Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, (London: Macmillan, 1991), 2nd ed.
J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
One of the more contentious issues in British social history is the degree to which World War I affected and changed British society. It is, as historian Jose Harris states in her study of pre-1914 Britain, largely a debate between those who view the war "as a time bomb of total change," and those who see it merely as a "pressure-cooker of gradualist evolution." [1] Arthur Marwick in his landmark work The Deluge: British Society and the First World War argues that the war completely and fundamentally changed British society. Concuring in this argument is Jay Winter who argues, using demographic evidence, that the war effected positive changes in standard-of-living conditions and in income disparity between the upper and lower classes, among other things. Finally Gerald De Groot doubts whether the war really changed all that much, arguing that these "changes," seen from the time period of Marwick and other fellow historians [i.e. during the 1960s] might have seemed revolutionary but from the perspective of the 1990s are rather subdued and limited in their impact.
The First World War, Marwick argues, was the cause of fundamental social change in Britain. For the first time, the government became directly involved in the lives of its citizens in a significant way. Income tax was expanded from just those who made more than £150 before the war [the upper 5-10% of the population] to practically every citizen. [2] Furthermore, such actions as the nationalization of the railways in August 1914, the passage of the Defense of the Realm Acts [which enabled the government to seize property and materiel for the war effort, as well as restrict travel among civilians], full-scale conscription, and the rationing of food and other goods, among many other actions, permanently destroyed the notion of "Liberal England." [3] As the war progressed, the role of the state became augmented and increasingly accepted by all classes, as something that both was desirable and permanent. [4]
Marwick argues that this change effected by the Great War needs to be compared with the reality of pre-war British society. While the welfare reforms made by the [1908-1916] Asquith Government shattered the concept of "Liberal England," the programs were funded in a parsimonious manner. After the war, however, several Acts such as the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, the Education Act of 1918, and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920, greatly expanded government's role in society. [5]
