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The Decline of Declinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

David Edgerton
David Edgerton
Affiliation:
David Edgerton is Head of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and Reader in the History of Technology at Imperial College, London.
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Extract

The “de-industrialization” of Britain since the 1970s and the emergence of a negative balance of payments in manufacturing in the early 1980s have provided a receptive context for accounts of failure in British business and the British economy. We have political economies of decline;2 powerful polemics against the British elite; and a range of historical explanations of the decline of industries and firms. Although the agenda for much British business history is still dominated by the issue of “decline” it is clear that the whole issue needs clarification. First and foremost much discussion of decline relies on a failure to be clear about the difference between absolute and relative decline, a failure to differentiate between relative decline and “doing badly,” and on faulty and partial international comparisons. Hannah is rightly worried by a brand of history which “explains an outcome which never happened…by a cause that is equally imagined.”

Type
Essays
Information
Business History Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 201 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1997

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References

1 Rowthorn, R. E. and Wells, J. R., De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar suggests that de-industrialization had little to do with industrial performance, and a great deal to do with the changing composition and destination of British trade in goods.

2 Newton, Scott and Porter, Dilwyn, Modernisation Frustrated: The Politics of Industrial Decline in Britain since 1900 (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Coates, David, The Question of U.K. Decline: State, Society and Economy (London, 1994).Google Scholar

3 Correlli Barnett's trilogy stands out. It consists of The Collapse of British Power (London, 1972), The Audit of War (1986), and The Lost Victory (1995). For critical reviews of Audit of War see Harris, Jose, “Enterprise and Welfare States: A Comparative Perspective,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 40 (1990): 175–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edgerton, David, “The Prophet Militant and Industrial: The Peculiarities of Correlli Barnett,” Twentieth Century British History 2 (1991): 360–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Lost Victory see Martin Chick in Twentieth Century British History 7 (1996): 399–403, David Edgerton, “Declinism,” London Review of Books (7 March 1996), and Tomlinson, Jim, “Correlli Barnett's History: The Case of Marshall Aid,” Twentieth Century British History 8 (1997): 222–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a general critique of the “cultural critique” see Collins, Bruce and Robbins, Keith, eds., British Culture and Economic Decline (London, 1990).Google Scholar

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5 As can he seen in the most recent textbook: Wilson, John, British Business History 1720–1994 (Manchester, 1995).Google Scholar

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10 For a general survey see Crafts, Nick, Britain's Relative Economic Decline, 1870–1995: A Quantitative Perspective (London, 1997)Google Scholar; Broadberry, S. N. and Crafts, N. F. R., “Explaining Anglo-American Productivity Differences in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 52 (1990): 375–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Broadberry, S. N. and Fremdling, R., “Comparative Productivity in British and German Industry 1907–37,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 52 (1990): 403–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Broadberry, S. N., “Manufacturing and the Convergence Hypothesis: What the Long-Run Data Show,” Journal of Economic History 53 (1993): 772–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maddison, Angus, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Van Ark, B., “Comparative Levels of Labour Productivity in Postwar Europe: Some Evidence for Manufacturing,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 52 (1990): 343–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13 Leslie Hannah, “Delusions of Durable Dominance, Or The Invisible Hand Strikes Back: A Critique of the New Orthodoxy in Internationally Comparative Business History,” (mimeo).

14 Hannah, Leslie, “The American Miracle, 1875–1950, and After: A View in the European Mirror,” Business and Economic History 24 (1995): 204–5.Google Scholar

15 For revisionist accounts see: Edgerton, David, Science, Technology and the British Industrial “Decline” 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Hannah, “Delusions of Dominance;” Broadberry, S. N. and Wagner, K., “Human Capital and Productivity in Manufacturing during The Twentieth Century: Britain, Germany and the United States,” in Quantitative Aspects of Postwar European Growth, ed. van Ark, B. and Crafts, N. F. R. (Cambridge, 1995).Google Scholar

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17 Jonathan Zeitlin, Between Flexibility and Mass Production: Strategic Debate and Industrial Reorganization in British Engineering, 1830–1990 (forthcoming).

18 Lazonick, William, “Industrial Organization and Technological Change: The Decline of the British Cotton Industry,” Business History Review 57 (1983): 195–236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar