Keith Robbins - The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870-1992

THE ECLIPSE OF A GREAT POWER

Modern Britain 18701992

Foundations of modern Britain

General editor: Geoffrey Holmes

THE TRANSFORMATION OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
13701529

John A. F. Thomson

THE EMERGENCE OF A NATION STATE

The commonwealth of England 15291660. Second Edition

Alan G. R. Smith

THE MAKING OF A GREAT POWER

Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 16601722

Geoffrey Holmes

THE AGE OF OLIGARCHY

Pre-Industrial Britain 17221783

Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi

THE FORGING OF THE MODERN STATE

Early industrial Britain 17831870

Eric J. Evans

THE ECLIPSE OF A GREAT POWER

Modern Britain 18701992. Second Edition

Keith Robbins

Foundations of modern Britain

THE ECLIPSE OF A GREAT POWER

Modern Britain 18701992

SECOND EDITION

Keith Robbins

First published 1983 by Pearson Education Limited

Second edition 1994

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Keith Robbins 1983, 1994

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-09611-0 (pbk)

So prodigious has been the output of specialised work on British history during the past twenty years, and so rich its diversity, that scholars and students thirst continually after fresh syntheses. Even those who read for the pure pleasure of informing themselves about the past have become quite reconciled to the fact that little can now be taken for granted. An absorbing interest in local situations, as a way to understanding more general ones; a concern with those processes of social change which accompany economic, educational and cultural development, and which often condition political activity too: these and many other strong currents of modern historiography have washed away some of our more comfortable orthodoxies. Even when we know what happened, there is endless scope for debate about why things happened and with what consequences.

In such circumstances a new series of general textbooks on British history would not seem to call for elaborate justification. However, the six volumes constituting Foundations of Modern Britain do have a distinct rationale and they embody some novel features. For one thing, they make a serious attempt to present a history of Britain from the point at which Britain became first a recognisable entity and then a Great Power, and to trace the foundations of this state in the history of pre-eighteenth-century England. The fact that five of the six authors either have taught or are teaching in Scottish universities, while one has held a chair in the University of Wales, should at least help to remind them that one aim of the series is to avoid excessive Anglo-centricity. The first two volumes, spanning the years 13701660, will certainly concentrate primarily on the history of England, emphasising those developments which first prepared the way for, and later confirmed her emergence as an independent Commonwealth, free from Continental trammels whether territorial or ecclesiastical. But the reader should also be aware, as he reads them, of Englands ultimate role as the heart of a wider island kingdom in which men of three nations came to be associated. During the period covered by volumes 3, 4 and 5, 16601870, this United Kingdom of Great Britain became not only a domestic reality but the centre of an Empire and the possessor of world-wide influence. Space will allow only limited treatment of Ireland and of Anglo-Irish relations until after the Union of 1801. It is appropriate, however, that in the final volume of the series reasserted nationalism should figure almost as strongly as the erosion of imperial status in the story of Britains slide down the slippery slope from palmy greatness to anxious mediocrity. The terminal date of volume 6, 1975, is deliberately chosen: the year in which Britain, tortured once again by her Irish inheritance and facing demands for Scottish devolution, or even independence, belatedly recognised that the days of complacent self-sufficiency as regards Europe, too, were past.

As well as paying more than mere lip-service to its own title, the present series adopts an irreverent attitude to time-honoured chronological divisions. Those lines of demarcation between volumes which dominated virtually every English history series conceived before 1960 (and, with a few exceptions, have displayed a remarkable capacity for survival subsequently) are seen as a quite unnecessary obstacle to readers understanding of the way modern historiography has reshaped whole vistas of our islands history in the past forty years. Years such as 1485, 1603, 1689, 1714, 1760 or 1815 established themselves in textbook lore at a time when they accurately reflected the heavily political and constitutional emphasis of traditional history teaching. Even on those terms they have become of limited utility. But equally seriously, the conventions which such divisions perpetuate often make it extremely difficult for authors to accommodate fundamental aspects of social and economic development within their allotted compass. The brutal slicing off of Tawneys century (15401640) at 1603 is perhaps the worst of these atrocities; but it is not the only one.

All dates are to some extent arbitrary as lines of division, and all present their own difficulties. It is hoped, none the less, that those selected in this series to enclose periods which are in any case a good deal longer than average, may prove less inhibiting and confusing than some of their predecessors and much more adaptable to the needs of British history courses in universities and colleges.