| Details | | David will present a new view of twentieth-century British history, one which makes better sense of the past, and to some extent the present, than conventional views. Most British histories are concerned with the rise and fall of the welfare state, and also the decline (and occasionally later supposed rise) of the economy. More recently some historians have wanted to see Empire as the key theme in British history. Edgerton rejects all these approaches as partial and often misleading. In their place he puts a multi-faceted story of a nation which emerges out of a broader British Empire only in 1945, of a place which was truly exceptional in its internationalism and industrialisation in 1900 (though not in its imperialism) but was no longer so after the 1950s, of a place which saw radical discontinuities rather than continuities. This leads to fresh understandings of the nature of the welfare state, of the economy, of the nature of Thatcherism, and indeed of possible historical explanations of Brexit. David Edgerton teaches in the History Department at King's College London, where he is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History. He was the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine now at King's College London. He chairs King's Contemporary British History, and is a co-director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. He was educated at St. John's College Oxford and Imperial College London, and has taught at the University of Manchester and Imperial College London. Among his books are England and the Aeroplane (1991, 2013), Warfare State (2005), The Shock of the Old (2006, 2019), and most recently The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (Penguin, 2019). He writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman. |
