WIKINDX Resources
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Journal Article:
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BibTeX citation key: Tomlinson
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JIM TOMLINSON. The decline of the empire and the economic ‘decline’ of Britain. Twentieth-Century British History 201–221.
Added by: sashi 2012-05-17 02:47:26
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Abstract
In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘golden age’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popular living standards. Economic historians have understandably used this coincidence to suggest that by this period the British Empire was no longer offering substantial economic benefits to the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were links between economic performance and the decline of the Empire. First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic ‘declinist’ accounts of British society and the economy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impact on policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts was the ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked with the loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become a commonplace of discussion of postâ€war Britain to assume that reversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economy required a reâ€orientation of policy away from the Empire and Commonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not a constant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a central feature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’ after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealth to achieve this objective.
Added by: sashi
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