Thrice denied: 'Declinism' as a recurrent theme in British history in the long twentieth century

Twentieth Century British History

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 227-251

  Tomlinson, Jim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 66049096912     PISSN: 09552359     EISSN: 14774674     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwp019     Document Type: Article

References (164)

1. Barry Supple, 'Fear of failing: Economic history and the decline of Britain', Economic History Review, 47 (1994), 442.
2. Barry Supple, 'Official economic inquiry and Britain's industrial decline: The first fifty years', in Mary Furner and Barry Supple (eds), The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge, 1990), 326, 330-7.
3. Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline 1895-1905 (Princeton, 1988)
4. Geoffrey Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 (Oxford, 1971).
5. David Cannadine, 'Apocalypse when? British politicians and British "decline" in the twentieth century', in Peter Clarke and Clive Trebilcock (eds), Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of Britain's Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1997), 263-9
6. also Ewen Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative party, 1880-1914 (London, 1995), especially Ch. 1
7. Avner Offer, 'Empire and social reform: British overseas investment and domestic politics, 1908-14', Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 119-38.
8. Ross Hoffman, Great Britain and the German Trade Rivalry (Philadelphia, 1933).
9. A summary of the development of pre-1914 'declinism' can be found in Donald McCloskey and Lars Sandberg, 'From damnation to redemption: judgements on the late Victoria entrepreneur', Explorations in Economic History, 9 (1971), 90-4.
10. John Clapham, 'An economic history of modern Britain', in Machines and National Rivalries, Vol. III (Cambridge, 1938), 69-71
11. Duncan Burn, The Economic History of Steelmaking 1867-1939: A Study in Competition (Cambridge, 1940).
12. Henry Phelps-Brown and Stuart Handfield-Jones, 'The climacteric of the 1890s: A study in the expanding economy', Oxford Economic Papers, 4 (1952), 266-307
13. David Coppock, 'The climacteric of the 1890s: A critical note', Manchester School, 24 (1956), 1-31.
14. For later assessment, Charles Feinstein, Robin Matthews and John Odling-Smee, 'The timing of the climacteric and its sectoral incidence in the UK, 1873-1913', in Charles Kindleberger and Giovanni di Tella (eds), Economics in the Long Run, Vol 2: Applications and Cases, Part I (Basingstoke, 1982), 168-85.
15. S. Berrick Saul, 'The American impact on British industry, 1895-1914', Business History, 3 (1960), 19.
16. David Landes, 'Technological change and development in western Europe, 1750-1914', in John Habakkuk and Michael Postan (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Western Europe, Vol. IV (Cambridge, 1965), especially 553-84
17. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969).
18. See also Landes's critique of Habbakuk's British and American Technology (Cambridge, 1962), which disputes the book's focus on the different structural and cost conditions causing the divergence in the two countries' technological paths in the name of a focus on British entrepreneurial failings: LaDdes, 'Factor costs and demand: determinants of economic growth.
19. A critique of Professor Habbakuk's thesis', Business History, 7 (1965), 15-33.
20. Derek Aldcroft, 'Technological performance and British entrepreneurs, 1875-1914', Business History, 7 (1966), 134,
21. and his 'The entrepreneur and the British economy', Economic History Review, 17 (1964), 113-34.
22. Donald McCloskey, 'Did Victorian Britain fail?', Economic History Review, 23 (1970), 446-59
23. If You're so Smart (Chicago, 1990), 41-9, 56-69.
24. A riposte to these allegations more in the tradition of British empirical economic history was that which pointed to the dynamism of British entrepreneurs especially outside the 'staple' industries: Charles Wilson, 'Economy and society in late Victorian Britain', Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 183-98.
25. McCloskey and Sandberg, 'Damnation to redemption'. For recent endorsement of this argument in the case of cotton, see Timothy Leunig, 'New answers to old questions: Explaining the slow adoption of ring-spinning in Lancashire, 1880-1913', Journal of Economic History 61 (2001), 439-66.
26. Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick (eds), The Decline of The British Economy (Oxford, 1986)
27. note also the refutation of critiques of managerial failure in British-owned multi-national corporations in Stephen Nicholas, 'The expansion of British multinationals: Testing for managerial failure', in James Foreman-Peck (ed.), New Perspectives on the Victorian Economy (Cambridge, 1991), 125-45.
28. One of the most amusing cases is the contrast between the introduction to Andrew Shonfield's British Economic Policy Since the War (Harmondsworth, 1959) with its theme of 'if we don't reverse British decline we will get in as big a mess as the French' and the holding up of France as an example to be followed which was so common in the early 1960s.
29. Henry Neuberger and Howard Stokes, 'German banks and German growth 1883-1913: An empirical view', Journal of Economic History, 14 (1974), 710-31.
30. More generally on Germany as the 'model' modern economy, see A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (London, 2006), introduction.
31. Hoffman, Great Britain.
32. Saul, 'American impact', 37; as Saul points out, the British machine tool industry in this period was far from uniformly backward, with Alfred Herbert, in particular, playing a dynamic role in developing new products: Saul, 24-5. Recent research endSrses his view: see Roger Lloyd-Jones and Myrrdin Lewis, Alfred Herbert and the British Machine Tool Industry, 1887-1983 (Aldershot, 2006), Chs 1 and 2, on that response.
33. Sidney Pollard (ed.), The Gold Standard and Employment Policies Between the Wars (London, 1970)
34. The Wasting of the British Economy (London, 1982).
35. Sidney Pollard, Britain's Prime and Britain's Decline: The British Economy 1870-1914 (London, 1989), 271.
36. Nicholas Crafts, 'Forging ahead and falling behind: The rise and relative decline of the first industrial nation', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (1998), 205.
37. Cd. 9035, Final Report of the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy After the War, Vol. XII, 1918.
38. Jim Tomlinson, Government and the Enterprise Since 1900: The Changing Problem of Efficiency (Oxford, 1994), Ch. 4
39. Julian Greaves, Industrial Reorganization and Government Policy in Interwar Britain (Aldershot, 2005)
40. Frank Trentmann, 'The transformation of fiscal reform: Reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early twentieth-century Britain', Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 1042-4.
41. Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (eds), The Baldwin Papers, 1908-1947 (Cambridge, 2004).
42. Alan Booth and Mervyn Pack, Employment, Capital and Economic Policy: Great Britain 1918-1939 (Oxford, 1985).
43. Daniel Ritschel, The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford, 1997).
44. Derek Aldcroft, 'The performance of the British machine tool industry in the interwar years', Business History Review, 40 (1966), 281-96.
45. A pioneer here was Kevin Lomax, 'Production and productivity movements in the UK since 1900', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 122 (1959), 185-210
46. foundational to quantitative understanding of the period is Charles Feinstein, Robin Matthews and John Odling-Smee, British Economic Growth 1856-1973 (Oxford, 1982)
47. some 'pessimists' about pre-1913 Britain became 'optimists' about inter-war performance: Derek Aldcroft and Harry Richardson, The Inter-War Economy: Britain, 1919-1939 (London, 1970), 18: 'on balance, therefore, we may conclude that the British economy was far from stagnant in this period since the growth record compares well with that of other periods'.
48. Michael Beenstock, Forrest Capie and Brian Griffiths, 'Economic recovery in the UK in the 1930s', in Bank of England Panel Paper 23 (London, 1984)
49. for a critique, see Nicholas Crafts, 'Long-term unemployment in Britain in the 1930s', Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 418-32.
50. The best appreciation of the economic policy dilemmas as seen at the time is Booth, 'Britain in the 1930s: A managed economy?', Economic History Review, 49 (1987), 499-522
51. and Peter Clarke, 'The Treasury's analytical model of the British economy between the wars', in Furner and Supple, The State and Economic Knowledge, 171-207.
52. Patrick O'Brien, 'Britain's economy between the wars: A survey of a counter-revolution in economic history', Past and Present, 115 (1987), 129.
53. Stephen Broadberry and Nicholas Crafts, 'Britain's productivity gap in the 1930s: Some neglected factors', Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), 531-58
54. Barry Eichengreen, 'The British economy between the wars', in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. II (Cambridge, 2004), 341-2.
55. Sue Bowden and David Higgins, 'British industry in the interwar years', in Floud and Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History, Vol. II, 393, though they go on to conjure up the Other of the USA: 'where was the vigour and dynamism that characterized the USA?'.
56. Booth, 'Britain in the 1930s'.
57. Some Anglo-American comparisons go back much further, for example, A. Flux, 'Industrial productivity in Great Britain and the USA', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 48 (1933), 1-38, but these were largely of interest to academics.
58. The highest profile focus on this issue was through the Anglo-American Council on Productivity - see Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan (Manchester, 1987)
59. Jim Tomlinson, 'The failure of the Anglo-American council on productivity', Business History, 33 (1991), 82-92.
60. Harold Wilson claimed, with some justice, that he had invented the notion of labour productivity as an operational notion in the 1940s: Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973-76 (London, 1989), 506
61. also Tomlinson, 'The British ''productivity problem'' of the 1960s', Past and Present, 175 (2002), 188-210
62. more broadly, Mark Bufton, Britain's Productivity Problem 1948-1990 (Basingstoke, 2004).
63. Jim Tomlinson, 'Mr Attlee's supply-side socialism', Economic History Review, 46 (1993), 1-22
64. Martin Chick, Industrial Policy in Britain 1945-1951 (Cambridge, 1998).
65. The Stagnant Society was a big-selling book of 1961 by Michael Shanks (Harmondsworth, 1961). Other major contemporary contributions were Shonfield, British Economic Policy; A. Macrae (ed.), Sunshades in October (London, 1963).
66. For the economic data underpinning the arguments, see Jim Tomlinson, '"Inventing decline": The falling behind of the British economy in the post-war years', Economic History Review, 49 (1996), 731-57.
67. Perry Anderson, 'Origins of the present crisis', New Left Review, 23 (1964), 26-53
68. Edward Thompson, 'The peculiarities of the English', in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds), Socialist Register 1965 (London, 1965), 311-62
69. David Coates and John Hilliard (eds), The Economic Decline of Modern Britain: The Debate Between Left and Right (Brighton, 1986). A key text in making declinism part of mainstream academic understanding was Andrew Gamble's Britain in Decline, which ran to four editions between 1981 and 1994.
70. Cannadine, 'Apocalypse when?', 275-81.
71. Jim Tomlinson, 'Mrs Thatcher's economic adventurism, 1979-1981, and its political consequences', British Politics, 2 (2007), 3-19.
72. Nigel Lawson, What's Right with Britain (London, 1982)
73. Alan Walters, Britain's Economic Renaissance (Oxford, 1986).
74. Jim Cronin, New Labour's Pasts (Harlow, 2004), Chs 7-9.
75. Anthony Giddens, Over to You Mr Brown (Cambridge, 2007), 74.
76. Most obviously in the work of strong supporters of Mrs Thatcher like Alan Walters, Britain's Economic Renaissance (Oxford, 1984),
77. but also much more widely in the academic community: See Theo Nichols, The British Worker Question. (London, 1986)
78. Corelli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 1986) - this followed up themes previously explored in The Collapse of British Power (London, 1971)
79. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 1981).
80. See also Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Postwar Britain (Harlow, 2001), 58-61.
81. Bruce Collins and Keith Robbins (eds), British Culture and Economic Decline (London, 1990).
82. For example Stephen Broadberry and Nicholas Crafts, 'British economic policy and industrial performance in the early post-war period', Business History, 38 (1996), 65-91.
83. Nicholas Crafts, 'The golden age of economic growth in Western Europe, 1950-1973', Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 429-47.
84. Charles Feinstein, 'Economic growth since 1870: Britain's performance in international perspective', Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 4 (1988), 1-13
85. 'Structural change in the developed countries during the twentieth century', Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15 (1999), 35-55.
86. Crafts, 'Golden age'.
87. Habbakuk, British and American Technology.
88. Broadberry, Productivity Race, 1, 2. One of the most powerful, though not from a historian, is Nichols, British Worker Question, which offered a forensic rebuttal of the use of productivity data in analyses of the British economy. Also Karel Williams, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and John Williams, Cars: Analysis, History, Cases (Oxford, 1994), 206-45, who also demonstrate the flimsiness of much use of such data, one of the key underpinnings of much declinist literature.
89. Supple, 'Fear of failing'.
90. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: Science and Technology and British Industrial 'Decline' (Cambridge, 1996)
91. Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge, 2006).
92. For a detailed study of scientific research, with clear anti-declinist conclusions, see Viviane Quirke, Collaboration in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Changing Relations in Britain and France (London, 2007), especially Ch. 3 and Conclusion.
93. Tomlinson, 'Inventing decline'.
94. Alan Booth, 'The manufacturing failure hypothesis and the performance of British industry during the long boom', Economic History Review, 56 (2003), citing data from Broadberry, Productivity Race, Table A3.1 (c), 49.
95. Stephen Broadberry and Nicholas Crafts, 'UK productivity performance from 1950 to 1979: A restatement of the Broadberry-Crafts view', Economic History Review, 56 (2003), 720.
96. Broadberry and Crafts, 'UK productivity performance', 721-5.
97. Booth, 'Manufacturing failure', 10.
98. Alan Booth, The Management of Technical Change: Automation in the UK and USA since 1950 (Basingstoke, 2007).
99. Stephen Broadberry, 'The performance of manufacturing', in Floud and Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History Vol III, (Cambridge, 2004), 58.
100. Geoffrey Owen, From Empire to Europe (London, 2000).
101. Jim Tomlinson, 'Not "decline and revival": An alternative narrative on British postwar productivity', in Richard Coopey and Peter Lyth (eds), Decline and Renaissance? Business in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, forthcoming).
102. A. Maddison, The World Economy: A Millenial Perspective (Paris, 2001), 276-7, 304.
103. McCloskey, If You're So Smart, 46-9.
104. Peter Jenkins, 'The map for Britain's journey into the Third World', Guardian, 27 September 1978, reprinted in Jenkins, Anatomy of Decline: The Political Journalism of Peter Jenkins, (eds), Brian Brivati and Richard Cockett (London, 1996), 95-9.
105. Richard Johnson, The Politics of Recession (London, 1985), 128-32 rightly talks of a 'bourgeois panic' in the mid-1970s, which was very much underpinned by declinist postures.
106. D. Pilat, A. Cimper, K. Olsen and C. Webb, The Changing Nature of Manufacturing in OECD Economies (Paris, 2006), 6-7.
107. Pilat et al., Changing Nature of Manufacturing, 10-11.
108. Martin Daunton, '"Gentlemanly capitalism" and British industry 1820-1914', Past and Present, 122 (1989), 119-58
109. Daunton, 'Financial elites and British society, 1880-1950', in Yussef Cassis (ed.), Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880-1960 (Cambridge, 1992), 121-46
110. Daunton, 'Britain and globalization since 1850: I. Creating a global order, 1850-1914', Transactions of The Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), 12-27.
111. Daunton, 'Gentlemanly capitalism', 157-8, supports an analysis of decline couched in terms of conservative social relations of production in industry, and the lack of decisive state policy because of the need for it to balance a number of powerful competing interests - these themes are not developed at length.
112. Daunton, 'Gentlemanly Capitalism', 152-4.
113. Andrew Marrison, 'Businessmen, industries and tariff reform in Great Britain, 1903-1930', Business History, 25 (1983), 148-78
114. Trentmann, 'Transformation'. As Daunton stresses, City opinion was also very divided on this issue. Compare Ewen Green, 'The influence of the City over British economic policy c. 1880-1960', in Cassis (ed.), Finance and Financiers, 193-218, which focuses on the policy aims of the City rather than effects of the policies actually pursued.
115. Sidney Pollard, 'Capital exports 1870-1914: Harmful or beneficial?', Economic History Review, 38 (1985), 489-514.
116. The city of Dundee illustrates both aspects: The jute barons played a large role in exporting capital, and they were only able to compete with Indian products because of cheap imported food. Tomlinson, 'The deglobalization of Dundee, circa. 1900-2000', Journal of Scottish Historical Studies (2009) (forthcoming).
117. Pollard, Gold Standard, Introduction; Robert Boyce, British Capitalism at the Crossroads: A Study in Politics, Economics and International Relations (Cambridge, 1987)
118. compare Martin Daunton, 'Britain and globalization since 1850: II: The rise of insular capitalism', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17 (2007), 31-2, who stresses the domestic bankers' criticism of the 1925 decision.
119. Richard Sayers, 'The return to gold', in Pollard, Gold Standard, 85-98.
120. Shonfield, British Economic Policy; Susan Strange, Sterling and British Policy (Oxford, 1971)
121. for a powerful critique, see Catherine Schenk, Britain and the Sterling Area (London, 1994).
122. Jim Tomlinson, 'Balanced accounts? The British balance of payments "problem" 1951-1973', English Historical Review (2009) (forthcoming).
123. Tomlinson, 'Inventing "decline"'.
124. Timothy Bale, 'The dynamics of a non-decision: The "failure" to devalue the pound, 1964-7', Twentieth Century British History, 10 (1999), 192-217. The rise of the Eurodollar market in London from the late 1950s severed the role of the City from Sterling's status and value; the City was now an 'offshore' financial centre in its international role.
125. Tomlinson. 'Mrs Thatcher's'.
126. Green, 'Influence of the City', 212, 210-11.
127. Green, 'Influence of the City', 210-11.
128. Robin Matthews, 'Why has Britain had full employment since the war?', Economic Journal, 78 (1968), 555-69.
129. Robert Rowthorn, Deindustrialization and Foreign Trade (Cambridge, 1987).
130. Daunton, 'Gentlemanly capitalism', 130-1
131. also F. Michael Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture (Oxford, 2001).
132. Daunton, 'Gentlemanly capitalism', 130-1
133. also F. Michael Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture (Oxford, 2001).
134. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (Oxford, 1991), Ch. 3.
135. Thomas Balogh, 'Apotheosis of the dilettante', in Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment (London, 1959)
136. Barnett, Audit of War. For sceptical comments, see John Raven, 'British history and the enterprise culture', Past and Present, 123 (1992) 178-204.
137. Mark Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964 (Manchester, 2000).
138. Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Competition (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
139. Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton, 1997), 7.
140. For Britain, see Howard Gospel, Markets, Firms and the Management of Labour (Cambridge, 1992).
141. Karel Williams, Tony Cutler, John Williams and Colin Haslam, 'The end of mass production?], Economy and Society, 16 (1987), 405-39.
142. Broadberry, Productivity Race (Cambridge, 1996).
143. Nichols, British Worker Question, 4-6.
144. Whether this is a productivity increase is moot; more labour effort means a bigger labour input, but this is not captured by conventional measurement of those inputs simply by hours. On the issue of effort, see Francis Green, 'It's been a hard day's night: The concentration and intensification of work in the late twentieth century', British Journal of Industrial Relations, 39 (2001), 53-80.
145. Marc Levinson, 'Gridlock on the docks', in The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, 2006), Ch. 2.
146. Williams et al., Cars, Ch. 10.
147. Nichols, British Worker Question.
148. Ian Budge, 'Relative decline as a political issue: Ideological motivations of the politico-economic debates in postwar Britain', Contemporary British History, 7 (1993), 1-23.
149. Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001).
150. G. Thompson, 'The American industrial debate: Any lessons for the UK?', Economy and Society, 16 (1987), 1-74.
151. A. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), 99.
152. Barry Supple, 'Moral choice and economics: British political economy in the twentieth century', in Ewen Green and Duncan Tanner (eds), The Strange Survival of Liberal England (Cambridge, 2007), 275-306.
153. Jo Melling and Alan Booth (eds), Managing the Modern Workplace: Productivity, Politics and Workplace Culture in Postwar Britain (Aldershot, 2008).
154. J. Tomlinson, 'A "failed experiment"? Public ownership and the narratives of postwar Britain', Labour History Review, 73 (2008), 228-43.
155. Daunton, 'Britain and globalization', I and II.
156. M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, 2001)
157. Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914-1979 (Cambridge, 2002).
158. Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008).
159. Green and Tanner, Strange Survival.
160. Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2003).
161. Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006).
162. Jim Tomlinson, 'Managing the economy, managing the people: Britain c. 931-70', Economic History Review, 58 (2005), 555-85.
163. For a scintillating critique of the 'promiscuous Other' in twentieth-century British intellectual history, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006).
164. Tony Hopkins, 'Back to the future: From national history to imperial history', Past and Present, 164 (1999), 201.