British governments began managing production capacity economically years before World War II.

Evidence

Economic advice had played very little direct role in the direction of the war economy in Britain during World War I; the World War II experience was to prove very different. Not only were economists recruited to assist in determining priorities, gathering information and generating usable statistics, but it was Robbins who ended up in charge of the main office, the Economic Section. Furthermore, in the later 1930s the government sought to direct productive capacity toward military ends. Aircraft production, for example, was a complex process, encompassing numerous functions and activities ranging from ministerial decisions on the types, qualities, and quantities of aircraft required by the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm, through the design and testing of prototypes by private companies, the evaluation of competing aircraft, the placing of orders, and finally the construction of airframes and engines. As early as March 1938 a formal decision was made to place orders regardless of financial constraint, seeking direct maximization of existing manufacturing capacity rather than working to the budgetary constraints that had earlier hindered the rapid production of modern types. One month before the war began, the government created the Ministry of Supply to coordinate wartime production, and in May 1940 a Ministry of Aircraft Production was formed. At its peak in 1944 aircraft production employed some 40 percent of Britain’s industrial workforce. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 403

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Could support a claimed distinction between war economy planning and later peacetime planning in the reader’s material on infrastructure and state-directed production.
• XREF: Connects to Mirowski/Plehwe’s wider mont-pelerin historiography and to debates about state economic planning capacity. — connects to: World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174; WWI’s state economic control revealed the economy’s inherent political nature; Wartime state control proved economies are politically moldable — Gary Mongiovi, Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy…, 29

Broader Connections

• Wartime state control proved economies are politically moldable #corroborates (0.85) — Gary Mongiovi, Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy…, 29
• WWI’s state economic control revealed the economy’s inherent political nature #expands (0.82)
• World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174