Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116311 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 408 pages

Customer Reviews

Useful study of recent British history
Francesca Carnevali, of Birmingham University, and Julie-Marie Strange, of Manchester University, have edited this collection of 23 essays. Its contributors are mainly from British universities, although there are also historians from Canada, Australia, France and Ireland.

Part One, on the whole century, includes essays on the British economy; modernity and modernism; class and gender; Britain's changing position in the international economy; and war and national identity since 1914. Part Two studies themes pre-1945 - suffrage and citizenship; motoring and modernity; the First World War and its aftermath; depression and recovery; consumption, consumer credit and the diffusion of consumer durables; the role of the state: taxation, citizenship and welfare reforms; leisure; and youth.

Part Three examines themes post-1945 - managing the economy, managing the people; immigration, multiculturalism and racism; the retreat of the state in the 1980s and 1990s; trade unions' rise and decline; sexuality; poverty and social exclusion; religion and `secularization'; Britain and Europe; and education and opportunity.

The book includes some fascinating essays, but unfortunately nothing on engineering or science. The essays on our economy pre- and post-1945 are particularly useful. Christopher Price, Lecturer in Economic History at Liverpool University, shows how Britain's economy grew by 3% a year after we ended free trade in 1931 by introducing a 10% tariff (raised to 20% in 1932). Keynes had pointed out that monetary policy, for example cutting interest rates to zero, was useless in a slump. We needed to increase demand for goods and services, for instance by raising wages and investing in useful projects.

Jim Tomlinson, Professor of Modern History at Dundee University, writes, "In the 1950s ..., and for most of the 1960s, the balance of payments problem was not (as government propaganda suggested) that Britain could not sell enough abroad to pay for its imports at a full-employment level of output. Rather, the problem lay elsewhere, with the ambition of successive British governments to have a large enough surplus of exports over imports to finance the significant proportion of `defence' spending sent overseas, and in addition to allow large-scale overseas investment. It was these expenditures, plus the vulnerability of the pound to periodic crises of confidence, due to its role as an international currency, that led to the frequency of balance of payments crises. It was not, to repeat, mainly due to some fundamental problems in British international competitiveness." Then as now, overseas military spending, foreign investment and an overvalued pound harmed Britain's economy.