WARFARE STATE Britain, 1920-1970 David Edgerton Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304pp, $38.95 paper (ISBN 0521672317).David Edgerton sets out to challenge what he regards as related myths about 20th-century Britain: that it was a welfare state and therefore a declining state. The prevailing view, he argues, is that if Britain had been more of a warfare state and less of a welfare state, it would not have declined in power. Proving part-but not all-of its case, the book is still a major and impressive achievement.On the first count of the indictment, that Britain was a non-declining (in absolute terms) warfare state from 1920 to 1970 as much if not more than it was a welfare state, Edgerton largely proves his case. The core of his proof comes in chapters one through four and six, wherein he shows that interwar Britain, supposedly demilitarized and pacifist, was already quite heavily militarized; that it grew more militarized during World War II; that it remained so after the war; and that Harold Wilson's Labour government, which had come to power (and created the Ministry of Technology) believing that Britain was an anti-technological declining power, discovered, once in power, that it was not. Edgerton uses statistics and narrative detail about state-supported personnel and government funding of war-related enterprises to make his case. These chapters are often a boring slog, but they provide necessary and compelling evidence.The remaining chapters are more fun but less persuasive. In them, Edgerton criticizes what he calls the anti-history created by technocratic declinists, which was at odds with Britain's actual history of a strong warfare state; C. P. Snow's notion of two cultures gets a particularly energetic drubbing. He argues that the very prevalence of technocratic declinism proves that Britain was not as anti-technocratic as the technocrats claimed, and he attributes their mythmaking to militarism and resource-grubbing. Historians, he says, have blindly followed technocrats' biased accounts, and consequently perpetrated a gross historiographical error, writing the 20thcentury British warfare state out of existence.Edgertoris attack on technocratic declinism is unpersuasive for several reasons. To begin with, he considers only Britain's absolute decline in time, not the possibility of relative decline across space, which, as international relations scholars have argued, is certainly a meaningful metric. Edgerton knows the difference between absolute and relative decline, and the utility of international comparisons, as he made clear in a previous work (Science, Technology, and the British Industrial Decline). His knowledge might have informed this book with more than a smattering of international comparisons.Such comparisons are necessary to judge not only what was happening but also what people thought was happening, and thus their absence contributes to a second weakness in Edgertoris argument. As Linda Colley and others have shown, Britons have not imagined their communities in a geographical vacuum. Historically, comparisons with France, Germany, and the rest of the sclerotic, despotic continent on the one hand, and with wild, uncivilized America and Asia on the other, have informed Britons' understanding of themselves as liberals (but not libertines). By failing to explore the contributions of the rest of the world to British myths about themselves, Edgerton analyzes one previously hidden historiographical distortion (declinist anti-history) by creating another (national isolation). …