Correlli Barnett

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Correlli Barnett was born on the 28th of June 1927 in Norbury, in the County Borough of Croydon, into a Britain that still considered itself a great power. He died on the 10th of July 2022 at the age of 95 in East Carleton in Norfolk, having spent nearly seven decades arguing, with mounting urgency, that Britain had not been a great power for a very long time. Two books shaped everything that followed. One was Carl von Clausewitz's On War, part of his special subject at Oxford. The other was Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, which a friend pressed into his hands. Together they handed the young student a lens: history viewed through technology rather than through constitutions and parliaments. What he saw through that lens disturbed him deeply. The questions he spent his life pursuing were not simply military ones. They were questions about national character, about the values instilled in British schoolrooms, about why the workshop of the world had quietly ceased to function. What force could cause an entire governing class to abandon the hard-edged statecraft that built an empire? And could a historian armed with flow charts and Clausewitzian logic ever convince anyone in power to listen?

• 2. The Making of a Contrarian

  ›

  Before Oxford, Barnett had already seen empire up close. From 1945 to 1948 he served in the British Army in Palestine during the Palestine Emergency as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps. That posting gave him something most historians lack: direct experience of the machinery of British power straining under pressure. At Oxford's Exeter College he earned a second class honours degree in Modern History, with Military History and the Theory of War as his special subject, and an MA in 1954. He later recalled that Clausewitz taught him to think about war as an extension of policy, while Mumford redirected his thinking toward the technological underpinnings of civilisation. That combination proved generative. Where his contemporaries at Oxford were reading history in constitutional and political terms, Barnett was reading it in technological ones. The contrast left a mark. His later books would relentlessly expose the gap between British self-image and British industrial capacity, and the argument traced back directly to those two books in the Bodleian.

• 3. Debunking Montgomery

  ›

  The Desert Generals, published by Kimber in 1960, announced Barnett as a provocateur. The book attacked what he saw as the cult surrounding Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery by rehabilitating the commanders Montgomery had replaced. Richard O'Connor had driven the Italians from Cyrenaica in late 1940. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, whom Barnett named "The Victor of Alamein", had stopped Rommel at the First Battle of El Alamein, only to be dismissed by Winston Churchill for his trouble. Montgomery, Barnett argued, enjoyed massive superiority of men and materiel before the Second Battle of El Alamein; the genius was less personal than circumstantial. He called Montgomery an "emotional cripple", a description he noted in subsequent editions was borne out in rich detail by the Nigel Hamilton biography. Field Marshal Michael Carver fired back in his book Dilemmas of the Desert War, calling Barnett naive and pointing to numerous flaws in his analysis. Carver also contested Barnett's broader claim, developed in The Swordbearers, that British forces were hidebound by tradition and hamstrung by inferior technology, observing that during Operation Crusader and the Battle of Gazala, British technology was a match for, or sometimes better than, German and Italian equivalents. Barnett's interpretations were widely dismissed by professional historians, yet the books kept selling and kept being read.

• 4. The Decline Thesis

  ›

  The Pride and Fall sequence is the centrepiece of Barnett's career. It runs to four volumes: The Collapse of British Power, The Audit of War, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50, and The Verdict of Peace. The sequence attributes Britain's twentieth-century decline to a shift in the values of the governing class that began in the late eighteenth century and accelerated through the nineteenth under the influence of evangelical and non-conformist Christianity. Barnett's eighteenth-century statesmen were hard men. He quoted them as viewing national power as the foundation of national independence, commercial wealth as a means to power, and war as among the means to all three. By the Victorian era, he argued, a moral revolution had replaced that unsentimental calculus with foreign policy conducted in reverence of highly ethical standards. To trace the roots of this transformation, Barnett built what he described as a colour-coded flow chart, logically tracing back the chains of causation of every total-strategic factor in Britain's plight in 1940-1941. The chains converged on a single primary cause. Enoch Powell, reviewing the work, called that causal thread the guiding and interpretative thread through the events of the twenty inter-war years. A.J.P. Taylor called The Collapse of British Power fine fighting stuff, powerfully based on the historical records. Robert Blake described it as pungently written, perceptive and controversial. Paul Addison judged The Audit of War, published by Macmillan in 1986, the most thorough and sustained assault so far on wartime orthodoxy, while also noting that the thesis rested on simplifications: Barnett divorced British history from its European context, failed to acknowledge the political imperatives behind post-war reconstruction, and singled out the welfare state and one government as uniquely responsible for difficulties no other government had surmounted. Peter Hennessy observed that The Audit of War acquired an instant vogue when it appeared.

• 5. Education and the Industrial Failure

  ›

  Barnett's quarrel with the British educational tradition runs through virtually every book in the sequence. He blamed the public-school system for breeding a governing class ill-suited to industrial competition, and his ideal counter-model was Bismarckian Germany, where the state pursued national efficiency in what he called a ruthlessly Darwinian world. Paul Addison summarised the position: Barnett is a withering critic of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism and its legacy for twentieth-century Britain, sharing some common ground with Marxist historians and quoting E.P. Thompson with approval, yet his ideal is not Marxist but Bismarckian. Addison noted that Barnett interpreted Britain's collectivist tradition as a decadent, romanticizing humanism, anti-industrial, riddled with illusions, and perpetuated by the public-school system. Roger Scruton defended the public schools in pointed terms. He argued that relevance in education is a chimerical objective: even in the applied sciences it is not relevance that forms and transforms the curriculum but knowledge. Scruton asked pointedly against which elite the English had failed, and challenged Barnett to name a European nation that had retreated more credibly from empire. The argument attracted powerful admirers in government. Sir Keith Joseph, Education Secretary from 1981 to 1986, told Anthony Seldon: I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter. Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, cited Barnett's views on education as an influence, specifically The Audit of War. In 1995, when Michael Heseltine became Deputy Prime Minister in John Major's Cabinet, he presented each member of the Cabinet with copies of The Lost Victory.

• 6. Britain's Place in the World

  ›

  Barnett spent decades applying his analytical framework to live policy debates. During the February 1974 general election he wrote to The Times warning that neither party was addressing what he called Britain's chronic unsuccess as a competitive industrial power. He argued that the peculiar structure and attitudes of British trades unionism had, for a century, largely been responsible for what he described as a dismal cycle of low wages, low investment, and low productivity. His 1982 commentary on Trident was characteristically direct. He argued that the American decision to sell Trident to Britain only made sense on the assumption that Washington regarded Britain as a docile ally, and asked whether the resulting special relationship was compatible with British membership of the EEC, warning that Britain risked falling into mid-Atlantic between Europe and America. In a 1996 interview he stated his belief that Britain's future lay with a federated Europe including the European single currency, and dismissed Eurosceptics as emotional idealists nostalgic for a lost past. After the Falklands War he praised the courage and professionalism of the task force but argued that the lesson was not the need for a blue-water surface fleet but rather that Britain should bring its foreign policy into congruence with its defence policy and shed unprofitable bits of pink on the map in good time. He reserved particular scorn for the Franks Report, characterising it as the British Establishment sitting in judgment on the British Establishment and finding itself not guilty.

• 7. Iraq, Kosovo, and Clausewitz

  ›

  When the United States and Britain moved toward war in Iraq, Barnett was among the earliest and most persistent opponents. In early August 2002 he wrote to The Daily Telegraph rejecting the comparison between opponents of the war and appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s. Where Nazi Germany had disrupted the balance of power in Europe, he argued, Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat to the region. In December 2003 he published a piece in The Spectator arguing that Al-Qaeda was winning the war on terror, a label he rejected on Clausewitzian grounds: you cannot wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy. He argued that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had opened up long American flanks vulnerable to guerrilla attack, a classic case of strategic overextension. His prescription was characteristically unconventional: replace US forces with UN troops from Muslim states, and focus counter-terrorism on special forces like the SAS, police, and above all spies inside Al-Qaeda cells rather than on heavyweight hi-tech firepower. His view on Kosovo had been equally unsparing. He opposed the 1999 air campaign and on the 30th of March 1999 argued that events had vindicated his original position on Nato's ill-thought-out policy, based on emotion and simplistic moralising. Later that year he described the 80-day air campaign as demonstrating that air power is a clumsy means of political coercion. His 2003 likening of the Iraq War to the Suez Crisis of 1956 proved one of his more durable analogies. Noam Chomsky cited Barnett's comment that an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three in a 2007 essay titled A Predator Becomes More Dangerous Once Wounded.

• 8. Churchill's Keeper

  ›

  Barnett's institutional role gave his arguments an unusual platform. From 1977 to 1995 he served as Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, the repository at Churchill College, Cambridge that holds Winston Churchill's personal papers alongside those of many of his contemporaries. That proximity to primary sources fed directly into his books. He was also a fellow of Churchill College, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts. From 1973 to 1985 he served on the Council of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Barnett married Ruth Murby in 1950. The couple had two daughters. Ruth died in 2020, and Barnett followed two years later. His bibliography spans nearly five decades, from The Hump Organisation in 1957 to the Pétain biography published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2005. His BBC work on the landmark television series The Great War, which he served as historical consultant and writer in 1963-64, reached audiences that his books alone could not. The flow chart he built to trace Britain's strategic collapse in 1940-1941, and that Enoch Powell called the guiding thread of his argument, now sits in the very archive Barnett tended for eighteen years.