Rise and Fall of the British Nation

'Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain ... Youwill not find a better informed history' David Goodhart, Evening Standard

'A striking new perspective on our past' Piers Brendon, Literary Review

From the acclaimed author of Britain's War Machine and The Shock of the Old, a bold reassessment of Britain's twentieth century.

Itis usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in anotherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smoothsequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to copingwith decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say,or the Soviet Union in this way.

David Edgerton's major newhistory breaks out of the confines of traditional British nationalhistory to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal an unfamiliarplace, subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply because of theworld wars and global economic transformations, but in its very nature.Until the 1940s the United Kingdom was, Edgerton argues, an exceptionalplace: liberal, capitalist and anti-nationalist, at the heart of aEuropean and global web of trade and influence. Then, as its globalposition collapsed, it became, for the first time and only briefly, areal, successful nation, with shared goals, horizons andindustry, before reinventing itself again in the 1970s as part of theEuropean Union and as the host for international capital, no longercapable of being a nation.

Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives usa grown-up, unsentimental history which takes business and warfareseriously, and which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsiderationfor the country and its future.

Reviews

... refreshing and immensely stimulating, and should be compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand the reality of twentieth-century Britain. Lewis Namier, another historian known for his combative brand of scholarship, viewed iconoclasm as the judge of a great historian, that having produced an account of a period 'others should not be able to practise within its sphere in the terms of the preceding era'. Edgerton has certainly achieved this.