Strategy versus finance in twentieth-century Great Britain

Abstract

this article tries to trace some of the processes in the decline of a great world power.1 Although the most obvious manifestations of Great Britain's demise occur after 1945, the object here has been to analyze certain long-term, structural weaknesses which go back beyond even the interwar years to the lateVictorian period. Being a general interpretation, the present essay has benefited from the flood of publications upon British external policy in the twentieth century which has appeared since the release of public records under the '30-year-rule'; but it has, of necessity, supplemented the findings of such books with documentary evidence on specific points. In addition, since the natural tendency of military historians is to write military history, and of economic historians to write economic history, the thrust of this article is to demonstrate the interrelationship between the two subjects. For it is in the vicious circle of the repeated contradictions between British strategic planning and the nation's economic requirements in the era of the two world wars that one most clearly sees the inexorable process of decline from its earlier world primacy.