The argument this series makes, in 33 steps. It is the same spine every module is built on, and no module states more of it than its own share.
Britain came out of the war owing more, against the size of its economy, than at any point in its history.
Within days of the Japanese surrender the United States cancelled Lend-Lease.
Britain replaced it by borrowing dollars from America on terms Parliament was told were generous.
The price of the loan was not money but a promise about the pound: that sterling would be freely exchangeable for dollars within a year.
The promise was kept in July 1947 and abandoned about five weeks later, in two acts: the government's notice and the order that made it law.
What kept Britain solvent after that was a second round of American money, and Britain took the largest single share of it.
Rationing got worse after the war, not better, and Britain was the last country to give it up.
In September 1949 the government cut the pound's price by roughly a third, ten weeks after telling the Commons it had not the slightest intention of doing so.
In the same years Britain started the most expensive new thing it had ever built, and got the cost badly wrong.
Rearmament for Korea put the payments constraint back on top of everything else.
To pay for it the government charged sick people for dentures and spectacles to save £13 million, and the minister who built the health service resigned over it.
Eight months later the incoming government of the other party told the Commons the rearmament money could not be spent.
From September 1949 the pound had one published exchange rate, $2.80, and it did not move for eighteen years.
Holding the exchange rate meant a British person could not freely move money out of the country.
When the reserves fell the government could neither change the exchange rate nor let the money run out, so it slowed the country down at home instead, and that is what stop-go was.
In 1956 the reserves did not just decide a budget: they decided a war.
Britain grew faster in these years than in almost any other period of its history, and fell behind its neighbours anyway.
The government elected in October 1964 inherited a deficit on current account of 402 million pounds, and it was 514 million the year before.
Between 1964 and 1967 the pound was attacked four separate times, and each time the exchange rate was held with borrowed foreign money rather than with British policy.
In July 1966 the government took more than £500 million out of its own economy in a single statement, in order not to change the exchange rate.
On Saturday 18 November 1967 the government lowered the exchange rate from $2.80 to $2.40, one seventh off the pound, after three years of defending it.
On 23 June 1972 Britain stopped publishing an exchange rate at all, and published no figure for what forced it.
The instrument governments reached for instead of the exchange rate was control of pay, and it had been running on and off since 1961.
In October 1973 Britain tied its wages to its prices by law.
Two weeks later the price of oil quadrupled.
Industrial conflict rose to a level the country had not seen since before the war.
In the winter of 1973 to 1974 a pay dispute put the country's industry on three days a week.
Prices rose faster in 1975 than in any year before or since, at 22.6 per cent across the year.
In July 1975 the government replaced percentages with a flat cash limit of £6 a week.
The pound then fell further than it had ever been devalued, and no minister announced it.
In December 1976 the government borrowed from the IMF on the largest arrangement in the Fund's history to that point, and the condition was a limit on its own borrowing.
And across the same decade the people living through it got about a third better off.
What ended in the 1970s was not the country's income but what capital earned, and that is the door this series stops at.