The Rise and Fall of the British Nation
A Twentieth-Century History
David Edgerton
Having read it
★★★★☆
A decent book and while I didn’t quite read every word of it, it was informative and insightful about Britain in the twentieth-century.
The term warfare state was particularly direct and useful in what it helped frame and describe, certainly when other sections made clear where the welfare state fitted in to the grand, or not, plans of state.
It’s well worth the effort and its perspectives on certain attitudes and events gets you productively questioning just what is being told to us by the system(s)!
A good passage
In 1951 a great national exhibition was opened, called ‘The Festival of Britain’, labelled a ‘Tonic for the Nation’. In the past exhibitions of a comparable scale and scope had been imperial and not national. 1938 saw a vast Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. In 1924–5 there was a British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, which included a new Empire Stadium. This stadium was known as such at least into the 1960s, though it is now remembered as the old Wembley Stadium.38 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.
A second good passage
[...] it is important to note that most plans fail, most schemes for the future are not realised. To study futures we need to focus on the unfilmed treatments, the unfinished novels, the unexploited patent, policies not adopted; in short we need to open up an archive of failure.1
A third good passage
The United Kingdom was the first power to put the nuclear deterrent at the heart of its strategy, to abolish conscription and to run down the bloated military-industrial complex. It was returning to liberal militarism, to professional capital-intensive forces in order to reduce expenditure to more manageable levels. It was a matter of back to the future.