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1 The Tyranny of History:An Analysis of Britains Decline
John A. Hall
Sources of Greatness
If we are to understand Britains fall from power, it is first necessary to
say something about the character of British pre-eminence. One of the
signal virtues of John Brewers The Sinews of War: War, Money and theEnglish State, 1688-1783 is to remind us that Britains rise to power
depended upon a militarism so pervasive and efficient that, during the long
eighteenth century, it was able to triumph over France, despite the latters
greater population and resources.1 Of course, the sinews of war are
provided by money, and Brewers fundamental contribution is in the fiscal
sociology of the British state. Britain extracted far more in taxes than did
France. This was especially evident during the Napoleonic Wars when the
incidence of taxation rose to 35 per cent of both commodity output and
per capita income, perhaps double the rate imposed in France.2
If there
were as many tax inspectors in Britain as in France, British taxes were
collected by a much smaller bureaucracy, without the exertions of internal
security forces. How was this possible? Did not the absolutism of theseventeenth-and eighteenth-century French state count for anything?
An essay by the distinguished historical sociologist Michael Mann in his
States, War and Capitalism helps us answer these questions.3
The
Autonomous Power of the State usefully distinguishes between the formal
despotic powers of the state and the ability to achieve its will, something
held to be dependent on the infrastructural capacity to actually penetrate
and organise social relations. We can add a gloss to this: a limitation on
the power of the state can enhance its actual strength, essentially because
increased legitimacy allows it to penetrate society more deeply. In fact,
this point is by no means new. Tocqueville was well aware that the British
state was made exceptionally powerful by its being forced, largely because
it possessed a navy rather than a standing army, to co-operate with its
aristocracy rather than to sideline it in a Versailles; differently put: the
British upper classes submitted to high taxation because they felt the state
to be their own.
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline6High incidence of taxation also stands behind the financial revolution of
the late seventeenth century, that is, the founding of the Bank of Englandand the creation of an interest specialising in the trading of money. It was
this interrelated and mutually supportive institutional mix of finance and
militarism which made it possible for Britain to gain Frances colonial
territories in the course of the eighteenth century. It is true that the one
defeat suffered by Britain meant the loss of the American colonies. But
this was largely a blessing in disguise: it led to a successful assault on old
corruption that removed much of the patronage and venality encrusted in
the British state, thereby enabling it to survive the life-and-death struggle
with Napoleonic France. By 1815 British pre-eminence was established
and generally apparent.
A more complete appreciation of the nature of British power depends
upon understanding the changing nature of the British economy. TonyWrigleys important Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of
the Industrial Revolution in Englandserves us well in this respect.4 His
argument draws an analytic distinction between an advanced organic
economy and a mineral-based economy. Eighteenth-century Britain is the
outstanding example of the former: its economy was highly
commercialised, and its remarkable level of urbanisation rested upon the
extraordinary productivity of those who worked in agriculture. It is
important to note in passing that taxation was high in eighteenth-century
Britain, in part because it was easier to extract resources from a
commercial economy than from one based on peasant agricultural
production; differently put, if the organic nature of the British polity
ensured consent in tax gathering, the other factor of high tax incidence was
the existence of an already commercialised economy. Nonetheless,
economic advance was strictly limited, as contemporaries such as Adam
Smith insistently emphasised, by the fact that all energy sources had an
organic base, most notably fodder and timber. In contrast, the widespread
use of mineral energy allows for sustained growth; it forms the basis of a
genuine revolution in human affairs.
All this makes it absolutely clear that there is no automatic transition
between the establishment of capitalism and the first creation of an
industrial society. The presence of an organic state may well be necessary
for the first emergence of commercial society; thus Adam Smith may have
been right to speak of a necessary connection between liberty and
commerce, and Weber of England as the cradle of capitalism.5
But
capitalism represents no long-term change in human destinies unless it canbase itself on the use of minerals for energy. This point is illustrated most
effectively by the decline of the Dutch Republic. This decline of a society
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John A. Hall 7
which clearly provided a suitable shell for capitalism resulted from the
exhaustion of peat, the energy base upon which the Dutch miracle hadflourished - and not, as some of the more extravagant theorists of
hegemony would have it, from having taken the leading role for capitalist
society.6
In contrast, a sustained industrial revolution was possible in
Britain because of the presence of very extensive coal stocks.
The industrial revolution gave an enormous boost to Britains position
in the world. Most strikingly, that huge increase in collective power
enabled Britain to handle a national debt which had reached crippling
proportions by the end of the Napoleonic Wars; Gladstonian retrenchment
was made possible by sustained economic growth. Equally importantly,
the industrial revolution led to Britain taking on, so to speak, a certain
camouflage, losing its militarist/mercantilist trappings and adopting,
sometimes very na vely, the language of liberalism. British industry hadsuch a technological lead that it became very clearly in its interest to
accept, and very occasionally to actively press for, free trade. Nonetheless,
a general appreciation of the importance of the coming of industry should
not blind us to the fact that the British economy, even in the middle of its
nineteenth-century climacteric, remained solidly dominated by financial
rather than industrial interests. Britain never balanced its current account
by means of the export of manufactures alone; profits derived from the
myriad activities that took place within the boundaries of the City of
London - the foreign exchange and money markets, insurance, the
financing of trade, and foreign investment - were always crucial to British
prosperity.
Decline, Inevitable and Self-inflicted
The analytic category of decline is poorly understood and
conceptualised.7
The most important point to be made initially about it is
that much decline within capitalist society is normal. The centre of
capitalist society has never remained in the same place for long and this
fact, the result of comparative advantage and the advantages of
backwardness (that is, the ability to apply the most up-to-date equipment
and methods when development does take place), suggests that Britain was
bound to lose its dominant role. It is worth noting in this context that
Britains eighteenth-century capitalist lead was based on advantages
difficult to copy elsewhere, such as a marked awareness of Malthusianfactors, extreme individualism, an elaborate apprenticeship system, and a
basic welfare system.8
In contrast, Britains advantage as pioneer of
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline8industrial capitalism was not sustained for long, as this mode of
production proved to be very easily imitable.The diffusion of techniques and practices throughout capitalist society
inevitably creates relative decline. This is no calamity: the growth path of
the most advanced state can remain strong and its economy healthy even
as its share of total world product diminishes. The British economy was, in
most respects, prospering in precisely this way before the First World
War.9
If Britain performed poorly in some new industries, it distinctly
dominated others - most notably, leisure, soap and biscuits; nor was
performance in innovation unalterably poor, as was most strikingly
demonstrated by the extremely successful creation of a chemical industry
during the First World War. Similarly, very careful analysis does not
indicate that the export of capital in this period was of such proportions as
to undermine British competitiveness, especially since recent scholarshipshows that far more of those exports than had been previously thought
were accounted for by direct, rather than portfolio, investment.
Furthermore, the British education system, despite blind spots, was more
responsive to the needs of a modern technological society than has hitherto
been realised; this has not been appreciated because various rigidities of
the German statist system, with which it is rather glibly compared, were
ignored and the extent of educational provision in Britain outside the state
sector was underestimated.
Despite all this, we need to conceptualise decline which is not inevitable,
relative and normal but rather unnecessary and self-inflicted. If Britain had
to fall, did it have to fall so very far? France and Germany were always
likely to gain after the Second World War since a proportionately larger
agricultural workforce together with less industrial concentration ensured
that they would have a higher growth path.10
But did they have to overtake
Britain quite so much? In order to try to answer this question we need to
consider, beyond the diffusion of practices within capitalism, some topics
in geopolitics and social organisation.
Decline can result from geopolitical exhaustion. This can be quite as
much a factor beyond national control as is the diffusion of practices
throughout capitalism: it can be natural rather than self-inflicted. This is
strikingly true of British history. Geopolitical exhaustion played a decisive
role in decline. Britain was faced in the modern world by Germany, a
geopolitical rival beyond appeasement. The waging of two world wars
resulted in the loss of external balances and inability in l945 to protect
itself against Americas almost brutal insistence on becoming the worldsleader.
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John A. Hall 9
Equally, however, geopolitical exhaustion can be, so to speak, self-
inflicted: over-extension can be so great as to undermine the economy.This diagnosis should not be applied lightly to the British case. Before
1914 the burden of defence on British taxpayers - measured as a
proportion of net national income - was smaller than it was on those of
France, Germany and Russia, and this despite the fact that British
expenditure had to provide protection for the empire as well!11
This
powerfully suggests that the Pax Britannica so dear to theorists of
hegemonic stability is a myth: Britain had an economic lead, but was never
in a position to impose its will on other powers within capitalism. The long
peace of the nineteenth century resulted from the ending of the struggles
between France and Britain and the successful maintenance of the balance
of power - and not from any hegemonic leadership supplied by Britain.
But these reservations should not obscure an imperial component inBritish decline. It is important to identify that component precisely. The
move from an empire of free trade to the formal acquisition of territories in
the late nineteenth century did come to affect the British economy, though
barely perceptibly before 1914. Thereafter, nationalist demands turned the
empire into a veritable millstone around the neck of Britains prosperity. In
the inter-war years it became costly, drained away talent and prevented the
metropolis from giving sufficient attention to the European theatre. And
that was not the end of its impact. It was a legacy of pre-eminence that
much of Britains decline occurred as the result of trading in easy imperial
markets - albeit this direction of trade became virtually an imperative in
l945 because of the need to repay sterling balances to the Commonwealth.
The effect of this pattern was exceptionally deleterious: Britain did not
fully participate in the more competitive, higher-technology markets of
Europe, and was thereby foredoomed to a lower growth rate than those of
the continental European states.12
But more striking than this is the self-inflicted damage caused by social
sclerosis. Mancur Olson has interestingly argued that states find it hard to
adapt continually because over time their societies come to control them;
differently put: nation states tend to institutionalise their moments of
success.13
It is this type of decline that, quite understandably, has been at
the centre of attention of modern British scholars. Let us then look at their
analyses of social stagnation, and of the inability of the British state to
reverse it.
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline10Locating the Guilty Party
Michael Manns essay on The Decline of Great Britain is representative
of a striking view, widely shared by many British scholars, both in
identifying three culprits - the unions, the aristocratic embrace and the City
- and in considering the last to have been far more influential than the
others.14
But before we look at each in turn, something must be said about
the concept of responsibility. The most useful sense of this word is the
neutral one, that is, that which establishes which social force or group
caused stagnation or limited the capacity of the state to modernise at any
particular moment - to accept this meaning is, of course, to recognise that
excessive and self-inflicted decline is in a sense as normal as is relative
decline. But responsibility also implies that things might have been
different; it would be idle to deny that this usage of the word isoccasionally present in what follows.
The best way of approaching an assessment of the British working class
is by means of a recent finding of contemporary sociologists of the state,
namely, that working-class political consciousness results more from
political oppression than from the logic of the capitalist mode of
production per se.15
Thus the presence of citizenship rights for most adult
white males in the USA from the 1830s explains the absence of socialism
in the United States - which is not, of course, to deny that fierce fights took
place at the industrial level. In contrast, tsarist autocracy managed,
incredibly, to turn its workers into genuine revolutionaries - perhaps the
only occasion in history when this has been achieved. The British case
stands fairly close to that of the USA, insofar as the state was at most
times liberal. But it was not always, and citizenship rights had to be fought
for during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fight
lent the British working class a sense of identity: conflict was not visceral
enough to create Marxist class consciousness, but a distinctive sense of
class identity and loyalty did emerge.16 The British working class became
an estate of the Realm, securely possessed of its own culture: it kept
pigeons, gambled, went to the pub and, to the despair of its leaders,
preferred football matches to political meetings. A single image can
cement the point. Where a Kautsky sat in cafs dreaming up theoretical
schemes of great complexity, Arthur Henderson, the organisational
dynamo of the early Labour Party, was otherwise engaged: he was an
expert player of lawn bowls, helped found Newcastle United Football
Club, and was a Methodist lay preacher.It is certainly true that by the late 1960s trade-union liberties had
become powerful enough to defeat various statist plans for modernisation.
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John A. Hall 11
Trade-union power played a very large role in destroying Wilsons 1966-
70 government as well as those of Heath and Callaghan. Further negativepoints need to be noted. We know from Edward Thompson that the
English working class was made prior to industrialisation; importantly, it
was thereafter in opposition to that new industrial world.17
This stands in
great contrast to, say, the Swedish working class whose birth in and of
industrialisation made it naturally concerned for the health of the new
economy. Another consequence of early institutionalisation is a myriad of
unions, often at war with each other in various boundary disputes; this,
too, has negatively affected economic life, making it especially hard to
establish secure corporatist arrangements.
Nonetheless, there are good reasons for scepticism towards the view
that British economic decline results from the militancy of the working
class. Firstly, a series of studies have suggested that low productivity ofBritish workers may have more to do with low investment than with
resistance to change. In particular, where levels of investment have
equalled those for European workers, productivity has been similar; at the
present time, Japanese companies apparently find British workers to be the
most productive within Europe.18
Secondly, and much more importantly,
the British working class has notalways opposed plans for modernisation.
What is notable about the union leadership of the first twenty or so years
after 1945 was the deference it showed to the political elite. Militancy
came in response to economic failure, which it then exacerbated; but it was
not the prime mover.
The second thesis about decline concerns the aristocratic embrace. It
has been most strikingly articulated by Martin Wiener in English Culture
and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit.19 Early Victorian Britain
benefited, in this view, from a puritanical, bourgeois and industrial culture
which was slowly swallowed up by the embrace of an aristocracy devoted
to finer things than mere production: the world of Isambard Brunel is held
to have fallen before that of William Morris and Laura Ashley. This thesis
was enthusiastically endorsed by leading Conservative politicians over the
last decade, not least by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
This second thesis deserves to be handled with as much scepticism as
the last. It tends to be based on literary evidence showing scorn for the
crass materialism of industrial pursuits. But such literary and aesthetic
scorn was not confined to Great Britain - indeed it was something of a
European staple, as Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks so clearly
demonstrates. Equally importantly, W.D. Rubinstein has now providedsufficient information about British men of wealth to make it possible to
completely dispel the image of sons of businessmen retreating to the
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline12countryside.
20Almost uniformly, industrial entrepreneurs have been far
less wealthy than those with landed wealth and those who work in the City.The decision to avoid British industry makes perfect sense in the most
economistic terms, once we realise that the real money has always been
found in the City. The theory of the aristocratic embrace, especially in this
form, is not much help in understanding British decline.
The final theory concerns the importance for British economic life of the
City of London. This theory received an early and brilliant formulation
from Susan Strange, and it has recently been usefully extended by
Geoffrey Ingham.21 The subtleties of the Strange/Ingham thesis of the
autonomous but convergent interests of the Holy Trinity of Bank of
England, City of London and Treasury cannot be fully captured in this
limited space, but three ways in which the power of finance has proved
deleterious to Britains industrial sector can be distinguished.The organisation of the City has been such, firstly, that British industry
has not benefited from intensive capital investment. An interesting example
of this can be seen in a company started in the Edwardian years by Fred
Hopper.22
This enterprise sucessfully expanded from bicycles to motor
bicycles and eventually to cycle cars, and it had a flourishing export
component. Nonetheless, its potential growth into car production was
stymied by such a lack of capital that the firm was eventually forced into
liquidation. It is crucial to remember that the City makes profits trading in
money and in shares - that is, its profits do not derive from involvement
with productive enterprise, as is famously the case in Germany and Japan.
At first glance, it might seem as if the Citys involvement with British
industry in the 1930s stands as an exception to this generalisation. This is
not so: the merger boom of the time made large profits for financiers, but it
was not accompanied by any fundamental restructuring or rationalisation
of industry.23
Secondly, the City has always insisted that a stable, high exchange rate
is necessary for its proper functioning. The classic instance of this is, of
course, the return to the Gold Standard in 1925. Probably more important
still were those stop-go policies of the post-war decades, when
government-led expansion would be followed by sharp retraction in order
to protect over-valued sterling. The effect of these policies was simple:
British goods were priced out of world markets - an experience that
became familiar to Americans when the dollar was especially strong in the
early Reagan years. This clearly represents self-inflicted rather than
merely unavoidable relative decline; for it was in the post-war decades thatBritains growth rate, by no means bad in comparison to its own history,
noticeably diverged from those of its European competitors.
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John A. Hall 13
Finally, the City has insisted quite as much upon the necessity of
freedom from regulation. This has meant that few attempts have beenmade at an industrial policy - certainly no long-term planning, even of an
indicative type, has really ever been properly tried in Britain. Laissez-faire
has ruled.
This radical re-interpretation of British history lies at the core of much
recent British scholarship. The historians Scott Newton and Dilwyn Porter
in Modernisation Frustrated: The Politics of Industrial Decline in
Great Britain since 1900 chronicle the many occasions on which
industrial initiatives were blocked by financial interests.24 But even more
impressive is sociologist Christel Lanes Management and Labour in
Europe: The Industrial Enterprise in Germany, Britain and France, a
detailed account of the micro workings of the contemporary British
economy.
25
The picture painted by Lane of the British economy is dire in the
extreme. In Germany, very high levels of training for workers, as well as
the integrated decision-making style, result from the fact that redundancies
are hard to effect, given laws requiring long warnings of closure and
generous compensation: skill and flexibility in the work-force derives from
a background consensus that all are members of a common enterprise. An
equivalent awareness that the granting of a measure of power to the social
partner may increase ones own strength, is not apparent in Britain: there
is no incentive to train a labour force which can be easily laid off and that
in turn encourages a management style based on direction rather than
consensus. All in all, the greatest failure of contemporary Britain seems to
be the inability to incorporate ordinary working people into any sort of
social consensus. Lanes portrait of the managerial cadre is quite as
depressing: compared with their German counterparts, British managers
are poorly trained, heavy-handed and still massively suffering from the
myriad of complexes induced by attendance at public schools.
Up to this point, it might seem as if Lanes analysis endorses the above
identification of the first two of the guilty parties, and that British banks
are right not to invest in British industry given the poor rates of return to
be expected. The burden of her analysis, however, is precisely that the
dominance of finance over industry accounts for the micro-behaviour
described. Where German banks long-term interest in market share
encourages the deepening of human capital at every level, the prevalence
of take-overs in Britain, with the consequent emphasis on the yearly
declaration of high dividends, makes it rational not to develop particularskills.
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline14Two clarifications to this dominant interpretation of British decline can
make it still stronger. On the one hand, we have seen that the Britishworking class by the l960s had indeed become an obstacle to industrial
renewal, even though decline could not be laid at its door; similarly,
British management is, as argued, notoriously inefficient, although that is,
as noted, largely the result of the division within British capitalism. On the
other hand, concentration on the role of financial interests can imprint on
this theory an instrumentalist, even conspiratorial character. The small
numbers of people involved in the workings of the City, the Treasury and
the Bank of England, their interlinking and overlapping in their social
world, are of a nature to make a conspiracy theory, for once, extremely
plausible. Nonetheless, it is necessary to go beyond such instrumentalism.
The instincts of the British ruling elite were often vital of consequence,
that is, state actors autonomously acting on them sometimes determinedkey political outcomes. The famous bonfire of controls that brought the
wartime planned economy to an end in 1948 was lit by politicians;
similarly, Wilsons refusal to devalue sterling in l964 was very much due
to his own obsession with prestige.26
More recently, the autonomy of the
state elite was seen in the very public refusal of Margaret Thatcher to
accept the advice of Gordon Richardson when Governor of the Bank of
England. To generalise bluntly about the character of this elite: it was at
once obsessed with great-power status and utterly complacent - as is
apparent in Anthony Powells great novel seriesA Dance to the Music of
Time, a fictional sociology of the elite. Perhaps this should not be
surprising. Winning wars leads to satisfaction with ones basic
institutions, to the belief that things are basically on track - an attitude,
incidentally, which explains the predominance of history over social
science in British intellectual life.
The fact that the political elite was not under absolute constraint returns
us to the question of responsibility. It seems fair to consider that at some
point in the post-war period the British political elite was responsible in
the fullest sense - that is, that rather than being merely the key agent, it
was also morally culpable. There is a certain rationality in hankering after
great-power status; but to allow 50 per cent of government research and
development money to be spent on military affairs in the 1980s is
altogether different - sheer madness.27 Tout comprendre, in this matter,
should not be tout pardonner.
If the emphasis consistently placed here on elite behaviour is scarcely
novel, it is unusual in contemporary social science. Attention shouldtherefore be drawn to one rather uncommon presupposition used in this
interpretation. Most theorists of society suggest that socio-economic
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John A. Hall 15
change is somehow more structural, works at a deeper level than the set of
social and political institutions which are presumed to exist somehow onthe surface of things. This is wrong. The argument here has been that pre-
industrial legacies matter. If Freud has justly been criticised by feminists
for insisting that biology is destiny, insufficient attention in contemporary
social science is given to the far more meritorious view that history is
destiny. This is certainly true of the differential formation of national
working classes. But this insight applies much more generally to Britain,
whose key social institutions, as we have taken care to note, were formed
prior to industrialisation. More particularly, by 1715 Britain had
developed that expertise in military and financial matters which remains
very largely intact today. In a sense, industrial decline should scarcely
surprise us: Britain was always a commercial rather than an industrial
society.Recently Mancur Olson has applied his theory of sclerosis to British
society in an analysis that suggests that Britain may be about to recover
because the organised working class has been disciplined.28
I am generally
much more sceptical than this highly representative American voice, of the
weight of the British labour movement as a whole. But what is most
striking about Olsons analysis is that he fails to understand which social
institutions really command British society. Much more radical changes
would be needed to upset the British pattern as a whole.
Is Britain Back?
An objection might be raised against this whole interpretation of British
history. Has not everything now changed? Certainly Margaret Thatcher
has claimed and continues to claim that the revolution associated with her
name has reversed British decline; in this matter, despite all their other
differences, John Major echoes his former leader. Should we accept the
claim that Britain is back? Extreme suspicion should be shown to this
claim - which is not to say, as we shall see, that fundamental structural
change may not now affect Britain.
Thatcher was essentially a reactive rather than a creative politician, a
Churchill rather than a Lloyd George. She was a good hater. Formally,
monetarism, the central doctrine of the Thatcherite revolution, absolves the
working class from responsibility for key economic decisions; but that
theory is best seen as a cover behind which the British working class was
disciplined, that is, unemployment was deliberately used as a political
weapon. Hostility was also shown to the aristocratic embrace. Significant
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline16changes have been made, and the newly-monied have done rather well. On
the other hand, however, the boldest plans for doctors and lawyers,designed to bring competitive pricing into the Health Service and to
destroy the restrictive practices that give British barristers their raison
dtre, have had to be substantially modified in the face of corporate
pressure. Putting aside these points, however, it must be recognised that
the Thatcher governments - entirely meritoriously - made it absolutely
clear that Britains success depends upon the extent to which it can survive
within the international market.
If these are significant achievements, they do not amount to renewal.
Consider first some facts. It is only a matter of months since much was
made of the improved growth rate of the British economy during the
1980s. It is, of course, true that a continuation of that rate would, albeit
only over a period of thirty years or so, restore Britain to the first tier ofEuropean economies. As it stands, however, the improvement amounted to
little. The economy suffered absolute decline between 1979 and 1984;
significantly behind this decline lay not just that fall in GDP derived from
manufactures which was common to other advanced industrial nations, but
an absolute shrinking of manufacturing capacity. Furthermore, the growth
rates of the 1980s appear much less impressive once it is realised that they
were calculated from the low base of 1981, that is, after the economy had
already shrunk. It is equally important to remember that the actual
productive power that the British economy had in 1979 was only regained
in l985. In any case, the British economy has, since, once again started to
look extremely fragile: growth has disappeared, placing Britain again at
the bottom of the European league. It is already becoming apparent that
the Thatcherite experiment depended on revenues from North Sea oil
which allowed welfare payments for unemployment - whose rise was the
real reason for the putative increase in worker productivity - as well as tax
cuts. As those revenues continue to decline, trouble looks increasingly
likely.
It is doubtful that any sort of Thatcherite programme could lead to
industrial renewal. The formula for success within capitalist society seems
to be that a national society needs to be organised by its state if it is to
swim in the wider sea of capitalist society. This statement should not be
misunderstood. No advocacy is here being made or implied for industrial
planning behind tariff walls. Whatever the needs of infant industries,
nationalisation and protection of basic industries tends to lead to
stagnation, and to noticeable distortions of the political process.29 Such apolicy is particularly undesirable in Britain, given the lack of industrial
training of the Civil Service - a factor which the British Left has singularly
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John A. Hall 17
failed to address. Nor is any particular advocacy for incomes policies or
indeed for corporatism intended. The shrinking of the manual workingclass in all late-industrial economies means that the need to incorporate
and control trade unions is much diminished: much more can now be left
to the workings of the market. Nonetheless, successful economies are those
where states make their citizens, mostly through high standards of
education, capable of responding flexibly to international economic
change.30
In contrast, the mere disciplining of British workers, the return
to a nineteenth-century situation, is not likely to produce human material
able to work with the high technology of the late-industrial age. Successful
national economies within capitalist societies are backed by states which
organise, even when they do not plan: they stand far removed from the
Thatcherite insistence that the state wither away.
The political troubles of the British economy have often been enshrinedin the following paradigm. One of the two major parties is interested in
profit, but from commerce rather than from industry; the other major party
is concerned with industry, but it hardly understands the need for profits
entailed in capitalism. Despite much sound and fury, little has changed:
currently there is no programme likely to regenerate Britain, and the most
logical prognostication remains that of continued decline.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the pattern of British politics is
perhaps now more fluid than it has been for 250 years. Increased economic
integration with Europe from 1992 may well, given both Britains lack of
preparation and the character of European Community institutions,
severely hurt the British economy initially. But deeper involvement with
Europe may have more serious consequences for key British institutions. It
is unlikely that the European Community will want to so order its economy
as to allow the constant threat of take-overs to disrupt its characteristic
pattern of industrial life: most European states look set to continue their
privileging of industry as against finance. The traditional British
preference for an unrestricted equity market is likely to be severely
curtailed by its European partners. All in all, the British system of
institutions may be disrupted far more fundamentally by Europe than it
was by Margaret Thatcher.
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline18
Notes
1 New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989.
2 Brewer makes this point at p. 89. He is drawing here on two important
recent studies: Michel Morineau, Les budgets dEtat et gestion des finances
royales en France au dix-huitime sicle, Revue Historique 536, Number 2,
1980, pp. 289-336 and Peter Mathias and Patrick OBrien, Taxation in
England and France, 1715-1870. A Comparison of the Social and Economic
Incidence of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments, Journal of
European Economic History 5, Number 3, 1976, pp. 601-50.3 Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State, in States, War and
Capitalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 1-32.
4 New York and Cambridge, England, 1988. This book can usefully be readtogether with a recent collection of Wrigleys essays, People, Cities and
Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987.5 Alan MacFarlane, The Cradle of Capitalism - The Case of England, in
Jean Baechler, John A. Hall and Michael Mann, eds., Europe and the Rise
of Capitalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 185-203.6 Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; George Modelski, The Long
Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation State, Comparative Studies in
Society and History 20, Number 2, 1978, pp. 214-38.7 Interesting comments made by Mann in The Decline of Great Britain,
States, War and Capitalism, pp. 210-37, lie at the back of the (amended)
distinctions drawn here.
8 E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, Chapter Four, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988.
9 This paragraph draws heavily on Sidney Pollards Britains Prime and
Britains Decline: The British Economy 1870-1914, London: Edward
Arnold, 1989.10 Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in
Britain and France, New York: Oxford University Press, l986, p. 27.11 John A. Hall, The Weary Titan? Arms and Empire, 1870-1913, in
Coercion and Consent, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.12 Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51, London:
Methuen, l984.13 Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982.14 Michael Mann, The Decline of Great Britain; Perry Anderson, The
Figures of Descent,New Left Review, Number 161, January-February 1987,
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The Tyranny of History: An Analysis of Britains Decline20
Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty, Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1978, pp. 89-138.
27 Sir John Kingman, Science and the Public Purse, Government and
Opposition 21, Number l, 1986 pp. 3-16.28 Mancur Olson, Is Britain the Wave of the Future? How Ideas Affect
Societies, in Mann, The Rise and Decline of the Nation State, Yale
University Press, 1982, pp. 91-113.29 See, for example, the superb analysis in Carlos Waisman, Reversal of
Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Politics and
Their Structural Consequences, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
l987.30 This view underlies Lane,Management and Labour. Cf. Peter Katzenstein,
Small States in World Markets, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, l985;
Linda Weiss, Creating Capitalism: Small Business and the State since
l945, New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l988; Ron Dore, StructuralRigidities: Industrial Policy and Structural Adjustment in the Japanese
Economy, 1970-80, London: Athlone Press, l986.