TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF MUDDLING THROUGH

THE SURPRISING STORY OF BRITAIN’S ECONOMY FROM BOOM TO BUST AND BACK AGAIN DUNCAN WELDON

Little, Brown, 339pp, £20 ‘For all the popular history published about, say, Anne Boleyn’s third cousin thrice-removed, books that outline the fundamental forces of British history – the tectonic economic changes beyond any individual’s or even government’s control – are surprisingly rare,’ wrote Anton Howes in his review for the Financial Times. ‘Thankfully, Duncan Weldon has written just such a book. He pans out from the trees we’ve become so accustomed to squinting at to show us a vast, wild and unpredictable wood. Here is the history that really matters.’ Aditya Chakrabortty, writing in the

Guardian, said it is ‘a terrific achievement, covering clearly but with subtlety everything from the spinning jenny to Covid-19. Along the way, Weldon makes some intriguing arguments, such as how successive generations of politicians swear they’re fixing problems, only for a new variant to pop up a little later.’

Although Weldon’s book is only 300 pages, wrote Dominic Sandbrook in his Sunday Times review, ‘his narrative races from the early 1700s to the Covid pandemic, taking in everything from the South Sea Bubble to the impact of the financial crisis... For a reader new to the subject, all this will probably be very useful. For anybody else, though, it’s far too short and far, far too dry. Surprisingly for a journalist, Weldon has a pathological aversion to colour or anecdote. Human beings do appear, but they almost never say anything. Perhaps that’s not surprising, in what is basically an economics textbook... Even the chapter on Thatcherism – surely the most controversial experiment in our economic history – is entirely bloodless.’

‘For a reader new to the subject, all this will probably be very useful’