Published by EH.NET (July 1, 2000)
Roger Middleton, The British Economy since 1945: Engaging with the
Debate. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. xix + 198 pp. $49.95
(hardcover), ISBN 0-312-22862-7.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Alan Booth, Department of History, University of Exeter.
This is another textbook treatment of British economic performance since 1945
in a market that, if not nearing saturation point, is certainly crowded. This
book is designed for the real beginner, and assumes comparatively little
previous knowledge of either recent British economic history or the methods of
the economic historian. It is part of a series, British History in Perspective,
which provides for first year undergraduates an overview of a problem area in
historical interpretation, giving a guide to the literature, principal themes
and competing interpretations. This is the first volume of the series to deal
with an economic topic. Accordingly, the book begins with compelling arguments
for studying economic history and tries to establish a basic toolkit with which
students can interrogate British economic performance. The author (Reader in
the History of Political Economy at the University of Bristol, UK) knows his
intended readership and undertakes these tasks with skill. He presents the
introductory economics in the text, but the core arithmetical and statistical
techniques are relegated to an appendix–one must not frighten the horses!
Thereafter, the material is organized in a rather unconventional way, being
extremely state-centered and policy-oriented. There are separate chapters on
economic performance, economic policies (more accurately, the goals of
policy-makers) and the effectiveness of policy. In truth, the book’s design and
content would be more accurately described as British Economic Policy and
Performance since 1945 and, for those who know Middleton’s work, it is
essentially the postwar sections of his Government versus the Market
(Edward Elgar, 1996), up-dated and in a form accessible to first year
undergraduates. In one very important respect, however, it goes beyond the
previous book and is more interesting as a result.
Middleton has become much more sensitized to the problems of presenting British
economic history since 1945 within the grand narrative of decline and missed
opportunities for faster growth and improved competitiveness. He establishes
solid performance criteria and emphasizes that Britain’s economic record was
“poor” only during the 1970s and at other times should be more accurately
described as “adequate.” This enables him to contrast a “popular” discourse of
abject failure and a “British disease” with a more considered, “academic”
picture in which the critiques of Britain’s managers, workers, institutions and
policy regime are less persuasive and easily substantiated than commonly
believed. Indeed, this is an encouragingly post-modern textbook, arguing that a
single grand narrative is most unlikely, given the complex web of economic and
political interactions that determine national economic performance.
But Middleton has thrown off only some of the shackles of past interpretations.
He concludes that Britain’s economic performance can be understood in terms of
a complex interaction of market and non-market failures. He faithfully reports
and endorses the existing literature with its emphases on weaknesses on the
supply side of manufacturing and limited convergence towards US levels of
(manufacturing) productivity. At the same time, he makes some use of
Broadberry’s findings that the US and the major European countries “overtook”
the British economy by transferring resources from low productivity agriculture
into higher productivity manufacturing and service occupations and by relative
productivity advance in services, but that there is no obvious trend in
Britain’s relative performance in manufacturing. If Broadberry is correct, and
the outlines of his argument are very compelling, even the core “academic”
literature on British economic performance since 1945 can be questioned more
heartily and persuasively than Middleton ventures. Its preoccupation with
manufacturing appears excessive and the comparative lack of attention to
agriculture and services is quite shameful. The comparative weakness of
Britain’s service sector does not lend itself easily to Middleton’s
state-centered, policy-oriented approach, but a more penetrating analysis of
agricultural policy could have been expected. Thus, given his attempt to
encourage students to engage with the debate, it is a pity that Middleton did
not press his post-modern agenda much farther even to the extent of questioning
whether the period since 1945 is really an appropriate one for assessing the
national economy.
Alan Booth, Department of History, University of Exeter, has recently
completed for Macmillan a study of the British economy in the twentieth
century.