[G]iven that we are today a country that would be as bankrupt as British Steel if it were not for the lucky strike of North Sea oil, and that our gro… - Correlli Barnett

It hardly needs emphasising that this wartime technological revolution marked a complete departure from Victorian and Edwardian laissez-faire orthodoxy. Given time for consolidation and further development – probably under some form of protection such as fostered the growth of American, German and Japanese industry – Britain's wartime achievements might have served as the starting-point for a root-and-branch modernisation of Britain as an industrial society. Indeed, the 1918 report of the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy virtually recommended this.
More fundamentally still, the wartime revolution could have served as the prototype for a new British "total strategy", based on Britain's own technological strength: in other words, the German and Japanese version of capitalism, a partnership between state and industry, rather than the Anglo-Saxon version. But instead Britain tried after the war to revert to her Victorian and Edwardian total strategy based on laissez-faire, the City of London, the gold-standard pound sterling and the Empire – with consequences which would only be fully revealed when the Second World War submitted Britain to yet another audit of industrial capability.

It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw factory settlements of the late Georgian and early Victorian England under conditions of ferocious competition and unbridled exploitation. It was in that era, when men, women and children were flooding into these settlements from the countryside and exchanging the slow, natural rhythms of the land or self-employed crafts (however hard that life might have been) for the harsh mechanical discipline and the pace and clamour of the mill, exchanging the village for the back-to-back terrace, that the British industrial working class, with its peculiar and enduring character as a culture apart, an alienated group often embittered and hostile, was created. It happened that water power and coal and iron largely existed in the bleak, wild landscapes of northern England, South Wales and lowland Scotland – regions hitherto lacking the numerous population and rich civilisation of the south; indeed regions traditionally turbulent and remote from the government of the Crown since the middle ages. Rare it was for the new factory settlements to cluster round an established city, as later would German industries develop round Leipzig and Dresden, Düsseldorf and Cologne: instead villages like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax, Middlesbrough proliferated into vast brick-built industrial camps; nothing but mean dwellings, drink-shops and "works".

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 of continued rivalry between nations.
The British and the Americans, on the other hand, had no such hard, clear-cut policy; felt no such overriding concern with German power. In the first place they shared the liberal assumption that the normal human condition was what they called "peace"; a natural harmony in which "war" was simply a meaningless and regrettable breakdown. They did not agree with the Clausewitzian view that "peace" and "war" were alternating aspects of a perpetual conflict of interest between organised human groups, a conflict which can express itself in mere economic and diplomatic rivalry; in threats of force; in covert violence or open pressure; in local use of force; in limited war; or finally, in total war. The notion that the Allied victory in the Great War was just one episode in a continuing struggle, from which the maximum advantage must be derived for the next episode, was therefore alien and repellent to them.