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  • Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970
  • Barton C. Hacker (bio)
Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970. By David Edgerton . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xv+364. $32.99.

President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address controversially warned Americans about the dangers of a military-industrial complex and the unwarranted influence of technical experts in policymaking. Later, historians joined social scientists in raising questions about the historical interaction of science, technology, industry, and warfare. They could frame such questions in several ways, and how they chose to do so goes a long way toward explaining the answers they found. Initially, they posed two very restricted questions, both focused primarily on World War II and after: How did manufacturers persuade military authorities to provide the virtually unlimited and lightly supervised funding that made defense contractors rich? How did civilian scientists, notably physicists, persuade military authorities to support scientific research so lavishly? Although historians and social scientists have more recently expanded the chronological, geographical, and thematic scope of their investigations, they have not, for the most part, substantially altered their frame of reference. In particular, they have rarely considered the role of military institutions in shaping the military-industrial complex or the state's use of science.

For at least two decades, David Edgerton, the Hans Rausching Professor in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London, has been seeking to put the military into the question, at least as far as Britain is concerned. Although not so identified by Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 looks very much like the capstone of a trilogy, the first two volumes of which are England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (1991) and Science, Technology, and the British Industrial "Decline," 1870–1970 (1996). Contrary to the prevailing version of British history during that century, Edgerton argues that Britain was a highly successful developer of science, technology, and industry. Furthermore, he insists, British success derived largely from the central role that its military institutions played as sponsors, buyers, promoters, and users of the products developed.

Warfare State is mostly a commentary on, and an argument with, the historiography of twentieth-century British science, technology, and industry. Thus, its sources are, for the most part, what has been written about those subjects. The footnotes are extensive—averaging more than 160 per chapter—and they include considerable substantive material as well. This makes the absence of a bibliography seem particularly unfortunate. Economic data appear in numerous figures and tables regarding the arms industry, military expenditures, government scientists, and related matters. The book also includes substantial prosopographical data on government scientists, [End Page 459] variously defined, in five appendixes—all addressed to drawing a picture of the military shaping of British science and industry.

Edgerton has organized his argument in a roughly chronological framework around three major themes: (1) the arms industry and the state; (2) the nature of the state elite, especially the higher civil service; and (3) the interpretations and conceptualizations of the British state, and of British militarism and technocracy. The first thematic area comprises three chapters: chapter 1, on the military-industrial complex during the interwar years; chapter 2, the development of the warfare-welfare state, 1939–55; and chapter 6, concerning the shift to a less militarized technology policy, 1955–70. His second theme, on the expertise of the civil service, includes chapters 3 and 4 on the interwar period and World War II and afterward, respectively. Edgerton rejects the common view of a civil service staffed by generalists to develop a new picture that stresses the central roles of technical experts, arms industrialists, and military officers. He devotes three chapters (5, 7, 8) to his third, essentially historiographic, theme. Here the author examines the ways that post–World War II British historians and social scientists have distorted their accounts of scientific, technical, and industrial development by slighting, omitting, or missing altogether the significance of technical expertise and military concerns. Chapter 8 offers a particularly interesting and wide-ranging review of the existing literature, American as well as British, that systematically removes military institutions or allows them only a special, circumscribed...

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