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Empire and Other Costly Dreams
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13233 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1987 |
3,373 Words |
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Dennis J. O'Keeffe
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THE PRIDE AND THE FALL
The Dream and Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation
Correlli Barnett
New York: The Free Press, 1987
359 pp., $22.95
The leading British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has produced a familiar thesis, albeit here amply documented, and both elegantly and forcefully argued. This time Barnett is talking about economic history and education. The British economy has declined in the twentieth century because British society gives insufficient attention to the imperatives of science, technology, and innovation. There is a sort of anti-practical, anti-industrial ethic in British life. This is true not only of the educated and managerial classes, but also, and indeed especially, of the educational system at all levels. Barnett shows in detail the British neglect of modern engineering and business methods. Compared to the economies of her competitors, so Barnett alleges, the economy of Great Britain picks up the latest productive thought and adaptations only with painful slowness, fundamentally because the labor force is insufficiently trained. The people are obliged, therefore, to live unjustifiably restricted lives, way below the level of affluence and economic freedom that could be achieved.
The origin of the malaise goes back to Victorian do-goodism and moralistic posturing. Barnett quotes the influential ninetieth-century romantic John Ruskin, who held that university education should attune young men to "the perfect exercise and knightly continence of their bodies and souls." He finds a similar indifference to material and economic questions in the life and work of the socialist William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of his death in 1944. Temple was a classical scholar with virtually no knowledge of the real world.
Above all, these men - and they were typical of upper-class Britons for a century or more - were deeply convinced that they knew what was good for other men. Such attitudes were expressed internationally in the folly of empire - that insatiable guzzler of resources that could otherwise have been invested at home. Domestically, such conceits worked their harm through the dissemination of stuffily and effectively anticapitalist values, which eroded the spirit of initiative, innovation and risk taking that in the early decades of the nineteenth century had made Britain the world's workshop. The Victorian period was in fact an unhappy watershed, a time when the admirable successes of the first Industrial Revolution were gratuitously reversed.
A long period of complacency set in during the late nineteenth century. Coal is a good case. Compared to its foreign rivals, the British coal industry was primitive in 1914 and its drastic undercapitalization remained until very recent times. Much the same was true of the steel industry, which in the first half of the twentieth century was decades behind its American and German rivals. And what was true of coal and steel was true of much of the nation's economic life. It is as if the legacy of an earlier period of preeminence was to be a many-faceted sloth from which the British have never since extricated themselves. The British have, as it were, a radically misconceived notion of themselves, one constantly projected by their senior decision makers and opinion
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