A.G. Hopkins The Land Where Nothing Works review and information book about How Britain Lost the Plot. Princeton University Press will publish the book on Britain’s current malaise, written by A.G. Hopkins, the British historian, on April 14, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

A.G. Hopkins The Land Where Nothing Works reviews

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• “The Land Where Nothing Works badly needed writing. Drawing on wide-ranging statistical evidence and writing with passion and flashes of (on occasion) laugh-out-loud dark humour, A. G. Hopkins succeeds in making his case that British decline since the end of the 1970s has been dramatic on just about every internationally accepted standard of measurement. This book, the work of one of our most distinguished and experienced modern historians, deserves to be widely read by all those keen to discover how Britain became the dysfunctional society it is today—and how its vertiginous decline might be reversed.” (Scott Newton, Cardiff University)
• “In The Land where Nothing Works, A. G. Hopkins, one of our most eminent historians of empire, traces a fascinating story of how Britain arrived at its current broken state. He combines a pithy, even racy, writing style with outstanding academic scholarship. He has covered a remarkable breadth of literature, from recent decades of journalism to highly reputable and thorough academic research. He has digested and synthesised this material with new insights into a coherent and fascinating account of Britain’s relative economic and social decline. For a time in the 1970s, Britain was labelled the ‘sick man of Europe.’ The ‘Thatcher revolution’ was meant to be a cure. Hopkins explains in clear and accessible language how and why the cure failed. The book is essential reading for all who worry that this failure could trigger Britain’s slide into a populist dystopia.” (John Muellbauer, University of Oxford)
• “Long-established as a preeminent scholar of empire, A. G. Hopkins has turned his attention to postwar Britain. In what he asserts will be his last book, he dissects the problems of the last seventy years with characteristic verve and insight. While inescapably controversial, his diagnosis will undoubtedly have a big impact on how we think about the political economy of modern Britain.” (Jim Tomlinson, University of Glasgow)

The Land Where Nothing Works

How Britain Lost the Plot

• Author: A.G. Hopkins (Engeland)
• Book type: book about Britain
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• To be released: April 14, 2026
• Length: 288 pages
• Format: hardback / ebook
• Prize: £ 25.00
• Ordering options >

Blurb of the book by A.G. Hopkins on Britain’s current malaise

Tracing the origins of Britain’s current malaise to the abandonment of social democracy.

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world.

In The Land Where Nothing Works, the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins offers an explanation, tracing Britain’s current problems to decisions made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation promoted by the United States.

In 1945, the new Labour government’s development programme aimed at creating a social democracy that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, which remains in force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian principles continue to be upheld.

Antony Gerald Hopkins was born 21 February 1938. is a British historian specialising in the economic history of Africa, European colonialism, and globalisation. He is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.

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