The Subject

IN the history of the United Kingdom in this century the two world wars have been so terrible a reality that historians have related to them, directly or indirectly, an astonishing number of developments. The difference in economic organisation and in social life between wartime and peacetime has been so huge and so encapsulated in the personal consciousness of so many still alive that the wish to produce a comprehensive theory of the relationship between war and history starts from the soil turned by even the most aridly factual of labourers. It is to these theories as they relate to the history of the British economy in this century that this pamphlet is directed. What changes in the economy have historians and economists laid to the account of the two world wars? And what changes may justly so be laid?