Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance (review)

This volume is a collection of essays presented to Barry Supple, the distinguished economic historian who is now director of the Leverhulme Trust in London. A rarity among Festschriften, Understanding Decline sticks to a theme—British economic decline as a problem of perception as well as reality. The challenge was laid down in Supple’s 1993 presidential address to the Economic History Society, “Fear of Failing,” reproduced here as the first chapter. For more than a century, Supple noted, British political debate has been dominated by the assumption that the country was either on the verge, or in the midst, of severe economic decline, when the reality has been that things “are going from not so bad to something somewhat better” (8). How can this discrepancy be understood?

Several of the contributors elaborate and extend Supple’s paradox. Donald Winch shows that this rhetorical tendency goes at least as far back as the eighteenth century, quoting Adam Smith’s complaint that “five years have seldom passed away in which some book or pamphlet has not been published . . . pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of the nation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated, agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade undone” (30). Scrolling forward to the twentieth century, a half dozen chapters join the chorus, demonstrating that reports of Britain’s decline have been greatly exaggerated. Jay Winter compares London with Paris and Berlin during the years 1870 to 1930, finding little sign of deterioration. Trebilcock looks at the insurance industry during the interwar period, reporting resilience and responsiveness, not rigidity and failure. In separate essays, Clarke and José Harris debunk the notion that John Maynard Keynes, William Henry Beveridge, and the New Jerusalem programs of the 1940s can be blamed for poor economic performance in the postwar era. Similarly, Charles Feinstein and Tony Hopkins demonstrate that the loss of empire in the 1950s and 1960s—a development linked to decline in the popular perception—was in no way a burden on the economy, and may indeed have contributed to the robust growth experienced between 1950 and 1973.

The most vivid amplification of the Supple thesis is a brilliant piece by David Cannadine, who compares the careers of three twentieth-century political leaders—Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher—all of whom devoted themselves to reversing what they saw as long-term national decline, morally as well as economically. All three defined the issues in terms of willpower, firmness, and national resolution, and all saw their careers as failures on this score. Indeed, they were doomed to failure, Cannadine argues, given the disjuncture between their moralistic interpretations of national problems and the harsh objective realities of the nation’s economic situation. Yet, clearly their political rhetoric resonated with large segments of public opinion.

A few of the authors do not seem to get with the Supple program, persisting in their analyses of the real causes of decline. Simon Szreter calls attention to a paradoxical inverse historical relationship between the apparent pace of economic growth and broadly based improvements in the living standards of the population. Szreter indicts the nation’s inadequate investment in human resources, in his view a policy essential to sustaining growth in the future. The rigidity of the British educational system is also part of Bernard Alford’s critique of the Atlee administration (1945–1951) in its “failure to grasp the opportunities for economic and institutional change and reform. . . . This failure was to prove critical in comparative economic performance in the second half of the twentieth century” (208). What is this? If decline is mainly a figment of the imagination, why then do we need these retrospective evaluations of policy? These lapses surely constitute ringing confirmation of Supple’s argument, that the British just cannot stop talking about decline.

It was never Supple’s intention to repress research on British economic performance, only to insist that the explicandum be kept in proper perspective. But...