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British Prime Ministers in the 1920s and 1930s inherited a world created for them by David Lloyd George between 1919 and 1923, and were unable to cope with its challenges, complexities and risks. In the case of Stanley Baldwin, who ruled for most of the period as leader of a Conservative or National Government, the strain of dealing with a rapidly worsening international situation led to his resignation in 1937 and his replacement with Neville Chamberlain. The British public was steadfastly against war and rearmament, the memories of the First World War, which broke out to the shock and horror…
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When Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937 he inherited a highly precarious world situation. His predecessor was exhausted from his time in office but also was defeated by the dilemmas posed by rearmament. Chamberlain believed that a broad policy of appeasement in both Europe and Asia would stabilise the world situation that had been produced by the peace making of 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century throug
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In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the French Fourth Republic commenced a purge of former members of the wartime Vichy regime that had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. However, by 1947, under the new conditions of the Cold War, the enthusiasm for anti fascist trials had waned and instead anti communism replaced it. This was accompanied by a swift revival of prewar fascist movements such as Action Francais, but the most successful figure on the fascist right by the 1950s was
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Here is another article from the archives, one that I enjoyed writing some years ago on my teaching blog: Ok, so this might be useful for teachers of modern Britain (1930s) and teachers of Soviet Russia. In the early 1930s the USSR had a complex relationship with western intellectuals, it has been described by historian Michael David Fox as ‘Showcasing the Great Experiment, and there is a wealth of writing (much of it highly critical) on the ‘fellow traveller’ movement of western intellectuals that made an ideological pilgrimage to the USSR under StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 –…
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This article was originally posted on the Explaining History Patreon in April. NeoliberalismSupply Side Economics Full Description:Supply-Side Economics posits that production (supply) is the key to economic prosperity. Proponents argue that by reducing the “burden” of taxes on the wealthy and removing regulatory barriers for corporations, investment will increase, creating jobs and expanding the economy. Key Policies: Tax Cuts: Specifically for high-income earners and corporations, under the premise that this releases capital for investment. Deregulation: Removing environmental, labor, and safety protections to lower the cost of doing business. Critical Perspective:Historical analysis suggests that supply-side policies rarely lead to the promised broad-based prosperity. Instead,…
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The British hold over the Indian Army was born of strategic calculations; the army was the most powerful weapon in Asia at Britain’s disposal, and its huge manpower enabled Britain to punch above its weight on the world stage during the conflict. The British government attempted to limit the numbers of commissions granted to Indian officers, but the demands of war and the mass mobilisation of India to fight the Axis powers meant that by 1945, the numbers of officers leading Indian companies and
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I originally posted this article on an older blog, but as Britain rarely learns from its crises, it’s pretty much evergreen: In a way, Britain has had but once crisis since the end of the Second World War, it has emerged in different guises at different times, but it has essentially been the same problem. Britain, as Dean Acheson said, has lost an empire but not yet found a role. In 1945 Britain did not accept that her empire was gone and more significantly, that the centre of world finance had shifted from London to New York. In 1945 Britain…
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From 1932 to 1952 the Republican Party was unable to win a presidential election in the United States of America. The economic model that they had championed for much of the 1920s and which had only been partially abandoned by Herbert Hoover in 1931-32 was ditched far too late and was replaced firstly by Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and then the enormous state intervention required by the Second World War. The economist Yanis Varoufakis succinctly summed up the outcome of the conflict when he said that fascism was crushed by a combination of StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878…
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During the 1950s, Britain, France the USA and the USSR all conducted great power politics and diplomacy in the Middle East, competing to court and undermine rising nationalist movements in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan and beyond. This podcast explores the wider context of these interactions and their culmination in the Suez Crisis Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, pleas
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There are numerous competing histooriographies of the Stalinist terror, which peaked in 1937. The pretext of the assassination of Kirov, that Stalin may well have had a hand in was simply that, an excuse for Stalin to shore up his own personal power by targeting for the first time the party itself. The disaster of collectivisation and the failure of the Soviet famines left Stalin highly vulnerable in 1934, an experience he would never forget nor allow to be repeated. Explaining History helps yo