The economy

This chapter falls into two unequal parts. The first charts, broadly chronologically, the shifting understandings, historical and historiographical, of the role of the state in economic life. The final section focuses on debates about the performance of the economy, especially notions of 'decline' which have been central to those debates since the late nineteenth century. Variegated but overlapping senses of ‘decline’, originating in very specific historical circumstances, have overshadowed much writing on the modern British economy with, it will be argued, often detrimental effects on our understanding. Such notions need to be historicized; placed firmly in the intellectual, ideological and above all political political contexts within which they arose