The ancient teacher of rhetoric, Quintilian, called them status: the agreed-upon questions upon which controversies in a community are grounded, the epistemologically shared beliefs that lie beneath yet provide our very ability to contest the questions on which we disagree (Institutio Oratoria, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1949: II.iv.30, III.vi.1-5). Yet because they are places of agreement, the common ground of particular status tend to remain invisible to us, and they tend to remain unexamined regardless of whether they provide a foundation of concrete or a foundation of quicksand. With Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970, David Edgerton in fact exposes a great patch of historiographic quicksand upon which we have all been standing, and in so doing shows how we (historians) need to re-examine some of our basic shared beliefs about the modern British state. We must put the military back in the stories we tell, and we must give it a role far more complex than the clichéd character of barrier to economic progress and geopolitical prominence.

The British state of the middle five decades of the twentieth century was indeed shaped by “civilian” concerns of welfare, but the painstaking details of the eight chapters of Warfare State show it to have been a state even more shaped by the “military” concerns of warfare. Edgerton combines exhaustive analysis of armament industries and government ministries and careful examination of external and internal relationships within Britain's civil service and scientific elites with a detailed evaluation of the evolution of our historical storytelling since the Great War. In so doing, he not only shows a British state which was far more complex an organism than any “welfare state” label can suggest, he also exposes the dangers that accompany academic misconceptualization of the past.

In the pages of Warfare State, Edgerton revises several important stories, but Edgerton's real targets are beliefs we have built upon a foundation of technocratic declinism and what he calls “anti-history.” Edgerton wants us to see how our very expertise can blind us to important parts of the past, how our professional lack of interest in certain questions can shape our willingness to confront the details of particular historical evidence. We may be able to quickly point out the technological determinism and Whiggishness of popular historical writing—“non-professionals” make easy targets—yet in our casual dismissing of popular story-tellers we have also failed to pay attention to real historical details being highlighted by their story-telling.

In a key sub-theme of the book, for example, Edgerton thus both picks apart C. P. Snow's “two cultures” idea (pp. 196–210) and connects its weaknesses to later technocratic misinterpretations of the Ministry of Technology created following Harold Wilson's “white heat” speech at the Labour Party's annual conference in 1963 (chapter 6). The bigger problem with the “two cultures” idea was not that Snow and the others got the history wrong. (In fact, they did: Edgerton's evidence makes clear that the Ministry of Technology was “an ending rather than the beginning of an overweening enthusiasm for national technology” (p. 264)). The bigger problem has been our anti-historical following of Snow's lead, our failure to dig into, as Edgerton has dug into, the messy historical evidence about British civilian and military culture.

Warfare State will, I fear, be coolly received by many in its intended audience. Part of the reason is Edgerton's writing style, particularly in the first half of the book. Edgerton is Hans Rausig Professor at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Imperial College London, and he clearly knows his subject forward, backward, sideways, and inside out. Unfortunately, however, that very expertise sometimes takes too much control over his prose. Nonspecialists will at times be overwhelmed by the detail provided about the bureaucrats, officers, and scientists of the warfare state, particularly in chapters 2–4. Comprehension is aided by five appendices (pp. 339–52) listing the dramatis personae (a listing which, by the way, future researchers on the warfare state will find invaluable), but the reality is that the decades of anti-history Edgerton decries mean most of the people named in Warfare State will be strangers to the average historian. And there will be a lot of these strangers to keep straight: the appendices list well over 250.

Be clear: the content provided in chapters 2–4 matters. A lot. Careful attention to the detail Edgerton provides will be rewarded, particularly for a reader who started with his outstanding final chapter on “Rethinking the relations of science, technology, industry and war.” Combine this final essay—which by itself justifies the price of the book—with the details from earlier chapters on interwar supply ministries, on nationalization and the armaments industry, and on the postwar expert state, however, and one sees the real power of Edgerton's argument.

But the opening chapters will not be quick reading. As a result, I fear they may provide an easy “anti-history”-type excuse for missing Edgerton's larger epistemological point. Warfare State, asks us for nothing less than a change in our underlying habits of mind, and bad habits of mind are notoriously difficult to change. With a physical habit such as smoking or drinking, it is relatively easy to see the negative consequences the habit promises for our lungs or liver; but habits of mind are harder. And when our habits are shared with all around us, when everyone else is smoking the rhetoric of decline and academic expertise, seeing the problem becomes more difficult still.

David Edgerton has thus done yeoman work here in pointing out the shared habits of mind underlying the stories historians have been telling about the relationships among science, technology, industry, and the military. What he has uncovered—stories great and small untold for decades because of the blinders of our own intellectual expertise—is sobering and troublesome. Let us hope, however, that we will be willing to see what he has revealed.