The Collapse of British Power Paperback – April, 1986

Contrary to what another reviewer wrote, this is the first of four excellent books written by Correlli Barnett on the topic of British Decline from 1918 to the post-WWII era. I cannot praise this book highly enough. It is a passionately-argued chronicle of Britain's many failures to right the course of the ship of state, leading the country from its victory in 1918 to its perilous near-defeat in 1940.

Barnett writes about "strategy" in the broadest sense, evaluating factors such as education, social conditions, diplomacy, the military, and others, to develop an overall assessment of the national condition.

Barnett places the blame for Britain's decline on the weakness and vacillation of its political elites. He argues that the nation's leaders came to eschew what they saw as the distastefully aggressive implications of Realpolitik, instead embracing such half-baked and idealistic notions as world disarmament. In effect, the nation fell prey to the feeble idea that the moral force of the League of Nations was an acceptable substitute for actual military power, with disastrous consequences for both Britain and the world.

There are many other equally provocative arguments in the book which the brevity of this format prevents me from discussing.

Empires rise and fall. We all know that. It's simply part of the passing of time on one level. But, of course, there are particulars on why an empire falls:Corruption at various levels, incompetent leadership, threats from abroad etc.. Gibbon, famously, wrote a magisterial 8 volume work on what went wrong with the Roman empire, and it still stands for a benchmark of this type of opus. In it he skillfully narrates all the military and political vicissitudes that led to the foundering of the Roman ship of state. Barnett, on the other hand, has the answer in one tsunami that sank the empire of merry old England: All her leaders of the 20th century through WWII were educated in Victorian public schools that, under the philosophy of Dr. Thomas Arnold, turned them into, ahem, creampuffs and pansies. This is the most succinct way of putting it. As silly as this premise seems at first glance, the book is extremely well-documented and one comes away feeling that Barnett has a point, though he overstresses it a bit much. Barnett is what I would call a Machiavellian nostalgist. He yearns for the days when crass English barons batttled it out with mattocks and halberds without qualms concerning world peace or evangelism or tea parties or knowledge of Greek and Latin or any of the things that went into making British culture what it was in the early part of the century. But just as you are about to chuck the book as the work of an unbalanced mind, you are confronted with mounds of carefully documented statistics showing that the British did indeed fall behind Barnett's two nemeses, the United States and Germany, in modern industrialization: the production of ball bearings, mechanical lathes etc. primarily because of trade unions, Liberalism, and the fact that the best minds of the country had been indoctrinated with the Romantic notion that industrial interests were beneath them, according to Barnett. Barnett's figures bare this fact out both before the Great War and between the wars. This is all very interesting but beside the point of why one should read the book, in my opinion: 1) It gives an intensely well-documented account of the culture of appeasement in the British inter-war cabinets and 2) It is very funny. The funniest chapter is perhaps the one on India, which Barnett regards as a useless sort of "Jewel and the Crown" affair which existed simply so British viceroys could be carried about in rickshaws and wallow in the White Man's Burden in the voluptuous East. Of the other non-white colonies (besides Malaysia) he is even more dismissive, regarding them as drains on the mainland and characterizing them as "stone-age" or "pre stone-age." He pulls no punches and some of those punches hit dead center in the solar plexus of the British empire of the time. The interwar cabinet members are frequently characterized as Bertie Woosters with a sprinkling of Jeeveses in the Chiefs of Staff to help them out all too seldomly. What one ends up with is a sort of side-angle view of the empire's demise. But a richly elaborate one. It's no secret that Britain was nearly bankrupt at the START of WWII due to mismanagement of her resources. Whether this mismanagement was due to Wordsworth, Shelley and the Bloomsbury circle is another matter. It's also no secret that a small island cannot reign over the globe forever. As Churchill put it after WWII, "the world has grown large around us."...Still, what if it hadn't?

In this volume, veteran British historian Correlli Barnett presents a solid examination of the underlying causes of the downfall of Great Britain, a proud nation which in living memory presided over the mightiest Empire in the world, on which it was said that the sun would never set. In 1914, Britannia ruled the waves unopposed. Now, in 2016, to the infinite sadness of older Britons, what is left of jolly old England is a somnolent Socialist nightmare, with London, the capital of the world in the days of Churchill, Chamberlain and Grey, now a majority-immigrant city with a Pakistani mayor and more surveillance cameras than Orwell's dystopian Oceania, these latter being sorely needed to put a dent in its soaring crime rates.

How could such a great nation experience such a rapid and catastrophic decline? There are, of course many reasons, ranging from ignorance to stupidity to malice. Barnett provides what is perhaps the most balanced and wide-ranging general appraisal of the whole sad process. In his analysis, he differentiates between proximate and profound causes, those which paved the way for Britain's decline and those that finally broke the lion's back. In identifying them, his vision is both broad and perceptive, carrying on a bird's-eye general narrative while still highlighting a wealth of interesting and illuminating details.

One profound cause he discusses in some detail is the stagnation (and to some extent, regression) in British education. In the 19th century, of course, Britain, the capital of the Industrial Revolution, was the world leader in science and engineering. But with a school and college system that primarily promoted humanistic and esthetic subjects, at the expense of science, this lead was rapidly overtaken by Germany's modern universities (and the United States, which copied them). This in turn lead, first, to a loss of innovation, and then, increasingly, to the dismantling of industry, as sufficiently skilled personnel became rare and prohibitively expensive.

At the same time, the liberal British governments of the late 19th century disastrously promoted the ideology of "free" trade, earnestly believing the dogma that global trade enriches all. Perhaps this is so in some theoretical world of utopian ideals; but in reality, of course, every *other* significant industrial power in the world imposed hard limits on their trade, keeping British goods out of their markets with stiff tariffs while selling their own to British citizens and corporations, sometimes even at subsidized prices. The result, predictably, thus became the further erosion of Britain's industrial base, and by 1914, both Germany and the US had surpassed her in production. This downfall of manufacturing was masked for some time by the financial gains of the stockmarkets of the City of London; but of course, this hollow wealth gave no real benefits to the country as a whole.

We now come to the proximate causes: Namely, unnecessary wars. In the very year 1914, Britain blundered into World War I, history's most expensive war until that date. There was no good reason for her to do so; then again, the same was true for all European nations, though some foolish politicians (mostly in France) believed otherwise. The terrifying costs of this tragic error, as measured in wealth and human life, left Britain both virtually broke and profoundly demoralized, unable to afford any longer the military defense of her Asian colonies. It is also against this background that one must understand the later much-maligned "Appeasement" policy of Neville Chamberlain: He and his generals were well aware that Britain simply did not have the resources to fight Germany, and if she tried, it would mean the end of her Empire.

Unfortunately for Britain, she was nevertheless still pushed into starting World War II - the most expensive war of all time, until World War III comes along - by going to war with Germany in 1939, supposedly over the independence of Poland. (Although the end result of this intervention was Poland's complete subjugation by the totalitarian Soviet Union; much like certain more recent American wars, this one accomplished almost exactly the opposite of what it was notionally intended to carry out.) Since she had no money left to fund the war, it was run on credits, largely American such; and when the Shylocks called in the loans, she had to sell most of her colonies, industrial patents, domestic markets and other resources to pay. The result was ruin, dismay and the take-over of a Socialist government that punitively taxed its own citizens and liberally promoted immigration and foreign aid. "Victory" in World War II surely seems a less than great occasion for celebration by the dispossessed masses of Britons. The victory as such, of course, was real enough in purely military terms, and a source of some national pride; but it was of a truly Pyrrhic quality, the last gasp of a Great Power that will now most likely never again amount to anything in world history. Politically and economically, V-Day in 1945 was in truth Britain's greatest-ever *defeat* in history, a disaster from which she has never recovered.

These, in brief, are the main points of an excellent work of scholarship, briefly and rather inadequately summarized. There are many more that could be mentioned, especially cultural ones, from the demoralization of the British armed forces through political hamstringing to the degeneration of the Church of England from self-confident, muscular Christianity to mere sentimentalism and humanitarianism. But it will not do to reproduce the whole work, here; rather, read the book, and support the author, who seems of late (and perhaps not altogether surprisingly) to have come under fire from the "usual suspects" for his "politically incorrect" brand of historical truthfulness. And for similarly enlightening analyses, see also, for example, the somewhat more cautious works of Peter Clarke and, especially, John Charmley (who, however, concentrate exclusively on the political dimension, at the expense of the cultural background to it which Barnett so expertly elucidates).

What should intrigue, and perhaps worry, the American reader is that everything Barnett describes appears also to be happening in the present-day United States. Here, too, we see a widespread gutting of the country's manufacturing base through "free" trade; schools falling victim to Common Core; a transformation of the universities away from centers of science and learning into "Safe Spaces" and "[Insert-Minority] Studies" departments; and one expensive foreign war after another, gouging literally trillions out of the shrinking tax-paying middle class - All with the political and media elites clamoring for more of the same. If anything, things seem rather worse in America in 2016 than in Britain in 1939. Will the final result be equally catastrophic, here? This is obviously not the place to discuss such matters; but they certainly ought to be discussed by thoughtful citizens, or else Britannia's daughter may soon follow her into oblivion.