ABSTRACT
T HE war economy may have been only an interlude in Britisheconomic development, an aberration from normal economicorganization, created ad hoc and dismantled in haste, but there was no possibility that its termination could make things as though it had never been. Nor was it only the economic aspects of the war that directly altered the economic future. Military destruction, political bargaining, moral and intellectual reactions to a harrowing new social experience-all had their effects on production and trade and on the resources that could pe applied to them. Yet it is not easy to say just what were the economic consequences of the war. Comparison of economic conditions immediately before and after the war shows many important differences, but there is little doubt that some of them would have been much the same even if peace had been unbroken from 1914 to 1918. An estimate of the economic consequences of the war must take account of other powerful influences operating at the same time.
