David Edgerton > Quotes

“The great expanding centre of ‘inner Britain’, London, did not build ships but it built aeroplanes, it did not mine coal but it made electrical equipment, it did not grow food but it did process it – into beer, refined sugar, Horlicks and Mars bars. It made tyres, Hoovers, films.”
― David Edgerton, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War

“It was not until 1914, after the powers of the House of Lords had been trimmed, and when the Liberal Party was dependent on the support of the Nationalists in the House of Commons, that the Home Rule Act was passed. The leader of the Conservative Party and senior army officers openly stated they would not accept the verdict of the imperial parliament. This was the other great issue of Edwardian politics – the constitution – meaning the place of Ireland in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords in parliament and the established churches. This was, according to the brilliant young journalist George Dangerfield (writing in the 1930s), one of the three extra-parliamentary rebellions which destroyed British liberalism. This ruling-class rebellion is much less remembered than those by workers and women.”
― David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History

“British battleships were driven by between 30 and 100 megawatts of power.”
― David Edgerton, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War

“The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.”
― David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

“in almost no
instance can artificial-rational systems be built and left alone. They require continued attention, rebuilding, and repair. Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity." He noted too, that in a technological age we should ask not who governs, but what governs: `government becomes the business of recognising what is necessary and efficient for the continued functioning and elaboration of large-scale systems and the rational implementation of their manifest requirements.”
― David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

“Neville Chamberlain, the only British prime minister until Margaret Thatcher to have had a university education in science and the only university-educated twentieth-century prime minister to have studied entirely outside Oxbridge.”
― David Edgerton, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War

“Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China depended on constant vigilance over, and maintenance and repair of, complex irrigation systems. It was argued that this required a huge all-powerful state: these ancient ‘hydraulic societies’ were necessarily not democratic.”
― David Edgerton, The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

“Thus, a battleship cost around £10m in 1940. Building that battleship today might cost £500m, but to build a battleship representing the same proportion of current GDP would mean spending £2.5bn.”
― David Edgerton, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War