'Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain...Youwill not find a better informed history'David Goodhart,Evening Standard'A striking new perspective on our past'Piers Brendon,Literary ReviewFrom the acclaimed author of Britain's War Machine and The Shock of the Old,a bold reassessment of Britain's twentieth century.Itis usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in anotherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smoothsequence of administrations,from building a welfare state to copingwith decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany,say,or the Soviet Union in this way. David Edgerton's major newhistory breaks out of the confines of traditional British nationalhistory to redefine what it was to British,and to reveal an unfamiliarplace,subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply because of theworld wars and global economic transformations,but in its very nature.Until the 1940s the United Kingdom was,Edgerton argues,an exceptionalplace: liberal,capitalist and anti-nationalist,at the heart of aEuropean and global web of trade and influence. Then,as its globalposition collapsed,it became,for the first time and only briefly,areal,successful nation,with shared goals,horizons andindustry,before reinventing itself again in the 1970s as part of theEuropean Union and as the host for international capital,no longercapable of being a nation.Packed with surprising examples and arguments,The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives usa grown-up,unsentimental history which takes business and warfareseriously,and which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsiderationfor the country and its future.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780141975979Number of pages: 720Weight: 500 gDimensions: 196 x 128 x 36 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Every so often a book comes out that the entire political class needs to read...Edgerton is Britain's most exciting and arresting late-modern historian...Thanks to this rich and compelling book,we now have a proper map and compass.
A fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain
An extraordinary revisionist study of modern Britain...Edgerton's aim here is nothing short of a radical repositioning of our sense of ourselves as a nation. It's a startling book,and an unexpected thesis...I'll be reading (it) over and over,and for years to come.'Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain in the 20th century...You will not find a better informed history of this country in the last century.Stimulating and bracing...He demonstrates that the story the British tell about themselves - and how it is taught in schools and discussed in the public sphere - is bogus.Unsentimental and rigorous rewriting of British history....It looks beyond the froth of political debate,takes business seriously and analyses government as much from Whitehall and administration as Westminster and politics.Beautifully written and can be read with pleasure by the general reader as well as the trained historianOriginal,opinionated,scholarly,complex and immensely stimulating...this ambitious and provocative book achieves something remarkable. It provides a striking new perspective on our past,one that future historians may not accept but will be unable to ignore.A sweepingly,and ambitiously,revisionist account of 20th century British history...full of striking lines...and a very important challenge to much of the existing historiography.
Timely jolt to a deluded'Bullshit Britain'. David Edgerton fillets national delusion and historical amnesia...of a country that knows so little of its own history.
Edgerton is an extraordinary historian...Written with bracing élan,Rise and Fall generates insights at every turn. Edgerton set out to rattle "the cage of clichés which imprison our historical and political imaginations",and succeeds magnificently.... refreshing and immensely stimulating,and should be compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand the reality of twentieth-century Britain. Lewis Namier,another historian known for his combative brand of scholarship,viewed iconoclasm as the judge of a great historian,that having produced an account of a period'others should not be able to practise within its sphere in the terms of the preceding era'. Edgerton has certainly achieved this.
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