>Paraphrasing very much. The story of British decline is a very
>interesting one, and I'm curious why this inventiveness bore so
>little industrial fruit. I know the story of the ascendance of
>financial over manufacturing interests and the failure of British
>firms to get big and professionally managed enough, but I was eager
>to hear more, either solid history or airy speculation.
There are a great many bad analyses of British decline, some of which, nonetheless have reasonable empirical material.
David Landes' The Unbound Prometheus Martin Weiner [can't remember the title]
The Nairn-Anderson (that's Tom and Perry) thesis ran that Britain had failed to complete the bourgeois revolution, and was hampered by ancient institutions. This is basically just a radical re-hash of Harold Wilson's modernisation. Will Hutton repeats it (as in her own way did Margaret Thatcher). It is pretty worthless, like those economists who say that the failure of the CIS is due to the lack of credible institutions, only begs the question.
I would go with an over-accumulation model, in which case JA Hobson is worth a look. From the second half of the nineteenth century Britain exported surplus capital and surplus labour to the United States, which re-combined over there as American Industry. The Irish famine and emigration was a measure of the Empire's inability to draw its dispossessed peasantry into capitalist production. Morgan developed his wealth as a broker for British and European capital exported to American soil. The fascinating question is why they could not be brought together in Britain. The moribund British capitalist class reduced itself to coupon-clippers, and the masses to destitutes.
One important factor in American technological development, was the high cost of free US labour. Eastern seaboard capitalists preferred to employ machinery than pay the cost of a workforce that had bidded up its price by virtue of the Western escape valve. By contrast, the British working class in the mid-nineteenth century was so impoverished that the same incentive to replace labour by machinery was not there. As Marx writes, cheaper to use a 'wretch' than a machine.
>
>One bit of US chauvinism I will confess to related to this thread:
>one reason British decline interests me is that I'm hoping to find
>precedents in it for US decline. A delusions-of-reference view of
>history maybe, but it's hardly the rah-rah school of chauvinism.
I'm not sure that you will find that many precedents. The big difference was that America and Britain managed to negotiate a transfer of power over many decades, in a transition that ought to have brought them to military conflict. (Trotsky, over-literal in his imperialist rivalry analysis once predicted war between them, for example).
(The transfer was effected through the medium of war with Germany, under cover of which the US assumed ever-greater dominance in the relationship. Britons of my mother's generation still speak of the US forces stationed in Britain in the 2WW as an occupying army - 'over- paid, over-sexed and over here' - one of the anti-American staples of the chauvinistic British left.) -- Jim heartfield