An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation
David Edgerton
Macmillan, London, 1991, £14.99.
Short (130 pages), elegant assault on the thesis of ‘the declinist’ tendency in British history, now associated chiefly with Corelli Barnet and Martin Weiner, who have argued that science and technology failed to penetrate British (but essentially English) culture. By looking at 20th British history through the development of the aircraft industry, Edgerton shows us British society through new eyes — and in so doing tramples gleefully all over the boundary markers of several would-be discrete academic areas.
The state equals military power; and after WW2 military power equals death from the air. Hence the primacy of the aeroplane in the scheme of things. In 1970 Britain still had the 3rd largest aircraft construction industry in the world — and far too much of the UK’s R and D was being consumed by the effort to compete with the USA/USSR. Harold Wilson knew this even if others didn’t: he ‘saw clearly what [C.P.] Snow’s scientific humanism could not bear to see: the deeply warlike orientation of English science and technology.’ (p. 85) Despite the creation of the Ministry of Technology (MinTech) — ‘an Industry Ministry of much greater scope than any other in the capitalist world; Japan’s much-vaunted MITI is a minnow by comparison.’ (p. 105) — Wilson failed.
But where did it go wrong? In his conclusion he attacks ‘the declinists’, whose theories are nothing more than ‘stories left over from the 19th century’. Yes, but he hasn’t answered how it is that the technological nation of the 1950s and 60s he describes had so little influence that it was unable to prevent both the Heath and Thatcher governments from deregulating the City of London — and wrecking the manufacturing economy. Or, more interestingly perhaps, how it was that the Tories persuaded the manufacturing turkeys to repeatedly vote for Christmas…
RR