Out of Empire

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, David Edgerton, 2018.

The Tube Station, Cyril E Power, 1935.

It is not essential, but I recommend reading my two-part review of Cain and Hopkins’ ‘British Imperialism: 1688-2015’ before tackling this one. Might just help give some context to what I am thinking about here.

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In Cain and Hopkins’ British Imperialism: 1688-2015, the concept of “gentlemanly capitalism” forms the basis of a particular interpretation of twentieth-century British (imperial) history. It suggests that Britain featured a political-economy contoured by the international interest of finance first and domestic industry second. In this perspective, Britain abandons its political-financial empire as global economic circumstances change around it, left adrift until its financial sector jumps aboard the good ship Eurodollar, and embraces a role as a node within, not as the hub of, the global economy. British gentlemanly capitalism does not change — it is the world around it that does.

But David Edgerton has a very different perspective. In The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, he aims to sketch an image of the United Kingdom that is dynamic, changing substantially in political-economic terms throughout the century. His thesis is not narrowly economic —the core argument, that a distinct and hitherto unknown ‘British nation’ emerged from the Second World War and survived until the 1980s, is cultural and political as much as it is economic. But, at the same time, Edgerton questions the central arguments Cain and Hopkins put forth in British Imperialism — arguments on the correct role of manufacturing, the relationship between the economy and the empire, and just who the British state really served.

Before I get into all that, however, I must stress quite how revisionist The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is. Edgerton relentlessly tries to subvert the core motifs of British history. He claims that Oswald Mosley — leader of the British Union of Fascists — was the origin of the radical economic nationalism which took over postwar Britain. Then he suggests that it is “very doubtful whether Keynesianism or welfarism were at the centre of politics” in the postwar era, and that, correspondingly, the Labour party was essentially a nationalist, not a welfarist or socialist, party. Thatcherism does not escape revision either: it represented, for Edgerton, an ambition to turn back to the 50s and precisely to that postwar national economy which Labour built. I could go on.

It is worth pointing out where Edgerton agrees with Cain and Hopkins. There is no disagreement that the ‘decline’ of Britain in the late nineteenth century, even in relative terms, is much overstated. There is a consensus that politics in the interwar period was basically that of free trade against protection, and not, even after 1929, an inchoate Keynesianism and financial orthodoxy. Most significantly, both agree that, as Edgerton writes, “thinking about imperialism from the perspective of the economy has important benefits”, and hence that it was during the 1940s and 50s the British economy was its most “imperially oriented”. Finally, both see the 1970s as a crucial transitional period, albiet for somewhat different reasons.

The foundational disagreement between them, however, concerns the central thesis Cain and Hopkins put forth: gentlemanly capitalism. Edgerton does not totally dismiss the idea. He acknowledges that international finance drove the policy of empire to a great extent in the early twentieth century, and that this explains the penetration of agricultural imports from Argentina and Australia. But beyond that, Edgerton has three objections to the gentlemanly capitalism thesis. These are not mere quibbles, but the result of a clear historiographical divide.

Edgerton makes the obvious point that after the First World War the national debt became a much larger asset class than overseas investments. After that, “the politics of rentiers’ income was the politics of the valuation of the national debt, not that of empire”. While recognising this fact is important for context, it does not significantly undermine gentlemanly capitalism. Cain and Hopkins would likely not disagree. Their argument is instead that the politics of empire was the politics of (gentlemanly) rentiers’ income, even if in Britain the national debt was more politically salient.

Much more powerfully, however, Edgerton argues that British industry had as substantial an interest in overseas imperial activities as finance, which cuts to the core of the above thesis. In Edgerton’s words, “British capital was as much about mining abroad as government debt… a proper accounting of the nature of British capitalism must include BP and Shell, Rio Tinto and Consolidated Goldfields, Vestey and Tate & Lyle, as well as the Argentine railways”. Indeed, it is rather incredible how little this history figures in British Imperialism. Via a rich-if-succinct sketch of these international industrial ventures, Edgerton pours cold water on Cain and Hopkins’ notion that early 20th century British industry resembled in any way the provincial, disconnected, network of firms of the 19th century.

Edgerton’s final objection is to the claim that national industry was politically feeble. To the contrary, he writes, “industrial capital too was gentlemanly and aristocratic and closely connected to the state through the Commons and Lords and in myriad other ways”. Even if, before 1945, national industry was a rung down from finance, it was certainly no longer after. In his view, postwar Britain was defined by a “strong national-industrial economy”, that cannot be absorbed by the gentlemanly capitalism thesis.

Edgerton justifies these claims through a detailed survey of the major figures in British politics and industry in the early century, revealing how intertwined they all were with finance, the state, and even the aristocracy. There is not an attempt to show this quantitatively, which is a shame, as Cain and Hopkins, to their credit, at least present some data on the declared professions of MP’s to demonstrate their thesis. But they do only do this for before 1914, and further, Edgerton might counter that the very incestuousness of finance and industry complicates the usefulness of this measure. As I said in my review of Cain and Hopkins, the weakest link in their argument is undoubtedly the key claim that not only were industry and finance clearly distinct in interest and agenda, but that industry remained relatively distant from power throughout the full 20th century. Even if Edgerton counters this rather unsystematically, the case was put weakly enough initially that I am inclined to agree with him.

But to be fair to Cain and Hopkins, while their picture of the British economy is perhaps a caricature, it does explain British imperialism before the Second World War rather well — which is, after all, their goal. Edgerton, on the other hand, produces no explicit counter-model to explain this development of the Empire before, and crucially between, the world wars. This is not Edgerton’s aim — the discrepancy here is largely an artefact of my own, rather artificial, attempt to put the two texts in conversation. But for a book which has as its key theme the emergence of a novel British ‘nation’ from the British Empire, that empire — its interwar expansions, relationship with its Dominions, and so forth — factors surprisingly little.

There are many differences in what Edgerton and Cain and Hopkins decide to emphasise. One of the best aspects of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is how well Edgerton comes to terms with the changing real economy of Britain during the twentieth century. His is a rich sketch of industries, firms, policies, technologies, and unions, giving you a grasp of what Britain’s economy looked like and how it changed over time. In Cain and Hopkins, however, there is not much attention given to any industry, even those intimately connected to the empire. On the other hand, Edgerton gives little consideration to the postwar Sterling area, its decline, or the rise of the Eurodollar market in London; parts of the story of postwar Britain essential to British Imperialism.

This, in fact, speaks to how each explains the decline of Britain’s empire in the 50s and 60s differently. For Cain and Hopkins, a gentlemanly capitalist Britain gradually releases the imperial grip as Europe’s economy recovers and quickly booms, while the emerging Eurodollar market presents new opportunities for the City. On the other hand, Edgerton emphasises domestic changes. Politics, not finance, leads the United Kingdom to pivot away from its empire, and we would do well to take the profound nationalism of postwar Britain seriously.

In this vein, one of Edgerton’s key themes is that postwar Britain was as much a “warfare state” as a welfare one. Britain was not just social-democratic after the war. Above all else it was economically and politically nationalist. National defence, early Cold War rearmament, and later nuclear weapons were as core to the British developmental project as the National Health Service. This shift, the ‘rise of the British nation’, as Edgerton would have it, affected the relation of Britain with its empire deeply. The British Empire died because the British nation killed it, not because London’s bankers ceased to profit from it. That is starkly different to Cain and Hopkins’ argument. But this is not a mere matter of interpretation: it reflects fundamentally different understandings of where power lay, and how it changed, within twentieth century Britain.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is a lot more than an intervention in the gentlemanly capitalism debate. It is a fantastic general history with a pleasing economic slant, and I learnt a great deal about Britain’s economic, but also its political and intellectual history. Edgerton’s discussion of ‘declinism’, a “central feature of intellectual discourse from the 1950s into the 1990s”, which was a “very important expression of anti-imperialist, anti-liberal nationalism”, I found particularly insightful and entertaining. The idea that Britain’s retreat from the global stage was due to pathological national failings, Edgerton says, was itself a form of jingoism “dressed up as critique”. And who was one of the greatest proponents of declinism on the left? None other, ironically, than Eric Hobsbawm, whose Industry and Empire was so damning of Britain’s economic development since 1850, but who is otherwise known as one of the key critics of nationalism alongside Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. Now if that is not revisionism at its best, nothing is.

Check out my supplemental for this review below!