Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacobin and I'll be presenting the show.

The outcome of the Brexit crisis has brought the very existence of the United Kingdom into question.

Historians may look back at the current period as the beginning of the end for the British nation.

The idea of wrong turnings and missed opportunities has a long history and British public debate.

This song by punk group The Adverts, the Great British Mistake, was released in 1978.

It now sounds like it could have been written in the past five years.

I guess today is David Edgerton. He's a professor at King's College London, where his work concentrates on the histories of 20th century Britain and of global science and technology.

His most recent work is the rise and fall of the British nation, one of the most ambitious reinterpretations of modern Britain for many years.

In the rise and fall of the British nation, you're careful to specify at the outset that it's not the rise and fall of the British economy or the British state that you're discussing, but rather the nation in particular.

What is the significance of the book's title?

Well, yes. Well, British history has a problem with nationalism and indeed the nation.

They're not supposed to exist or they exist in very unusual forms.

The central claim of my book is that something I called a British nation corresponding to the territory of the UK emerged as a national formation with a national economy with national politics.

Self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain emerged after 1945, but had a rather short life that was broken up from the 1980s.

So I'm talking about a particular phase in history before the nation came both the Empire and a set of places as were located in a global free trading space.

What came after the nation? Well, a fresh commitment to a globalist, particularly European, liberal economic perspective.

So I'm suggesting a discontinuity in British history, but it's not as I think you've suggested.

It's not a necessarily a story of the economy. It's not a moral story of the rise and fall of something good.

It's the rise and fall of something significant.

I have to say, actually, that the national period, the 1940s to the 1970s, actually saw the fastest rise in GDP ever in British history.

So there is some correlation with the process of nationalization and the process of economic growth.

...