Education for Decline?

The British economy and the character of British culture provide the back­drop to the episode that I have been investigating. I now want to see how the British resistance to the theory of circulation fits into this broad picture. There are two, starkly opposed theories about the economic fortunes of Britain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and each carries with it a particular image of British society and British science. How does my story bear upon the dispute between the supporters of these two, opposing theories?

The first theory has been called declinism. The declinists hold that, after its initial lead in the industrial revolution, when the country was led by men who were “hard of mind and hard of will,” Britain ceased to be the workshop of the world and, ever since, has been in a steady state of decline both cultur­ally and economically. The main causes of the decline, the argument goes, are to be found in the antiscientific, antitechnological, and antimilitary in­clinations of subsequent generations of the British elite. The entrepreneurial spirit was drained out of British society, and innovation gave way to inertia. An important role in causing this sorry state of affairs is attributed to the universities. Universities are said to have cultivated the arts and humanities at the expense of science and technology. Literary and genteel inclinations were encouraged rather than more robust industrial and military values.34

The historian Correlli Barnett has formulated an influential version of the declinist theory in his book The Collapse of British Power.35 Barnett places great emphasis on national character. He diagnoses a fatal complacency that infected the British character after victory in the battle of Waterloo. Moral principle rather than self-interest became the dominant motive of political activity. Barnett is clear about the causes. The blame lies with the high-flown sentiments of evangelical religion and the ideology of individualism and free trade. Liberal economic doctrines, he concludes, were “catastrophically in­appropriate” for a Britain facing the growing economies of (protectionist) America and Prussia (98). By the 1860s, the misguided British faith in the “practical man,” along with the weakness of the educational system, had made the country dependent on its commercial and military rivals for much of its more advanced technology (96). By 1914 Britain, with its overextended empire, may have looked like a world power, but it was “a shambling giant too big for its strength” (90). In The Audit of War, Barnett acknowledges that the Cavendish Laboratory made Cambridge a “world centre of excellence” in science but insisted that this was “of little direct benefit to British industry.”36 The lack of industrial and commercial relevance was due to the cultural bias of the universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, against “technology and the vocational” (xiii): “Here amid the silent eloquence of grey Gothic walls and green sward, the sons of engineers, merchants and manufacturers were emasculated into gentlemen” (221).

Barnett acknowledges the success of the desperate, last-minute efforts that were made during the Great War to overcome the lethargy and inefficiency of British capitalism. In The Collapse of British Power he describes how the

Ministry of Munitions brought about a “wartime industrial revolution” (113) by setting up more than two hundred national factories for the manufacture of ball bearings, aircraft and aircraft engines, explosives, chemicals, gauges, tools, and optical instruments. But the effort was not to last, and the full lesson was not learnt. British economic performance and British power, he asserts, continued their trajectory of decline throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The defects of the British national character similarly bedeviled the coun­try’s struggle during World War II and, to Barnett’s evident disgust, expressed themselves after 1945 in the electorate’s desire to build a “New Jerusalem”—a welfare state.

This pessimistic picture has been widely accepted, but is it true? That it captures something is beyond doubt, but the basis of Barnett’s account has been challenged by the advocates of a rival picture. They may be called the antideclinists. Antideclinists acknowledge that there was an economic slow­down after 1870 but insist that if this counts as a “decline,” it was a relative, not an absolute, decline. It was almost inevitable as new nations industrial­ized and began to play a role in world trade. Thus in the early 1870s Britain produced 44 percent of the world’s steel, whereas by 1914 it produced 11 per­cent, but, as the economic historian Sidney Pollard put it, “It is evident that a small island with only limited resources of rather inferior ores could not go on forever producing almost half the world’s output of iron or steel; that share had to drop.”37

Pollard is by no means uncritical of British economic policy, but he takes the view that in 1914 the British economy was riding high. Decline, he sus­pects, is a political myth: “the statistics are against this argument.”38 With re­gard to the universities, antideclinists draw attention to the significant role of the British educational system in producing large numbers of scientists and technologists, many of whom have gone into government and industrial ser­vice.39 The declinists also tend to overlook the civic universities that emerged in the late nineteenth century and often worked in close conjunction with local industry.40

David Edgerton has presented the antideclinist case in a series of publica­tions that includes Science, Technology and British Industrial Decline, 1870­1970 and Warfare State Britain, 1920—1970.41 He argues that the declinist view rests on the claim that Britain has not spent enough on research and devel­opment (R&D). The declinist premise is that economic growth depends on R&D, but, says Edgerton, this premise is false: economic growth is largely in­dependent of investment in R&D. In any case, British spending on R&D has long been comparable to, or greater than, its competitors. Rather than being in the thrall of an antiscientific elite, Britain has been a scientific powerhouse during the twentieth century. Since 1901 Britain has won roughly the same number of Nobel Prizes as Germany. By 1929 well over half the students at British universities were studying science, technology, or medicine. In War­fare State Britain Edgerton notes that despite this, “The image of Germans as both militaristic and strong innovators and users of high technology in warfare is still a standard one in popular accounts” (274). It would be closer to the truth, Edgerton argues, to invert the usual stereotypes and apply this description to the British. British military policy has been to invest in the high technology of its navy and air force—and use them ruthlessly against the economy and civilian population of the enemy.

Edgerton has also marshaled the neglected evidence about the massive involvement of British scientists in governmental and military roles. The declinists ignore the historical, statistical, and economic data that support the view of Britain as a technological and militant nation. For Edgerton the declinist theory is not detached, historical scholarship; it is an ideology that expresses the partisan claims of a disgruntled political lobby. The unending complaint that British universities ignore technology and shun the scientific – military-industrial complex is actually the expression of an insatiable demand for ever more engagement. As Edgerton puts it: “I take the very ubiquity in the post-war years of the claim that Britain was an anti-militarist and anti­technological society. . . as evidence not of the theory put forward, but of the success (and power of) the militaristic and technocratic strands in British culture” (109).

How does my study fit into this debate? Does the British resistance to the circulation theory of lift provide evidence in favor of the declinist, or the antideclinist, view? At first glance it would seem to support declinism. I have identified an elite group of academically trained scientists who turned their backs on a workable, and technologically important, theory in aerodynamics. They left it to German engineers to develop the idea of circulation that had originated in Britain. This lapse seems to confirm the familiar, declinist story about the weaknesses of British culture. Rayleigh’s strengths lay in research rather than development, and as one commentator has put it, “Rayleigh’s weakness in this direction was an example of the British research and devel­opment effort in general.”42 The way Lanchester was sidelined surely epito­mizes the resistance to modernization. Putting aeronautics in the hands of a committee of Cambridge worthies and country-house grandees reveals the amateurism so characteristic of British culture.43

A closer examination of the episode casts doubt on this declinist read­ing. First, recall how closely the elite British scientists whom I have studied worked with the government and the military. From 1909 they were given a role close to the center of power, and they embraced it readily. The first place that Haldane went for advice, as the government minister responsible for military affairs, was Trinity College. The University of Cambridge provided the mathematical training of a significant number of Britain’s leading aero­dynamic experts, including Rayleigh, Glazebrook, Greenhill, Bryan, Taylor, Lamb, Southwell, and of course Glauert, who later championed the circu­latory theory. The intimate connection between academia and the military evident in the field of aerodynamics does not, in isolation, refute the declinist picture, but it certainly runs counter to it. It exemplifies the policy of high – technology militarism that has long characterized British culture but that is ignored by declinists.44

Second, the initial opposition to the circulatory theory must be put in context. The work of the Advisory Committee covered a broad range of other aerodynamic problems as well as lift. Along with the National Physical Labo­ratory and the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, the committee was deeply immersed in the theory of stability and control. We should not forget the words of Major Low, who recommended a comparative perspective. He argued that the British and the Germans both had their strengths and weak­nesses, and where one was strong, the other was weak. The British strength was stability.45 In this area the same group of experts who fell behind in the study of lift excelled and led the world. And they did this by using their Tripos, or Tripos-style, mathematics. In this case they did not call on fluid dynamics but on the equally venerable and equally abstract dynamics of rigid bodies. I have described the central role played in this area by the Cambridge-trained G. H. Bryan, who used the work of E. J. Routh, the great Tripos coach.

The conclusion must be that the same cultural and intellectual resources that had failed in the one case, the theory of lift, succeeded in the other, the theory of stability. British experts may have faltered over the theory of lift be­cause they were mathematical physicists rather than engineers, but it was not because they were effete or antimilitary or significantly antitechnological. Sta­bility is as much a technological problem as is lift. Nor did these experts falter over lift because they were torpid and unresponsive in the face of novelty and innovation. On the contrary, they rejected the circulatory theory of lift pre­cisely because it lacked novelty. It was novelty that the British experts wanted, not the old story of perfect fluids in potential motion. They were seeking in­novations in fluid dynamics and looking for new ways to address the Stokes equations. The theory of decline therefore points the analyst in precisely the wrong direction to appreciate the true nature of the British response.

The lesson to be learned is that broad-brush, pessimistic macro­explanations will not suffice. They do not fit the facts of the case I have studied.46 In Barnett’s words, British cultural life is identified as “stupid,” “le­thargic,” “unambitious,” and “unenterprising.”47 Some of it certainly is, but an unrelieved cultural pessimism can shed no light on the specific profile of success and failure that I have been analyzing. Declinist pessimism does not possess the resources to account for the successes of British aerodynamics that went along with the failures. In the event, it cannot even illuminate the failures themselves. Barnett’s contemptuous adjectives do no justice to the clever and ambitious British mathematicians and physicists whose work has been examined. His picture of pacifist tendencies hardly accords with the speed with which young Cambridge mathematicians volunteered for active service in 1914. What is needed, and what I have given, is a micro-sociological explanation that addresses both success and failure in a symmetrical manner. My account of the British resistance to the theory of circulation does not ap­peal to the vagaries of national character or broad, cultural trends. Like other studies related to the Strong Program, it rests on the technical details of the methods used by clearly identified scientific groups and the character of the institutions that sustained them.48