A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 736pp, £25
ISBN 0297850768
From London to Canberra and Washington, DC, anglophone culture dominated the 20th century. Hywel Williams celebrates a provocative history of conquest and empire
Of the various schools of historical thought that have tried to explain their past to the British peoples, the Whig version has enjoyed the greatest and most long-lived success. But Victorian historians such as S R Gardiner and Thomas Babington Macaulay, followed by their 20th-century successors G M Trevelyan and Winston Churchill, may not have been right. The "Whig interpretation of history", lambasted by Herbert Butterfield in his polemical essay of 1931, stands accused of writing the history of the victors and of portraying the past according to the needs of a vainglorious present.
But Whiggish history, with its story of orderly political progress towards representative government, undoubtedly made sense to a British reading public. It helped that these were historians with a flair for the written word and for the communication of knowledge beyond the walls of the academy. The history of the Whigs took an unashamedly romantic view of "the island story" and owed as much to the novels of Walter Scott as it did to archival research. It is this dis tinguished company that Andrew Roberts now joins with his magnificently provoking History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.
When considering Britain's 20th century, conventional post-Whig historiography takes its cue from the collapse of empire and the birth of the welfare state. Unsurprisingly, the story becomes one of decline and steadily narrowing horizons. Roberts describes the range of Britain's imperial obligations as revealed through parliamentary answers given by ministers in August 1914 to questions about tribal customs in Assam, press freedom in Lahore, Coptic newspapers in Egypt, the South African Native Land Act, Maasai cattle in British East Africa, taxation in the Malay states and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company Bill. Contemporary parliamentarians, by way of contrast, have to exercise their minds on NHS reform and the future of city academies.
But the focus of Roberts's survey of "English-speaking peoples", a worthy successor to Chur- chill's history of the same subject up to 1900, lies beyond his native shores. Otto von Bismarck famously said in 1898 that the decisive factor in modern history was "the fact that the North Americans speak English". From that perspective, Britain's economic decline from the mid- to late 20th century becomes something of a sideshow.
This is an account of a distinctive culture that enjoyed astonishing political and economic success in the 20th century. That pre-eminence is inseparable from the rise of the United States to superpower status, but it is also informed by the history of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the British West Indies and Ireland from 1901 to the present day. In telling their stories, Roberts draws on a set of ideas, broadly "Thatcherite", that gives his narrative a distinctive thrust and poise. This is the first time that Thatcherism, too often dismissed on the left as merely a matter of nationalism and greed, has been used to supply an interpretation of an entire culture.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples resonates which the sound of Roberts undermining stale assumptions and slaughtering sacred cows. The Boer war, he argues, was fought partly because the imperial government in London was concerned about the human rights of non-Boers denied the vote in the Transvaal. He attributes the Wall Street crash to the failure of monetary policy as administered by the Federal Reserve: "There was nothing endemic in capitalism that led to the crisis of 1929." When it comes to 1930s appeasement, he tells us that Clement Attlee thought that the Chamberlain government was too bellicose in 1938. He finds rich pickings in the thoughts of intellectuals jaded by anglophilia, including Germaine Greer's conclusion in 2004 that Australia should discard its British heritage for an Aboriginal culture partly because "an Aboriginal republic would be a lot sexier".
But the book is also informed by a desire to do justice to the often forgotten sacrifices of ordinary people. It is eloquent, for example, in its account of how Australia, a country of only five million at the time, sent 300,000 men to fight overseas in 1914-18; 60,000 of them never returned. "New Zealand, with a population of only a little over one million, sent a staggering 11 per cent of her total population; Canada, with eight million, sent no fewer than 600,000."
As such, this is not a book for those who like their history written in various shades of apologetic grey. This is history written with the author's heart on his sleeve: it is bullishly optimistic about the victories and benefits of market economics, the virtues of Protestantism as a capitalist-friendly ethic, the benefits of "liberty under the law" and the probity of parliamentary systems inspired by the Westminster model. It is confident, too, in its judgements about the psychology of its subject: "Superb, inspired amateurism [is] in the finest traditions of the English-speaking peoples." There's a breezy quality to its treatment of the transfer of mid-20th-century dominance within the English-speaking world from Britain to the United States. This, we are told, is part of "the majestic sweep of history" and a mere shift of emphasis. "Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British empire-led and the American republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late 18th and the 21st centuries."
A succession of four great foes supplies Roberts with the central pillars of his work: Prussian militarism, Nazi fascism, communist cold-war aggression and Islamist terrorism. The retreat from Mons in the First World War, Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor during the Second World War, the North Korean attack in 1950 - all, he argues, show a common pattern at work: "The English-speaking peoples have often suffered reverses in the first battle . . . before going on to ultimate victory." This is Roberts at his most assuredly Whiggish, and the rigidity of his distinctions between friends and enemies leads to some conflation. America's occasional bouts of economic protectionism are therefore down-played in favour of its free-trade ethos. Far from being a victory for the Marxist-Leninism of the rice fields, as seen in these pages, the Vietnam war was surely a victory for third-world nationalism. And Ireland, English-speaking but anti-British in its politics for most of the 20th century, is too often treated here as an aberrant den of unreason.
Written with the memory of the 1970s crises ever alive in the author's mind, and with a historical intelligence stimulated by the present Middle Eastern conflicts, this is a work of astonishing range and depth, combining as it does a polemical flair with sure-footed scholarship. It disinters a recent past that is then re interpreted to exhilarating - and very contemporary - effect. Macaulay could not have done it better himself.
Hywel Williams is the author of "Britain's Power Elites: the rebirth of a ruling class" (Constable)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
