Can historical interpretations be based on unsubstantiated assumptions? Political commentators and historians have often portrayed post-1918 Britain as a nation in decline. The list of causes is familiar—the cost of the First World War, an overextended Empire, a devotion to Victorian industries like shipbuilding and textiles, poor levels of scientific and technical education, a class bound society, and a lack of innovation. Historians such as Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett have argued that these patterns persisted well into the twentieth century and were exacerbated by the Second World War. Even today such factors are used to help explain Britain's relatively poor economic performance after 1945.

In his wide-ranging book Warfare State—Britain, 1920–1970, David Edgerton goes some way in attacking many of the assumptions behind such accounts of Britain's decline. Edgerton is quite innovative in his insistence at rewriting the usual accounts of Britain's supposed decline after 1918 and reconsidering the role of the military in Britain's economic, technological, and scientific development. Edgerton takes a broadly synthetic approach which utilizes some primary sources such as government reports, novels, and memoirs. However, his chief concern is to reassess (often brutally) the historiography of other historians in the field. He overreaches at times in attempting to recast the entire historiography of twentieth-century Britain (much of which he terms “anti-histories”). Nevertheless this is an extremely stimulating book that forces a serious reframing of the usual tropes of economic decline and persistent scientific backwardness (neatly labeled “declinism” by Edgerton).

Warfare State is divided into three main sections. The first section deals with the arms industry and the British economy from 1920 to 1970. The middle section examines the nature of the British state elite and the higher reaches of the civil service during the same period. The final section puts forth provocative new views on interpretations and conceptualizations of the British state, British militarism, and technology. Of these three sections, the first is the clearest and most evocative, the middle is a bit more opaque but still insightful, and the final section is the most problematic.

Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College, London. He has written extensively on military technology, science, economic policy, and theories of British decline. His main areas of expertise are shown most clearly in the brilliantly written first section of Warfare State. Edgerton deftly outlines the continuing vitality of the arms industry and its crucial role in the British economy during the interwar period and beyond. He clearly shows that the standard portrayal of low British military expenditure during the interwar period is incorrect. Edgerton notes Britain's continued spending and technical innovation on the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. According to Edgerton, military spending in the Second World War built on patterns from the interwar period and continued to be high after 1945. In fact, Edgerton argues that in the later 1950s “British forces were spending a higher proportion of their resources on R & D than any in the world, including the USA” (104). The technology and science policy of the Labour Government of 1964–70 is neatly reassessed. Edgerton argues that Harold Wilson's rhetoric of the “white heat” of technological innovation and subsequent creation of the Ministry of Technology were not fresh departures in state-funded technological research. Instead, this episode was a redirection of massive state-funded military research into civilian areas. Furthermore, it was accompanied by large-scale cuts to defense spending and ended in failure.

Edgerton's middle section is a denser read but serves as a useful corrective to the views of previous historians such as Barnett and Wiener. Whereas Barnett and Wiener put huge emphasis on the supposed predominance of the arts-educated “generalists” who controlled the levers of administration, Edgerton argues that technically trained experts played a key role. Edgerton crafts a picture of state experts who can be considered as a research corps of the British state and were employed in areas like “ballistics, meteorology, oceanography and aerodynamics” (112). Such experts formed an important and self-confident technical middle class who were not as downtrodden by Oxbridge-trained classics graduates as previous historians have thought. In fact, Edgerton believes that it was the rise of these technocrats that led to the writing of “anti-histories” from the later 1950s onward which created the historiographical trope of “declinism” (191–229).

Edgerton's final section is the most frustrating. In it, he puts forth his explanation of why “declinism” has seemingly had such a firm grip on the British historical imagination and why British intellectuals have not highlighted the existence of a “warfare state.” He also tries to sketch out a new understanding of the relationship between science, technology, industry, and war. Those not sharing his views on the importance of the warfare state are treated harshly. Liberals before 1939 and social democrats after 1945 are singled out as being particularly blind to the vigorous warfare state. Edgerton has a special animus for postwar technocrats like C. P. Snow. Snow famously voiced concerns about the emergence of “two cultures,” one scientific and the other nonscientific, who viewed one another with “mutual incomprehension” (198–200). Edgerton flays Snow for being misinformed and being accepted by the British public too uncritically. Edgerton's demolition of these various interpretations occasionally descends into polemic, and he simplifies the interpretations of his opponents. It also remains to be seen whether Britain's warfare state during peacetime was any more “invisible” than that of most other western countries with the exception of Nazi Germany. His final chapter provides additional complications when it ventures into historiographical speculation. Edgerton sensibly begins his chapter by pointing out the need for “putting the military into the history of science, technology and industry” and argues for a restructuring of the historiography of these accounts (327). As he notes, even in the so-called pacifistic interwar period between one-third and one-half half of British “scientific research” was war research. However, things become confused when Edgerton argues for the need to tackle “historiography from below,” which at one point he defines as “vulgar, non-professional historical writing” (334–35). Such terminology continually reappears in his book and complicates his argument. Edgerton argues for the cultural determinants of historical writing. He pinpoints the growth of certain historical tropes of British economic performance to specific historical moments and social contexts. He argues that most professional historians have been unfamiliar with actual scientific developments and have relied on historical musings by technocrats like C. P. Snow who distorted the historical record for their own narrow ends. Such reliance may well be true but to use terms like “anti-histories” to dismiss entire schools of historical interpretation is unhelpful.

Warfare State is a stimulating book that leads to a serious rethinking of past assumptions on British science, technology, and economic performance. However, it could have been an even stronger book by doing one of two things. Edgerton could have ended his book after his first two sections and produced a shortened but very sturdy history of the contributions of military technology to British economic policy and a rehabilitation of the forgotten technical middle class. In his other, shorter books such as England and the Aeroplane (Basingstoke, 1991) and Science, Technology and British Industrial “Decline” 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 1996) he has stuck to these areas of strength. Conversely, if Edgerton wanted to include his third section he should have avoided terms like “anti-histories” and analyzed British (and particularly English) culture more thoroughly. Edgerton certainly examines the ideologies of liberalism and social democracy in his book. However, he does not discuss cultural reasons tied to a sense of national identity that help explain why British intellectuals have not traditionally glorified war, militarism, or the technological expert.