the country struggled to pay off huge dollar-denominated debts from a drastically reduced income. That is one reason why the Marshall Plan in Britain had almost no impact upon investment or modernization in industry: 97 percent of the counterpart funds (more than anywhere else) were used to pay off the country’s massive debt. These problems would have been bad enough for any medium-sized European country in Britain’s straitened post-war circumstances; they were hugely exacerbated in this case by the global scale of British imperial responsibilities.
