The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. This title shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests and sitting at the heart of a global production system.

From the acclaimed author of Britains War Machine and The Shock of the Old, a bold reassessment of Britains twentieth century.

It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union in this way.

David Edgertons major new history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal...

'It's rare for a book to make you see the world differently, but this ... does exactly that on almost every page' Guardian Standard histories of technology give tired accounts of the usual inventions, inventors, and dates, framing technology as the inevitable march of progress. They split history into ages - electrification, motorisation, and computerisation - and rarely ask whether anyone bothered to use these inventions at the time. Shock of the Old is not one of those histories. I Letters exist alongside emails and outlasted telegrams; we still make physical books and magazines...