Britain’s War Machine builds on and expands the approach taken in David Edgerton’s two most well-known works, England and the Aeroplane (Basingstoke, 1991) and The Warfare State (Cambridge, 2006). The essence of this approach is a revisionist reappraisal of the relationship between British industrial and technological resources and the British state, thereby aiming for a new perspective on the British war effort. This places British technical and military achievements as a counterweight to the pessimistic economically determinant theories of declinists such as Corelli Barnett. By the same token, Edgerton challenges the interpretation of the other side of the political spectrum by positing the warfare state as an alternative to the welfare state as a culminating achievement of British official policy.

Britain’s War Machine focuses on the technological and industrial capacities of the British war effort in 1939–45, delivering some salient challenges to a received wisdom of British decline and incapacity along the way. Instead of the traditional perspective of British decline as a power, characterized by dependency on external resources and external powers such as the United States, Edgerton reminds us of the breadth and extent of the international British imperial economy, which was able to successfully draw on global resources beyond the British Isles. This background context is necessary and is handled with some nuance, avoiding the more radical statements of British economic sufficiency found in Christopher Price’s work, for example. This is a selective perspective, however. Edgerton’s evaluation of British economic capabilities is firmly wedded to the European conflict against Germany and Italy, and he accepts the more traditional perspective of British dependency after the opening of the Pacific War, which marked the decisive deployment of American resources within the war as a whole.

The main thrust of the work is bound up with a survey of British technological capacities and the individuals—scientists, politicians, and sometimes outright cranks—who drove the exceptional levels of innovation evident in the British war effort, whether the jet engine or some of Winston Churchill’s pet mechanized excavation projects. On the whole, the account is very sympathetic to British achievement and indicates the scale and breadth of the efforts made to harness technical and production innovations to serve what Edgerton defines as a liberal militarism as a form of warfare and a driver of grand strategy. This prioritized technical innovation and the organized deployment of industrialized resources to fight machine-intensive conflict in place of a war of mass conscript armies. A case covered in some detail is the development of the British strategic bomber force, which, Edgerton reminds us, attracted some noteworthy liberal and even internationalist support.

This presents a more politically nuanced, credible, and technically informed version of the “British way of war” than Liddell Hart’s more famous strategic concepts and in some respects vindicates Bidwell and Graham’s thesis about the use of firepower to substitute for mass infantry combat on a wider strategic scale. It also suggests, although sometimes with less conviction, how contemporary and transitory British criticisms of materiel production on the path to realizing this strategy have left lasting and perhaps unwarranted resonances in subsequent historiography. At the very least this approach offers a broader and more substantive understanding of the actual position of British tank production than the orthodox understanding admits, and the extension of this analysis on the larger strategic level offers genuine potential to reappraise larger understandings of the British war effort, as Edgerton maintains.

This is a convincing thesis, and much of the detailed evidence presented is impressive, not least because such a synthesis of broad and disparate strands of technical and operational development in government policy have seldom been attempted. Nonetheless, if there is a weak spot in this approach, it lies at the level of policy analysis. Much of this may be attributed to the nature of the work as a broad and comprehensive survey of the relationship between resources and technology and the British war effort in the widest strategic and operational senses. Yet some aspects of that relationship require more explicit exploration of the relevant linkages between them. Much is said (and with valuable effect) about previously ignored or little-known developments, and more well-known developments are successfully reappraised to indicate the scale, depth, and consistency of British officials’ interest in technical innovation and their deployment of it. But this is not matched by similar detailed coverage of how these personalities and developments informed British strategy and strategic thinking. In this area, Edgerton’s Warfare State or George Pedden’s Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge, 2007) perhaps provides more attention to, and a clearer understanding of, the policy framework that informed British official decision making. This work nonetheless provides a valuable addition to scholarship on the Second World War and should be essential reading for any reader seeking an understanding of some of the less tangible but nonetheless powerfully influential dynamics required for a sufficient historical understanding of the British war effort.