War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-Albion (November, 2006)

A. N. Wilson. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. xii + 609 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography index. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-374-10198-5.

Reviewed by: Rohan McWilliam, Department of History, Anglia Ruskin University.

A. N. Wilson and Edward, George, Edward, George

A. N. Wilson is a force of nature. Novels, histories, journalism, and biographies leap from his Chestertonian pen along with the odd bon mot and a delight in troublemaking. A self-appointed chronicler of English manners and foibles, he writes from the not unfertile position of the conservative maverick. By this I mean that he displays an affection for national institutions and traditions, but he is not deceived about their shortcomings and limitations. He celebrates the pragmatists rather than the ideologues and is ever willing to expose the distance between soaring rhetoric and sordid deeds.

A sequel to Wilson's Victorians (2002) (whose subject I suspect was more to his taste), After the Victorians is very much a popular history written for a non-academic audience and should be assessed as such. Like the earlier volume, this is intended as a "portrait of an age." It covers the years from Victoria's death in 1901 to the accession of Elizabeth II. Wilson's waggish agent apparently suggested that the book should be titled "Edward, George, Edward, George" after the monarchs in between. The English paperback edition has been given the subtitle, The World Our Parents Knew, which perhaps explains Wilson's attraction to the subject but which does not give much away about the contents of the book. The subtitle of the American edition is The Decline of Britain in the World which is not much more helpful as the issue of "decline" is ever present but never discussed in a coherent way, although the book ends predictably with Dean Acheson's observation that, after the Second World War, the British lost an empire and failed to find a role (p. 528) ...

This Just In: Lend-Lease Ends Tonight

Farewell to Britain’s US Mortage from hell

We should learn from the cold calculation America showed after the war, says Sir Christopher Meyer

At midnight tonight the Bank of England will transfer $83m(£42.4m) to the US Federal Reserve. This will be a historic moment: the last repayment of the loan that the United States made to Britain in 1946 and the final chapter in the story of Britain’s alliance with America in the second world war ...

REVIEW: David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (August 2006)

David Edgerton. _Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xv + 364 pp. Tables, figures, appendices, index. $32.99 (paper), ISBN 0-521-67231-7.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Simon Ball, Department of History, University of Glasgow

Big Guns

_Warfare State_ is a sustained polemic that does little to understate its own ambitions. "Putting the British warfare state into the twentieth-century history of Britain is to re-write some of the most important passages of its political, military, economic and cultural history," David Edgerton argues. "The revisions to standard accounts are as least as great," he goes on to claim, "as those brought about by highlighting the 'fiscal-military state' of the eighteenth century" (p. 5). Indeed Edgerton believes that historians of twentieth-century Britain have created such a mélange of self-deluding interpretation that there is little choice but to ignore much of what has gone before and start again. Edgerton's favorite rhetorical strategy is to brand those with whom he disagrees as "anti-historians." They are not merely wrong, they malign. _Warfare State_ offers an account of British state policy from the end of the First World War to the end of Harold Wilson's government in 1970. It does so in a roughly chronological fashion. Since Edgerton's goal is to stress continuity rather than change over this period, however, his book is best understood by means of its underlying structure. This structure comprises of two strands: first, a series of swingeing attacks on the "anti-historians" and then an analysis of the military inputs of the British state read in conjunction with a sociology of the politico-civil service elite. The attack on the "anti-historians" is the most readable part of the book; the analysis of the military state is the most substantial ...