Correlli Barnett

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Correlli Barnett CBE (born June 28, 1927 in Norbury, Surrey) is an English military historian, who has also written extensively on the United Kingdom's industrial decline.

1 Early life and work
2 Influence
3 Books
4 Notes
5 External link

[edit] Early life and work

Barnett attended Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon and then Exeter College, Oxford where he gained a second class honours degree in Modern History with his special subject being Military History and the Theory of War, gaining an MA in 1954. Barnett worked as historical consultant and writer for BBC television series The Great War (1963-64). He has contributed numerous articles to various newspapers arguing against the 2003 Iraq War.

He is the author of The Desert Generals, a book that attacked the perceived cult of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and assessed the roles of his sacked predecessors as commanders in the North Africa campaign.

Barnett's The Pride and Fall sequence:

The Collapse of British Power
The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation
The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50
The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future

The Audit of War is Barnett's best known work. In sum, the sequence describes the decline of British power during the twentieth century, a decline attributed by the author to a change in the values of England's governing élite from the late eighteenth century, and one which was encouraged by evangelical and non-conformist Christianity. Barnett claims the British statesmen of the eighteenth century were men "hard of mind and hard of will" who regarded "national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three". Furthermore, they regarded it as "natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance".^[1] The British national character, Barnett argues, underwent a profound moral revolution in the nineteenth century which came to have a deep effect on British foreign policy; foreign policy was now to be conducted in a reverence of highly ethical standards rather than an "expedient and opportunist pursuit of England's interests".^[2]

He has been criticised for being overly-negative about Britain's war effort, with his emphasis on production inefficiencies, in the light of Britain's overall participation in Allied victory. He also published Britain and Her Army 1509-1970, which as a survey combines the political, the social and the military over the grand sweep of Britain's post-medieval history.

[edit] Influence

There were some Cabinet Ministers in Margaret Thatcher's government who were influenced by Barnett's works. Sir Keith Joseph, Education Secretary from 1981 to 1986, admired Barnett's work about the anti-business culture in education and in an interview with Anthony Seldon he proclaimed: "I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter".^[3] Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, also cited Barnett's views on education as an influence, specifically The Audit of War.^[4] In 1995 when Michael Heseltine became Deputy Prime Minister in John Major's Cabinet, he presented each member of the Cabinet with copies of Barnett's The Lost Victory.^[5]

[edit] Books

The Hump Organisation (1957)
The Channel Tunnel (with Humphrey Slater, 1958)
The Desert Generals (Kimber, 1960)
The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963)
The Battle of El Alamein (Macmillan, 1964)
Britain and Her Army, 1509 - 1970 (A Lane, 1970)
The Collapse of British Power (Eyre Methuen, 1972)
The First Churchill: Marlborough, Soldier and Statesman (Eyre Methuen, 1974)
Strategy and Society (Manchester University Press, 1976)
Human Factor and British Industrial Decline: An Historical Perspective (Working Together Campaign, 1977)
Bonaparte (Allen & U, 1978)
The Great War (Park Lane Press, 1979)
The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Macmillan, 1986)
Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (W W Norton & Co Inc, 1991)
The Lost Victory: British Dreams and British Realities, 1945-50 (Macmillan, 1995).
The Verdict of Peace: Britain between her yesterday and the Future (Macmillan, 2001)
Post-conquest Civil Affairs: Comparing War's End in Iraq and in Germany (Foreign Policy Centre, 2005)
Pétain (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, forthcoming).

[edit] Notes

^ Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Pan, 2002), p. 20.
^ Ibid, p. 24.
^ Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett, Keith Joseph (Acumen, 2002), p. 300.
^ Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (Bantam, 1992), p. 607.
^ Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), p. 493.