Abstract
ONE thing may be remarked about the more recent interpretations — their parochiality. Were we to ask a citizen of Japan, Russia or Germany whether he perceived an extraordinary degree of change in our society over the period from 1914, and were he to use his own society as a yardstick, he might well reply that he did not. It has been fairly pointed out that the actual social reforms which Titmuss can unequivocally attribute to war are neither very numerous nor very impressive: the free treatment of venereal disease, free immunisation against diphtheria, an increase in the number of children provided with milk and dinners at school and the abolition of the household means test, which has in any case tended to creep back in disguises. To claimthe Welfare State and the major changes in the British economy which it implied as the result of the war is to place a lot of strain on the concept of a change of social attitude during the war. Yet there can be no doubt that war did change social aspirations and that this change in its turn was connected with changes in the economic system. The question is, what changes? It is here that we must step outside the periphery of these theories of social change to examine the more empirical research of those who have pursued the paths first opened up by Bowley.
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E. F. Nash, ‘Wartime Control of Food and Agricultural Prices’, in Lessons of the British War Economy, National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Cambridge, 1951).
D. Seers, Changes in the Cost of Living and the Distribution of Income since 1938 (Oxford, 1949).
E. V. Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy 1914–25 (1952);
F. McVey, The Financial History of Great Britain 1914–1918 (New York, 1918);
A. W. Kirkaldy (ed.), British Finance, during and after the War 1914–21 (1921).
J. M. Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940).
R. S. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–45 (1956) gives an account of the development of opinion in the government independently of Keynes’s ideas.
K. Langley, ‘The Distribution of Capital in Private Hands in 1936–8 and 1946–7’, Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, XIII (1951).
H. Durant and J. Goldmann, ‘The Distribution of Working-Class Savings’, Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, VII (1945).
Sir G. Ince, ‘The Mobilisation of Manpower in Great Britain for the Second World War’, Manchester School of Social and Economic Studies, XIV (1946).
A. L. Bowley, Prices and Wages in the United Kingdom 1914–20 (1921).
W. C. Hornby, Factories and Plant (1958) p. 10.
W. H. B. Court, Coal (1951) is a first-rate study of a similar problem of declining productivity in the Second World War.
P. Grand’Jean, Guerres, Fluctuations et Croissance (Paris, 1967).
There is an account of government ‘concentration’ policy in G. C. Allen, ‘The Concentration of Production Policy’, in N.I.E.S.R., Lessons of the British War Economy (1951).
See, for example, A. F. Hinrichs, ‘The Defence Program and Labor Supply in the United States’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, VII (1941).
G. D. H. Cole, Trade Unionism and Munitions (1923)
I. O. Andrews, Economic Effects of the War upon Women and Children in Great Britain (New York, 1918).
By, among many, Marwick, The Deluge, p. 329; or Sir A. Newsholme, Fifty Years in Public Health (1935) p. 408.
W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, The British War Economy (1949) p. 500. For the greater upward movement in real earnings than real wages, see J. L. Nicholson. Gowing, The British War Economy (1949) p. 500. For the greater upward movement in real earnings than real wages, see J. L. Nicholson, ‘Employment and National Income during the War’, in Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, vii (1945).
P. A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity (New York, 1942) p. 120.
W. H. Form and C. P. Loomis, ‘The Persistence and Emergence of Social and Cultural Systems in Disasters’, American Sociological Review, xxI (1956)
W. H. Form, C. P. Loomis and S. Nosow, Community in Disaster (New York, 1958).
Historians have tended to neglect this topic. The best work is B. Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control 1910–1922 (Oxford, 1959).
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Milward, A.S. (1970). The Domestic Impact. In: The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain. Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00731-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00731-8_3
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