Britain in Context [antikvár]

The purpose of this book, as its title indicates, is to portray Britain in context. It is designed to present Britain both in a temporal context and in a world context; to place the Britain of today in perspective, relative both to the rest of the world, and to the Britain of yesterday. Moreover, this book is intended to portray Britain as it is; not as optimists would wish it were, nor as pessimists would have us believe it is, but rather as it actually is. It has no particular axe to grind, no special message to deliver, other than to present a true portrayal of Britain-dimples, freckles, warts, and all. It is hoped that the book will provide an unbiased, unprejudiced picture of Britain that can be used as an impartial source of reference, an arbiter in policy discussions on Britain's past, present and future role in the world and status as an individual country. Moreover, it is specifically designed so that the information is presented pictorially in a manner as attractive, appealing and easily accessible as possible, as the reader will immediately see on turning over the pages. It is in this respect, therefore, that this book differs from other sources of impartial information about Britain; all too often, they present such information in an unappealing formát (almost invariably in the form of statistical tables) that makes them largely indigestible except to the expert. It is not at the expert that Britain in Context is aimed; rather it is at the intelligent layman who wishes to gain an objective view of Britain as it is. Ultimately, this book's purpose is to dispel the half-remembered truths, badly digested statistics and deliberately distorted statements, and replace them by a fair portrayal of Britain in context. Clearly, any attempt to portray all the economic information of relevance to Britain (or which might conceivably be found of interest by someone) would be doomed to failure: the resulting volume (or, rather, volumes!) would simply be enormous. The initial task in designing this book, therefore, was to exercise judgement in selecting those aspects of Britain which were likely to be of most interest and of greatest importance in obtaining a fair description of Britain in context. To this end, three broad categories were adopted-these correspond to the three main parts of the book. The first part examines Britain as Part of the World, and concentrates on those particular aspects that are of interest when discussing Britain's role in the world and when comparing Britain with other countries. The second part describes Britain as an Economic Aggregate, and focuses attention on the main aspects of Britain as an economic unit. Finally, the third part explores Britain as a Society of Individuals, and describes the situation of the individual (person or household) in Britain today and how it compares with other countries and other times. Within each of these three main parts, the same kinds of criteria have