The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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The
financial help that was offered to Europe and the United States turned
them into manufacturing nations.
British dominance in a number of fields of
industrial output was overtaken as the century drew to a close
by the United States
and after the turn of the century by Germany. As the decade passed, Japan
showed
herself to be much more competitive than Britain in a variety of manufacturing
fields,
particularly in eastern markets. “Furthermore, European manufacturers
and industrialists began
poaching upon former British markets and performed
with a more acute business acumen than their island
counterparts.”17

It
could even be argued that the real cause behind Britain’s decline goes as
far back as the Industrial
Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution itself was not of
unqualified advantage to Britain when
measured in the long-term. While the
arrival of steam power, of the factory system, railways, and later,
electricity,
enabled the British to overcome natural, physical obstacles to higher productivity,
and
therefore increased the country’s wealth and strength, such inventions were
soon to help the United
States, Germany, Japan, Russia even more, because the
natural, physical obstacles to the development of
their landlocked potentials were
much greater. What industrialization did was to equalize countries’
chances to
exploit their indigenous resources and, over time, to take away some of the
advantages
hitherto enjoyed by small, peripheral, maritime-cum-commercial
states such as Britain and the
Netherlands, giving them instead to the great land-
based powers.”18

This
could be put another way. As it was said in Chapter One, the early
British industrial lead was a happy
accident, due to geography and certain broad
economic and technological trends rather than other reasons.
Given this, “the only
possible way in which this lead could have been preserved against nations
with
superior population and resources was by keeping ahead technically – as British
still does,
even today, against India, China and Indonesia. But this technical
advantage could only be preserved by
constant research and training, which the

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