At the turn of the 20th century, toward the end of a brutal and surprisingly difficult victory in the Second Boer War, the people of Britain began to contemplate the possibility that theirs was a nation in decline. They worried that London's big financial sector was draining resources from the industrial economy and wondered whether Britain's schools were inadequate. In 1905, a new book - a fictional history, set in the year 2005 - appeared under the title, "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire." The crisis of confidence led to a sharp political reaction. In the 1906 election, the Liberals ousted the Conservatives in a landslide and ushered in an era of change. But it did not stave off a slide from economic or political prominence. Within four decades, a much larger country, across an ocean to the west, would clearly...
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