Winding Down the War Economy

Historians’ attempts to explain the ‘erosion of state intervention’ in the British economy following the First World War continue to take their bearings from R. H. Tawney. It was principally Tawney who in 1943 defined the issues in his now classic analysis, ‘The abolition of economic controls, 1918–1921’. Here, Tawney brilliantly diagnosed the previous generation’s failure to draw peacetime policies from the findings of its own wartime ‘experiments in state control’ as well as from the manifest evidence of need for state direction of economic development. ¹