ISLAND STORIES
BRITAIN AND ITS HISTORY
IN THE AGE OF BREXIT
David Reynolds

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © David Reynolds 2019

Front cover photograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

David Reynolds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008282318

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008282332

Version: 2019-09-13

Epigraph

We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

Winston Churchill, 10 January 1914

Trade cannot flourish without security.

Lord Palmerston, 22 April 1860

Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

Margaret Thatcher, 1 May 1979

Vote Leave. Take Back Control.

Brexit campaign slogan, 2016

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

List of illustrations

Introduction: Brexit Means …?

1. Decline

2. Europe

3. Britain

4. Empire

5. Taking Control of Our Past

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by David Reynolds

About the Publisher

List of illustrations

1. ‘Brexit means …’ © Christian Adams (Tim Benson, The Political Cartoon Gallery)

2. ‘Bull and his burdens’, John Tenniel © Punch, 8 February 1879, Vol 76

3. ‘We can fly the Union Jack instead of the white flags …’ © Cummings, Daily Express/Express Syndication, 16 June 1982

4. ‘Er, could I be the hind legs, please?’ © Vicky/Victor Weisz, Evening Standard, 6 December 1962

5. ‘The Double Deliverance’ (1621). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

6. ‘Very Well, Alone’. © David Low, Evening Standard, 18 June 1940.

7. ‘Come on in! Vite! The water’s wunderbar.’ © Cummings, Daily Express, 28 June 1989

8. ‘The United Kingdom: Liberate Scotland now …’ © Lindsay Foyle, 15 January 2012

9. Woodcut from James Cranford, ‘The Teares of Ireland’ (1642). © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images

10. ‘Massacre at Drogheda’ from Mary Frances Cusack, An Illustrated History of Ireland (1868)

11. Mr Punch reviews the fleet at Spithead, Punch, June 1897. © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

12. ‘Windrush Betrayal’. © Patrick Blower/Telegraph Media Group Ltd, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2018

13. ‘The Aliens Act at Work’ (1906). © Jewish History Museum, London

14. ‘We need migrants …’ © Matt Pritchett/Telegraph Media Group Ltd, Daily Telegraph, 30 June 2017

15. ‘It’ll whisk you back to the sepia-tinted 1950s’. © Kipper Williams, In or Out of Europe (2016).

16. ‘Remainers Ahead’, © Grizelda, New Statesman, 13 April 2018

17. ‘Free at Last’ © Patrick Chappatte, New York Times, 23 June 2016.

Introduction
Brexit Means …?

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. The margin was arithmetically narrow, yet politically decisive: 51.89 per cent ‘Leave’ and 48.11 per cent ‘Remain’. ‘Leave’ meant ‘out’ but nobody in the governing class, let alone the country, had a clear idea where the country was going. No contingency planning for a ‘Leave’ vote had been undertaken by David Cameron, the Prime Minister who had called the referendum. And Theresa May, who succeeded Cameron after he abruptly resigned, lacked any coherent strategy for exiting an international organisation of which the UK had been a member for close to half a century. Her mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’ initially sounded cleverly Delphic. By the end of her hapless premiership in July 2019, it had become a sick joke. There was still no clear idea what Brexit meant. The country’s future seemed more uncertain than at any time since 1940.

And not just its future; also its past. How should we tell the story of British history in the light of the referendum? Had the turn to ‘Europe’ in 1973 been just a blind alley? Or was the 2016 vote mere nostalgia for a world we (thought we) had lost? Bemused by both future and past, Brexit-era Britons feel challenged about their sense of national identity – because identity has to be rooted in a clear feeling about how we became what we are.

This is not a book about Brexit – its politics and negotiations: these will drag on for years. Instead, I ponder how to think about Britain’s history in the light of the Brexit debate. Because the country’s passionate arguments about the European Union raised big questions about the ways in which the British understand their past. About which moments they choose to celebrate and which to blot out. And about how to construct a national narrative linking past, present and future. Or, more exactly, national narratives – plural – because a central argument of this book is that there is no single story to be told – whatever politicians may wish us to believe.

For a century, there was a dominant national narrative: about the expansion of Britain into a global empire. In 1902 – after victory over the Boers in South Africa – the poet A. C. Benson added words to Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance ‘March No. 1’, extolling the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’:

Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet

But after two world wars and rapid decolonisation, the ‘ever-mightier’ imperial theme rang hollow. In 1962, Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, declared that Britain had ‘lost an empire’ but ‘not yet found a role’.[1] Over the next decade British leaders – Tory and Labour – tried to join the European Economic Community. But two French vetoes from President Charles de Gaulle blocked their way and it was not until 1973 that the UK (together with Ireland and Denmark) eventually became a member of the EEC. Even though Britain was always an ‘awkward partner’[2] – protesting about the size of its budget contributions and the EEC’s obsession with farm subsidies – for the next four decades or so the narrative did seem clear: the British had lost a global empire but found a European role.

But in 2016 that new role suddenly also seemed to be lost. During the referendum debate, various historical precedents and patterns were invoked to help frame Brexit Britain’s historical self-understanding. Much cited was ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Second World War. Leaving the EU ‘would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had’, declared billionaire Peter Hargreaves, a financier of Brexit. ‘It will be like Dunkirk again … Insecurity is fantastic.’[3] Developing the 1940 theme, Tory politician Boris Johnson asserted that the past 2,000 years of European history had been characterised by repeated attempts to unify Europe under a single government in order to recover the continent’s lost ‘golden age’ under the Romans. ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,’ he claimed. ‘The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.’ The villains of the piece, in Johnson’s view, were once again the Germans. ‘The Euro has become a means by which superior German productivity is able to gain an absolutely unbeatable advantage over the whole Eurozone.’ He depicted Brexit as ‘a chance for the British people to be the heroes of Europe and to act as a voice of moderation and common sense, and to stop something getting in my view out of control … It is time for someone – it’s almost always the British in European history – to say, “We think a different approach is called for”.’[4]

Also touted as a historical guide for Britain’s future was the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’ – influenced by Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples from the 1950s – and even the concept of an ‘Imperial Federation’ with the ‘White Dominions’, as proposed by Joseph Chamberlain in the 1900s. Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts was one of those advocating CANZUK – a confederation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as potentially ‘the third pillar of Western Civilisation’, together with the USA and the EU. He argued that that ‘we must pick up where we left off in 1973’ when the ‘dream of the English-speaking peoples’ was ‘shattered by British entry into the EU’. Theresa May spoke in a similarly expansive vein when outlining her government’s vision of Brexit. ‘June the 23rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.’ Although stating that she was ‘proud of our shared European heritage’, May insisted: ‘we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union.’[5]

Here were hints of how Brexit might be seen in historical perspective: as the latest attempt to resist a continental tyrant, or as the chance to resume a global role that had been rudely interrupted by joining the EU. But neat historical analogies are not adequate. Nor are simplified benchmarks like 1940 or 1973. We need to probe more deeply what is still often called ‘our island story’ – and to do so with greater geographical breadth and over a longer time span – in order to gain some perspective on the Brexit malaise.

* * *

Our Island Story was the title of Henrietta Marshall’s best-selling History of England for Boys and Girls, first published in 1905. In 2010 the education secretary Michael Gove told the Tory party conference that he would ‘put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum’, so that ‘all pupils will learn our island story’. In 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron lauded Marshall’s stirring account of the country’s inexorable progress towards liberty, law and parliamentary government.[6] But today a simple ‘Whiggish’ narrative is implausible. This is a book about ‘stories’, plural – about different ways in which to see our complicated past. In particular, we need to move beyond the idea of a self-contained ‘island’, portrayed as adopting various roles over the centuries – empire, Europe, the globe – as if these could be tried on and then taken off, like a suit of clothes. In reality, ‘we’ have been ‘made’ by empire, Europe and the world as much as the other way round.

And the ‘we’ – the United Kingdom – has also been a shifting entity, a historically conflicted archipelago, comprising more than six thousand islands, and not a unitary fixed space occupied by a people whom many in England still tend to call, interchangeably, ‘British’ or ‘English’. [7] In particular, ‘our island story’ omits Ireland – ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as George Bernard Shaw entitled his satirical comedy of 1904 about an English con man who dupes Irish villagers into mortgaging their homes so he can turn the place into an amusement park. Ireland was brought under English rule in the Norman period but never really subdued, despite the Acts of Union in 1801. Its centuries of turmoil and tragedy, in turn, had a profound impact on the island of Britain.

This, then, is a book about history, framed by geography. But it is also a book about ways of thinking, because being ‘islanded’ is a state of mind.[8] The English Channel did not always seem a great divide: for four centuries the Anglo-Norman kings ruled a domain that straddled it and treated water as a bridge rather than a barrier. The sense of ‘providential insularity’ came later, as a product of England’s Protestant Reformation, followed by several centuries of war against the continental Catholic ‘other’, embodied in Spain and then France. As the power of Protestantism waned in twentieth-century Britain, providential insularity was given a new lease of life by two wars against Germany, and especially by the way that 1940 has become inscribed in national history and popular memory.

Nor would the ‘island’ narrative have proved so enthralling had medieval English kings not created such a strong state, which they then tried to impose by force on their neighbours. The Welsh were incorporated in the 1530s, the Scots not until 1707, but thereafter – during the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries – the London government effectively directed the whole of ‘our’ island of Britain. Yet making the ‘other island’ across the Irish Sea ‘British’ as well proved a far more difficult task. The English failed to do so, but the struggle ebbed and flowed for centuries, costing several million lives through war and famine. At points along the way the ‘Irish Question’ also tested the unity of Britain itself – in the 1640s, for instance, when it was the catalyst for civil war, and in the Home Rule crisis before 1914. In 1920, after the brutal war of independence, it resulted in the partitioning of the island of Ireland in two between an independent Catholic state and an embattled, Protestant-dominated Ulster clinging on to its Britishness within the UK.

In the mid-1960s the rancorous issues of partition and sectarianism escalated into the three-decade long ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, whose brutal violence was quelled only by the Good Friday agreement of 1998. This brought a ragged peace to Ulster and also redefined the political geometry of Ireland, opening up the border between the two states. Yet during the EU referendum debate, the Conservative and Unionist Party closed its eyes to recent history. Only after the vote to leave the EU did it start to grapple with the profound implications that Brexit would have for Northern Ireland, the peace process and the unity of the UK.

By the end of the twentieth century, both the Good Friday agreement and the institution of devolved governments in Scotland and Wales presaged a different set of relationships between and within the two main islands. In England the apparent indifference of London to the socio-economic problems of the regions, especially in the north, played a significant part in the Leave victory in 2016, and the failure of the Westminster Parliament to resolve – or even address – the challenges of Brexit aggravated this sense of alienation. Yet the saga of Britishness – forged by war and burnished by retelling – continues to exert immense power, whether deployed by politicians or dramatised in movies. Equally potent are the individual national stories of the Scots, Welsh and Irish – even of the English without the others[9] – all reinvigorated by the crisis of the Union. In a struggle for the future, the past really matters. Yet not just the past of the two islands and their tangled relations with continental Europe. The global dimension is equally important.

Developing as a seafaring nation from the sixteenth century, the English used their relative security from the Continent as both a sanctuary and a springboard. Exploiting their growing naval reach they were able to prey on foreign rivals, profit richly from the slave trade, open up markets and create settlements – first in the Caribbean and North America; later in the Indian subcontinent, Australasia and Africa. The wealth thereby generated played a critical part in Britain’s precocious industrial revolution. It also drew the country gradually and messily into a patchwork of formal empire, which the British then struggled to rule on the cheap in the face of bigger and stronger international challengers. By the 1970s, after two world wars and an often violent process of decolonisation, the British Empire has disappeared. But the UK remained a global economy, shaped by its commercial and financial past, and the stories of global greatness, now somehow disconnected from the empire project, still appealed to political and public nostalgia. More problematic legacies of empire, such as the slave trade or mass immigration, tended to be ignored in the grand narrative of our island’s worldwide reach.

Those simple words ‘island’ and ‘stories’ are, therefore, worthy of close examination. To do so we need to engage with ‘big history’ and the longue durée in ways which do justice to the English stamp on these islands’ histories without being narrowly Anglocentric. And although Island Stories has been prompted by the Brexit imbroglio, it reflects deeper concerns. There is now a profusion of innovative and detailed scholarly research, based on analysis of new sources and fresh insight into old sources. But much of this work takes the form of micro-histories, addressing narrow topics for an academic audience, and a good deal of it has been shaped by the ‘cultural turn’ – which privileges food, dress, and gender relations and frowns on political history as being antiquated and irrelevant. As a result, big-picture narratives have been left to popular writers skimming the surface, or to politicians advancing their own agenda. This short book is an attempt by one professional historian to start filling this gap, at a time when political and international history really matter.

The four main chapters outline and probe four alternative, if overlapping, ways of telling our island stories in the era of Brexit. They draw on some of the narratives that have been offered by famous voices of the twentieth century, such as Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Hugh Gaitskell and Margaret Thatcher, and also by politicians of our own time including Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. But the chapters range far beyond the problems and personalities of the twentieth century, and offer some very long views to offset the national fixation with 1973 and 1940.

Each chapter explores an overarching theme, reflecting on the history of the last millennium. The first chapter ‘Decline’ looks at how and why Britain’s place in the world has changed in recent centuries, and whether the turn to Europe represented realistic statesmanship or a failure of national will. I also consider the country’s assets – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power – in the Brexit era and the powerful hold of ‘heritage’ in the national culture. The second chapter looks more closely at Britain’s engagement with Europe, going back beyond the Protestant Reformation to the Anglo-Norman kings, and exploring that ambiguous role of the Channel as both barrier and bridge. The third chapter turns to the long history of Britain, tracing the impact of English empire-building on the archipelago and assessing the two Acts of Union in 1707 and 1801 that brought Scotland and then Ireland into the United Kingdom. The chapter also discusses the impacts of two world wars, 1990s devolution and the Brexit vote on the unity of the Union. The fourth chapter, ‘Empire’, emphasises the role of slavepower as well as seapower in making Britain great, but also examines how the ideology of freedom both promoted the empire and eroded it. In the last section of this chapter, ‘The Empire comes home’, I offer a historical context for the impassioned Brexit debate on immigration and reflect on a post-imperial country in which racist attitudes coexist with multiculturalism.

In the concluding chapter, ‘Taking Control of Our Past’, I reflect more generally on what the political feuding since 2016 reveals of Britain’s deeper problems in dealing with Brexit and also in coming to terms with its past. This is, of course, a personal view – on topics that are highly contested, for history has become an integral part of political argument in Brexitoxic Britain. Island Stories is a contribution to that fevered debate.

1
Decline

Of every reader, the attention will be excited by an history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.

Edward Gibbon, 1788[1]

Thus began the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus The History of the Rise, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume one had appeared in 1776, just as the American colonies declared independence from Britain and proclaimed themselves a republic. The sixth and last volume was published in 1788, a year before ancien régime France was engulfed by revolution. Its fratricidal anarchy would spawn Napoleon’s continental empire.

Gibbon’s chronicle of the Pax Romana became a literary classic during the nineteenth century, as Britain saw off the Napoleonic challenge and grew into a global power – spanning the world from India to Africa, from the Near East to Australasia. By the end of the century the term Pax Britannica had entered the vernacular. But there were also creeping fears of imperial mortality – captured by Rudyard Kipling, the bard of empire, in his fin de siècle poem ‘Recessional’:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre![2]

An 1879 Punch cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull the ox carrying the world’s woes on his back – Russia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Scotland (a recent financial scandal in Glasgow), a striker and a gleeful African warrior from the costly Zulu Wars.

Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian leaders sought strategies that might save their unlikely empire from a Roman fate. How best to deal with jealous rivals? By military confrontation, or selective appeasement? The first could sap the nation’s wealth and power; the latter risked letting in the barbarians by the back door. They also wrestled with the Roman tension between libertas and imperium, of civic virtues supposedly corrupted by militarism and luxury. Would British imperialism undermine political liberty at home? Conversely, would a freedom-loving people have the backbone to resist the jackals of the global jungle? These dilemmas became acute during the era of the two world wars.

On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples.[3]

Ideologists of ‘decline’

Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’.[4]

Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’[5]

Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’[6] But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower.[7]

Winston Churchill was another politician who, in later life, became obsessed with Britain’s decline – doing so, like Chamberlain, when in opposition and with one eye on gaining power. Conviction and calculation conjoined. After a spectacular political rise on either side of the Great War, culminating in Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the age of 50, the premiership seemed within Churchill’s grasp. But then, for a decade from 1929, he was cast out into the political wilderness, regarded as a wilful opportunist too mercurial for inclusion in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s son. To attract attention he campaigned loudly on various causes, from Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis to air rearmament against Germany. It is the latter for which Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’ are now best remembered. But the underlying issue for him – and the one that sustained the rest of his life – was Britain’s decline as a great power.

Churchill’s crusade, however, took a very different form from Chamberlain’s. He was and remained a staunch Free Trader who had broken with the Tories over tariff reform. Churchill’s vision of Britain’s greatness centred not on the white-settler colonies that Chamberlain wanted to weld into an imperial economic bloc, but on India, which young Winston had experienced first-hand as a soldier fighting for his Queen Empress. In 1931 the Conservative party adopted a policy of giving India ‘dominion status’ within the British Empire – potentially setting it on a course of devolution and independence similar to that already conceded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Incensed, Churchill broke with the party leadership and embarked on a four-year crusade against what became the Government of India Act of 1935. Now virtually forgotten in British history, this was the biggest parliamentary struggle of the 1930s – eclipsing in time and passion even the issues of Germany and rearmament – for which Churchill rolled out some of his most extravagant rhetoric.

Inveighing in February 1931 against the ‘nauseating’ sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor,’ Churchill claimed that India was ‘no ordinary question of party politics’ but ‘one of those supreme issues which come upon us from time to time’, like going to war against Germany in 1914. A month later he warned that ‘the continuance of our present confusion and disintegration will reduce us within a generation, and perhaps sooner, to the degree of States like Holland and Portugal, which nursed valiant races, and held great possessions, but were stripped of them in the crush and competition of the world. That would be a melancholy end to all the old glories and recent triumphs.’[8] The root problem, in Churchill’s opinion, was a failure of national will since the Great War. ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse, of a morbid state of the mind.’[9]

If willpower alone was what counted, Winston would have won the battle over India. But he led a diehard minority within the Tory party. What’s more, his vehemence and obduracy not only estranged him from the party leadership; it also undermined his credibility on more consequential matters. His description of the Indian nationalist leaders as ‘evil and malignant Brahmins’ with their ‘itching fingers stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’ was striking, but it was ‘not likely to make comparable descriptions of genuinely evil men credible’.[10] Churchill’s hyperbole about India helped keep him in the political wilderness. Only with the onset of a second German war was he brought back into government.

Churchill never modified his opinions about India, empire and decline. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War in April 1942 – as Hitler’s Afrika Korps advanced on Cairo and the Japanese conquered Burma – he deplored any concessions to Indian nationalists. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt breezily informed Prime Minister Churchill that the British should concede self-government to India, on the lines of the Articles of Confederation under which the new United States had initially been run after independence in 1783, Churchill replied that he ‘could not be responsible’ for such a policy and even threatened to make it a resignation issue.[11] In November 1942 he warned defiantly: ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’[12]

On this, Churchill proved as good as his word. But not because liquidation did not happen; only that he did not have to preside over it. For that lucky escape, he had the British electorate to thank: they voted him out of office in July 1945. What one might call his ‘second wilderness years’, from 1945 to 1951, allowed him to watch from the sidelines and criticise with impunity Clement Attlee’s Labour Government for its ‘scuttle’ from India and Burma in 1947. Some of his predictions had prescience – for instance that ‘any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war’ – but, as in the 1930s, they were blunted by his jeremiad of decline and his lamentations about lack of will. ‘It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories, and all the services it has rendered to mankind. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.’[13]

In similar vein, campaigning for the premiership again in October 1951, Churchill denounced Attlee’s six years as marking ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world’ since ‘the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.’ He asserted that ‘our Oriental Empire has been liquidated’ and ‘our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.’[14] Back in office, however, the ailing Churchill did not fight the tide. He saw little choice but to approve the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954, arousing the anger of a new generation of Tory diehards, which opened the door to Egypt’s nationalisation of the Canal two years later.

Although Tories have been particularly prone to narratives of decline, something of the sort also underpinned Labour’s election victory of 1945. The party’s manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ was rooted in a historical narrative of lost greatness – this time not about empire, but about social promise betrayed by wilful politics.[15] ‘So far as Britain’s contribution is concerned’, the manifesto argued, ‘this war will have been won by its people, not by any one man.’ (The Tory campaign featured Churchill.) The Great War had similarly been a people’s victory, Labour went on, but afterwards the people had allowed ‘the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ (Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase) to craft ‘the kind of peace that suited themselves’. And so, despite winning the war, ‘the people lost that peace.’ By which Labour meant not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also ‘the social and economic policy which followed the fighting’.

In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’

Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918. The result is known to all.’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]

This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.

Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She outlined her stark version of history in the introduction to her memoirs, The Downing Street Years: ‘Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it’ over the course of the previous century. In economic terms, Thatcher acknowledged that some degree of relative decline was inevitable, once rivals such as America and Germany caught up with Britain’s head start. But, she argued, the country had ‘failed to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency.’ Most serious of all, after 1945 the country had indulged in a protracted and disastrous experiment with socialism. This ‘represented a centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’, which ‘jammed a finger in every pie’ on the principle that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’[17]

Breaking the hold of Labour statism was not merely a domestic priority. Thatcher argued that ‘Britain’s weakened economic position meant that its international role was bound to be cramped and strained as well.’ She cited the failure of the Suez expedition of 1956 as a turning point – in her opinion a military victory undermined by ‘political and economic weakness’ because Anthony Eden’s government withdrew the troops that had regained the Canal after a run on the pound encouraged by Washington. ‘Whatever the details’, she continued briskly (and evasively), this defeat ‘entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.’ Thanks to the ‘Suez syndrome’, as she called it, ‘having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.’[18]

Her account of history was not just retrospective wisdom. Reversing decline was almost the leitmotif of Thatcher’s politics. ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down,’ she had declared during her very first election campaign in 1950, when she was 24: ‘We Conservatives are not afraid to face the future whatever problem it entails, because it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.’[19] Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of her message in the 1979 campaign. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she exclaimed to a BBC interviewer. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now!’[20] She told an audience in Bolton: ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.’[21] This was her refrain right to the end. ‘Let me give you my vision,’ she declaimed in her final election broadcast. ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again; this I know in my heart.’[22]

Thatcher shared with Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill a Napoleonic belief in the capacity of a great leader to transform history through sheer willpower. Indeed, in her memoirs she applied to herself the famous words of William Pitt the Elder, during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63: ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can.’[23] And she employed her formidable will and conviction to cover inner insecurities and get her way in an overwhelmingly male world. Not only did she seem happiest when ‘up against a wall’, biographer Hugo Young observed. But ‘when she wasn’t actually embattled, she needed to imagine or invent the condition: embattled against the cabinet, against Whitehall, against the country, against the world’.[24]

After Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, Cummings in the Daily Express (16 June 1982) shows her waving the Union Jack in triumph while white-flag merchants from the Foreign Office and the Labour party – Tony Benn (middle) and party leader Michael Foot (right) – lie flat on their backs.

Indeed one can say that her grand narrative of those Downing Street years was constructed around two triumphant battles royal against ‘decline’: the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Argentina’s shock capture of the Falkland Islands, which it claimed as the Malvinas, provoked a cross-party wave of anger in Parliament on 3 April, but Thatcher made the operation to liberate the 1,800 British islanders from Argentine rule into her own personal crusade. And she used the eventual victory over General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta to make a larger point. ‘When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts,’ she told a Tory rally in Cheltenham on 3 July 1982. ‘Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were.’ But now, she proclaimed, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’[25] Or more pithily, to a jubilant crowd singing ‘Rule Britannia’ outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Great Britain is great again.’[26] Almost as if the mission she had set herself in 1950 had now been accomplished.

In June 1983 the ‘Falklands Factor’ helped her to win a landslide election victory and in 1984–5 she was ready to take on Arthur Scargill and the striking miners in their last-ditch effort – under the slogan ‘jobs, pits and communities’ – to stop what was effectively the closure of their industry. For Thatcher, however, the miners became the centrepiece of her struggle to break up the unprofitable and bureaucratic state monopolies and she treated Scargill as the domestic equivalent of General Galtieri. Notes for a speech to Tory backbenchers in July 1984 read:

Since Office

Enemy without – beaten him

& strong in defence

Enemy within –

Miners’ leaders …

– just as dangerous

Biographer Charles Moore writes that Downing Street staff prepared for the miners’ strike as if it were another war. ‘Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. And once she had vanquished Scargill just like Galtieri, Thatcher won the election of 1987 on the slogan: ‘Britain is Great Again. Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’[27]

Yet there were limits to Britain’s ‘greatness’. Margaret Thatcher was also the Prime Minister who, having liberated 1,800 British subjects from the Argentine junta, in December 1984 signed over 5.5 million other British subjects in Hong Kong to the rule of China – a communist state to boot. Like Churchill over the Canal Zone, she saw no choice given the realities of power. Under the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, British sovereignty would end in 1997 but Hong Kong was to be a ‘Special Administrative Region’ enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for another fifty years, with its social and economic system ‘unchanged’ and civil and property rights ‘protected by law’. Even before the handover in 1997, however, these guarantees were called into question by the Chinese government’s brutal repression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. And nothing the British government said or did could influence Beijing.

The rhetoric of reversing ‘decline’ by the assertion of willpower has also been at the heart of the Brexit narrative. Take, for instance, the speech delivered by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiter, who took pride in his nickname ‘the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’.[28] That, he claimed, was the century in which ‘the seeds of our greatness, sown long before in our distinguished history, sown conceivably by Alfred the Great, began to grow and to flourish in a way that led to our extended period of good fortune and greatness.’ But Rees-Mogg said that he also wanted to be the ‘Honourable Member for the Twenty-First Century’ because this was the century in which the country would ‘regain its independence’ and ‘rediscover the opportunities of a truly global Britain’.

‘How we came to join the European Union is an important part of understanding our Island story,’ Rees-Mogg explained. ‘We won the war and were full of optimism about our place in the World, but then came Suez.’ In his opinion, the debacle of 1956 had a profound and debilitating effect, permanently undermining the nation’s self-confidence. ‘Margaret Thatcher tried to break away from that, but it was such a strong feeling that once she had gone it seeped back again.’ As a result of Suez, ‘the Nation’s view of itself changed and the Establishment, the Elite, decided that its job was to manage decline, that the best they could do was to soften the blow of descending downwards, soften the effect on the Nation of being less successful than it had been in the past, and recognise that we would not be able to keep up with other countries. This led to the notion that it was Europe or bust.’ But that, he argued, was a false contrast because Britain had ended up with both: in Europe and also bust. The country made the mistake of joining flagging, low-growth economies so that the process of ‘managing our decline’ became ‘part of managing the decline of the whole of the European Union by putting a fortress around it’.

So, he asserted, the 2016 referendum was a vote ‘by people who believed in democracy’ and ‘voted to take back control’. And any attempt by those he derided as ‘cave-dwellers’ to keep Britain in the EU – in fact if not name – ‘would be Suez all over again. It would be the most almighty smash to the national psyche that could be imagined … an admission of abject failure … that we were not fit, that we were too craven, that we were too weak to be able to govern ourselves … Although countries across the Globe can govern themselves, poor little Blighty cannot.’ But if, on the other hand, Britain embraced Brexit wholeheartedly, there was ‘a world of opportunity ahead of us’ as we took ‘charge of our own destiny protected by our own laws’ and ‘setting our own direction’ in international affairs rather than ‘hiding behind the skirts of the German Chancellor’.

This, then, was Jacob Rees-Mogg’s take on contemporary history: the ‘brave British people’ asserting themselves against the establishment’s ‘managers of decline’, and scorning the nanny state across the Channel. His fixation with 1956 echoed Thatcher’s ‘Suez syndrome’. His drama of goodies versus baddies paralleled the tone, though not the content, of Labour’s 1945 manifesto. And the elevation of willpower was a feature of all these anti-declinist narratives of betrayal. But the spin on Brexit was all his own.

A remarkable rise

On the face of it, decline might seem a plausible description of Great Britain’s changing place in the world over the last century or so. In the 1870s, the country possessed more battleships than the rest of the world combined. It directly controlled about a fifth of the earth’s surface, including India, Canada and Australasia. It was the world’s largest economy, accounting for over 20 per cent of global manufacturing output and a similar proportion of global trade. The first industrial nation had become the greatest power the world had ever seen. A century later, however, Britain had lost nearly all its overseas territories; it accounted for a mere 4 per cent of world manufacturing and about 7 per cent of world trade. The first post-industrial nation was struggling to find its post-imperial role.

Membership of the EEC from 1973 was supposed to resolve that identity crisis – the loss of an outmoded global empire would be offset by a new European dynamic. But in the wake of the 2016 referendum, Brexiters claimed that ‘Europe’ had been a blind alley and that leaving the EU in 2019 was the way to reverse national decline and retrieve Britain’s global greatness.

Yet this preoccupation with Britain’s ‘decline’ can mislead. More historically remarkable is the coutry’s rise. That, indeed, had been Gibbon’s thesis in the case of Rome: ‘The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.’ Similarly, observed a more recent historian, François Crouzet, ‘it is a mistake to think that England’s original supremacy was normal and her decline abnormal.’[29] On the contrary, what really needs explanation is the original ‘supremacy’.

To put it simply, Great Britain stood in the forefront of the great surges of European expansion that shaped the world between 1700 and 1900: commerce and conquest in the eighteenth century, industry and empire in the nineteenth century. All these movements were intertwined with the lucrative Atlantic slave trade – half of all Africans carried into slavery during the eighteenth century were transported on British vessels – and the profits from that trade lubricated Britain’s commercial and industrial revolutions.[30] The country’s principal advantage was a relatively secure island base during what was still the era of seapower. Unlike rivals such as France and Prussia/Germany, who shared land borders with bellicose neighbours, Britain could shelter behind the English Channel – what Shakespeare called the country’s ‘moat defensive,’ its ‘water-walled bulwark’. Or, to quote Gladstone in 1870, ‘the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off by that streak of silver sea … partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend the local neighbourhood of the Continental nations.’[31] Insularity did not guarantee immunity – in 1588, 1804 and 1940 the threat of invasion seemed acute – but it did mean that the British did not require a large standing army of the sort that became normal on the Continent. The Royal Navy, however, was popular and also necessary, not just for direct defence but also because, as an island, increasingly dependent on the import of food and raw materials, Britain needed to protect its seaborne commerce from peacetime privateers and wartime enemies.

Britain’s insular position left it ideally placed to capitalise on five great bouts of warfare against France. Whereas French leaders from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte had to fight their primary battles on land against continental foes, Britain was able to divert more of its resources into the struggle for trade and colonies. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–63 left the British in control of most of North America and although thirteen colonies won their independence during the next world war of 1776–83, Britain held on to what became Canada and the British West Indies. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793–1815 was a period of extended crisis, during which Britain endured long periods of economic isolation, but, in the end, the country won a total victory. French seapower had been destroyed and Britain was left as the world’s main colonial power, paramount in India but also increasingly entrenched in Australasia and parts of Africa. Its fleet, previously based mostly at home and in the Baltic and Mediterranean, was now spread around the globe. The Royal Navy’s ability to command the seas depended on holding what Admiral Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord at the start of the Great War, called the ‘five strategic keys’ that ‘lock up the world’ – the great British bases at Dover, Gibraltar, Alexandria, the Cape of Good Hope and Singapore.[32]

Established at strategic points around the globe, able to project power through a strong navy and merchant fleet, Britain after 1815 also enjoyed the huge advantage of becoming the world’s first industrial nation. The country’s initial manufacturing surge had been driven by the cotton trade. All the raw material was imported and most of the production was for export. By 1830, cotton goods accounted for half the value of British exports and raw cotton made up 20 per cent of net imports. After the cotton boom subsided, iron and steel became the new growth sector, stimulated by the railway-building mania of the 1830s and 1840s, and then sustained by British dominance in the financing and construction of railways around the world. By 1860, a country with only 2 per cent of the world’s population was producing half the world’s iron and steel and accounted for 40 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. It had the highest GDP in the world and its population, despite vast inequalities of wealth, enjoyed the highest average per capita income.[33]

During much of the Victorian era, therefore, Britain did seem truly great as the leading colonial empire, the world’s industrial giant and the dominant sea power. In the decades after 1815, the Royal Navy appeared to rule the waves, driving piracy from the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, confronting slave traders in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, and aggressively promoting Britain’s commercial interests – particularly in the Opium War of 1839–42 to open up China to British trade. Many foreign leaders had no doubt that British power was decisive. ‘Only England, mistress of the seas, can protect us against the united force of European reaction,’ exclaimed Simón BolÍvar, the liberator of South America, as he contemplated the danger of Spanish reconquest. Muhammad Ali, the Ottomans’ unruly viceroy of Egypt, remarked that ‘with the English for my friends I can do anything: without their friendship I can do nothing’.[34] The analogy between the Pax Britannica and the Pax Romana did not sound far-fetched. Like Rome, Britain seemed to rule or shape much of the world, and was what the poet Alfred Tennyson rhapsodised in 1886 as

… the mightiest Ocean-power on earth

Our own fair isle, the lord of every sea.[35]

The country’s global power was on flamboyant display during celebrations for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897. A week of martial festivities culminated in a vast naval pageant off the Isle of Wight when the Queen reviewed 165 of her warships manned by 40,000 sailors. The highpoint was 22 June when Her Majesty processed in state along six miles of London streets amid cheering crowds. Speaking for most observers, the Manchester Guardian described the theme of the celebrations as ‘the world-wide Empire of Britain … the exultant expression of a power the greatest in the world’s history’. Onlookers were particularly intrigued by contingents of troops from the Queen’s domains all over the globe. A reporter for the new popular newspaper The Daily Mail could hardly contain his patriotic fervour as he described them marching up Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s:

white men, yellow men, brown men, black men, every colour, every continent, every race, every speech – and all up in arms for THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE BRITISH QUEEN. Up they came, more and more, new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazeteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children. And you begin to understand, as never before what the Empire amounts to.[36]

Much of the rhetoric from that week in June 1897 was similarly extravagant, often preposterous. A jubilee mug, inscribed with portraits of the 78-year-old monarch, carried the legend The Centre of a World’s Desire. A Canadian poet penned his own tribute:

Here’s to Queen Victoria

Dressed in all her regalia

With one foot in Canada

And the other in Australia.[37]

A truly remarkable posture, but not one that could be sustained for long. In fact, the world we have lost was one that we were bound to lose. Britain’s global power was always more limited than appearances suggested. A closer look at the nature of that power – economic, international and imperial – will help explain why.

The changing relativities of wealth and power

It is a precept of international affairs that wealth is needed to underpin power: to quote historian Paul Kennedy, there is ‘a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities, on the one hand, and military strength, on the other’.[38] The British case certainly fits that broad argument. In 1880, Britain produced nearly 23 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods; only 10 per cent in 1928 when Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer and a mere 4 per cent in 1980, around the start of Thatcher’s premiership. As a trading nation Britain’s slide was slower but the end result was similar. In 1899 Britain accounted for 33 per cent of the world’s exports of manufactured goods, 25 per cent in 1950 and less than 10 per cent in 1980.[39] While Britain’s share of the world’s wealth gradually diminished, the cost of armaments rose exponentially. In the 1980s, for instance, 385 Tornado fighters for the RAF cost more in real terms than all the 21,000 Spitfires produced before and during the Second World War.[40] Yet a nation that fell behind in the spiral of technological sophistication risked eclipse as a first-rank power, especially if others overtook it in economic capacity.

And this was bound to happen. Britain’s Victorian-era economic supremacy was in a sense artificial, given the country’s size and population. Britain’s comparative advantage was certain to be reduced once the process of industrialisation spread to countries with larger populations and greater resources – Germany in the late nineteenth century, America during the twentieth century and China in the twenty-first. The United States and the People’s Republic were both countries the size of a continent, blessed with a booming workforce, abundant natural resources and a vast tariff-free internal market. Apart from being disadvantaged in the long run by relative size, Britain was also susceptible to the ‘catch-up’ phenomenon. Once countries had crossed a basic socio-economic threshold, they could copy an economic leader’s technological innovations, rather than having to learn by trial and error. And the growth rates of previously underdeveloped countries always look particularly spectacular – the ‘Asian tigers’, for instance, in the 1960s, and China during the last quarter-century.

The predominant British response to economic catch-up was to consolidate existing advantages. One of these was its naval-industrial complex – based on integrated steel/armament/shipbuilding firms such as Vickers, Armstrong-Whitworth and John Brown, as well as the Royal Dockyards – which later diversified into military aircraft and tanks. In the early 1930s, Britain and France shared half of global trade in armaments almost equally between them; in 1938, Hawker-Siddeley advertised itself ‘the leading aircraft organisation in the world’. The British arms industry was boosted by the two world wars and sustained by the Cold War. Even though the ‘warfare state’, like the slave trade, is now largely omitted from general narratives about the British economy, it matters as much in the history of modern Britain as the ‘welfare state’.[41]

Even more important were financial and commercial services – another aspect of Britain’s economy often neglected by narratives of rise and decline that focus on heroic industrialism. This service sector coexisted with the development and mutation of industrialisation; indeed these processes were often complementary because goods can be derived from services just as much as services from goods – exemplified by innovations across the centuries ranging from bills of exchange and actuarial tables to barcoding and computerised trading.[42] Britain’s merchant navy, most of it serving non-British customers, headed the list of ‘invisible’ earnings, supported by insurance and banking. Together with profits from overseas assets such as railways, plantations, utilities and oil concessions, these earnings were equivalent to around 75 per cent of the earnings from exports of domestic merchandise in the 1890s.[43] These more than covered the gap between Britain’s imports and exports, and they provided a ‘war chest’ on which British governments drew in both world wars. Indeed, during the 1930s, the Treasury referred to Britain’s financial position as the ‘fourth arm’ – as central to waging a future war as the three armed services.

The other response to sharper economic competition was to shift from free trade to protectionism. In the 1900s, Joseph Chamberlain may have failed in his campaign for tariff reform, but in 1932, at the nadir of the world depression after Britain had abandoned the gold standard, his son Neville – then Chancellor of the Exchequer – steered it through the Commons with Joe’s widow watching proudly from the gallery. In a trading economy now protected by tariffs, ‘Imperial Preference’, meaning preferentially lower rates, was accorded to countries of the British Empire. An embryonic Sterling area was also formed during the 1930s, and then consolidated during the Second World War. This overlapped with Imperial Preference but was not coterminous. Canada, though enjoying preferential tariffs, was outside the Sterling Area; countries in Latin America and Scandinavia belonged to the latter but not the former. Between 1913 and 1938 the empire’s share of British exports rose from 22 per cent to 47 per cent, and during the interwar years the empire attracted far more new British foreign investment than non-imperial countries – a contrast with the pre-1914 story.[44] The empire/Commonwealth and the Sterling Area became the framework for British foreign economic policy – a privileged market for goods and capital which tried to insulate the domestic economy from international competition from the thirties to the late sixties.

The end of imperial preference and Britain’s entry into the EEC broadly coincided with the demise of the Sterling Area, the onset of the oil crisis and the collapse of the post-war boom. The long 1970s recession accelerated the process of deindustrialisation for all Western European countries, but Britain’s experience of it was exacerbated by the ferocity of class politics in the Thatcher era. Within this complex nexus of global economic change, it is no simple task to isolate the historical consequences of joining the EEC. Suffice to say here that a crude declinist narrative fails to take account of the country’s adaptive economic changes since the 1970s: an accelerating shift into services and the success of the financial sector, which adjusted particularly well to the post-imperial era.

‘As the good ship sterling sank, the City was able to scramble aboard a much more seaworthy vessel, the Eurodollar.’[45] This term signified dollar assets held not in the USA but in Europe – starting with those created by Middle Eastern states from the profits of the 1970s oil shocks. They were attracted to the City of London by the tax benefits on offer and by the deliberately more relaxed regulatory environment than Wall Street. But this was not the ‘old’ City, geared to sterling and the British economy, but a ‘new’ City, ‘externally orientated’ and ‘foreign-owned’ (dominated by US, Japanese and continental European banks) and which ‘flourished as long as it was left alone by the authorities’.[46] This externalisation process accelerated when the Thatcher government ended exchange controls in 1979 and encouraged the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of the stock market. In 1981 only 3.6 per cent of the UK stock market was owned by foreigners but the proportion then rose to 43.1 per cent in 2010 and 53.9 per cent in 2016. There are, of course, still plenty of British players in this business – Jacob Rees-Mogg, for instance, made his multimillion fortune as a hedge-fund manager – but in large measure the City had adapted to change by becoming an immensely lucrative offshore banking sector through which foreigners, not least post-Soviet Russian oligarchs, could move their money without too many questions or impediments.[47]

So the erosion of Britain’s relative advantage in manufacturing did not mean that the country became a minor feature of the world economy. On the contrary: today it is the tenth-largest global exporter and fifth-largest global importer; it ranks second or third in both inward and outward direct foreign investment. In economic terms Britain is roughly where one might expect for a country of its size, resources and historic commercial expertise. What has changed is that Britain’s relative power internationally has diminished because, over the last century, other states have generated economies that are equal or superior to it.

What mattered even more for the country’s place on the world stage was the changing nature of geopolitics. International rivalries intensified from the 1860s, after a half-century of peace since the defeat of Napoleon. And then revolutions in the technology of warfare over the subsequent century negated many of the benefits of Britain’s insular position.

Despite what is a common belief, ‘European peace in the nineteenth century did not derive to any great degree from Britain’s maintaining a continental balance.’[48] That equilibrium stemmed from the exhaustion of Europe in 1815, after more than two decades of ruinous war, and the acceptance of the post-Napoleonic peace by all the continental powers except defeated France. Rather than the Pax Britannica sustaining the peace it was peace that sustained the Pax. Indeed Britain was almost a free rider – allowed to concentrate its resources on global expansion because of the unusual tranquillity of Europe, which was in marked contrast to the eras of Philip II, Louis XIV and Napoleon.

When continental states once more resorted to war as an instrument of policy – resulting in the unification of Italy and then Germany between 1859 and 1871 – Britain could do little to affect the outcome. Its trump card, the Royal Navy, was largely impotent in the face of fast-moving crises in the hinterland of Europe, and the British did not adopt the continental practice of large standing armies sustained by military conscription. In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian war, Lord Salisbury reckoned that whereas the Austrians and the Germans could each put over a million men into the field, and the Russians 1.5 million, Britain’s ‘utmost strength’ for ‘foreign action’ was 100,000. Little wonder that Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, reportedly scoffed that if the British army landed on the German coast, he would send the local police force to arrest it.[49] Bismarck’s new German Empire – created through successive victories over Denmark, Austria and France – became the greatest military power on the continent, dominating Central Europe. Benjamin Disraeli called the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 ‘a greater political event than the French Revolution … The balance of power has been entirely destroyed and the country which suffers most … is England.’[50]

Even more important for future geopolitics was the outcome of the American Civil War. At the start, in 1861, Britain declared its neutrality: 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports came from the Confederacy, supporting a textile industry that employed 4 million people. And the ethical issues looked confused: the Federal government claimed to be fighting to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery, and many English liberals saw the Confederate cause as a war for national liberation, like the recent secession of the Italian states from the Habsburg Empire. In October 1862 Gladstone told an audience in Newcastle that the ‘leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.’ Indeed, he welcomed the potential break-up of the Union because it was ‘in the general interests of Nations that no State should swell to the dimensions of a continent.’[51]

But talk of possible British mediation in the conflict was a passing phase. By April 1865, the North, with its far superior resources, had defeated the ‘Rebellion’ and the United States of America regained its unity ‘from sea to shining sea’. The implications of a country the size of a continent were not lost on Europeans. In 1866 the French economist Michel Chevalier urged Europe to unify in the face of ‘the political colossus that has been created on the other side of the Atlantic’. And in 1882, as the pace and intensity of economic development accelerated throughout America’s vast and now peaceful single market, the German writer Constantin Frantz considered it ‘hardly preventable’ that ‘the New World will outstrip the Old World in the not far distant future’.[52]

What is more, the balance of force across the whole world was shifting against Britain. After the post-1815 lull, imperial rivalries renewed with the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s and the attempted partition of China at the turn of the century. Britain’s naval supremacy had by then been undermined. In 1883 the Royal Navy boasted 38 battleships; the rest of the world had 40. By 1897 Britain was outnumbered: 62 against 96.[53] By this time the Russian Empire had expanded across Asia to the Pacific, creating friction along the borders of British India. And other non-European powers were emerging. Japan had industrialised and turned its economic strength into military might, defeating China in 1894–5 and Russia in 1904–5.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the British therefore tried to defend a global position that had been consolidated during a rare half-century of European peace and stability after 1815. And they had to do so against rivals which had caught up with Britain, and even surpassed it, in economic and military capability. France remained a competitor in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Japanese threat was acute in 1937–42. But the most momentous and sustained challenge came from the German Reich.

Unified Germany’s first bid for hegemony, in 1914–18, was stopped but at great cost. Britain and the empire lost one million dead, as well as nearly 15 per cent of the country’s total assets. The war also saw a geopolitical shift to the Pacific as both Japan and America – wartime allies of Britain – developed into major naval and economic powers. And although the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires disintegrated under the strain, Russia survived revolution and civil war to re-emerge under Bolshevik leadership. This posed a double danger for Britain, because traditional rivalries with Russia in Asia were now coupled with the ideological challenge of a Soviet state officially dedicated to world revolution.

Round two of the German challenge assumed a more menacing form for Britain because of the collapse of France in June 1940. Throughout the Great War the French, with increasing British support, had sustained a Western Front against Germany. But in four weeks Hitler achieved what the Kaiser’s best generals had failed to do in four years – knocking France out of the war and winning a continental empire. Hitler was now free to turn against the Soviet Union years earlier than expected. Germany’s amazing victories emboldened Italy and Japan to press their own bids for empire in North Africa and East Asia respectively – with British possessions as the main target.

Thanks to its own resources and those of the empire, Britain avoided defeat in 1940. There is no doubt that this was a moment of global significance. Had Britain surrendered, like France, or been knocked out the war, Hitler would have been free to devote all Germany’s manpower and resources on his war against the Soviet Union, while the United States would probably have pulled in its horns and concentrated on defending the Western Hemisphere. Instead, British defiance encouraged Roosevelt to extend material support and then enter the war. Britain became the essential base from which the Western Allies could eventually mount a cross-Channel assault to help liberate Europe.

So Britain’s 1940 really mattered. But whatever Churchill declaimed then about ‘victory at all costs’, overcoming Hitler’s Reich was beyond its own capabilities once there was no French army or Western Front in Europe, and when the Royal Navy faced challenges in the Mediterranean and the Pacific as well as in home waters. Britain therefore had no choice but to rely on new allies to win the victory – above all the USA and the USSR. By May 1945, after five years of total war, Hitler was dead and his Thousand-Year Reich lay in ruins, but he had brought down the old Europe with him. Such was the extent of Germany’s early success in 1940 that the Führer had, in effect, called the superpowers into existence to redress the balance of the Old World. After the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the United States dominated the campaign in Western Europe, while the Red Army’s long and bloody fightback from Stalingrad to Berlin left it in control of most of Eastern Europe. By the time the Germans surrendered, the armed forces of the USA and USSR each numbered between 11 and 12 million men, more than double the British figure.

Had the world reverted to the pattern of the previous post-war era after 1918, with American and Russian withdrawal from Europe, the power shift would not have been so pronounced. But out of this war there developed a bitter Soviet–American rivalry, which not only divided Germany and Europe into two military blocs but also became truly global and fiercely ideological. Although Britain was still a major power in the immediate post-war period – third in military and industrial terms around 1950, thanks in part to the total defeat of Germany and Japan – it could not match the two superpowers, despite maintaining until 1960 the policy of peacetime conscription. In 1953, Britain’s peak post-war year, its armed forces totalled 900,000 compared with 3.5 million for the USA and 4.75 million in the case of the USSR.[54] Nor, in the age of nuclear weapons and inter-continental missiles, could it hope to keep up in the Cold War arms race with the Big Two. Since the 1960s, Britain’s continued existence as a nuclear power has depended on its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

This does not mean that Britain is no longer of any military consequence. It remains the only European member of the Western Alliance, apart from France, to maintain a capacity for power-projection outside the NATO area. But its days as a major global presence are over. As with the economic story, others have surpassed its precocious early lead – reducing Britain to the position that one might expect for a state of its size, population and resources. In power, as in wealth, what is historically striking was ‘rise’, not ‘fall’.

Empire, power and greatness

Britain would never have risen so high but for the ‘multiplier’ effect of empire. It was the empire which made Britain great. At the start of the twentieth century Britain and Ireland had only 42 million people, whereas the population of the USA was 76 million and of Tsarist Russia 133 million. When the inhabitants of Britain’s overseas territories were included, however, the arithmetic looked different. At its peak after the Great War, the British Empire covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s land surface and encompassed a similar proportion of its population, over 500 million in all. France accounted for only 9 per cent of the earth’s land surface and 108 million of its people.[55] At times of crisis the empire could serve as a vast resource of material and manpower. During the Great War the British government mobilised 6.7 million men from Britain and Ireland, but 3 million more came from the empire – nearly half of these from India.[56] In 1939–45 the imperial contribution was yet more pronounced: while the UK mobilised 5.9 million, the so-called ‘white dominions’ – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – raised nearly 2.5 million and India over 2 million.[57]

Mindful of such statistics, some historians have castigated British leaders for ‘losing’ the empire, because that diminished the country’s ability to compete with the continent-sized superpowers. Correlli Barnett, for instance, argued that if the British had not lost their nerve, they could have held on to India by ‘resolute autocracy’.[58] Yet it was not willpower but hard power that mattered. And, to quote again the German commentator Constantin Frantz in 1882, Britain was really ‘an artificial worldpower’ (eine künstliche Weltmacht) because ‘the territorial base of this power was just a European country’ and its resources came from colonies spread out across the oceans which were tied to Britain only ‘through the threads of the fleet’ and ‘these threads could all be broken or cut’.[59] This was not a vast continental empire commanding adjacent terrain, unlike the United States and the Soviet Union after each had surmounted its crisis of civil war – in 1861–5 and 1917–22 respectively.

This lack of a contiguous continental empire was Britain’s basic weakness as a world power. But almost as significant was the diversity of its colonial territories. The empire emerged haphazardly, with little coordination from London. There were leftovers in Canada and the Caribbean from the pre-1776 American colonies; spoils from the wars against France, of which India was the most important; the fruits of creeping imperialism in West Africa as weak tribal governments caved in before the advance of European commerce, conquest and culture; pre-emptive strikes in South and East Africa in the late nineteenth century to block European rivals; and the carve-up of the decaying Ottoman Empire before and after the Great War, including territories such as Egypt astride the Suez Canal, oil-rich Iraq and the poisoned chalice of Palestine.

Nor did Britain truly ‘own’ these diverse ‘possessions’. British control was usually superficial. In colonies settled by white emigrants from the UK, who dominated the indigenous population, successive London governments gradually followed the path of increasing devolution. This pattern began in Canada in the 1840s and was extended to the other white-settler colonies in Australasia and southern Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1931, when the London Parliament’s residual authority was abrogated, the Dominions – as the white-settler colonies were known – were effectively independent in all domestic affairs. Although still dependent on Britain for defence, the main bond linking them with Britain was that of loyalty to the country from which many of them, or their parents, had only recently emigrated in the early decades of the twentieth century. This ‘Britannic nationalism’ was a potent force in mobilising support for the ‘mother country’ in the two world wars. In the 1930s, for instance, over 95 per cent of Australians and nearly 50 per cent of Canadians were of British stock.[60]

This policy of measured devolution was adopted in colonies where there was a large British settler community and also the capacity for fiscal independence. ‘Non-white’ colonies were treated differently because, until well after 1945, they were generally thought incapable of self-government. In these cases the British employed more autocratic and paternalistic methods, with an unelected government headed by a British Governor exercising certain devolved powers under supervision from London. Much of the dependent empire was run in this way as Crown Colonies. Even where there seemed little benefit to Britain – as in West Africa, the West Indies or the Falklands – London clung on for fear that a rival power might acquire the territories or because these lacked a natural ethnic or political viability. At the same time the British tried to minimise the costs of continued rule, thereby turning a blind eye to the problems of poverty and underdevelopment unless, as in the 1930s Caribbean, these colonies exploded in serious disorder. This was empire on the cheap: Britain was getting little out but putting little in.

Between the Dominions and the Crown Colonies stands the special case of India. There Britain supplanted the Mughal emperors as the paramount power. In what was called British India they ruled directly through the Indian Civil Service, headed by a European elite of only 1,300. In some six hundred princely states, covering a third of the sub-continent, they ruled indirectly through hereditary lords who handled all but defence and foreign policy under the eye of a British ‘Resident’. British influence over a population numbering over 300 million in 1900 essentially depended on alliances with local landed and commercial leaders and on the Western-educated Indians who filled the clerical grades of British administration. Despite early Victorian waves of evangelical and reforming zeal, Indians – as elsewhere in the empire – were largely left to their own religious, social and cultural practices, except when order was threatened or British interests jeopardised.

In India, those interests were substantial. Around 1900 Britain provided 60 per cent of India’s imports – particularly textiles, machinery and iron and steel products – and used the surplus generated to balance its deficits on trade with continental Europe and North America. Even more important was the Indian army. In 1914, its strength of 160,000 fighting troops – one-third of them British – represented half of Britain’s peacetime military strength: vital manpower for a country with no tradition of military conscription. And this was also a cut-price army: India, in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, was ‘an English barrack in the Oriental seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’.[61] More precisely, the Government of India paid out of its own tax revenues for the peacetime army in India and for the basic costs of troops serving overseas. During the Great War, 1.3 million Indian troops were sent abroad – from France to Gallipoli to East Africa – and they played a particularly significant role in the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, bringing Palestine and Iraq under British control.

Looking back now, the great British Empire seems like a bit of a con. How could so many be ruled for so long by so few? Admittedly, there were positive forces promoting acceptance of British imperial rule: the ties of ‘Britishness’ in the settler colonies, for instance, and the networks of clientage in India and elsewhere. But ultimately empire rests on force, or the threat of force, and for much of the Victorian era this could be exerted through superior British military technology. The Royal Navy may have faced growing European challengers, but it needed only a few steam-driven gunboats to overwhelm the Chinese junks and open up that country to European trade in the mid-nineteenth century. The British army may have been comical as far as Bismarck’s Europe was concerned, but it was quite sufficient to handle most threats on the imperial periphery. At the battle of Omdurman in 1898, General Horatio Kitchener’s army – including the young Winston Churchill – won control of the Sudan at the cost of only 368 men. His adversary, the Khalifa, lost 11,000: massacred by 3,500 shells and half a million bullets. In the pithy couplet of Hilaire Belloc:

Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.[62]

Underpinning superior force was the potency of racial prestige – a point underlined by the colonial administrator Frederick Lugard. In Africa and India, he said in 1890, ‘the native looks on it as a sacrilege to touch a Sahib, and also expects little short of death from the Sahib if he should try conclusions. To this prestige the white man owes his ascendancy, and it must at any price be maintained, just as one would with a brute beast.’[63] Acute awareness of these ‘intangibles’ of prestige and credibility was voiced by Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office during the Czech crisis with Germany in September 1938. ‘I know’, he wrote in his diary, ‘we are in no position to fight: but I’d rather be beat than dishonoured. How can we look a foreigner in the face after this? How can we hold Egypt, India and the rest?’[64]

In the nineteenth century, Britain struck out. In the twentieth century the empire struck back, especially in the era of the two world wars which opened up extensive opportunities for anti-colonial nationalists. In many British dependencies, new political organisations took shape, extracting concessions from the colonial authorities, which in turn gradually reduced their control over local policy and resources. The pattern of Dominion devolution was replicated, reluctantly, elsewhere – with the Indian case being especially important. Fiscal autonomy, conceded after serious disturbances in 1919, allowed the Indians to construct a tariff wall against British goods; this helped to ruin the Lancashire textile industry. When war began again in 1939, London agreed to pay for the extraordinary costs of using Indian troops; this resulted in a £1.3 billion British debt to India, equivalent to roughly one-fifth of Britain’s GDP.[65] All this changed the cost-benefit analysis of holding on to India. At the same time the diffusion of military technology evened up the military imbalance between rulers and ruled. In 1946, for instance, less than half a century after Omdurman, a bunch of Jewish insurgents, using seven milk churns filled with TNT, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem – the nerve-centre of British power in Palestine. Ninety-one perished, and with them much of Britain’s determination to hang on to its troubled Mandate. Ties with the white Dominions also weakened after 1945, as British migration tailed off; other ethnicities flowed in, and a keener sense of national identity was created. Australia led the way, but this was true even in New Zealand, previously the most ‘loyal’ of Dominions. In South Africa the bonds had always been weaker because of the dominance of the ex-Dutch Afrikaners, while in Canada the Francophone community and the neighbouring USA had long exerted their own countervailing pulls.

For Tories such as Margaret Thatcher and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suez in 1956 was a crucial moment in Britain’s ‘decline’ – sapping the will to power – and also an episode that (in ways that that neither chose to specify) could have turned out differently. In reality, however, Suez – though making a big splash politically, especially within the Tory party – was ‘little more than an eddy in the fast-flowing stream of history’.[66] Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s military operation to regain control of the Suez Canal was an act of desperation by a sick man, who was often running a temperature of 105 because of a botched operation on his gall bladder. He deliberately excluded most of Whitehall, including the Foreign Office, Treasury and Joint Intelligence Committee. It was also at odds with underlying post-war verities of British foreign policy. Collusion with Israel – supposedly covert but in fact embarrassingly transparent – ran against traditional British cooperation with the Arab states, while the failure to consult the United States, leading to a Washington-induced run on sterling, breached the basic post-war axiom of keeping in step with the Americans.

By the 1950s, ministers and officials recognised that defence commitments had outstripped national income and also that, in the thermonuclear era, British security depended on its role as junior partner in a ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Suez was therefore an aberration from the pattern of post-war British foreign policy – a contingent moment reflecting the personality of a particular leader, rather than a fundamental turning point in British history. At most, it dramatised to the world – and to the British public – the limitations on British power that were already common knowledge in Westminster and Whitehall.

If one is looking for a moment that was both psychologically traumatic and geopolitically significant, it is necessary to go back to the Second World War. Not, however, to 1940 – that ‘finest hour’ enshrined in national myth and movies – but to early 1942 when Britain’s Southeast Asian Empire crumbled in the face of a Japanese blitzkrieg. The attack on Pearl Harbor formed the curtain-raiser to an audacious series of combined operations by Japan’s land, naval and air forces that not only evicted the British from Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore in a few weeks, but did so in a way that dramatically undermined key fundamentals of Britain’s global position. The supremacy of modern airpower over traditional seapower was demonstrated in December 1941 when Britain’s only two capital ships guarding its Asian Empire, Prince of Wales and Repulse, were sunk in a couple of hours by Japanese torpedo-bombers. ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock,’ wrote Churchill in his memoirs. ‘As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sunk in upon me.’ Across the Pacific and Indian Oceans ‘Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.’ That nakedness was then totally exposed by the fall of Singapore in February 1942 to inferior Japanese forces. Some 80,000 British and empire soldiers marched off into captivity in what Churchill called ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.[67] For some weeks India and Australia seemed in danger.

Churchill himself admitted the extent of Britain’s global overstretch in 1941–2, telling the Commons: ‘There never has been a moment, there never could have been a moment, when Great Britain or the British Empire, single-handed, could fight Germany and Italy, could wage the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of the Middle East and at the same time stand thoroughly prepared in Burma, the Malay Peninsula, and generally in the Far East against the impact of a vast military empire like Japan.’[68]

Although the Japanese tide was eventually turned – largely by the US Navy – and Britain regained most of its Asian Empire, the damage done in 1942 proved lasting. Newsreel film and press photos of British officers in their baggy shorts signing the articles of surrender in Singapore and then marching off into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were beamed around the world, shattering the image of racial superiority that, as Lugard had rightly asserted, was so essential to British power. No longer could imperial loyalty be assumed. And the panic offer of independence to India in the crisis of 1942, though not enacted then, had to be honoured after the war – beginning the domino-like process of decolonisation.

In short, 1940–2 – from the fall of France to the fall of Singapore – was nothing less than a ‘strategic catastrophe’ for Britain’s global position. It constituted the ‘real turning point’,[69] forcing the British into the expedient of peacetime conscription that was not sustainable in the long term, and into dependence on a force-multiplier alliance with the American superpower. The standard national narrative emphasises 1940 – heroic evacuation from Dunkirk and victory in the battle of Britain – while ‘the import of the imperial disasters of 1941–2 has been obscured’.[70] In the country’s global history, however, Singapore matters far more than Suez.

Affluence, heritage and history

Britain’s current position in the world rankings of wealth and power does not compare with what it was 150 years ago. As has been suggested, this is hardly surprising: the country’s rise was remarkable but not the diminution in its standing when more populous and resource-rich states caught up and global decolonisation took hold. Yet this is not the whole story.

‘The British Empire declined; the condition of the people improved’: that was A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict on 1914 to 1945.[71] Taking the twentieth century as a whole, observes David Cannadine, the ‘age of decline’ was also ‘the age of affluence.’[72] Notwithstanding periodic hand-wringing about British economic performance, the country remains one of the richest in the world. At the end of the twentieth century, in income per head, Britain was ‘right in the middle of the range among big Western European countries (a little higher than Germany and Italy, a little lower than France), but on a world scale plainly very rich’.[73] Whatever the country’s changing place in world rankings, since the Industrial Revolution the British have been ‘beneficiaries of developments which in every generation’ have left them ‘richer than their predecessors’.[74]

The problem is: which British? The fruits of affluence have not been evenly shared across the population. Over the last century, the British economy has undergone radical restructuring. Just as Britain was in the vanguard of industrialisation – the shift of labour from the primary sector (farming, mining) to the secondary (the manufacturing industry) – so it also led a further shift to service industries (the tertiary sector) which today accounts for around 80 per cent of GDP. Even though there remains in some quarters an assumption that ‘manufacturing’ in more traditional forms such as steel, ships and motor vehicles is the mark of a great nation, this process of ‘tertiarisation’ is the norm for most developed Western countries. The USA, Germany and France are all around the 80 per cent level, but ‘in Britain the process of deindustrialisation has gone further and faster than just about anywhere else.’[75]

And the human cost has been considerable, especially at two points during the twentieth century. First, in the 1920s and 1930s, a whole generation of workers in staple industries such as coal, steel, textiles and shipbuilding experienced long-term structural unemployment. Their iconic protest was the Jarrow March from Tyneside to London in October 1936. And then the even more precipitous slump from the 1970s in what was left of those sectors and across heavy industry as a whole. Between 1971 and 1999 the proportion of workers in manufacturing halved, from 34 per cent to under 16 per cent, while employment in the service sector rose from 54 per cent to 72 per cent – with most of that growth coming in financial and business services: up from 6 per cent to over 18 per cent of the workforce.[76] In both phases, deindustrialisation was mainly the result of sharp foreign competition from lower-wage developing economies, but it has been accentuated by the policy decisions of various British governments – privileging the gold standard in the 1920s, sticking to monetary targets and breaking union power in the Thatcher era. The consequence in each case was high levels of unemployment and enduring social deprivation in regions that had been heavily dependent on a single economic activity or enterprise – a coal mine, steel mill or car factory, with the old industrial heartlands of northern England, South Wales and Clydeside hardest hit. This process has tended to exacerbate the sense of a North–South divide – with prosperity most evident in London, the Home Counties and parts of the Midlands. This fed into the pro-Brexit vote in June 2016.

Indeed it has been argued that ‘de-industrialisation’ not ‘decline’ should be considered the most appropriate ‘meta-narrative’ for post-war British history – perhaps even comparable with the epic historical transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, given its wide-ranging effects on ‘income distribution, unemployment, the gendered distribution of work and the shape of the social security system’.[77] The new service economy is highly polarised between what have been called ‘lovely’ jobs and ‘lousy’ jobs, with the latter routine and poorly paid, so that ‘in-work’ poverty has to be quietly mitigated by state benefits. Precipitate de-industrialisation has brought with it sharp increases in social inequality and economic insecurity. And in understanding the human costs, concepts such as ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ are not merely irrelevant but obfuscatory. The root questions are political more than economic. What have governments done to promote new economic activities, retrain unemployed workers and educate younger generations into flexible work skills? This agenda takes us into the realm of national policies rather than structural processes – and ‘policies’ in a much more sophisticated sense than political rhetoric about reversing national decline by acts of Napoleonic willpower.[78]

Yet the ideology of decline still has visceral power. There seems to be a ‘gut feeling that Britain, having once been top dog, ought always to be top dog’. In which case, the fact that other dogs are bigger is taken as evidence of the nation’s ‘decline’, even though the British dog is now a lot fatter than a century ago.[79] Some seem to find it particularly galling that former enemies, notably Germany, now occupy an elevated place. The insistence on ‘greatness’ – that Thatcherite aspiration to put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Britain’ – suggests a rooted Tory unwillingness to bid farewell to the position and status that had been lost. Yet it is striking that when the Europhile Liberal Democrat politician Nick Clegg published his 2017 manifesto about how to reverse the verdict of the EU referendum, he felt it necessary to entitle the book How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again). The appeal of the ‘G’ word, it seems, is not confined to the political right.

Magnifying this sense of lost greatness is the visibility of the past in contemporary Britain. The era of ‘decline’ is not only an age of affluence but also the heyday of Heritage. Yet what the ‘H’ word actually means is elusive. ‘We could no more define the national heritage than we could define, say, beauty or art,’ stated the first annual report of the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1980–1. In its view the term obviously included ‘the natural riches of Britain’, threatened by ‘thoughtless development’, but ‘heritage’ was also ‘a representation of the development of aesthetic expression and a testimony to the role played by the nation in world history’.[80]

The prodigious growth of the ‘heritage industry’ has spawned many forward-looking projects of urban and rural regeneration. But it can also foster nostalgia funded by affluence. At one end of the spectrum is the National Trust – despite its name a private charity whose membership has mushroomed from 1 million in 1981 to over 5 million in 2017. Now one of the largest landowners in Britain, the Trust describes its mission as preserving ‘special places’ not only ‘for everyone’ but also ‘for ever’. It has been credited with largely ensuring the survival of the English country house, and with that an alluring evocation of past gentility. At the other end of the spectrum, local councils and museums have given new life to a multitude of derelict industrial sites.[81] Some of these – Ironbridge, for instance – can be infused with a gritty grandeur to match, in a different way, country houses like Stourhead or Cliveden.

The vogue since the 1980s for ‘heritage films’ has also enhanced the ‘historical imaginary’ of Britain. Many influential blockbusters feature famous monarchs, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and George III, and country-house dramas have always been popular, from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey. Often memorably acted and beautifully filmed, these films and TV programmes can insidiously suggest that the nation’s past is more impressive and exciting than its present. That can also be the effect of the most dynamic area of recent history television, so-called ‘Reality History’. Moving away from an academic, informational approach, TV channels adopted a more emotive, participatory format – encouraging the viewer to identify with historical figures and their experience by adopting their lifestyle (the House genre), wearing their clothes, or enduring their experiences (Trench, Ship, and so on).[82]

Particularly potent have been movies about Britain’s Second World War produced by post-war British studios. The total number was remarkable: about one hundred in the two decades from 1946 to 1965. Some 30 million people went to the cinema every week in the late 1940s, when Britain’s population totalled 51 million. Although attendance fell below 15 million in 1959, this figure still virtually matched the circulation of all national daily newspapers. War films – though despised by many critics – proved consistent box-office successes. The Dam Busters was the top-grossing British film in 1955; likewise Reach for the Sky in 1956 (about the wartime aviator Douglas Bader). Sink the Bismarck was another big success in 1960. Unlike movies of the 1920s and 1930s about the Great War, there was very little questioning of the conflict’s rightness; nor were soldiers on both sides depicted as essentially ordinary men led as victims to the slaughter. The post-1945 films celebrated men and masculinity; their heroes – stars such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd – were generally tough but reserved, stereotypically English, and their German and Japanese foes usually classic ‘baddies’. Apart from a few Australians, the contributions of the empire to victory rarely figured, nor those of allies such as the Americans – let alone the Russians. Complementing the message of the popular boys’ weekly, The Eagle, these movies projected the war as ‘a great game’ and ‘a good cause’. Of course, most audiences probably enjoyed them simply as action-packed entertainment – escapes from Nazi prisoner-of-war camps being particularly popular. But, at a subliminal level, the films served to reinforce the heroic narrative of Britain Alone.[83]

These movies were seen by much larger audiences from the 1970s through endless repeats on television. And, more recently, the heroic narrative has been sharpened down to the person of Churchill himself, through what is called a process of ‘re-mediation’ – as one medium refashions the product of another: book, journalism, film, with multiple feedback loops – and in the process amplifies the Churchillian impact. Churchill started the process with six volumes of war memoirs published between 1948 and 1954. He intended to shape the verdict of history at an early stage by, as he liked to put it, being one of the historians. The most vivid parts of those books were purveyed to a much larger audience through serialisation across the world in major newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the New York Times and Life magazine in the USA. Film-makers also picked up the memoirs, for instance, the Winston Churchill: The Valiant Year series shown in America and Britain in 1960–1, and Churchill’s immortality was then assured by a state funeral in 1965, broadcast on TV across the world. Meanwhile, historian Martin Gilbert was gradually constructing Churchill’s literary mausoleum in what became an eight-volume ‘official biography’, on which he worked for twenty years before its completion in 1986. These volumes and the accompanying tomes of supporting documents in turn provided vast amounts of additional information for new movies and TV films. In The Wilderness Years – an eight-part television series of 1982 – Churchill in the 1930s was brought to life for a new generation by the actor Robert Hardy. In the twenty-first century, British-American co-productions hiked up the budgets and also the special effects. In quick succession came Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour in 2017 – the same year as the movie Dunkirk, another box-office triumph about Britain in 1940. And so the process of Churchillian re-mediation has continued for some seventy years, with books, films and journalism feeding on each other.[84]

In the process, however, there has been a gradual narrowing of the Second World War in popular British imagination to the story of one country and one leader in one year, and this has distorted the magnitude and complexity of that global conflict. In June 1940, Churchill urged his beleaguered countrymen to ‘so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’ In his memoirs, Churchill turned exhortation into description, entitling the second volume, about 1940, Their Finest Hour. Over time, ‘theirs’ and ‘his’ have become intertwined. And ‘finest’ implies that Britain’s Churchillian moment cannot be bettered, in other words that it has been all downhill ever since.[85]

In various ways, therefore, heritage is in danger of becoming a substitute for history in public awareness of Britain’s past. ‘The nation’, observed historian Patrick Wright, ‘is not seen as a heterogeneous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, into the future. Instead it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical entity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’[86] In other words, history is understood as content not process: a proud inheritance to be cherished and preserved, rather than an ongoing project of making and remaking.

If you are sure what Britain is, or should be, this may not be the book for you. But if you can cope with the challenges of living in the future tense, rather than luxuriating in the past pluperfect,[87] then read on. What follows is an attempt to conceive of Britain and its history as work in progress.

2
Europe

Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.

Margaret Thatcher, Bruges, 20 September 1988

The idea of Britain existing separately from Europe is a familiar feature of modern British culture. In daily speech, from football matches to weather forecasts, the two terms are often used to denote distinct entities. This has also been a trope of political rhetoric, from the long debate in the 1960s about whether Britain should ‘join’ Europe, via the 1975 referendum about whether to ‘stay in’, and on to the Brexit vote in 2016 to ‘leave’. Of course, ‘Europe’ here signifies a specific political organisation – the EEC or the EU – but much of the political debate has drawn on a narrative about Britain’s historic and special character compared with the Continent.

One of the most celebrated speeches about Britain’s non-European identity was delivered by Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, to the party’s annual conference in Brighton in October 1962. He spoke at length about the conditions that would have to be fulfilled before Labour could agree to join the ‘Common Market’ – especially changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, which he denounced as ‘one of the most devastating pieces of protectionism ever invented’ – and he stressed Britain’s obligations to the Commonwealth. Gaitskell’s conclusion was that the arguments for British entry were ‘evenly balanced’ and that ‘whether or not it is worth going in depends on the conditions of our entry’. He did not conceal his anger at the way Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government seemed hell-bent on joining, despite the costs to the Commonwealth. Yet what caught the headlines was not Gaitskell’s judicious weighing up of pros and cons but his emotional soundbites.[1]

For instance, he warned about a two-faced Europe, of which Britain had good historic reasons to be wary. ‘For although, of course, Europe has had a great and glorious civilisation, although Europe can claim Goethe and Leonardo, Voltaire and Picasso, there have been evil features in European history, too – Hitler and Mussolini … You cannot say what this Europe will be: it has its two faces and we do not know as yet which is the one which will be dominant.’ The ‘ideal of Federal Europe’ also stuck in the Labour leader’s gullet. This meant that ‘if we go into this we are no more than a state (as it were) in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California … it would be the same as in Australia, where you have Western Australia, for example, and New South Wales. We should be like them. This is what it means; it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state.’ And with that transformation would come, Gaitskell believed, a repudiation of Britain’s historic identity: ‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought … For we are not just a part of Europe – at least not yet. We have a different history. We have ties and links which run across the whole world.’[2]

A couple of months later this kind of British rhetoric about a thousand years of history and a global destiny was picked up by Dean Acheson – who had served as US Secretary of State of State in 1949–53 at height of the Cold War. Acheson’s line about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role – quoted at the start of this book – has now become notorious, but the background story is important. In 1962, Acheson – now a crusty elder statesman – was asked to deliver the keynote address to a student conference at the US Military Academy at West Point on 5 December. He made his usual pitch about the importance of the Atlantic Alliance, and the speech attracted little attention in the United States. But embedded in a section about some of the problems facing Western Europe, was the single paragraph on Britain that proved incendiary:

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength, and enjoys a precarious economic relationship by means of the Sterling Area and preferences in the British market – this role is about played out. Great Britain, attempting to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power. H.M.G. [Her Majesty’s Government] is now attempting – wisely, in my opinion – to reenter Europe, from which it was banished at the time of the Plantagenets, and the battle seems to be about as hard-fought as were those of an earlier day.[3]

That whole paragraph is worth quoting both because of its contemptuous dismissal of the Commonwealth, the Sterling Area and Britain’s Cold War diplomacy and also because of its (now rather uncanny) prediction that Britain’s attempt to enter the EEC might presage another Hundred Years’ War. Above all, however, it was the epigram about Britain losing an empire without finding a role that caught the eye in London and provoked an outcry in Tory circles. The Express denounced this American ‘stab in the back’ of its devoted ally; the Telegraph observed snidely that Acheson had always been ‘more immaculate in dress than in judgement’.[4] And because the former Secretary of State was deemed to be close to President Kennedy, the Prime Minister himself felt it necessary to offer his own capsule narrative of British history, to placate his party and what he called ‘the “patriotic” elements in the country’. Macmillan declared that ‘Mr Acheson has fallen into an error which has been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years, including Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler.’[5]

An Evening Standard cartoon showing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begging President John F. Kennedy to let him be the back legs of the American pantomime horse, while Dean Acheson looks on from the wings.

Acheson never retracted his argument but he did later express regret about how he had expressed it – albeit in a typically sardonic manner. ‘The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull,’ he told an interviewer in 1970, adding that this was ‘not always easy to achieve’. He admitted that the controversial sentence in his West Point speech suffered from being too epigrammatic and quotable. ‘If I’d taken twice the number of words to express it, it would have been inoffensive and recognised as true at once. Since then it has been adopted by almost every British politician, though they have never given me credit for it at all.’[6]

Acheson was right: his one-liner about losing empire and not yet finding a role became almost a cliché of British commentary, especially for those who wanted Britain to join ‘Europe’.[7] Yet the emotional invocations of national history by Gaitskell and Macmillan reflect an abiding counter-strain, which re-emerged, for instance, at the time of German unification in 1989–90. ‘We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,’ Margaret Thatcher exclaimed during a European summit in December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall was breached.[8] Her close friend Nicholas Ridley vented similar feelings splenetically to a Spectator journalist, calling the European monetary union ‘a German racket, designed to take over the whole of Europe’ and exclaiming that, as for handing over sovereignty to the EC, ‘you might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ The Spectator gleefully ran the interview as a cover story, graced by a poster of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl daubed with a Hitler moustache, and Ridley was obliged to resign from the Cabinet. So Boris Johnson’s battle cry in 2016 that the British must again be ‘heroes of Europe’ and stand up to German domination was more of the same. The Telegraph headlined that story: ‘Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did’.[9]

To make some sense of these potted narratives we need to take in more than the Second World War and its aftermath, and look across the broad sweep of Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years’. An appropriate way to do so is by reflecting on the ‘English Channel’. Although this figures much less in the narratives of Welsh or Scottish history (defined by the Marches or the Borders) and hardly at all for Ireland (across the Irish Sea), the Channel has come to symbolise the Britain–Europe divide: a maritime frontier etched out in the White Cliffs of Dover. But we need a more fluid understanding of the Channel within ‘our island story’ – a more nuanced perspective on Britain’s changing interactions with a changing Continent.

The Channel – barrier and bridge

A millennium ago, what we British now call the English Channel was described as not so much a divide but a passageway between two land masses. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century chronicler, referred to it as ‘the straits to the south’ which ‘allow one to sail to Gaul’.[10] His perspective was hardly surprising because, for several centuries after 1066, England was ruled by a political elite who spoke a version of French and who moved naturally between their domains on either side of the water. And in the age of sail, not rail, France could be reached from London far more quickly than Scotland. The result was ‘a shared culture’, ruled by an intermarried aristocracy and by the Roman Catholic Church, whose clerics constituted the administrative class (and also the historians).[11]

The sharing was, however, far from harmonious because of rival claims to territory and title. Armies from the French side of the Channel invaded England on several occasions, notably during the civil war of 1139–53 over the succession to Henry I and again in 1215–17 during the ‘Barons’ War’ against King John about how to interpret and implement the Magna Carta. More common, however, were armies crossing in the opposite direction, from north to south. After Henry I, the Anglo–Norman dynasty founded by William the Conqueror were succeeded by the descendants of Geoffrey of Anjou – Henry II and his sons Richard and John – whose ‘Angevin empire’ at its peak in the 1170s stretched in a great arc from Normandy west to encompass Brittany and then south down the coast to Bordeaux, Aquitaine and the Pyrenees, as well as east through the Massif Central to the Auvergne. Although covering about half of modern France, this ‘empire’ was a hodgepodge of separate possessions, plagued by disputes within Henry’s fractious family. It fell apart during the Anglo–French wars in John’s reign, with the loss of Normandy and all the other lands apart from Gascony, the southwest rump of the once vast duchy of Aquitaine.

Edward I and the Plantagenets struggled to hang on to what was left of their French lands. Their crucial claim was to the duchy of Aquitaine. The Capetian kings of France – engaged, like Edward I in Britain, in an aggressive programme of state building – claimed that, under the 1259 Treaty of Paris, the duchy could only be held in homage and fealty to the French crown. In 1286, Edward I did perform an act of homage to Philippe IV of France, using the words, ‘I become your man for the lands which I hold from you on this side of the sea according to the form of peace made between our ancestors.’[12]

The implications of this vow became increasingly intolerable to his successors: a monarch who claimed to be sovereign on the English side of the sea was in a position of feudal inferiority to the Valois dynasty in respect of his continental inheritance. As the confrontation escalated, Edward III (the grandson of Edward I) took advantage of a French succession crisis in 1328 to assert his claim, via his mother, to rule France as well as England. The result was open warfare between the two monarchies on and off from 1337 – what became known as the Hundred Years’ War. After Henry V’s surprise victory at Agincourt in 1415, the English and their Burgundian allies did finally seem close to enforcing their claim. In the 1420s they controlled much of France from Brittany and the Channel to the Loire. But then the war turned against them, in part due to the inspirational leadership of Jeanne d’Arc, and by 1453 the English possessions were reduced to a small area around Calais. Despite new French wars under Henry VIII, Calais was eventually lost in 1558, though subsequent English monarchs did not stop reiterating their nominal claim to be rulers of France until the Napoleonic era.

Defeat in the Hundred Years’ War therefore ended a period of almost four centuries when the Channel was a bridge as much as a barrier, linking two sides of an Anglo–French culture in which the English elite had roots and often lands in France. Over the next four centuries there slowly emerged a sense of contrasting and competing national identities, sharpened by the Reformation and the protracted struggle to establish a distinctively English form of Protestantism, which lasted till 1690, and then by another on-off Hundred Years’ War with the French, this time against Louis XIV and later Napoleon. In this process, the Channel did assume the character of an iconic barrier, especially in official rhetoric.Yet it never ceased to function as a bridge because, as a Protestant nation, England could not be indifferent to the fate of the Reformation on the continent, now wracked by conflicts between Protestants and Catholics.[13]

Henry VIII’s break with Rome began for very personal reasons: his desire for the Papacy to annul his barren marriage in the hope of producing a legitimate male heir with his latest infatuation, Anne Boleyn. When the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry set himself up as ‘supreme head’ of the English church and then, seizing on the convenient ideas of anti-clerical reformers, his regime attacked the institution of monasticism and dissolved all the religious houses, owners of about a third of the land in England. Instead of prudently managing those assets, however, Henry flogged them for ready cash to pay for an ego-trip bid to regain England’s lost French empire. The war of 1544–6 was a costly disaster and England’s incremental Protestant Reformation left the country increasingly exposed in Counter-Reformation Europe.

The 1550s proved a critical turning point, defined by the accidents of gender and mortality. Henry died in 1547. His young son Edward VI was an ardent Protestant, eager to promote his faith, but he died – probably of tuberculosis – in 1553, aged 15. Anticipating his death, Edward tried to ensure a Protestant succession by willing the Crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey. But her reign lasted only nine days before Mary, Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, was installed on the throne. A staunch Catholic, committed to extirpating Protestantism, Mary married the heir to the Spanish throne, who became King Philip II in 1556. This placed England on the other side of Europe’s wars of religion. But then in 1558, Mary died aged 42, possibly from cancer of the uterus. She was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth – the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who was then 25. Given the fate of her siblings, few would have predicted at her accession that Elizabeth would reign for nearly 45 years. In 1562, for instance, she contracted smallpox and seemed close to death. Her fortuitous longevity proved to be of huge historical significance.

Elizabeth was a firm but cautious Protestant. Both those adjectives mattered: she secured the Reformation but did not allow religion to divide the country as happened in France. Equally important, in 1559–60 Scotland’s anti-Catholic nobles expelled the French and established a Protestant regime. What ensued has been described as ‘the greatest transformation in England’s foreign relations since the start of the Hundred Years’ War’ – making ‘an ally of England’s medieval enemies the Scots, and an enemy of its medieval allies the Burgundians’ whose possessions in the Netherlands had now passed to Philip of Spain.[14] What’s more, France and Spain finally made peace in 1559 after nearly seven decades of periodic conflict, freeing Philip to concentrate on his mission of rolling back the Reformation.

In 1567 the Duke of Parma began a ruthless Spanish campaign to suppress the Protestant-led rebellion in the Low Countries; in 1572 thousands of French Protestants were killed in what became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. At home Elizabeth, pressed by her advisers, turned on recalcitrant Catholics as potential traitors; abroad she began to aid the Dutch revolt in the interests of national security. This escalating confrontation with Spain climaxed in Philip’s abortive invasion in July 1588 – which was defeated not so much by English naval prowess as by the fabled ‘Protestant wind’ that prevented the Spanish Armada from linking up with Parma’s army in Flanders and instead drove the sailing ships into the North Sea. A third of the original 130 vessels did not make it around Scotland and home to Spain.

From these years of fevered insecurity, when regime and religion both seemed to hang in the balance, there emerged a new national ideology. Rooted in providentialist interpretations of recent history, it depicted the English as a staunchly Protestant nation, blessed by God’s protection. An intellectual landmark was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church – popularly known Foxe’s Book of Martyrs because it was a collection of stories – some true, others little more than rumour – about Christian martyrs, mostly anti-Catholic. Foxe had started compiling his work in Latin, while exiled on the Continent during Mary’s reign. Returning to England in 1559, soon after Elizabeth acceded to the throne, he was quickly taken under the wing of her principal adviser, William Cecil, who put Foxe in touch with the printer John Day, persuaded him to publish in English and also helped finance what was a truly massive project – the biggest book printed in England to date. The first edition, which appeared in 1563, ran to 1,800 pages, lavishly illustrated with 60 woodcuts; the second, in 1570, filled 2,300 pages – more than two million words – in two volumes, with 150 illustrations. Over the course of Elizabeth’s reign five editions were published; four more followed during the seventeenth century; and abridged versions, in cheap instalments, were printed throughout the eighteenth century – carrying Foxe’s message to a new and much wider audience.[15]

‘The Double Deliverance’: Samuel Ward’s print, published in Amsterdam in 1621 and widely distributed. In the centre the Pope and a Spanish grandee (King Philip II?), with advisers including the Devil, plot England’s destruction. Left: the Armada of 1588 is blown away by the wind from Heaven. Right: Guy Fawkes prepares his deadly plot but the all-seeing Jehovah smiles on his chosen people in England. [16]

This providentialist sense of the English as a Chosen People – like the Israelites of old – became enshrined in the national calendar. Particularly significant in English national memory was what preacher Samuel Ward called in 1621 the nation’s ‘double deliverance’ from ‘the invincible navie’ and ‘the unmatcheable powder treason’ – in other words, from the Armada of 1588 and the Catholic plot to blow up king and parliament in 1605. The failure of both were depicted as acts of divine intervention.

The Gunpowder Treason Plot became even more sacred to Protestant memory during the reign of the crypto-Catholic Charles I and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Charles’ attempt to impose an Anglican prayer book on the Scottish Presbyterian church provoked the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40. In an effort to put down the Scottish revolt, the King tried to raise an army of Irish Catholics, which deepened suspicions that he was a Papist. Finally obliged to call Parliament in London into session, after more than a decade, in order to obtain money for the Scottish war, Charles was confronted by a long list of civil and religious grievances from a legislature that voted itself into permanent session (the ‘Long Parliament’) until its demands were met. Deadlock turned into confrontation and then three English civil wars between 1642 and 1651, which were intertwined with the politico-religious struggles in Scotland and Ireland.

Charles was executed in 1649 and although his son regained the throne in the Restoration of 1660 as Charles II, he returned to a country permanently changed by the civil wars. England was now firmly established as a constitutional monarchy committed to a Protestant church. So much so that when Charles’ brother and successor, James II, turned to Catholicism, he was displaced in 1688 in favour of his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her Dutch Calvinist husband William of Orange. After Mary died in 1694, ‘King Billy’ reigned alone until his death in 1702. The year before, a parliament dominated by Tory squires passed the Act of Settlement, prohibiting a Catholic (or anyone married to a Catholic) from acceding to the throne. This was no ritual act of piety. In 1707, ensuring the Protestant succession throughout Britain was a major reason for the Anglo–Scottish Treaty of Union, which established a new constitutional entity, Great Britain. And in 1714, when Queen Anne (Mary’s younger sister) died without a living heir, Parliament passed over more than fifty individuals closer to her in blood yet Papist in faith. Instead they invited Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover – barely able to speak English but a staunch Lutheran – to be crowned King George I.[17] In other words, to preserve England as a constitutionally affirmed Protestant nation it was considered an acceptable price, both in 1688 and also 1714, to call in a continental monarch.

The Protestant succession also brought with it renewed engagement with the Continent. By the 1680s France, under Louis XIV, had replaced Spain as Europe’s predominant Catholic power. Autocratic and aggressive, Louis and his successors sought to expand through enforced dynastic marriages and overt military conquest – a project seen by many in Britain as portending a ‘universal monarchy’. The French directly supported the son and grandson of James II in their bids to put the Stuarts back on the throne through invasions in 1715 and 1745. This threat forced Britain into continental alliances in the wars of 1689–97, 1702–13 and 1743–8 – waged to restrain French power.

In any case, the Protestant succession meant that Britain was itself a continental monarchy. Except for the twelve years of Queen Anne (1702–14), ‘from 1688 to 1837 the holder of the British thrones was simultaneously ruler of significant continental European territories’ – the United Provinces under William III and the Electorate of Braunschweig-Lüneburg under the Hanoverian dynasty. Although generally known as Hanover after its capital city, the Electorate actually covered much of north-central Germany – from Brunswick to Bremen on the North Sea, and from Göttingen to the edge of Hamburg. George I and George II were rulers of two separated territories and – retaining deep German roots – they took their continental obligations seriously, spending at least one summer in three in Hanover, together with key ministers usually headed by the senior Secretary of State. This pattern was broken only in 1760 with the accession of George III – the first Hanoverian to be born in Britain and to speak English as his mother tongue. Indeed he never visited Hanover during his sixty-year reign.[18]

The Hanover connection and the experience of fighting continental wars gave the eighteenth-century British political elite a keen awareness of Europe as a whole, both geographically and politically. This also discouraged insular isolationism. In 1716 the Earl of Sunderland asserted that ‘the old Tory notion that England can subsist by itself whatever becomes of the rest of Europe’ had been ‘justly exploded since the revolution’ of 1688. In 1742 the MP John Perceval ridiculed the idea ‘that this country is an island entrenched within its own natural boundaries, that it may stand secure and unconcerned in all the storms of the rest of the world’. The politician Lord Carteret insisted in 1744 that ‘our own independence’ was closely linked to ‘the liberties of the continent’.[19] And setbacks against the French were often blamed on eighteenth-century equivalents of lack of willpower: luxury, selfishness, even an addiction to tea. ‘Were they the sons of tea-sippers’, asked the pamphleteer Jonas Hanway, ‘who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube’s streams with Gallic blood’ at Blenheim?[20]

It became an explicit theme of Whig political rhetoric during the first half of the eighteenth century that the ‘national interest’ required Britain to maintain a ‘balance of power’ on the Continent, through judicious alliances and selective intervention. Yet there were many who disagreed. One critic claimed in 1742 that the idea of it ‘being the Honour of England to hold the balance of Europe has been so ignorantly interpreted, so absurdly applied, and so perniciously put into practice, that it has cost this Nation more lives, and more money, than all the national Honour of that kind in the World is worth’.[21] The Tory politician and political philosopher Lord Bolingbroke offered an alternative strategy. ‘Great Britain is an island,’ he insisted. ‘The sea is our barrier, ships are our fortresses, and the mariners that trade and commerce alone can furnish are the garrisons to defend them.’ Bolingbroke did not totally rule out sending soldiers to the Continent. ‘Like other amphibious animals, we must come occasionally on shore,’ he admitted, ‘but the water is more properly our element, and in it, like them, as we find our greatest strength, so we exert our greatest force.’[22]

Emerging here was what would prove to be a lasting tension in debates about British foreign policy between a ‘continental’ and a ‘maritime’ strategy. The latter became more plausible after 1760 under a monarch who did not share his predecessors’ orientation towards Hanover, both personally and politically. What’s more, Britain’s trade had now shifted away from northwest Europe to the Mediterranean, East Indies, Caribbean and the American colonies, in an increasingly profitable nexus of goods, commodities and people-trafficking. The major wars against France in the second part of the ‘long eighteenth century’ – 1756–63, 1778–83, 1793–1802 and climacterically 1803–15 – were struggles for global empire, especially in North America and the Indian sub-continent. Indeed Britain was now, to quote historian Peter Marshall, ‘a nation defined by Empire’.[23]

Yet also still defined by its relations with the rest of Europe: every one of these wars entailed threats to the security of the British homeland, above all the menace of invasion by Napoleon in 1803–5. But except for the crisis years of 1812–15, Britain did not deploy large armies on the continent – using instead its commercial wealth and stable national debt to employ foreign mercenaries as its contribution to continental alliances. In 1760, for instance, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, there were 187,000 soldiers in Britain’s pay yet the contingent of British and Irish troops sent to Germany numbered only 20,000.[24] In the seven wars against France from 1688 to 1815, the British were diplomatically isolated just once, when Spain and the Dutch joined France in 1779–80. As a result, Britain lost control of the seas and, with this, its American colonies.

These conflicts had a profound effect on national identity. ‘Great Britain’ – the union of England and Wales with Scotland in 1707 – was an invented nation, forged and hardened through these conflicts. ‘A powerful and persistent threatening France became the haunting embodiment of that Catholic Other which Britons had been taught to fear since the Reformation,’ historian Linda Colley has observed. ‘Confronting it encouraged them to bury their internal differences in the struggle for survival, victory and booty.’[25]

The global struggle against France between 1793 and 1815 (over twice as long as both of Britain’s twentieth-century world wars combined) revived a real threat of invasion. A small French force landed in Wales in 1797, followed by more substantial invasions of Ireland in 1796 and 1798 – one of the main reasons for incorporating Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1801. Indeed from 1798 to 1805 the invasion of England was Napoleon’s main strategic aim. ‘Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe,’ he blustered. ‘We have six centuries of insult to avenge.’ Britain was mobilised as never before. In 1804–5, nearly a tenth of the country’s 10.5 million people were directly involved in national defence. In these years, France became Britain’s bogeyman, with fears fanned by propagandists. ‘That perfidious, blood-thirsty nation, the French,’ one pamphlet claimed in 1793, was ‘the source of every evil you have experienced for a century past.’[26]

Only when he lost control of the seas after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 did Napoleon turn east against Prussia and then Russia. But he posed a new challenge in the form of economic warfare. His ‘Continental Blockade’ of Britain from 1806 and British retaliation against any state that cooperated with him proved the climax of this battle to control the narrow seas. It also had wider implications. The refusal of Portugal to join the blockade allowed the British to open a vital second front from 1808 in the Peninsular War, fighting Napoleon in Spain. And the Tsar’s refusal to maintain the blockade was a major factor in Napoleon’s hubristic invasion of Russia in 1812, which marked the beginning of his end. In 1814 and again in 1815 Britain was able to subsidise a coalition of three major powers (Prussia, Russia and Austria) as well as its own now-substantial army and thereby twice defeat the Little Emperor – culminating in the British-Prussian victory at Waterloo in June 1815.

The French wars from 1793 to 1815 led to a sharper definition of national borders. For the British, the sea between the two countries became generally known as ‘The English Channel’ – reflecting their claim that ‘the maritime frontier was defined by the French coast’. For the French, the waterway was known as ‘La Manche’ – the sleeve – indicating a looser conception of territorial waters. ‘The sea became an external limit of the French territory, without belonging to it,’ but the English claimed the sea as well.[27] Affirming Britain’s security interest in the other side of the Channel coast, in 1839 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, orchestrated an international agreement to guarantee the independence and neutrality of Belgium, which had broken away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. France and Prussia were among the signatories. This had fateful consequences seventy-five years later.

After Waterloo there was periodic friction with France and occasional invasion scares, but, to quote historian François Crouzet, the French ‘never again picked up the gauntlet’. They ‘understood that they would not have a chance, and so backed down when the risk of war was serious, for example in 1840 and again in 1898’.[28] Gradually relations between Britain and France moved haltingly towards co-existence, then entente and eventually alliance – redefining Britain’s continental connection until 1940.

The Channel – transcended yet triumphant

During the century between 1815 and 1914, Britain tried to maintain its hybrid grand strategy – maritime and continental – by new means. Global expansion, often conducted by limited wars such as the conquest of Egypt in 1882, was combined with periodic bouts of calculating diplomacy to maintain a European balance. Throughout, large-scale wars such as the Crimea (1854–6) and South Africa (1899–1902) were the exception. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century – after the geopolitical turning points of American and German unification between 1861 and 1871 – the implications of Britain’s relative decline began to kick in. During the long eighteenth century the British had battled against a single foe, France, for European stability and global hegemony. The struggle was immense, but the chess game was essentially simple. By 1900, however, the country faced simultaneous challenges on the continent and globally from a variety of powers, even though Germany was the most threatening because closest to home. The first German war (1914–18) was won by Britain and France, but only with massive American help; in the second France quickly became irrelevant geopolitically and America all-important. In the process the Channel lost much of its strategic significance – transcended by the bomber and then the nuclear missile. Yet its psychological importance for British identity was triumphantly re-asserted by the events of 1940. The era of the two world wars requires closer attention because it has become central to national debate.

In the late-nineteenth century, Britain’s default response in the face of multiple challengers was a policy of selective ‘appeasement’ – in those days a perfectly respectable diplomatic term. It meant, according to historian Paul Kennedy, ‘satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly very dangerous’.[29] But the rationality and acceptability of appeasement was more obvious to the British than to others. ‘We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance,’ Churchill privately admitted in 1914. ‘We have got all we want in territory and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.’[30] He chose to omit the italicised phrases when quoting this memorandum in his war memoirs – a sign, presumably, of his awareness that they did not accord with what the British liked to present as their principled love of peace.

The United States, at least, could be managed around the turn of the century by calculated appeasement – backing down on points of friction, while playing up the economic and cultural ties between the two ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers. The US was a force only in the Americas and the Pacific, with – at this stage – minimal political engagement in Europe. In Europe itself, Germany was not geographically a direct threat – unlike Napoleonic France had been. However, its aspirations under Kaiser Wilhelm II to become a ‘world power’ equal to the others did pose a serious challenge, especially in the 1900s when Germany built a large modern fleet to rival the Royal Navy. This prompted Britain to draw closer to France and Russia – colonial rivals in North Africa and the Indian subcontinent respectively but also European states that feared the growth of German military power. The Anglo–French entente of 1904 and the Anglo–Russian agreement of 1907 were intended to resolve, or at least reduce, imperial tensions in the interests of deterring Germany.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.