Great powers that stop being great tend to find their new and depleted condition both surprising and unwelcome. Indeed, a common first reaction – particularly among elite circles in such powers – tends to be denial, followed then by resistance and eventually by nostalgia. Certainly that pattern is overwhelmingly evident in the politics of the United Kingdom in the decades after 1945, as the country which had once stood alone in the face of Nazi expansion, and whose armies had ultimately prevailed, was forced to come to terms with its reduced standing in a postwar universe framed by the Cold War standoff between its two major wartime allies.

The depletion was both economic and political. It was economic in the sense that, well before the Second World War began, the United Kingdom had already lost its mid-nineteenth century status as the manufacturing capital of the world. In 1860 that dominance had been near total, with the UK then – as “the workshop of the world” – producing “53 per cent of the world’s iron and 50 per cent of its coal and lignite”, and consuming “just under half of the raw cotton output of the globe”. As the US Civil War began, the UK economy “alone was responsible for one-fifth of the world’s commerce … two-fifths of the trade in manufactured goods [and] over one-third of the world’s merchant marine”. But that dominance did not last. From the 1870s, powerful economic competitors grew up in other areas of the emerging industrial capitalist “north” – with Germany at one end of the emerging industrial heartland and the United States at the other. Moreover, a second industrial revolution in the 1890s eventually generated new sources of power (electricity), new commodities (not least automobiles), and new competitive capacities (based on the systematic application of science to production) in which the UK economy did not excel.