The French, in their attitude to making peace, were...preoccupied with the question of Germany's power in the future; a future which they saw as one … - Correlli Barnett

From 30 January 1933 onwards the English had had to deal with a German government whose leader poured public scorn of the utmost brutality on the fundamental beliefs by which the English had come to live. In Nazi Germany and post-evangelical England the utterly incompatible products of two different strains of romanticism now confronted one another – the German, with its mystical and atavistic outlook on race and nationhood, its obsession with power and domination, its neurotic love of violence; and the English, with its faith in the moral law, its vision of the brotherhood of man, its trust in the essential goodness of human nature, its pacific gentleness and compassion. Such a confrontation could only end in a tragedy of misunderstanding.

The European states, and above all Germany (newly united in 1871), therefore entered the second Industrial Revolution, that of science-based industries like chemicals and electrical goods, very well equipped by education, training, and research systems to take the lead. Britain, on the other hand, could only deploy a sorry militia of the ignorant led by the "practical man". Not merely did Britain lack a modern educational and research structure, it lacked the necessary national understanding and will to create one. Here then is the leitmotiv in British education for the next sixty years: the painful effort against the very grain of national prejudices to remedy what was already by 1870 a half-century of backlog.

In the twentieth century the capability of a nation's armed forces cannot be separated from that nation's technological capability and industrial resources, or even social fabric. This realisation led me...to the concept of "total strategy", defined...as strategy conceived as encompassing all the factors relevant to preserving, or extending, the power and prosperity of a human group in the face of rivalry from other groups... It will be seen that "total strategy" provides a different approach from that of the economic historian, and especially an economic historian in the Anglo-Saxon Adam-Smithian free-market tradition.