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The UK: Less a liberal market economy, more a post-imperial one

David Coates
Capital & Class 2014 38: 171
DOI: 10.1177/0309816813514816
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514816
research-article2013

CNC38110.1177/0309816813514816Capital & ClassCoates

Article

The UK: Less a liberal

market economy, more
a post-imperial one

Capital & Class

2014, Vol. 38(1) 171182
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309816813514816
c&c.sagepub.com

David Coates

Wake Forest University, USA

Abstract
This article adds a new element to the growing critique of the original varieties of
capitalism (VoC) distinction between liberal and coordinated market capitalisms
by questioning the usefulness of the liberal market economy (LME) category itself. It
demonstrates that many of the distinguishing features of the LME category are in
the US and UK cases at least best explained by those economies external global
and hegemonic role, rather than by their internal institutional complementarities.
Imperialism holds the key to liberalism a key demonstrated here by a detailed
examination of the UK case. The lessons for the study of comparative capitalisms are
major: a total setting aside of the LME/CME distinction, and a return to the building
of a global understanding of capitalism which is more than the sum of its individual
parts. In order to understand LMEs, you need to understand imperialism; and to
understand imperialism, you have to engage again with a revitalised Marxism.
Keywords
Varieties of capitalism, liberal market economies, imperialism, gentlemanly
capitalism, liberal militarism

Introduction
It is conventional in much of the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature to treat the US
and the UK economies as examples of one particular capitalist model, to be contrasted
with one or more other models, which are invariably treated as socially superior but
economically suspect. Sometimes the typology is that of liberal market economies
(LMEs) against coordinated market economies (CMEs). Sometimes, it is Anglo-Saxon
Corresponding author:
David Coates, Wake Forest University, USA.
Email: coatesd@wfu.edu

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capitalism against Rhineland capitalism. Sometimes it is liberal welfare states against

conservative and social-democratic welfare states; but regardless of the specific categorisation, there is a tendency in the relevant literatures to group the USA and the UK
together. The argument here is that putting them together obscures more than it illuminates; and it does so precisely because the similarities of the two economies are rooted in
the one thing that dominant typologies in CC studies systematically fail to emphasise:
namely, the institutional consequences of past and present imperialisms.

The limits of LME as a category

Prime responsibility for linking the US and UK together as LMEs lies with Peter Hall
and David Soskice (2001: 19). Though their predominant concern was visibly with the
defence of CMEs, in treating both the US and UK as non-coordinated economies Hall
and Soskice stressed the distance between government and business in both of them, the
systemic weakness of organised labour when compared to more coordinated market
economies, and the predominance of idea systems within the liberal model, privileging
the right of managers to manage and of capital freely to move (see also Gallas, in this
special issue, on the UK). The LME/CME distinction was always a politically charged
one, largely functioning as a defence of European welfare capitalism against its neoliberal
critics. But in conceding the viability of LMEs as well as CMEs, and by placing the US
and UK economies firmly in the LME camp, Hall and Soskice inadvertently gave retrospective reinforcement to the Reaganite enthusiasm for business deregulation and to the
Thatcherite assertion that the UKs late-20th-century economic weaknesses had much to
do with the partial nature of the constraints on private enterprise created by years of halfhearted social democracy. It was Hall and Soskice (2001: 57), after all, and not Margaret
Thatcher, who insisted that because international liberalization enhances the exit
options of firms in LMEs the balance of power is likely to tilt towards business. The
result should be some weakening of organized labor and a substantial amount of deregulation, much as conventional views predict.
My general unease with the LME/CME distinction, and with the new institutionalist
paradigm it helps sustain, has been laid out elsewhere (Coates 2002, 2005; see also my
other paper in this special issue). What concerns me here is a more specific weakness in
the basic typology: the relatively unexamined inadequacy of LME as a category of analysis in the original Hall and Soskice formulation. Applying the label liberal market economy to either the USA or the UK brought with it three significant weaknesses on which
it is valuable to dwell: the lack of fit between the model and the reality it labelled; the
truncated and ultimately misleading view of institutional development and change it
helped to sustain; and the systematic failure of the whole approach to place models of
capitalism on some more systematically developed historical and contemporary global
map (see also Bieling and Jessop in this special issue).

The lack of fit

The gap between model and reality is clearest in the case of the USA as a LME. When
labelling it in that way, Hall and Soskice focused on financial systems and corporate

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governance, industrial relations, education and training, and inter-company relationships. That focus led them to ignore or downplay, among other things, the close working
relationship between the Pentagon and the US engineering industry, between the oil
industry and the Department of Energy, between large agribusinesses and the Agriculture
Department, and between large pharmaceutical companies and federally funded basic
research and Medicare/Medicaid spending. Missing so much of what is defining of US
capitalism, the LME label simply played into the hands of conservatives keen to extol the
virtues of what they choose to characterise as a free-market capitalism unburdened by
extensive welfare rights or corporate cronyism. Sadly, in contemporary America, there is
in fact far too much of the latter and far too little of the former. The contemporary US
economy is probably more properly described as a classic example of crony capitalism,
full as it is of interlocking corporate boards, mutually reinforcing top-salary compensation committees, and revolving-door relationships between Washington and Wall Street
and the categories of our scholarship ought not to prevent us from seeing that. The
entirety of the US economy is not a free-market capitalism in any meaningful sense of
that term, and nor for that matter is the UK economy: a strong reason why dispensing
with the LME category as a tool of comparative analysis is long overdue.

The truncated view of history

But there is more. By restricting our view to just two types of capitalist economy, and by
focusing discussion of institutional change within them predominantly on the post1945 period, the varieties-of-capitalism approach pioneered by Hall and Soskice pulls us
away from any recognition that the differential timing of industrial take-off remains vital
to the contemporary condition of each major national economy, not least because of the
institutional legacies left in place by the balance of pre-capitalist and capitalist social
forces at the moment of industrialisation (see also Taylor in this special issue). There is
more than path-dependency going on in the historical trajectories of national capitalisms, powerful as path-dependency undeniably is. There is also the legacy of the past,
including the legacy of the pre-capitalist past; which is why it is not possible fully to
understand the contemporary balance of class forces in each major economy, or the
institutional mix each demonstrates, without tracing both back to the origins of each
particular capitalist model.
The US and UK economies were both early industrialisers, relative to their German
and Japanese contemporary competitors, and that still matters. In first-wave capitalisms
those economies which began the process of capitalist industrialisation on a significant
scale in the first half of the 19th century, notably Britain, the Netherlands, the USA and,
more problematically, France industrialisation followed a relatively lengthy period of
internal social differentiation which had already brought about significant shifts from
pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production in key economic sectors before factory
production was introduced. In the first-wave capitalisms, it was the industrial middle
class that set the pace, presiding over an industrialisation process whose tempo was, in
retrospect, relatively slow, but whose reach and penetration into the economy was relatively thorough and dense from the very outset. Second-wave capitalisms the economies of Germany, Russia and Japan were different. Their industrialisation on a

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significant scale began in the latter part of the 19th century. Here, the impulse towards
capitalist industrialisation arose less from the internal evolution of their societies than
from external pressures working on their ruling groups from an emerging industrial capitalist world. In these societies, the industrial middle class was weaker, and more dependent on pre-capitalist ruling groups; and indeed, it was the national-military needs of
these autocratic regimes which often provided the key impetus to industrialisation as
such. The state apparatus tended in consequence to preserve greater organisational roots
in the landed aristocracy, while, paradoxically, generally being from the outset far more
deeply involved in the orchestration of capital accumulation than were the liberal states
of first-wave capitalism (Looker & Coates 1983: 99-101). Labelling one set of capitalisms as LMEs and the other as CMEs simply blocks any analytical capacity for letting
these crucial historical differences back in; which is a second reason why the whole LME/
CME distinction needs now to be set aside.

The lack of a global map

There is more still. Stringing together a number of economies as LMEs also obscures
what is arguably the most important difference between some of them and the rest, and
does so by failing to place any of the national economies on any coherently specified
global map. Globalisation is not a new feature of capitalism, and nor are all economies
equally globally potent. What separates the UK and US economies from any others that
scholars might be tempted to label as LMEs is the global role indeed the globally dominant role that the UK in the past played and the US currently plays in a system of
internationally linked economies, a role that no other LME and certainly no CME has
ever been in a position to play. The argument developed in the rest of this article turns
centrally on this point: namely that the key features of both the US and UK economies
singled out by Hall and Soskice as defining of their shared LME status including the
weakness of business regulation in both, their propensity for Reagan-like conservative
governments, the moderation of their labour movements, the weight of finance relative
to manufacturing in their GDP, and their current inability to turn trade deficits into
trade surpluses can and should be linked back to the UK and USs shared experience of
early industrialisation and subsequent global economic dominance. The argument will
also be that where the US and UK economies differ on such things as the greater political importance of deregulation in the USA, the greater public support for state welfare
provision and even public ownership in the UK, the greater weight of finance and the
lower degree of militarisation of core engineering industries in the UK these differences
also need to be linked back, this time to the timing of global dominance, to the fact that
the UK is now a post-imperial economy and society, while the US is (at most) simply
poised to become one.
This is not to imply that German and Japanese capitalism are somehow better forms
of capitalism because their imperialism failed (the weaknesses of so-called CMEs, though
real, are beyond the scope of this paper). It is rather to argue that the UK and US economies are best thought of, not as LMEs but as imperial capitalisms, at different stages on
a standard imperial trajectory. And it is for that reason, and not because they are two
versions of some timeless LME construct, that the two economies are both so similar and

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yet in critical ways now so different from one another. The general thesis underpinning
the argument below is that imperial and post-imperial economies tend to have an unbalanced relationship between manufacturing and finance, an overly militarised and increasingly uncompetitive manufacturing sector, a globally focused political class, and a more
than usually moderate labour movement. The liberalism, in the LME-CME sense, of
both the US and UK economies is a product of their imperialism, and not just a function
of some accidental institutional complementarity into which they have inadvertently
blundered. This cannot be understood without that recognition, or changed without a
fundamental resetting of their economys entire global positioning.

Legacies of imperialism: The UK case

Applied to the contemporary UK, the argument is as follows.

Financial dominance
All capitalist economies contain, to varying degrees between individual capitalisms and
to varying degrees over time, different circuits of capital: merchant capital, agrarian capital, industrial capital and financial capital. It is a feature of hegemonic economies that, as
their hegemonic presence grows, so too does the weight of financial capital in the circuits
that constitute them. That increasing weight is partly a product of the surpluses earned
by global dominance then coming back to the hegemonic centre. It is partly a product of
other economies coming to the centre to buy the technology that first established that
hegemony, and needing to borrow local finance to do so; and it is partly because the
export needs of a dominant economy initially require the outflow of local funds to lubricate its export sales. In hegemonic economies, this outflow of capital is initially functional to all its key capitalist strata merchants, farmers and industrialists as well as
bankers but over time, it inevitably creates a gap between finance and industry that
undermines the capacity of local financial institutions to help the hegemonic industrial
base retool in order to meet the overseas competitive challenges its hegemony has helped
call into existence. The retreat from circuits of industrial capital to those of finance capital would appear endemic to all dominant capitalisms (Arrighi 1994). We certainly see it
in the separation of financial and manufacturing capital in the contemporary USA
(Coates 2011: 1426).
In the UK case, it is impossible fully to understand the weight of finance in the contemporary economic formation without linking that weight back to the gap that opened
up between UK-based finance and UK-based industry in the critical decades before
1914. The story has often been told of how initially Britains world monopoly position
gave its industrial capitalists surpluses on which internally-financed long-term investment could proceed apace; how that world monopoly position also gave sterling a particular role in the 19th-century world economy (broadly similar to that of the dollar
between 1944 and 1971); and how it attracted to London foreign borrowers keen to
draw on those surpluses for their own industrial take-off. From the 1890s, in consequence, the English banking system found it more profitable to finance foreign trade and
to handle portfolio investment abroad than to seek out domestic industrial demand for

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long-term finance. This established both a distance between industrial and financial
interests and an international focus for British banking practices that had no close contemporary parallel elsewhere (Coates 1986: 26971; Coates 1994: 15362). It was in
this manner that, as Andrew Gamble (2004: 37) rightly observed, far from being the
pioneer of industrialism, Britain [became] an economy dominated by financiers and
rentiers. Indeed, the word became may not actually be entirely appropriate here,
because industrial capitalism in the UK, even at the height of its brief global dominance,
was always the minor player always the bastard child of a capitalist social formation
that was throughout predominantly commercial and financial in nature.

Manufacturing weakness
What that brief period of global manufacturing dominance then consolidated was what
Cain and Hopkins (1993) have labelled as gentlemanly capitalism: the fusion of aristocratic and banking interests and the generation of a social culture that prioritised the
making of money from money over the making of money from industrial enterprise.1
Though the UK is known as the home of the first industrial revolution, that primacy was
possible only because of the prior development within the UK of both agrarian and
mercantile capitalism; and there remains much academic controversy, particularly in
Marxist academic circles, about exactly why, and exactly when, UK manufacturing
industry fell victim to the dominance of financial interests in the circles surrounding the
British state (cf. Ingham 1984, 1988; Lees 1986; Anderson 1987; Barrett Brown 1988;
Callinicos 1988). Certainly by 1914, with over 40 percent of the total exported capital
of the world raised on its financial markets, London was the leading centre for the issue
of foreign loans and equities (Cassis 1990: 1), and a fully capitalist rentier class had
come into existence. In consequence, the viability of London as an imperial centre had
come to depend heavily on its role as a financial entrept rather than as a major manufacturing centre with global leadership capacities.
That in its turn reminds us that the economic (and political) weakness of UK-based
manufacturing industry is of long standing. The industrial-owning class was, from the
outset of the UKs rise to brief global manufacturing dominance, heavily concentrated
regionally away from London; and this class never replaced in political dominance more
traditional elites whose income depended on banking and on land. The brief midVictorian period of unrivalled manufacturing supremacy left economic and political
elites in the UK slow to respond to the challenges to dominance represented by the pre1914 rise of German and American competition. There is plenty of evidence in the lateVictorian UK economic story of a retreat into imperial markets by established industries,
and of a general institutional rigidity a slowness to make the move from proprietary
capitalism to the managerial capitalism made necessary by the second industrial revolution (Elbaum & Lazonick 1984). The long-term legacy of that a postwar flawed
Fordism (Boyer 1996; Clark 2001) left the UK manufacturing sector vulnerable to
German competition a second time after the brief hiatus caused by the devastation suffered by German industry during the Second World War; and by then, the UK state
lacked both the capacity and the will for effective rapid economic modernisation. There
can be no full explanation of the UK economys continuing trade deficit without some

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recognition of that particular lack, and the resulting failure to seize the opportunity of
full-scale postwar industrial modernisation before the revival of Germany and Japanese
competition.

Liberal militarism
Why this lack of capacity and will? In part, because of the long-term impact on UK
manufacturing competitiveness of a century of liberal militarism. Globally hegemonic
powers spend money on armaments and on war. The UK did (and still does) both. Paul
Kennedy (1988: 243) noted this for the 1980s, and linked it to UK decline: Britain
spends proportionately more (5.5 percent of GDP) than any other NATO partner except
Greece. Globally hegemonic powers develop and sustain a large military-industrial complex. The UK still has that: a manufacturing sector disproportionately focused on (and
holding global leadership capacities in) military rather than civilian industrial production. And globally hegemonic powers of the UK kind which industrialised prior to
dominance with only the minimum of direct state economic leadership demonstrate a
propensity for what David Edgerton (1991) properly called liberal militarism, namely a
state propensity to regularly reconfigure military-focused manufacturing while deliberating abstaining from similar leadership in the civilian sector.
It is true that, undefeated militarily but seriously weakened economically by the
Second World War, successive UK governments did then periodically attempt state-led
industrial modernisation; but always to very limited effect. For far too long for the competitive health of the UKs manufacturing sector, postwar UK governments attempted to
retain the possessions and trappings of empire (Blank 1977). For far too long, both
Labour and Conservative governments pursued an expensive strategy of keeping
Britains military industries at the leading edge (Edgerton 1991: 1401). For far too
long, a disproportionately large share of UK R&D, and associated scientists and engineers, remained focused on military, not civilian, production (Coates 1994: 193201;
2000: 198201) and this at the very time in which countries such as Japan were investing in the long-term technological development of motor vehicles and other manufacturing industries under strong state leadership (in Japans case, through MITI) (Fine &
Harris 1985: 243). For far too long, that is (initially from 1985, and then again from
1995), the UK has remained a major net exporter of armaments but a net importer of
manufactures (Edgerton 1991: 164; emphases added).
Therefore, by the time the UK political class did come to terms with the UKs diminished global role, it had let slip key opportunities for civilian manufacturing modernisation of the kind underway in the UKs main CME competitors, most notably Germany
and Japan. The 20th-century UK state was one created far more for empire than for
domestic industrial modernisation. Its strongest institutional nexus in the years before
1964 was that linking the Treasury to the Foreign Office and the Ministries of Supply/
Defence. As the UKs global power waned, so did the standing of the Foreign Office
replaced within the core institutional triangle by various iterations of a civilian industry
ministry. To this day, the UK state remains a triangular structure linking the Treasury, the
Ministry of Defence and the DTI (with the last perennially renamed and persistently
denied real purpose and purchase). There is an important industry ministry story to be

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told for post-war Britain, and sadly it remains (as we see once more with Vince Cable)
largely a story of failure.2 And even today, after years of attempts of civilian modernisation and a curtailing of the UK defense budget, the volume of arms sales still rose globally during the recent economic downturn, and BAE still tops the list of the worlds
largest weapons manufacturers.

The consolidation of an imperial mindset

In the modern era, the legacies of empire are not simply institutional and economic; they
are also cultural. In empire after empire, predominant patterns of thought emerge to
reinforce the imperial project patterns which then help to undermine the very imperialism that first created them. In the UK case, there is a legitimate debate in the relevant
historical literature about how deep and wide support was for the British Empire even at
its height (Porter 2006: 227). It is possible to point to critics of imperialism throughout
the 19th century free-trade liberal critics as the UK began to lay claim to more and
more territory from the 1840s, and centre-left (social-democratic) critics at centurys
end, when imperial jingoism peaked. But there is no escaping the fact that those critics
remained a minority voice within the British political class prior to 1914 imperialism
at its height was politically popular and that although the proportions shifted thereafter, the Empire project left a generalised hubris among British politicians and state
administrators which has still not entirely gone away.
The 1940s freeze of the international architecture of the postwar world order still
encourages UK governments to punch above their weight, to see themselves as the
USs ally in global policing, and to be at best reluctant Europeans for fear of losing
their capacity for an independent role on the world stage. And that is true not just of
post-war Conservative governments: Old Labour governments were equally prone to
this global posturing, and so too was New Labour after 1997. In Tony Blairs defiant
internationalism, and arguably even in Robin Cooks ethical foreign policy (doing
good in the world), we see the same propensity to rearrange other peoples political
furniture the same imperial hubris that once justified colonial expansion (Coates &
Krieger 2004: 110-12). That hubris is there in the wider political culture, too we
need only remember the popularity of the Thatcher invasion of the Falklands to realise
that. Certainly as late as 1983, the UK electorate seemed to have no difficulty supporting sovereignty claims on territory at the other end of the world, without in any way
conceding similar sovereignty to others: imagine what the British popular reaction
would have been, had the Argentinians laid claim to the Isle of Man for some equally
specious historical reason.
Given the disproportionate involvement of residual aristocratic elements in the staffing of the Empire, and the general propensity of right-wing politics to emphasise issues
of national (rather than class) interest, the persistence of an imperial hubris on the right
of British politics is perhaps only to be expected. What is less clear is why centre-left parties in the UK should still be so vulnerable to the same thing. That vulnerability has a
structural, as well as a personal and accidental, origin. Tony Blairs personality may
explain some of the reason for British involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it
does not explain it all. The vulnerability of the British centre-left to the residue

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179

of imperial hubris lies in the manner in which the relatively slow transformation of the
pre-capitalist UK economy into an industrial capitalist one, and the associated slowness
(or in the USs case, the entire absence) of the destruction of a traditional peasantry,
combined in the 19th century to moderate early working-class politics in both the UK
and USA: moderate, that is, when compared to labour politics in later industrialisers like
Germany, Russia and Japan (Coates 2010).
It was this moderation that was then reinforced by the bounty of empire, with the
contradictions of early capitalist accumulation being softened in the core of the global
system by being pushed to its edge. It is not just conservative politics in the UK (and the
USA) that is anchored away to the right in the wake of empire. The whole centre of
political gravity shifts that way, to the extent that entire labour movements are suborned
into the imperial project. This incorporation is both extreme and unavoidably visible in
the contemporary US case, but it is there too in the UK. British labourism was always
less radical than mainstream European social democracy, and in large measure remains
so. Remember with what ease Gordon Brown could articulate a discourse of Britishness,
and with what speed the post-New Labour parliamentary leadership moved, in 2012, to
condemn the renewed Argentinian claims on the Malvinas (Hoggart 2012).
Perhaps there is a general truth here: that ultimately the whole centre of gravity of
UK (and indeed US) politics can only be explained in the imperial way. Certainly the
ease with which UK (and later US) industrial capital established a powerful global
presence without any direct and systematic state intervention for that purpose
reinforced in conservative circles, once the economy became globally hegemonic, an
equation of business interests with limited government at home and with marketopening policies abroad. It was in catch-up capitalisms, not in early capitalisms, that
conservative political elites and supporting business leaders readily deployed state-led
civilian industrial modernisation programmes. It was business and political elites in
economies like Germany and France (and indeed, even in the USA after the Civil War,
and Japan after the Second World War) that deployed protectionism against the penetration of their domestic markets by manufactured goods from stronger economies
abroad. Political and industrial elites in early capitalisms, by comparison, became wedded to limited government and free-trade maxims during their period of global dominance when they needed open markets to keep their export factories in full production
and then proved slow to shed that non-interventionist and free-trade mentality when
their economic supremacy began to wane. We invariably see the persistence of a strong
state, free market liberalism in imperial capitalisms which was functional to the beginning of their imperial story, but not to its end. What was it that Keynes (1936: 32)
said: that Ricardos doctrine conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition
conquered Spain!

Concluding remarks
At least two things follow from the UK case study that should be of interest to all
scholars of comparative capitalisms. The first is that if it is their imperialism rather
than their liberalism that places the US and UK economies in the LME category, then
for the VoC literature to make further progress, it will be necessary for its adherents to

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generate a typology of capitalisms that is capable of distinguishing imperial capitalisms

from post-imperial capitalisms, and of differentiating capitalisms that have exercised
global hegemony from those that have never done so. The second is that the new institutionalism offers no particular way of explaining and understanding imperialism.
Marxism does, of course, but as a paradigm of thought it has no monopoly of that
understanding and explanation. So if the new institutionalists do not want to surrender the field of comparative capitalisms simply to a revitalised Marxism, they then too
need to engage with non-Marxist explanations of imperialism, in order to create a
coherent map of the contemporary global economy on which then to place the pathdependent trajectory of particular national capitalisms. The temptation in scholarly
research these days is always to go to the particular; but the particular can only be fully
illuminated by its place in the whole. It is time for Big Picture thinking again in the
study of comparative capitalisms. Marxisms intellectual moment has returned.
Endnotes
1. It was Cain and Hopkinss view that gentlemanly capitalism then developed in ways which
emphasized the distance between land, high finance and the upper reaches of the service sector on the one side, and mechanical industry on the other (1993: 15). There is much debate
in the relevant literature on whether early 20th-century UK manufacturing suffered from a
corresponding loss of the industrial spirit, or merely from a freezing of dominant mindsets
in an increasingly inappropriate early Victorian classical liberalism (on this, arguing the latter,
see Coates 2000: 13541).
2. It is possible to trace the DTI story back to the first Wilson government, with the initial
clash between George Browns DEA and James Callaghans Treasury over the National
Plan (won by Callaghan). Stronger attempts were then made to create a powerful civilian industry ministry by Anthony Wedgewood Benn: his 1960s DTI was dismantled by
Heath. His second attempt at the Department of Industry was diminished by the lefts
defeat in the EEC referendum in 1975, and was run down by Eric Varley. The DTI under
Thatcher with Nicholas Ridley at the helm was at an all-time low, until resurrected
as a power base for Michael Heseltine as deputy prime minister under Major. The DTI
was emasculated again under New Labour by Gordon Browns resetting of the Treasury
as the de facto industry ministry, and is now the scene of a party battle inside the current
coalition between Vince Cable (wanting his ministry to be a genuine engine of manufacturing growth) and a Treasury under the most austerity-prone Chancellor since Thatchers
Geoffrey Howe. In these clashes to date the Heseltine period apart the Treasury has
always won, leaving the civilian industry ministry subject to a regular change of title,
functions, and status (Lee 1997: 10865).

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Author biography
David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies in the Department of Politics
and International Affairs at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA. He has written extensively on contemporary political economy, labour history and US and UK public policy. His writings are at <www.davidcoates.net>.

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