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The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History Paperback – 4 April 2019
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'Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain ... You will not find a better informed history' David Goodhart, Evening Standard
'A striking new perspective on our past' Piers Brendon, Literary Review
From the acclaimed author of Britain's War Machine and The Shock of the Old, a bold reassessment of Britain's twentieth century.
It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union in this way.
David Edgerton's major new history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal an unfamiliar place, subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply because of the world wars and global economic transformations, but in its very nature. Until the 1940s the United Kingdom was, Edgerton argues, an exceptional place: liberal, capitalist and anti-nationalist, at the heart of a European and global web of trade and influence. Then, as its global position collapsed, it became, for the first time and only briefly, a real, successful nation, with shared goals, horizons and industry, before reinventing itself again in the 1970s as part of the European Union and as the host for international capital, no longer capable of being a nation.
Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives us a grown-up, unsentimental history which takes business and warfare seriously, and which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date4 April 2019
- Dimensions12.9 x 3.1 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-100141975970
- ISBN-13978-0141975979
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Review
A fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain
-- Christopher de Bellaigue ― GuardianAn extraordinary revisionist study of modern Britain ... Edgerton's aim here is nothing short of a radical repositioning of our sense of ourselves as a nation. It's a startling book, and an unexpected thesis ... I'll be reading [it] over and over, and for years to come.' -- Brian Morton ― The Herald
Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain in the 20th century ... You will not find a better informed history of this country in the last century. -- David Goodhart ― Evening Standard
Stimulating and bracing ... He demonstrates that the story the British tell about themselves - and how it is taught in schools and discussed in the public sphere - is bogus. -- Iain Martin ― The Times
Unsentimental and rigorous rewriting of British history. ... It looks beyond the froth of political debate, takes business seriously and analyses government as much from Whitehall and administration as Westminster and politics. -- A. W. Purdue ― Times Higher Education
Beautifully written and can be read with pleasure by the general reader as well as the trained historian -- Vernon Bogdanor ― Daily Telegraph
Original, opinionated, scholarly, complex and immensely stimulating ... this ambitious and provocative book achieves something remarkable. It provides a striking new perspective on our past, one that future historians may not accept but will be unable to ignore. -- Piers Brendon ― Literary Review
A sweepingly, and ambitiously, revisionist account of 20th century British history ... full of striking lines ... and a very important challenge to much of the existing historiography.
-- Duncan Weldon ― Progressive ReviewTimely jolt to a deluded 'Bullshit Britain'. David Edgerton fillets national delusion and historical amnesia ... of a country that knows so little of its own history.
-- Chris Kissane ― Irish TimesEdgerton is an extraordinary historian ... Written with bracing élan, Rise and Fall generates insights at every turn. Edgerton set out to rattle "the cage of clichés which imprison our historical and political imaginations", and succeeds magnificently. -- Nick Pearce ― OpenDemocracy
... refreshing and immensely stimulating, and should be compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand the reality of twentieth-century Britain. Lewis Namier, another historian known for his combative brand of scholarship, viewed iconoclasm as the judge of a great historian, that having produced an account of a period 'others should not be able to practise within its sphere in the terms of the preceding era'. Edgerton has certainly achieved this. -- Oliver Hadingham ― History
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin (4 April 2019)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0141975970
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141975979
- Dimensions : 12.9 x 3.1 x 19.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 64,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 551 in Business & Economic History
- 8,036 in History (Books)
- 21,744 in Society, Politics & Philosophy
- Customer reviews:
About the author

David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. He is the author of a sequence of ground-breaking books on twentieth-century Britain: England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (1991), republished as England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (Penguin 2013); Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline', 1870-1970 (1996), Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (2005), Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (2011) and The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History (2018). He is also the author of the iconoclastic and brilliant The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2006), which was re-issued in 2019.
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However the book lacks a wider understanding on how Britain came to enter the EEC or how the 'financialisation' of the economy under the Thatcher reforms brought foreign ownership to City banks and manufacturing, gradually undermining any distinctive national economy. That latter issue - the creation of money as debt by private banks is essential to understanding these developments. Nevertheless, this is a welcome and refreshing take on recent history with fascinating anecdotes such as when in 1987, the left wing Labour nationalist MP and ex-miner Dennis Skinner was taunted as a 'grammar school boy' (Tupton Hall, passing the 11 plus a year early) by a group of braying Tory MPs, he politely pointed out that Margaret Thatcher who was sitting with the group, also attended grammar school. Thatcher said nothing.
The author convincingly challenges a number of these myths – the idea of Britain as a nation of amateurs, unwilling to concede authority to scientists, engineers and other specialists in forming policy, especially as compared with supposedly more technically savvy nations like the Germans; the belief that the UK stood alone and unprepared at the beginning of the Second World War; the widely held conviction that the history of modern Britain is one of decline.
I found the account of the welfare state particularly interesting. Edgerton shows that before the war the UK already had an impressive system of healthcare and welfare provision, not funded and managed by the state, but a mixture of municipal, charitable and private provision. The post-war Labour government did not spend any more on healthcare – chiefly because it spent so much on the military, including a secret and expensive nuclear weapons programme. Instead it simply abolished this variety of provision and brought everything under the control of the state. Edgerton might have commented on the irony that one of the main reasons the healthcare systems of many continental European countries are superior to the NHS is that they did not turn them into monolithic state enterprises, but instead managed to combine state funding (usually supplemented by affordable private insurance) with a varied and more flexible and competitive system of provision.
I thought the book had some quite serious weaknesses. If I understand it correctly, the author’s key thesis is that after 1945 a new ‘British nation’ was created – ‘a distinctive economic, political and social unit within the borders of the United Kingdom’. Driven by ‘post-imperial nationalism’ and the need for ‘the internal rebuilding of the nation’, this new Britain was a radical departure from the liberal, imperial and cosmopolitan Britain that (Edgerton argues) existed before 1939. It lasted only until the 1970s, when ‘the many barriers between the British nation and other nations were pulled down…, a process which in part meant a return to the situation existing at the beginning of the century.’
I wonder if this novel thesis is meant to serve a covert purpose, as an oblique rationale for UK membership of the EEC/European Union, conceived as a return to some supposedly natural, internationalist order of political and economic affairs. The period after the war was ‘post-imperial’ only as a matter of degree. When you think about the Malayan emergency (1948-60), the Suez fiasco (1956), and the Mau Mau emergency (1958-64), the boundaries of this time when the new un-imperial British nation was supposed to have flourished begin to dissolve. Perhaps uncomfortably aware of this, Edgerton is forced, improbably, into describing the Suez operation as ‘not an imperial war, but a post-imperial, national war’.
The historical narrative ends on an odd note, with an overheated rant against the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010), and a bilious glance forward to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013. The acknowledgements are dated January 2018, and one of the internet references is dated as having been accessed in February 2018, nineteen months after 17.4 million British people voted to leave the EU. In a book that makes so much of ‘the British nation’, one might have expected, at the very least, a supplementary chapter on the events and issues surrounding this earth-shaking development, which looms distractingly over the latter part of the book like the proverbial elephant in the room.
The author’s studied silence on the matter is consistent with the evasive way that EEC/EU membership is treated throughout – presented as if it were part of the natural order of things, requiring no justification, but simply a situation to be welcomed by all right-thinking persons, whereas ‘euroscepticism’ is absurdly dismissed as part of ‘a new politics of private wealth’. (Edgerton needs to get with the program; after the Referendum, the standard Remainer complaint was that the result had been swung by the votes of ‘the ignorant white working class’.) There is no hint that the very concept of ‘the British nation’ might be compromised by the absorption of the United Kingdom into a supra-national body among whose declared aims is the abolition of the nation-state. In the entire text there is no mention of the European Court of Justice, or of EU law and the extent to which it has come to supersede national law. The issue of sovereignty is raised in relation to the opposition of Tony Benn and others on the left to EEC membership in the early 1970s, but only to be dismissed with the remark (exploiting a common confusion between sovereignty and power) that the USA presented a greater threat in this respect. There follows a long discussion of the Suez crisis and the role of the US in bringing it to an end, and the issue of sovereignty and the EEC is simply forgotten.
The author’s political leanings are very much towards the left, and his pronouncements sometimes have the ring of the campus anarchist: ‘The British warfare state was able to unleash great violence on the world…. In Europe, as in the Empire, it inflicted far more violence on its enemies than it was forced to endure.’ To his credit, however, he doesn’t usually allow his politics to get in the way of his historian’s respect for facts and evidence. The myth of post-war British decline, which he demolishes, is particularly cherished by left-wing enthusiasts for the European Union.
Edgerton was born in Montevideo to British parents, and he tells us he came to the UK in 1970. A more self-aware author might have used this British-but-with-a-difference perspective in creative and insightful ways. But he has some strange ideas about modern British social history. Older readers will be surprised to learn that membership of the European Union brought about ‘a continentalization of British food tastes. With imported Mediterranean foods, from citrus to tomatoes to avocados, aubergines and courgettes, the British diet became varied and interesting.’ Leaving aside the bizarre idea that the EU introduced us to oranges and tomatoes, it was Elizabeth David’s revolutionary series of cookery books, starting in 1950 with A Book of Mediterranean Food, that began the ‘continentalization of British food tastes’. When I got my first job in the mid-1960s, spaghetti bolognese was a staple in our house, with Suleiman’s Pilaff (‘one of the most comforting dishes imaginable’) an occasional treat when there were some lamb leftovers – topped with real yoghurt from the Polish delicatessen. Besides, a parallel and arguably even greater revolution in British eating habits arose from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigration, which is why restaurants run by and for English expats in Normandy advertise Chicken Tikka Masala.
The British have always been more open to the wider world than many other European nations – try booking a flight to Australia through a French travel agent, or buying or exchanging foreign currency in France (better still, forget it). The British were embracing package holidays to Spain and the opportunities afforded by cheap air travel before we joined the EEC. Family camping holidays in Brittany and the Dordogne were not a boon graciously bestowed by the European Commission, but a consequence of increasing wealth and car ownership. Membership of the EEC/EU is more a manifestation than a cause of post-war British cosmopolitanism.
In all, a useful reference book on the period, but with some major blind spots and hobby-horses, and to be treated carefully.
It has opened my eyes and made me rethink events I have lived through and the preceding decades.
The author does not mince his words when he considers his point of view to be important or challenging to those commonly accepted.
Sometimes it felt as though his conclusions were not adequately supported by the partial evidence he quoted, but there is such a vast amount of ground covered that it is inevitable that this should happen. It is incumbent on the reader to use the notes and bibliography in these situations to pursue further research to satisfy himself on the issue.
Top reviews from other countries
Edgerton’s book is meticulously researched and thought-provoking. He challenges the popular narrative of British history that portrays the country as a global superpower that rose to dominance during the Industrial Revolution and declined after World War II.
Edgerton argues that this narrative is flawed as it ignores significant economic and social changes during both periods. He highlights the role of technology, particularly military technologies, which played a crucial role in Britain's rise and decline. The author contends that the British state was always geared towards maintaining a powerful military, and this fueled industrialization, which was overshadowed by the need to maintain control over colonial territories.
Edgerton also questions the idea of the post-World War II decline, pointing out that Britain remained a significant economic power, and its welfare state was held up as a model for the rest of the world. He contends that Britain's decline was exaggerated in the popular imagination, shaping the country's current political landscape.
Although the book is a challenging read at times, it is well worth it. It provides a fresh perspective on British history and challenges the traditional narrative that has been prevalent for decades. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Britain, imperialism, and the global economy.
It is a history written for the free mind,by the free mind, of the free mind.
Edgerton’s book presents a novel thesis and includes enough factual and statistical information to allow the reader to see if it actually makes sense in explaining a good deal of UK history during the twentieth century. The ‘rise and fall’ refers not to the British Empire, or its part-inheritor, the Commonwealth (even of the white-colonial nations), or even the UK as commonly understood. Rather it refers to England, understood as a somewhat racially homogenous, “ethnic nation state” (comparable to, say, Poland, or Spain or any number of modern European nation states – all of which have ethnic minorities, but that consideration has to be set aside in Edgerton’s discussion as a variable that will only muddy his theoretical waters). In Edgerton’s view all three major political streams, embodied in the Tory, Liberal, and Labour parties, made their contribution to a major post-1945 effort (which persisted up through the Thatcher years) to “rebuild the English nation” as a both an economically self-sufficient society and yet one that would have enough strong economic-diplomatic ties abroad (the US, the Commonwealth nations, Europe) to resume its role as a significant player on the world stage. Of course, in this way of looking at things, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland could either be a co-operating entities or dogs in the manger. There is a great deal of emphasis on how the three political streams planned to balance imports and exports (both agricultural and industrial-commercial, including financial services headquartered in London) and English investments abroad and foreign investment within the UK as part of this nation-building program.
A side-argument of the book is that in spite of the influence of social-welfare ideas and their post-1945 expansion and implementation, it was men of wealth (landed, commercial, industrial) and traditional upper-class clout who made all of the important decisions throughout the century, and that many of these decisions were as “progressive” as anything advanced by the Labour Party, which harbored as many “liberal free traders” and “empire salvagers” as their conservative brethren. He emphasizes, based on budgets over the years, that the UK was a “warfare state” as well as a welfare state. In fact, the real originator of programmatic recommendations and policy initiatives appears to have been the government (successive PMs and their cabinets), who, strictly speaking, were more guided by national goals than party goals. Chapters for the first and second halves of the century alternate between specialized topics (party views, intellectual and cultural strains that embody them, actual programs, and the messy reality of actual events (Suez!) that backfired or undermined intentions and goals). Edgerton believes that almost every general statement about English “character” and British politics that came to be the “accepted view” over many decades of the 20th century is wrong (not necessarily meaning that their polar opposites are right – he’s more nuanced than that). In this connection he dismantles the accepted trope of “England standing alone” against fascism and Hitler during 1939-1941 and the self-congratulatory spate of false memory that dominated discussion of the WWII era during the latter half of the century. Atlee’s surprise victory over Churchill in June 1945 is no surprise to Edgerton, who points out Labour’s pro-war stances in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 – they wished to “nationalize the war” as part of nationalizing society.
He ends on the truly depressing note of Tony Blair’s gutting of the country’s infrastructure (continuing Thatcher’s work in this respect) and his lusting after Clinton and Bush’s approval by backing their middle-eastern military interventions (which, I must agree, proved to be disasters founded on ignorance and the strong geopolitical wish-fulfillment ideas of America’s leaders who believe in that will-of-the-wisp, America as “exceptional country” that should be the world’s policeman and enforcer of “democracy”). The self-damaging rush to Brexit, humoring a combination of “little Englander” sentiment and xenophobia (two sides of the same coin) is seen as an apt follow-on to Blair’s disastrous reign and the fecklessness of England’s several party leaderships.
The book is not an easy read, mostly for stylistic reasons. It could certainly have used an editor who understood how to do the following: rid sentences of redundant phrases; use commas and semi-colons to make sentence structure clearer; place repetitions of factual data (sometimes needed) more strategically and appropriately, rather than bunching them up. The book should continue to be a useful textbook for a variety of reasons, but I doubt that it will ever catch on with the “general reader” of history (a vanishing species) due to its density of detail and lack of smooth readability. I assume that Edgerton’s notion of a successful “(re)-building of an English nation”, 1945-1975), followed by the decline of that achieved new nation will generate a great deal of heated debate in the UK, but it may seem too specialized or idiosyncratic to attract American and Canadian readers.
The book is well written and is well produced. The quality is good.... i.e. well-bound and clearly printed.




