In Europe

decisive than is often claimed. Statistics showed a sharp revival of the Western European economies even before mid-1948, when the first dollars began pouring in. By late 1947 British and French production was already back at pre-war levels; the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium followed suit in late 1948. At that point, the Marshall aid had only just begun.
    There must, therefore, have been other reasons for this unexpected boom: during the war, Europe had become acquainted with countless new – and largely American – technologies and production methods; many young people had gained a wealth of organisational experience in the army; Germany and Italy were able to replace their ruined industries with the newest of the new; the traditional and predominantly agricultural Netherlands was forced to catch up quickly, and become industrialised on an unparalleled scale. The welfare state took shape: all Dutch citizens above the age of sixty-five received a government pension after 1947, the French began their enormous HLM (affordable social housing) projects, and in Britain the National Health Service was launched in 1948. In June 1948, the Deutschmark was introduced in Germany's British and American zones, a drastic monetary reform which took an almost immediate effect: the black market vanished from one week to the next, shops became well stocked and, to their amazement, the Germans began to realise that life would go on after the demise of the Third Reich.
    In 1959, the Conservative leader Harold Macmillan won the British elections with the unimaginable slogan ‘You've never had it so good!’
    Interestingly, along with all this, there was also a decline going on: the old, imperial Europe was being rapidly dismantled. During the war, powerful independence movements had arisen in almost all the colonies, the period saw both peaceful revolutions and violent wars of liberation, and in under two decades the sometimes centuries-old ties had been cut between Europe and the subcontinent, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, North Africa, the Congo and other colonies. In 1958 the British dropped the word ‘Empire’: from then on,‘Empire Day’ became ‘Commonwealth Day’. Following the Japanese occupation, the Netherlands proved unable torestore its authority over the Dutch East Indies. France, so humiliated during the war, attempted to regroup overseas: an eight-year war was fought in Indochina, until the French were decisively defeated by the nationalist rebels at Dien Bien Phu. Something similar happened in Algeria. The Belgian Empire in Africa collapsed in 1960. And in 1975, the ancient Portuguese Empire dissolved at last after a long, drawn-out war in Angola and Mozambique.
    Even so, during this period, the economies of Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands blossomed as never before. Some historians explain this phenomenon by noting that the occupation of many colonies had less to do with economic gain than with rivalry between the great European powers themselves. Until 1919, Germany was present in Africa, in modern-day Namibia and Tanzania, because the British and the French had colonies there as well. The British were in South-East Asia because of the French, and in order to defend India. That is how things were everywhere. Until the start of the twentieth century, empires were profitable, or at least cost-effective. From the 1920s, however, the balance of costs and assets became increasingly unreliable: in 1921, the management of Iraq alone was costing the British an annual £21 million – more than their entire health-care budget – and they were receiving very little in return. As Great Britain reached the verge of bankruptcy, as independence movements began spreading everywhere and many of the old European rivalries lost their relevance after 1945, the European empires soon expired. By the mid-1950s the countries of Western Europe were trading more with each other than they ever had with their colonies.
    Italy in particular profited in many ways from these new forms of cooperation. The country began producing for customers all over Europe: refrigerators, scooters, washing machines, cars, typewriters, spin dryers, televisions, the first luxury goods for the masses. The number of cars sold in Europe rose from just over 1.5 million in 1950 to more than 13 million by 1973. In 1947, the Italian Candy washing-machine manufacturer was producing one machine a day; by 1967 it was producing one every fifteen