The rise and fall of the British nation - David Edgerton

'Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain ... You
will 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.

It
is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an
otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth
sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping
with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say,
or the Soviet Union in this way.

David Edgerton's major new
history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national
history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal an unfamiliar
place, subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply because of the
world wars and global economic transformations, but in its very nature.
Until the 1940s the United Kingdom was, Edgerton argues, an exceptional
place: liberal, capitalist and anti-nationalist, at the heart of a
European and global web of trade and influence. Then, as its global
position collapsed, it became, for the first time and only briefly, a
real, successful nation, with shared goals, horizons and
industry, before reinventing itself again in the 1970s as part of the
European Union and as the host for international capital, no longer
capable of being a nation.


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