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Warfare State
Edgerton's 2005 reframing of twentieth-century British history around military-industrial production rather than welfare-state mythology — the empirical foundation of his subsequent global use-centered framework.
Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 is David Edgerton's 2005 monograph that systematically dismantled the welfare-state mythology that had structured British twentieth-century historical self-understanding. Where conventional histories emphasized the construction of the National Health Service, the welfare reforms of the 1940s, and Britain's transformation into a social-democratic society, Edgerton documented in archival detail that Britain across the same period was one of the most heavily militarized industrial economies in the world — a warfare state whose productive infrastructure, scientific establishment, and political-economic priorities were organized around military-industrial production at scales that the welfare-state narrative rendered invisible. The book established Edgerton as one of the most rigorous contrarian historians of his generation and laid the methodological foundation for his subsequent global work on use-centered technology history.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's empirical core is the documentation of British military-industrial scale across five decades. Edgerton's archival work demonstrated that British military spending, scientific employment, and industrial capacity devoted to military production substantially exceeded what conventional histories acknowledged. The country