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Science, Technology and the British Industrial "Decline," 1870-1970, by David Edgerton; pp. viii + 88. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 17.95, 6.25 paper, $29.95.
David Edgerton's volume on science, technology, and British economic performance in the Economic History Society's New Studies in Economic and Social History series is revisionist history with a vengeance. Not only does Edgerton judge that "there is a good deal wrong" with "the conventional picure of the role of British science and technology in the industrial `decline,"' he characterizes texts that he associates with it as "misleading" (Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick, ed., The Decline of the British Economy [1986]), "misleading and self-contradictory" (D. H. Aldcroft, Education, Training and Economic Performance [1994]), and "essentially a work of bad history" (C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution [1959]) (11, 3, 74-75, 79). He describes studies that have called into question the standard account of the inadequacies of British science and technology and their contribution to the country's comparatively slow economic growth, such as Sidney Pollard's Britain's Prime and Britain's Decline ( 1989) and W. D. Rubinstein's Capitalism, Culture and Economic Decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (1993), as "devastating" critiques that have demolished" opposing viewpoints (75, 76)
Edgerton understands the historiography of British science and technology to which he takes such violent exception as "primarily cultural" (68). Exemplified" above all in Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 18501980 (1981)...