agricultural labourers conscript armies wanted. — location: 1676
The British warfare state was able to unleash great violence on the world. — location: 1690
Concern about the physique of recruits led to government support for maternity services, and for children, including medical inspections and school meals. Maternalism and militarism marched together. — location: 1716
Yet the British empire, not the German Reich, was allied to the world’s most despotic, backward and anti-Semitic power – Russia – against the most philo-Semitic, scientific and well-educated – Germany. The Reich, not the empire, had universal male suffrage; the Reich, not the empire, had the greatest socialist and anti-militarist party in the world. The Belgians had at least as bad a reputation as the Germans for colonial atrocities. — location: 1761
a scourge of the aristocracy and its powers, though a man close to plutocrats. — location: 1805
It is thisthat alloaws These sorts to see themselves as anti estabishment
From the early 1930s, with the hoped-for global economic order collapsing into depression and economic nationalism, — location: 1905
be disastrous, even if it led to victory in war. The winners could be communism, and the Americans, and the losers could be the British empire and the British elite. — location: 1934
The key to the confidence of British economists was that they understood that the capacity to produce weapons was not simply a product of the absolute size of belligerent economies. While this was important, a critical factor was the wealth of the population – the higher the income per head the greater the proportion of the economy which could be turned over to arms production after meeting the basic needs of the people. — location: 1971
The war in the East decisively weakened the British empire in many ways – 1942 should indeed be more widely recognized as a key year in the dissolution of the empire. — location: 2012
The combined bomber offensive mounted year by year such that, by 1945, the Allies had the capacity to destroy whole cities at will. The US bomber force in the United Kingdom was itself about as large as Bomber Command and both depended on US resources. The aviation spirit came largely from the USA or via the USA. Many of the engines on British bombers, and the bombsights, were made to British designs in the USA. Here was the apotheosis of British global and capital-intensive warfare. — location: 2099
From the 1960s the British war effort came to be described, though this description only became at all common in the 1980s, as a ‘people’s war’. — location: 2102
was suggested that in the United Kingdom equality of sacrifice engendered a new consensus, which drove the essential reformist politics of the war. — location: 2106
The essential point is this: the war saw the expansion of a warfare state with its distinctive needs and procedures, rather than the take-over of the state and nation by a mobilized people. — location: 2119
While Lloyd George, as he put it, led the empire, Churchill emerged as the leader of a nation, and one which was not a superpower. Lloyd George won his war; of Churchill it was to be said that he was ‘the saviour of his country’. — location: 2150
— location: 2151
Founding fatheralmost
The wartime internationalist spirit of combination disappeared with victory. Lend-Lease was suddenly ended after August 1945. That meant that the United Kingdom would have to start buying imports from the USA again, before it had the chance to build up its export trade. The British view of matters was very different to that of the USA or its allies. They insisted they were first into the war and ought to be recompensed for this. The British wanted the Americans to pay for British orders and investments in arms in the USA before 1942, when Lend-Lease kicked in. They also wanted the supplies and services rendered in return for deferred payment (in effect loans), especially in India and Egypt, to be turned in part into gifts. But neither the Americans nor those territories which had in effect lent the United Kingdom vast sums were having this. The British were forced to take out a loan from the USA, of around £1 billion, in order to continue to import necessities which could only come from the USA, and which they could not pay for because of the wartime mobilization, which had prioritized British arms production over exports. — location: 2155
The post-war Labour government not only maintained but developed the warfare state, giving it support unprecedented in peacetime. Comparing public expenditure of the late 1940s with that of the 1930s, the great difference was not in the rise of welfare spending, but the much greater rise in warfare spending. — location: 2178
The fruit of the land profited not those who worked it, but those who owned it, and owned it not by virtue of their own industry, but through inheritance. — location: 2235
Russia. In terms of the productivity of labour the story was different – here the farmers and colliers of the New World were way ahead. — location: 2242
The majority of coal was burned raw, causing fogs to the extent that wash days were rainier. — location: 2266
Like petroleum products supplies, British food was not national, nor imperial. — location: 2387
The Great Depression meant there was very cheap wheat on the world market, a boon for most of the British people, but not for British or foreign farmers. Support for domestic arable production would return in the 1930s. Nationalists were especially keen to make use of the full productive potential of British land. Many published on the special virtues of the British earth. — location: 2429
In the case of food the post-Second World War years saw a drive to increase domestic production, one which would be sustained for decades. — location: 2601
History of the Countryside : not wealth as such but nationalisation
It is the most complete critique of capitalism in wartime British film. — location: 2684
Aristocratic landowners have borne the brunt of the attention and criticism. Even socialist critics had very great difficulties in establishing the ownership of capital, as opposed to land, and also of discerning the links between ownership of capital other than land and political power, except abstractly. Even in critical literature the British capitalist, rentier apart, has been invisible. — location: 2742
But Lloyd George simply went too far after the war, selling too many peerages and far too many baronetcies, making Cardiff, for example, the City of Dreadful Knights. — location: 2868
The ennoblement of Lord Vestey was particularly scandalous, offending the king because Vestey avoided UK tax. — location: 2869
The focus was now much more national, technical and administrative than on the celebration of capitalist or financial values. Perhaps partly for this reason, the previous importance of businessmen in high politics has tended to be ignored by historians. — location: 2953
Most of the Great War debt was bought at high interest rates at times of rising prices. £2 billion of the 1917 war loan bought at 5 per cent cost the taxpayer £100 million per annum. The total debt of over £7 billion, cost nearly £300 million per annum to service. More than 8 per cent of GDP was spent on debt interest in the 1920s, some 40 per cent of the state budget, and three times the defence budget. The British taxpayer therefore owed the British rentier a living. — location: 2999
BP was nationalized by the Iranian government in 1951 (to outrage from the British Labour government). — location: 3113
In the 1930s this often meant doing deals with countries so that British profits would continue to flow home, which meant granting access to the British market so that they could acquire the sterling to pay their debts. — location: 3121
In other words, under gentlemanly capitalist rule the UK was in the business of collecting debts rather than maximizing domestic production, or exports. — location: 3125
This thesis, while partly true, in the end gives a distorted account of British capitalism, even that of British rentiers and finance. While overseas investment (including in the rest of the empire, and in overseas government and municipal stocks) was large before 1914, after 1914 the UK national debt was far larger than overseas investments of all kinds. The politics of rentiers’ income was the politics of the valuation of the national debt, not that of empire. — location: 3127
The basic opposition between national-industrial and global-commercial is thus misleading, and the inference that the national-industrial one was the better one is misleading too. — location: 3144