Peter Dewey considers every aspect of the period in his rich survey, from international trade, changes in landownership and the impact of mass communications and finds a much more positive picture than is often portrayed.

BACK OF COVER:
LONGMAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN
General Editor: J.V.Beckett
Professor of English Regional History, University of Nottingham
WAR AND PROGRESS: BRITAIN 1914-1945
The era of the two World Wars was a period of major transition in Britain, as elsewhere. It is often depicted in negative terms: the country struggling under the burdens of an unsustainable world role abroad, while undermined by depression and social division at home. In this striking contribution to the new Longman Economic and Social History of Britain, however, Peter Dewey finds a much more positive pattern in the wealth of evidence he lays before us. His is a story of economic achievement, and the emergence of a new sense of social community in the nation, rather than a lugubrious saga of disenchantment and decline.
Every aspect of the period comes under his microscope. The topics he reviews include: the impact of the two wars themselves; changing patterns of international trade; the rise and decline of the different industrial sectors; government experiments in economic and social policy; changes in landownership; employment, unemployment and labour relations; health, housing and welfare; and the growing importance of leisure in the interwar years.
These big general themes are counterpointed throughout by Dr Dewey's crisp attention to the particular, and by his sharp eye for telling detail. The book is equally at home examining the impact of mass communications on interwar Britain or considering the significance of government-designed underwear in World War Two.
A vast amount of statistical and other information is processed (and made interesting) in these pages, and one of their great strengths is the clarity with which Peter Dewey can set out even the most complex issues for a non-specialist readership; but he never loses sight of the human realities that lie behind the statistics and the historiographical debates. This is above all the story of how the daily lives of ordinary peoples were changed, profoundly and permanently, by these three momentous decades.
And, he concludes, changed almost universally for the better: for, despite the enormous costs and losses of the two wars, the British people were to emerge from the years covered in this book with higher average living standards, more generous welfare policies, and a more just, humane and egalitarian society than they had ever known before.
PETER DEWEY is Senior Lecturer in Economic History at Royal Holloway, University of London.