Were the Interwar Years Truly a Slump?, Part II (book review)

In the end the question of whether the 1930s should be properly considered a slump or a depression or not is problematic itself, as it seems to depend on which part(s) of the overall picture one magnifies as well as the other parts that are left out or downplayed. If one focuses on the woes of the North and West [of Great Britain] as Branson and Heineman do, it is easy to see why these terms are often used to describe economic conditions during the Interwar period. If, one the other hand, one looks at the emergence of the consumer economy and the growth in affluence in the Southeast and the Midlands as Pollard and Stevenson and Cook do, one is hard pressed to find a depression or a slump occurring at all. Lastly, when reading Wiener, one can carry away the idea that such debates do not really matter. What matters instead, is that a long-term social and cultural trend against industrialization was deeply imbedded in many British minds, and this caused both the decline in the North and the boom in the South.

Neither of these four authors are entirely wrong, but neither are completely right either. The general problem I had with the first three books is that they either overstate the effects of the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, or pretend as if it did not really happen. Furthermore, Pollard's book was problematic in that some of his statistics can be used to whitewash real, human sufferings. While one can show on paper--as Pollard has done--that fewer people than we once thought suffered adversely during the 1920s and 1930s, it still does not excuse the fact that close to three million people were unemployed in the early 1930s, and that many did indeed suffer from increased deprivation during the 1930s. In many ways there were two Britains, or the beginning of this dichotomy, and the best thing about Stevenson's and Cook's book is that they both realize this. Finally, I found Martin Wiener's book to be the most problematic of all those cited in this paper. His underlying thesis, which is repeated ad nauseam, is a bit too sweeping and generalized. While it may indeed be true that certain cultural factors led to British industrial decline during the twentieth century, to reduce the last 150 years of the industrial revolution in Britain to a continuous

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