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The English and their History
In The English and their History, the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they have told about themselves have shaped them, from the prehistoric 'dreamtime' through to the present day.
If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. They first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.
The English have come a long way from those precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it, and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity.
Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly beginning a new period in their long history. Especially at times of change, history can help us to think about the sort of people we are and wish to be. This book, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division, and yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.
If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. They first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history.
The English have come a long way from those precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it, and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity.
Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly beginning a new period in their long history. Especially at times of change, history can help us to think about the sort of people we are and wish to be. This book, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division, and yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.
1024 pages, Hardcover
First published November 6, 2014
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October 30, 2018
I guess there are different sort of shapes that a historical overview can take. There’s an ice-core shape, where historical epochs are divided into roughly equal sections and given roughly equal attention. That’s maybe more common in a big multi-author or multi-volume venture. There’s a string-bean shape where you pick out a few periods and massively inflate them. There's a wedge-shape, with more emphasis on the distant past, narrowing as we get closer to the present. This book is wedge-shaped, with the thick end of the wedge in the present, rapidly tapering into the past. So in a book of 900 pages (plus footnotes and bibliography) we have approximately:
10 pages on everything upto 600AD (yes, that includes Roman conquest and rule)
25 pages on c.600-1066
100 pages on 1066-1500
120 pages on 1500-1660
150 pages on the 18th century
180 pages on the 19th century
300 pages on the 20th century
That means about half the book is on the 19th and 20th centuries: a period which readers are doubtless more familiar with than earlier periods. Also a period on which there are numerous excellent overviews available elsewhere. (Interestingly, Hobsbawm’s brilliant tetralogy features nowhere in the notes or suggestions for further reading).
Maybe there’s no right or wrong way to do this and of course you could argue with any approach or focus. At the same time, I think it’s more than quibbling to suggest that an overview of the British isles and empire devoting about 2 pages to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and 40 to the events of 1997-2014 has suffered a major failure of perspective. The index has 0 entries for Stonehenge and 25 – count ‘em! - for Tony Blair (none of which read “-liar” or “-war criminal”). As an aside, I don’t necessarily begrudge an author their biases, nor do I think it’s possible to write readable history without them, but a firmer editorial hand could have spared me the author’s heavy-breathing and Nivea-cream attitude to Margaret Thatcher and her war on the poor.
I don’t mean to be overly scathing of this book, which I quite enjoyed, but in many respects it certainly constitutes a missed opportunity.
On the plus side, Tombs writes very well and engagingly – no mean feat for over 900 pages. He describes the rise of institutions like monarchy, the parliament, the courts and the English language from serial conquest and cultural miscegenation. We get a whirlwind tour of the Romans (ridiculously brief), Saxon invasions, Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, the wars of the Roses, the Reformation, the Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution and so on. He has an excellent eye for the intriguing detail and a very British sense of humour:
I’m not one for flag-waving but Tombs’ description of the historical origins of freedom of speech, rule of law, jury trial, habeas corpus, democratic checks and balances and Poor Laws (some form of government welfare for the indigent was written into law from at least the 16th Century) get me some of the way there. Another surprise was just how dangerous the priesthood was as a profession for much of history. The number of churchmen who are hanged, drawn and quartered or burnt alive over sectarian disputes is fairly shocking.
When we come to the rise of the British Empire, Tombs has an unfortunate tendency to come off as a mealy-mouthed apologist for imperial depredation.
Err sorry, what bizarre shit? This while India’s fabulous wealth poured into the coffers of England and the sub-continent was systematically de-industrialised to become an importer of British-woven cotton. While the Royal Navy was forcing the Chinese to become opium addicts at gunpoint. Please spare me the bollocks about the nobility of “free” trade. Particularly when a few paragraphs later we have:
Few million dead but let's not worry too much about that. This is tempered by a more balanced section in which he discusses the pros and cons of empire both for the rulers and the ruled, but Tombs has a jarring tendency to minimise the evils and exaggerate the benefits of colonialism.
The section on the twentieth century is not terrible but again, occasionally jarring. On WW2 for example, we have:
This formulation strikes me as neat, succinct and trite. Generally, Tombs tends to understate the Soviet contribution to the war effort, neglecting to mention that between Barbarossa (22 June 1941) and D-Day (6 June 1944) the land-war largely meant the Soviets fighting the Nazis alone.
The post-war section is overlong and deeply riddled with Tory bias. Say what you will about Hobsbawm but even those who dramatically disagreed with his politics respected the even-handedness of his historical writing.
All in all, I respect the heroism of the project and enjoyed Tombs’ writing but the book has some major flaws that should have been addressed at the editorial level. I felt I should have learned much more from a one-volume history of the British isles. Disappointing.
10 pages on everything upto 600AD (yes, that includes Roman conquest and rule)
25 pages on c.600-1066
100 pages on 1066-1500
120 pages on 1500-1660
150 pages on the 18th century
180 pages on the 19th century
300 pages on the 20th century
That means about half the book is on the 19th and 20th centuries: a period which readers are doubtless more familiar with than earlier periods. Also a period on which there are numerous excellent overviews available elsewhere. (Interestingly, Hobsbawm’s brilliant tetralogy features nowhere in the notes or suggestions for further reading).
Maybe there’s no right or wrong way to do this and of course you could argue with any approach or focus. At the same time, I think it’s more than quibbling to suggest that an overview of the British isles and empire devoting about 2 pages to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and 40 to the events of 1997-2014 has suffered a major failure of perspective. The index has 0 entries for Stonehenge and 25 – count ‘em! - for Tony Blair (none of which read “-liar” or “-war criminal”). As an aside, I don’t necessarily begrudge an author their biases, nor do I think it’s possible to write readable history without them, but a firmer editorial hand could have spared me the author’s heavy-breathing and Nivea-cream attitude to Margaret Thatcher and her war on the poor.
I don’t mean to be overly scathing of this book, which I quite enjoyed, but in many respects it certainly constitutes a missed opportunity.
On the plus side, Tombs writes very well and engagingly – no mean feat for over 900 pages. He describes the rise of institutions like monarchy, the parliament, the courts and the English language from serial conquest and cultural miscegenation. We get a whirlwind tour of the Romans (ridiculously brief), Saxon invasions, Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, the wars of the Roses, the Reformation, the Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution and so on. He has an excellent eye for the intriguing detail and a very British sense of humour:
“in the 1120s, many moneyers were castrated and had their right hands cut off by Henry I for debasing the currency.”
[If only the government pursued unscrupulous bankers with such vigour today...]
“Thomas Carlyle asserted in 1858 that the Normans had forced ‘a gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles… lumbering about in potbellied equanimity’ to undertake ‘heroic toil and silence and endurance, such as leads to the high places of this Universe and the golden mountain tops where dwells the Spirit of the Dawn.’”
“Richard I [shot by a crossbow], in a characteristic gesture, forgave the captured crossbowman from his deathbed – who after Richard died was flayed alive by his men.”
I’m not one for flag-waving but Tombs’ description of the historical origins of freedom of speech, rule of law, jury trial, habeas corpus, democratic checks and balances and Poor Laws (some form of government welfare for the indigent was written into law from at least the 16th Century) get me some of the way there. Another surprise was just how dangerous the priesthood was as a profession for much of history. The number of churchmen who are hanged, drawn and quartered or burnt alive over sectarian disputes is fairly shocking.
When we come to the rise of the British Empire, Tombs has an unfortunate tendency to come off as a mealy-mouthed apologist for imperial depredation.
“Contemporary critics and later writers often dismissed this [the argument that Britain was saving the world with free trade] as a cloak for economic self-interest: Britain had an economic dominance unique in history with 20-25 percent of total world trade, 30-40 percent of world shipping… 50 percent of total foreign investment… and so profited from removal of trade barriers. This is at best a half-truth. Over the whole period in which it operated, c. 1850-1930, free trade probably made Britain slightly poorer.”
Err sorry, what bizarre shit? This while India’s fabulous wealth poured into the coffers of England and the sub-continent was systematically de-industrialised to become an importer of British-woven cotton. While the Royal Navy was forcing the Chinese to become opium addicts at gunpoint. Please spare me the bollocks about the nobility of “free” trade. Particularly when a few paragraphs later we have:
“If this was an overall benefit to the world’s economic well-being [?!], there were also those who lost, sometimes catastrophically: peoples whose land was taken for agricultural development, and who went hungry while their countries exported produce – most disastrously, in the Indian famines of the 1870s and 1890s.”
Few million dead but let's not worry too much about that. This is tempered by a more balanced section in which he discusses the pros and cons of empire both for the rulers and the ruled, but Tombs has a jarring tendency to minimise the evils and exaggerate the benefits of colonialism.
The section on the twentieth century is not terrible but again, occasionally jarring. On WW2 for example, we have:
"American economic power made it possible to crush the Axis... the evisceration of the German army was mainly due to the Russians; but the strategic defeat of Germany as a whole and that of Italy were primarily due to Britain."
This formulation strikes me as neat, succinct and trite. Generally, Tombs tends to understate the Soviet contribution to the war effort, neglecting to mention that between Barbarossa (22 June 1941) and D-Day (6 June 1944) the land-war largely meant the Soviets fighting the Nazis alone.
The post-war section is overlong and deeply riddled with Tory bias. Say what you will about Hobsbawm but even those who dramatically disagreed with his politics respected the even-handedness of his historical writing.
All in all, I respect the heroism of the project and enjoyed Tombs’ writing but the book has some major flaws that should have been addressed at the editorial level. I felt I should have learned much more from a one-volume history of the British isles. Disappointing.
Want to read
August 14, 2018This is a spritely survey text. I admit that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it is so. Granted, the book becomes something of a slog around the Middle Ages. But as a wise old historian once said to me, "It's hard to make the Middle Ages sing." So I give the author a pass there. I'm sure I knew most of this stuff thirty years ago, but with disuse it has fled from my memory. This is a stylish refresher. I was in thrall to the early Roman narrative with its Celts already on site, its Angles and Saxons and the subsequent overrunning of the island by Danes and Norwegians. (See clarifying note from Pete: "Us Celts were ensconced upon this sceptred isle long before Julius arrived c55 bc. What is more we remain the dominant dna & the popular white anglo-saxon protestant is a very rare find, more Vikinga dna than Saxon or Angle or Jute.") The story of the Norman Conquest was the first one I'd come across that did not induce torpor. Everything about the Angevin Empire was news to me. I had no idea that England had held such extensive possessions in France. Great Scot, the holes in my Anglophilia! Also very interesting has been the story of the nasty Puritans, Bloody Mary, wise Elizabeth and her court—perhaps England's greatest monarch, according to the author—Mary Queen of Scots and all the murdering and mayhem leading up to the so-called Glorious Revolution. I learned how Magna Carta, the first instrument between crown and the commons with regard to tenancy rights, eventually expanded to become the foundational document which made the idea of parliament possible. The burning of both Catholics and protestants was news to me, I had not known it was so extensive, as was the long, detailed back and forth between parliament (protestant) and crown (Catholic) with regard to religious questions. England did not entirely escape the madness of the Thirty Years War; it had it's share of bedlam, for the most part inspired by monarchs—Charles I (beheaded), James I and James II (permanently incapacitating nervous breakdown)—who wanted to take the largest protestant population in Europe and return it to Catholism. How's that for hubris?
November 17, 2020
There is no doubt that this is a thoroughly researched, thoughtful and exhaustive history of England and it’s people. It’s set out in largely chronological form, but with occasional sections where key themes are followed through for an extended period. In truth, it’s really more an explanation of the results of changes prompted by historical episodes and significant figures from the country's past rather than an exhaustive diary of events. It also assumes a certain amount of pre-knowledge, so for me it did prompt a fair bit of additional research to flesh out the detail. Throughout, there is a good deal of focus on the social impacts of these events and how this, in time, shaped the character of the English.
The early chapters cover a myriad of invasions, battles and changes of monarchy. The religious history is given a fair amount of coverage too. It felt like there was more history in the early chapters and, perhaps, a greater degree of reflection in the latter stages of the book. I found the section covering the Industrial Revolution particularly illuminating, with some fascinating explanation as to why England beat other countries to the punch. There’s also some straight talking when it comes to some recent political figures, with praise for Churchill but criticism for Thatcher, Major and particularly Blair. Towards the end there is some excellent discussion on the subjects of immigration, terrorism, education, health and the 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps the only subject not covered here in the way I might have expected is that of the impact of the growing drug culture through the latter part of the 20th century.
In his summary, the author reflects on what it means to be English. A nation surrounded by sea which for many years has remained immune to invasion and revolution. In fact the last time its political and social systems were overthrown was in 1066 and this has provided an extended period during which defining national institutions, including the crown, parliament and the country’s legal system have survived. In addition, the geographical structural of the country (it’s shires and boroughs) have largely remained intact. In consequence, England hasn’t gone through some of the dramatic changes other countries in Europe and in many other parts of the world have experienced. Does this help to explain the true character of Englishness, if such a thing exists? I’m not sure, particularly given the multicultural nature of modern England, but it’s one I’ll continue to ponder on.
This is a bulky book - I listened the audio version at over 45 hours - but it’s one that kept my interest throughout. Highly recommended.
The early chapters cover a myriad of invasions, battles and changes of monarchy. The religious history is given a fair amount of coverage too. It felt like there was more history in the early chapters and, perhaps, a greater degree of reflection in the latter stages of the book. I found the section covering the Industrial Revolution particularly illuminating, with some fascinating explanation as to why England beat other countries to the punch. There’s also some straight talking when it comes to some recent political figures, with praise for Churchill but criticism for Thatcher, Major and particularly Blair. Towards the end there is some excellent discussion on the subjects of immigration, terrorism, education, health and the 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps the only subject not covered here in the way I might have expected is that of the impact of the growing drug culture through the latter part of the 20th century.
In his summary, the author reflects on what it means to be English. A nation surrounded by sea which for many years has remained immune to invasion and revolution. In fact the last time its political and social systems were overthrown was in 1066 and this has provided an extended period during which defining national institutions, including the crown, parliament and the country’s legal system have survived. In addition, the geographical structural of the country (it’s shires and boroughs) have largely remained intact. In consequence, England hasn’t gone through some of the dramatic changes other countries in Europe and in many other parts of the world have experienced. Does this help to explain the true character of Englishness, if such a thing exists? I’m not sure, particularly given the multicultural nature of modern England, but it’s one I’ll continue to ponder on.
This is a bulky book - I listened the audio version at over 45 hours - but it’s one that kept my interest throughout. Highly recommended.
March 22, 2024
United and Divided.
Robert Tombs is an Englishman (with some Irish heritage) and a professor of French history at Cambridge University. However, he felt compelled to write the story of the English people. Not a usual subject, a history told from the perspective of the English people. One may freely write about Scottish, Irish, French or German history, but somehow English has become a taboo. Or perhaps it is too intertwined with British. Maybe it’s due to being a nation without a state. What is clear, is that this book is successful, insightful and intelligent. This is a look at the national identity and near 2000 years of English history. Tombs writes with insight and authority, where he places key events in perspective to the modern day. Showing how the chain is all linked together and the whole thing has been driven in a certain direction.
England has been one of the safest, richest and best governed places on Earth. The standard of living there in the fourteenth century was higher than much of the world in the twentieth. Even with the huge decline since 1945, the English have been among the luckiest people in existence, ‘rich, peaceful and healthy’. Being a sovereign kingdom for most of its existence, its relationships have been more important and for longer with Scandinavia, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA than Scotland, Wales or Ireland. England is tied to the continent, as an important player in its history. Beginning with the latter days of the Roman Empire, into the mini kingdoms which were unified under kings Athelstan and Alfred before being blown away by the Norman Conquest. This was the biggest social upheaval, power and wealth exchange ever to befall the English, the repercussions still felt today in some respects. From here England was tied to Europe. Within the fabric of time, Tombs also makes I important pit stops are made along the journey, especially those pivotal to the growth of the English language, Bede and Geoffrey Chaucer. The medieval period was also known for the birth of rights and representation, most famously in Magna Carta in 1215. From here the monarch’s absolute power declined and parliaments arose.
The personal union of two crowns came in 1601, with the accession of James I and VI of England and Scotland. However this did not stop the northern kingdom from invading England, it in-fact increased until 1745. After the brief experiment with Republicanism under Oliver, and then his son Richard Cromwell, monarchy was restored under Charles II. Plague in 1665 and fire in 1666 rapidly reshaped London. But, to Tombs the most important event was in 1688, the Glorious Revolution, where William of Orange expelled the Catholic James II in a bloodless coup and decisively affirming a Protestant kingdom. Religious disagreements would crop up in the next 250 years in English life, but rarely with violence. It was a rejection of ‘fanaticism’, the English way would be a rejection of extremism. William also brought England onto the international stage like never before. He invaded to win a war the Dutch were fighting against France. This laid down the path for dominance. Fighting several major wars over the next 140 or so years, England and then Britain would emerge as the world’s greatest power.
The nineteenth century was Britain’s century. England had merged into a United Kingdom in 1801 and now ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ became synonymous. The 1815 victory over Napoleon at Waterloo secured long lasting peace in Europe. The Victorian era brought in a new religious revival, with ideals of virtue, justice and self improvement. Outlawing the slave trade and then enforcing it, one of her greatest triumphs, now ignored. England was unique and also a pioneer. A two chamber parliament, reform acts to widen (if not wholly successfully) the vote, constitutional monarchy, control over government spending and trial by jury. All quintessentially English and copied on the continent. Tombs gives a balanced assessment of the British Empire, defending it against modern criticisms. Tombs feels that the nation, blood and culture did die on the Somme in 1916 and it has never recovered. A Second World War, certainly was the nail in the coffin, where decline began. The modern age began, mass immigration, industrial decline, large loans, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair governments and the birth of the welfare state all feature. How each has shaped the modern English is explained by Tombs.
In looking back, there perhaps isn’t any other way to write this book. Tombs is fair and shows huge respect over his material. 2000 years of history and not once did I feel he didn’t know the period intricately or misinterpreted the impact of an event. It would be nearly impossible to top this on scope, style or knowledge. With 915 reading pages, I didn’t once feel like this was a slog and throughly looked forward to reading it. History is relevant and important and Tombs has showed it here with the story of the English People.
Robert Tombs is an Englishman (with some Irish heritage) and a professor of French history at Cambridge University. However, he felt compelled to write the story of the English people. Not a usual subject, a history told from the perspective of the English people. One may freely write about Scottish, Irish, French or German history, but somehow English has become a taboo. Or perhaps it is too intertwined with British. Maybe it’s due to being a nation without a state. What is clear, is that this book is successful, insightful and intelligent. This is a look at the national identity and near 2000 years of English history. Tombs writes with insight and authority, where he places key events in perspective to the modern day. Showing how the chain is all linked together and the whole thing has been driven in a certain direction.
England has been one of the safest, richest and best governed places on Earth. The standard of living there in the fourteenth century was higher than much of the world in the twentieth. Even with the huge decline since 1945, the English have been among the luckiest people in existence, ‘rich, peaceful and healthy’. Being a sovereign kingdom for most of its existence, its relationships have been more important and for longer with Scandinavia, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA than Scotland, Wales or Ireland. England is tied to the continent, as an important player in its history. Beginning with the latter days of the Roman Empire, into the mini kingdoms which were unified under kings Athelstan and Alfred before being blown away by the Norman Conquest. This was the biggest social upheaval, power and wealth exchange ever to befall the English, the repercussions still felt today in some respects. From here England was tied to Europe. Within the fabric of time, Tombs also makes I important pit stops are made along the journey, especially those pivotal to the growth of the English language, Bede and Geoffrey Chaucer. The medieval period was also known for the birth of rights and representation, most famously in Magna Carta in 1215. From here the monarch’s absolute power declined and parliaments arose.
The personal union of two crowns came in 1601, with the accession of James I and VI of England and Scotland. However this did not stop the northern kingdom from invading England, it in-fact increased until 1745. After the brief experiment with Republicanism under Oliver, and then his son Richard Cromwell, monarchy was restored under Charles II. Plague in 1665 and fire in 1666 rapidly reshaped London. But, to Tombs the most important event was in 1688, the Glorious Revolution, where William of Orange expelled the Catholic James II in a bloodless coup and decisively affirming a Protestant kingdom. Religious disagreements would crop up in the next 250 years in English life, but rarely with violence. It was a rejection of ‘fanaticism’, the English way would be a rejection of extremism. William also brought England onto the international stage like never before. He invaded to win a war the Dutch were fighting against France. This laid down the path for dominance. Fighting several major wars over the next 140 or so years, England and then Britain would emerge as the world’s greatest power.
The nineteenth century was Britain’s century. England had merged into a United Kingdom in 1801 and now ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ became synonymous. The 1815 victory over Napoleon at Waterloo secured long lasting peace in Europe. The Victorian era brought in a new religious revival, with ideals of virtue, justice and self improvement. Outlawing the slave trade and then enforcing it, one of her greatest triumphs, now ignored. England was unique and also a pioneer. A two chamber parliament, reform acts to widen (if not wholly successfully) the vote, constitutional monarchy, control over government spending and trial by jury. All quintessentially English and copied on the continent. Tombs gives a balanced assessment of the British Empire, defending it against modern criticisms. Tombs feels that the nation, blood and culture did die on the Somme in 1916 and it has never recovered. A Second World War, certainly was the nail in the coffin, where decline began. The modern age began, mass immigration, industrial decline, large loans, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair governments and the birth of the welfare state all feature. How each has shaped the modern English is explained by Tombs.
In looking back, there perhaps isn’t any other way to write this book. Tombs is fair and shows huge respect over his material. 2000 years of history and not once did I feel he didn’t know the period intricately or misinterpreted the impact of an event. It would be nearly impossible to top this on scope, style or knowledge. With 915 reading pages, I didn’t once feel like this was a slog and throughly looked forward to reading it. History is relevant and important and Tombs has showed it here with the story of the English People.
October 3, 2016
كتاب ممتاز حقا، يقوم بمراجعة شاملة للتاريخ المتعارف عليه لإحدى أكثر الأمم والشعوب تأثيرا على مسار التاريخ العالمي في القرون الثلاث أو الأربعة الأخيرة.
ما يقوم به هذا الكتاب هو تأريخ طازج للطريقة التي يحكي بها الإنجليز تاريخم لأنفسهم أو للعالم. أي أن هذا الكتاب ليس مجرد كتاب تاريخ، بل هو كتاب تاريخ عن كتابة التاريخ.
من كتب هذا الكتاب هو البروفيسور الإنجليزي روبرت تومب المتخصص في التاريخ الفرنسي منذ 1814 إلى 1914. لكن ربما هذا ما أعطى الكفاءة اللازمة لمراجعة تاريخ ومؤسسات وثقافة وتقاليد الأمة الانجليزية.
التأريخ للعوائل الحاكمة الانجليزية مهم جدا في هذا الكتاب بقدر أهمية التأريخ للرياضات التي ابتدعها الإنجليز (كرة القدم، الكريكيت، البريدج الخ) والتي أثرت على الامزجة الاجتماعية والنفسية والهوياتية لباقي شعوب العالم.
لا أدري ماذا أقول لكم، ولكني أعود لهذا الكتاب بشكل دائم. حتى اتعلم كيفية فهم التاريخ.
ما يقوم به هذا الكتاب هو تأريخ طازج للطريقة التي يحكي بها الإنجليز تاريخم لأنفسهم أو للعالم. أي أن هذا الكتاب ليس مجرد كتاب تاريخ، بل هو كتاب تاريخ عن كتابة التاريخ.
من كتب هذا الكتاب هو البروفيسور الإنجليزي روبرت تومب المتخصص في التاريخ الفرنسي منذ 1814 إلى 1914. لكن ربما هذا ما أعطى الكفاءة اللازمة لمراجعة تاريخ ومؤسسات وثقافة وتقاليد الأمة الانجليزية.
التأريخ للعوائل الحاكمة الانجليزية مهم جدا في هذا الكتاب بقدر أهمية التأريخ للرياضات التي ابتدعها الإنجليز (كرة القدم، الكريكيت، البريدج الخ) والتي أثرت على الامزجة الاجتماعية والنفسية والهوياتية لباقي شعوب العالم.
لا أدري ماذا أقول لكم، ولكني أعود لهذا الكتاب بشكل دائم. حتى اتعلم كيفية فهم التاريخ.
August 10, 2019
Outstanding history of England and The English concentrating on the period from 600AD to the publication of the book in 2014 (chronologically finishing with the Scottish independence referendum).
The author also examines how history has been retold and how it has been weaved into the myths that different groupings want to weave around England. He is particularly scathing of the Whig view of history, regarding it as implying a continuous series of progressive discontinuities and struggles which did not happen in reality - for example he shows how the 1832 Reform Act was actually regressive in many ways due to its abolition of “potwalloper” constituencies and explicit exclusion of women. He also reserves particular ire for the narrative of post war decline, arguing much of it is irrational and prevents a calmer analysis of the challenges the country faces.
The book is at all times engagingly written. Too many history books are either (and often simultaneously) far detailed for the casual reader and/or guilty of omitting basic detail (assuming too much basic knowledge).
The signs of these two (often twin issues) are when I find myself skim reading large passages (for the first issue) and taking frequent breaks to consult Wikipedia (for the second).
It is a tribute to the writing of this book that I made it through 900 pages without feeling the need to do either.
Also impressive is the sheer scope of the book - sometimes with these type of sweeping histories the author’s bias for a particular period is clear. Here (despite the rather inevitable Zeno’s paradox phenomena where each chapter covers proportionately fewer years) the level of interest and insight shown does not seem to vary over the 1400 years. Mainly I suspect as the author’s academic specialism is actually French history.
If there is an era that he sees as pivotal it is the 1500-1700 period which he labels the Great Divide, of Tories and Whigs, Anglican’s and non-conformists which he believes persists through the present day.
Close to the end of the historical section (prior to the conclusion) Tombs makes the following prescient comment when setting out the difficulty of unraveling England’s relationship with Europe.
It would take a foolhardy prophet to predict the outcome of a referendum on EU membership (if there is to be one) or its long-term consequences.
The author also examines how history has been retold and how it has been weaved into the myths that different groupings want to weave around England. He is particularly scathing of the Whig view of history, regarding it as implying a continuous series of progressive discontinuities and struggles which did not happen in reality - for example he shows how the 1832 Reform Act was actually regressive in many ways due to its abolition of “potwalloper” constituencies and explicit exclusion of women. He also reserves particular ire for the narrative of post war decline, arguing much of it is irrational and prevents a calmer analysis of the challenges the country faces.
The book is at all times engagingly written. Too many history books are either (and often simultaneously) far detailed for the casual reader and/or guilty of omitting basic detail (assuming too much basic knowledge).
The signs of these two (often twin issues) are when I find myself skim reading large passages (for the first issue) and taking frequent breaks to consult Wikipedia (for the second).
It is a tribute to the writing of this book that I made it through 900 pages without feeling the need to do either.
Also impressive is the sheer scope of the book - sometimes with these type of sweeping histories the author’s bias for a particular period is clear. Here (despite the rather inevitable Zeno’s paradox phenomena where each chapter covers proportionately fewer years) the level of interest and insight shown does not seem to vary over the 1400 years. Mainly I suspect as the author’s academic specialism is actually French history.
If there is an era that he sees as pivotal it is the 1500-1700 period which he labels the Great Divide, of Tories and Whigs, Anglican’s and non-conformists which he believes persists through the present day.
Close to the end of the historical section (prior to the conclusion) Tombs makes the following prescient comment when setting out the difficulty of unraveling England’s relationship with Europe.
It would take a foolhardy prophet to predict the outcome of a referendum on EU membership (if there is to be one) or its long-term consequences.
September 14, 2017
This book is a massive history of the English, written by an English expert on France, Robert Tombs. Somehow, against the odds, it manages to be sprightly, interesting, and, most of all, generally upbeat about the past, present, and future of England. Tombs rejects the idea of “Whig history,” not because English progress does not exist, but because the past was rarely as bad as we often think, making any progress less dramatic than it may appear. He offers rational, yet clear-eyed, hope for a bright future—one not destined to be good, but certainly with a better than even chance of being so. Thus, this book is a counterweight to recent narratives of English decline (such as 1999’s “The Abolition of Britain,” by Peter Hitchens), and a book that all pessimists should read.
While “The English and Their History” is a straight chronological exposition, with six parts (each with a thoughtful concluding summation essay), Tombs makes explicit that four “memory themes” give it additional structure: the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; the Civil War; Empire; and the modern “sense of England and Britain as nations in decline.” He recurs to these events and their interpretation in their own time, as well as by later generations, to compare and contrast the behavior of Englishmen over the course of a thousand years. Tombs’s goal is therefore to tie events together in the reader’s consciousness, not in service of some ideological end or overarching grand theory about the English, but through these memory themes. This framework is quite successful, though of course the nature of any such history is that the author must pick only a few events in any given period, and discuss them, for the most part, in a relatively superficial manner. This book is therefore not a reference work, and has to be read in its entirety to obtain substantial value from it.
Tombs begins with a brief overview of England before it became England, then starts his formal narrative around 600 A.D., with Pope Gregory the Great sending the monk Augustine (not of Hippo) to convert the English, beginning to be recognized as a people, “from their Germanic heathenism.” Of course, these English were polyglot and not only Germanic; as Tombs is at pains to emphasize, the early ethnic development of the English is both obscure and complex, and further roiled through the time of the Norman conquest. (Thereafter, though, the English were most definitely a people of England; it is completely a myth that “England has always been a nation of immigrants,” at least until the recent past.) Christianity began the rebirth of England, after the troubles and decline in the post-Roman world, bringing back literacy and beginning to temper the violence that characterized this warrior society.
The book zooms through the first thousand years of English history quite rapidly. Tombs covers Alfred through Cnut; then Hastings and the Normans. As to the latter, Tombs notes that the Normans, like many conquerors, preserved local institutions that worked for their purposes, especially ones involving local justice and control—but that many of those, in particular involving central control and widespread political participation, differed already from Continental customs, forming the basis of the modern structural gulf between England and the Continent. The Normans were also incredibly dynamic, among other things engaging in a massive and expensive building spree, much of it still visible today. Nonetheless, the Normans were conquerors, with all that implied both for the existing elite and the existing common man. From this era derives the recurrent theme in English history of the “Norman yoke” in opposition to the ancient rights of the English, a template that can be, and has often been, imposed on later events having nothing to do with Normans.
Next come the Angevins/Plantagenets, Henry II and Thomas Becket, Robin Hood, and so on. Ironically, for most casual readers, this far-away period is among the best known in English history—who really knows or cares much about, say 19th Century English politics, on which Tombs spends much more time? Far more fun to talk about Sherwood Forest. But it’s not all the Sherriff of Nottingham—Tombs, among many other interesting points, notes that England was at this early period, and more or less continuously thereafter, a very wealthy country, with a diversified economic base and not generally subject to the same degree of destructive wars as the Continent. And politically, England was a society with a “stable, ordered hierarchy, in which all knew and accepted their position. . . . To serve a superior—above all, the king—was honourable.” Social mobility was very low, yet there was no underclass, and resentment and agitation focused on simple justice, such as the rebel Jack Cade’s slogan, “Every man should have his due”—by which he did not mean redistribution or a reordering of society. “Society was a dense network of communities and associations, which gave it great resilience.” Tombs also emphasizes that “It is a much later myth—largely a product of politicized seventeenth-century history—that English medieval society was chronically lawless, marked by extreme oppression, violence, exploitation and rebellion.” In fact, medieval English life was pretty good, on balance. Homicide rates were low by modern standards—much lower than, say, most of Africa and South America today. Food was plentiful and varied; justice was competent; and the government didn’t bother the average person.
As he moves forward, Tombs expands his focus to England’s neighbors, to the extent they were important to the English and their development. The Hundred Years War comes and goes. (Tombs notes that “Henry V in France was joined by every able-bodied peer—there were not many ‘gentlemen in England now abed’ on St. Crispin’s Day, at least not among the higher orders.”) The Black Death also comes and goes—“Yet if society was shaken, it did not collapse.” But society changed, of course, despite the efforts of the King and the elite to keep things the same. Some changes were low-key, such as (failed) sumptuary laws. Some changes were dramatic, either instantaneously or over time—the Peasant’s Revolt, the end of serfdom and a general increase in social mobility. GDP per capita in 1500 reached levels “equivalent to China and India in the 1990s,” and did not drop precipitously as population increased, showing the first signs of resistance to the Malthusian Trap (and lending credence to the theory that the Industrial Revolution occurred in England in part due to unique cultural factors).
It wasn’t all good, of course. The Wars of the Roses roiled what had been a mostly peaceful internal scene, and featured such dubious lowlights as the Battle of Towton in 1461, supposedly the bloodiest battle ever fought in England, with reputable scholars calculating that around 1% of the entire English population died in the battle itself. This exception aside, though, Tombs notes that English wars were almost always less vicious than Continental wars (and he seems to think Towton is exaggerated as to its bloodiness, though he does not elaborate). Moreover, “there was never prolonged general disorder even during the Wars of the Roses,” and at no point did social and political structures ever disintegrate—so “the people of England in the 1400s—surely shockingly—were richer and safer than in many countries during the 2000s.”
The next major section covers subsequent fresh divisions in England, both the Reformation and most especially the Civil War. The Tudors take the stage, and the Continent and its own struggles take a larger role in English history. The road to civil war was long, winding, and not inevitable. In fact, in the early 17th Century, England was again stable and safe, with an extremely low murder rate and little political intrigue or violence, and nominal religious strife, yet what strife there was descended into war. Tombs rejects any simplistic or unitary explanation for the Civil War, and notes the wrenching effect it had on many communities as well as the constantly shifting coalitions and the relatively restrained violence. Soon enough, the English were back to the Restoration, though “It was the Civil War that created the Whig-Tory divide moulding our deepest political identities, and it also bequeathed a sectarian bitterness that long enlivened and envenomed political culture.”
That’s about the first third of the book, until 1660. From then until the 20th Century, most of the history is of politics and culture, with a strong subtext of foreign wars, especially the Napoleonic, and extensive discussion of the beginnings and development of Empire, its arc being the arc of much of English history over the past 250 years. Many bon mots of the famous appear, my favorite being Horace Walpole’s dismissal of the Society of Dilettanti, established in 1734, as a club for which “the nominal qualification . . . is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk”—although a close second is Johnson’s dismissal of the Earl of Chesterfield’s famous letters of advice to his son as embodying “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.” The politics of this era I find dull, but your mileage may vary. Certainly, if you want to learn about Robert Walpole, the Hanoverian kings, John Wilkes, and the Pitts, you will learn a lot here.
Tombs shows the expansion of England, first to being an “Atlantic nation” and then to becoming a global Empire (even as it lost the United States along the way). He examines the Industrial Revolution, noting the already-high levels of literacy, education and wealth among the English of all classes, and rejecting the idea that foreign demand, or slavery, was particularly relevant to Britain’s explosive economic growth. Yes, English wages didn’t rise all that much initially—because they were already high relative to world standards, and then they proceeded to take off. Tombs veiws Dickens as the mirror of his time (as he earlier examines Shakespeare for related, though not identical, purposes), and focuses on the beginning of various forms of social welfare legislation, about which he says a great deal in the second half of the book, along with other forms of social unrest and reform. On the other hand, Tombs clearly thinks that the picture we have of England as covered entirely with “dark, satanic mills” is too negative, and that the 19th Century was the apogee of England in many ways, with increasing wealth, health, population, power, political participation, and social reform.
Here, and throughout the book, Tombs does an excellent job explicating various religious movements, their interactions, and their critical impact on the society as a whole—at this later stage, especially as they were the drivers of social reform and poor assistance. Maybe related, the hand of government was both extremely light and extremely competent, with “perhaps the smallest central-government machinery every found in an industrial society.” Most government was conducted on the local level, embodying the principle of subsidiarity—although it was far from laissez-faire in certain areas, notably sanitation and factory working conditions, in which central laws were quite aggressively enforced, for the time at least.
Similarly, Victorian England was not bad at all—it was pretty good, in fact, and most of what we think of as stereotypically “Victorian” is a false stereotype. “Victorians were probably less prudish than Americans and in some ways (for example, the freedom given to young women of all classes) more permissive than the French.” (Tombs in numerous places in the book notes that English law, from earliest times, gave vastly more legal rights to women than generally believed, and that informal rights of women, in practice, were greater still.)
Other topics come and go, each covered with verve and interest, if not in extreme depth. These include Ireland and Scotland; the role of sport in Empire; changes in crime and criminality (a frequent, if unheralded, theme in this book, and seemingly used as a proxy for the civilized nature of the English through history); the campaign against slavery; the campaigns for global free trade (more for the benefit of the globe and peace than for Britain, Marxist scholars be damned). In this latter part of the book, as announced up front, Tombs focuses on Empire. Nothing is particularly new, but it is all pulled together well, with fascinating statistics: “The Colonial Office numbered 113 clerks in 1903—half the UK Ministry of Defence’s press office today—to oversee an empire that consisted of over 100 separate political units (not including some 600 Indian princely states).” Like the United States for a few brief years in the 1990s, in the 19th Century was functionally a global hegemon that was in practice invulnerable. In the nature of things, this hegemony eroded over time, for many reasons, presaged by problems in India, the Boer War, and other rumblings.
Which, of course, culminated in the disastrous 20th Century—disastrous for the world, and most especially disastrous for England. Tombs covers World War I, again with fascinating and illuminating tidbits: “The preliminary bombardment for the third battle of Ypres (1917) lasted nineteen days, using 321 train-loads of ammunition totaling 4.3 million shells—a year’s output of 55,000 munitions workers, costing £22m (almost the whole army budget in 1914).” “Men were not constantly in the trenches. . . . Siegfried Sassoon—‘Mad Jack,’ winner of the Military Cross, warrior, poet and protestor—spent less than a month at the Front.” The inter-war period passes; World War II arrives, bringing with it, and in its wake, enormous social upheaval and change (as war always does, and typically not for the better). Here, the only possibly controversial part of Tombs’s analysis is his firm contention that area bombing was extremely effective in bringing the war to a close, something that has long been in dispute.
Tombs notes the end of Empire, with its mixed benefits and costs for both the mother country and its former colonies, and the start-stop accession of Britain to the EU, which he treats as tortured yet inevitable because needed to stem what the ruling class otherwise saw as a certain decline to irrelevance (he wrote prior to Brexit, and does not seem to have contemplated that England could ever leave the EU). Here, as elsewhere, Tombs thankfully eschews agonized navel-gazing about alleged societal guilt, a topic that seems to interest him very little.
Finally, Tombs addresses, with a mostly mildly negative answer, whether the period since World War II has been “An Age of Decline?” He acknowledges that the nearly universal perception is that it has been such an age. He begins by adducing figures showing how United Kingdom GDP per capita has, as with the rest of the West, continued to grow exponentially. This is a bit of a red herring—there is little doubt that the UK is much wealthier today even than a few decades ago. The prophets of decline complain not of poverty of pocket, but poverty of culture and morality, and many probably regard wealth as part of the cause of decline, rather than a sign of strength. To be fair, though, it’s not that Tombs thinks that modern liberal democracy is all that awesome; in fact, the reader senses a certain jaundiced view of the modern English political elite in particular. It’s just that Tombs thinks that decline is overstated, just as frequently the unpleasantness of medieval life is overstated. This is not to say that Tombs refuses to take stands and issues namby-pamby “on the one hand, on the other hand” analysis; quite the contrary. He’s just more willing to see the silver lining than a lot of more ideologically driven authors.
In this last section, Tombs spends some time on an area that I have never really focused on—the difference between the UK “constitution” and the American Constitution. Of course, the UK has no constitution—it has the common law, and for at least the past few hundred years, has operated under a doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy. “When it is said that the United Kingdom has no constitution, it really means that no entrenched fundamental text defines and limits the powers of the various branches of government, above all the legislative power of Parliament.” By Americans, at least, this has often been treated as a distinction without a difference, which effectively means pointing to the generally parallel set of liberties accorded citizens in both countries, and implying that this is the necessary result. But, of course, given the fundamental differences in the underlying structures, this is either a mere coincidence, or only the result of close parallels of culture, such as use of the common law, which have actually diverged over time. (And, of course, the parallels are somewhat exaggerated—for example, freedom of speech in Britain has never had anything close to the American level of protection.)
The supremacy of Parliament in England until very recently was on the path to elimination, since accession to the EU meant that English courts began to treat EU law as supreme, and, less visibly but perhaps even more perniciously, resulted in “causing [judges] to apply broad principles, balancing ‘competing values,’ and making ‘value choices’ in the Roman law tradition, rather than invoking precedent, scrutinizing the precise wording of legislation, or interpreting ‘the will of Parliament’ as sovereign, as in the Common Law approach.” With Brexit, the formal subordination of Parliament to the EU bureaucracy will presumably end; and with luck, the common law will be restored (although the common law is only as good as the society from which it is generated, so perhaps this is a vain hope).
Americans tend to recoil from the idea of Parliamentary supremacy, addicted as we are to the theory of formal division of powers, with what is commonly regarded as the core component of judicial review of legislative acts, supposedly needed to effectuate the guarantees of the Constitution, especially as regards minority rights. But this fails to appreciate that what we actually have today in the United States is not divided powers, but judicial supremacy, where the legislative role for all important social and cultural issues, as well as for many other critical matters ranging from governmental structures such as administrative law, judicial creations such as immunity for government officials, and even military operations, are dictated by the federal courts acting as a super-legislature. The vast majority of these legislative diktats are devoted to advancing left-wing causes and principles. Conservatives both do not control the courts and, to the extent they have do in some areas, are usually (foolishly, in practice) philosophically opposed to this method of government. Legislative supremacy, or even putting the legislature back on an equal footing with the judiciary, would be a huge improvement over what the United States has now, which is in effect a judicial tyranny.
[Review finished as first comment.]
While “The English and Their History” is a straight chronological exposition, with six parts (each with a thoughtful concluding summation essay), Tombs makes explicit that four “memory themes” give it additional structure: the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; the Civil War; Empire; and the modern “sense of England and Britain as nations in decline.” He recurs to these events and their interpretation in their own time, as well as by later generations, to compare and contrast the behavior of Englishmen over the course of a thousand years. Tombs’s goal is therefore to tie events together in the reader’s consciousness, not in service of some ideological end or overarching grand theory about the English, but through these memory themes. This framework is quite successful, though of course the nature of any such history is that the author must pick only a few events in any given period, and discuss them, for the most part, in a relatively superficial manner. This book is therefore not a reference work, and has to be read in its entirety to obtain substantial value from it.
Tombs begins with a brief overview of England before it became England, then starts his formal narrative around 600 A.D., with Pope Gregory the Great sending the monk Augustine (not of Hippo) to convert the English, beginning to be recognized as a people, “from their Germanic heathenism.” Of course, these English were polyglot and not only Germanic; as Tombs is at pains to emphasize, the early ethnic development of the English is both obscure and complex, and further roiled through the time of the Norman conquest. (Thereafter, though, the English were most definitely a people of England; it is completely a myth that “England has always been a nation of immigrants,” at least until the recent past.) Christianity began the rebirth of England, after the troubles and decline in the post-Roman world, bringing back literacy and beginning to temper the violence that characterized this warrior society.
The book zooms through the first thousand years of English history quite rapidly. Tombs covers Alfred through Cnut; then Hastings and the Normans. As to the latter, Tombs notes that the Normans, like many conquerors, preserved local institutions that worked for their purposes, especially ones involving local justice and control—but that many of those, in particular involving central control and widespread political participation, differed already from Continental customs, forming the basis of the modern structural gulf between England and the Continent. The Normans were also incredibly dynamic, among other things engaging in a massive and expensive building spree, much of it still visible today. Nonetheless, the Normans were conquerors, with all that implied both for the existing elite and the existing common man. From this era derives the recurrent theme in English history of the “Norman yoke” in opposition to the ancient rights of the English, a template that can be, and has often been, imposed on later events having nothing to do with Normans.
Next come the Angevins/Plantagenets, Henry II and Thomas Becket, Robin Hood, and so on. Ironically, for most casual readers, this far-away period is among the best known in English history—who really knows or cares much about, say 19th Century English politics, on which Tombs spends much more time? Far more fun to talk about Sherwood Forest. But it’s not all the Sherriff of Nottingham—Tombs, among many other interesting points, notes that England was at this early period, and more or less continuously thereafter, a very wealthy country, with a diversified economic base and not generally subject to the same degree of destructive wars as the Continent. And politically, England was a society with a “stable, ordered hierarchy, in which all knew and accepted their position. . . . To serve a superior—above all, the king—was honourable.” Social mobility was very low, yet there was no underclass, and resentment and agitation focused on simple justice, such as the rebel Jack Cade’s slogan, “Every man should have his due”—by which he did not mean redistribution or a reordering of society. “Society was a dense network of communities and associations, which gave it great resilience.” Tombs also emphasizes that “It is a much later myth—largely a product of politicized seventeenth-century history—that English medieval society was chronically lawless, marked by extreme oppression, violence, exploitation and rebellion.” In fact, medieval English life was pretty good, on balance. Homicide rates were low by modern standards—much lower than, say, most of Africa and South America today. Food was plentiful and varied; justice was competent; and the government didn’t bother the average person.
As he moves forward, Tombs expands his focus to England’s neighbors, to the extent they were important to the English and their development. The Hundred Years War comes and goes. (Tombs notes that “Henry V in France was joined by every able-bodied peer—there were not many ‘gentlemen in England now abed’ on St. Crispin’s Day, at least not among the higher orders.”) The Black Death also comes and goes—“Yet if society was shaken, it did not collapse.” But society changed, of course, despite the efforts of the King and the elite to keep things the same. Some changes were low-key, such as (failed) sumptuary laws. Some changes were dramatic, either instantaneously or over time—the Peasant’s Revolt, the end of serfdom and a general increase in social mobility. GDP per capita in 1500 reached levels “equivalent to China and India in the 1990s,” and did not drop precipitously as population increased, showing the first signs of resistance to the Malthusian Trap (and lending credence to the theory that the Industrial Revolution occurred in England in part due to unique cultural factors).
It wasn’t all good, of course. The Wars of the Roses roiled what had been a mostly peaceful internal scene, and featured such dubious lowlights as the Battle of Towton in 1461, supposedly the bloodiest battle ever fought in England, with reputable scholars calculating that around 1% of the entire English population died in the battle itself. This exception aside, though, Tombs notes that English wars were almost always less vicious than Continental wars (and he seems to think Towton is exaggerated as to its bloodiness, though he does not elaborate). Moreover, “there was never prolonged general disorder even during the Wars of the Roses,” and at no point did social and political structures ever disintegrate—so “the people of England in the 1400s—surely shockingly—were richer and safer than in many countries during the 2000s.”
The next major section covers subsequent fresh divisions in England, both the Reformation and most especially the Civil War. The Tudors take the stage, and the Continent and its own struggles take a larger role in English history. The road to civil war was long, winding, and not inevitable. In fact, in the early 17th Century, England was again stable and safe, with an extremely low murder rate and little political intrigue or violence, and nominal religious strife, yet what strife there was descended into war. Tombs rejects any simplistic or unitary explanation for the Civil War, and notes the wrenching effect it had on many communities as well as the constantly shifting coalitions and the relatively restrained violence. Soon enough, the English were back to the Restoration, though “It was the Civil War that created the Whig-Tory divide moulding our deepest political identities, and it also bequeathed a sectarian bitterness that long enlivened and envenomed political culture.”
That’s about the first third of the book, until 1660. From then until the 20th Century, most of the history is of politics and culture, with a strong subtext of foreign wars, especially the Napoleonic, and extensive discussion of the beginnings and development of Empire, its arc being the arc of much of English history over the past 250 years. Many bon mots of the famous appear, my favorite being Horace Walpole’s dismissal of the Society of Dilettanti, established in 1734, as a club for which “the nominal qualification . . . is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk”—although a close second is Johnson’s dismissal of the Earl of Chesterfield’s famous letters of advice to his son as embodying “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.” The politics of this era I find dull, but your mileage may vary. Certainly, if you want to learn about Robert Walpole, the Hanoverian kings, John Wilkes, and the Pitts, you will learn a lot here.
Tombs shows the expansion of England, first to being an “Atlantic nation” and then to becoming a global Empire (even as it lost the United States along the way). He examines the Industrial Revolution, noting the already-high levels of literacy, education and wealth among the English of all classes, and rejecting the idea that foreign demand, or slavery, was particularly relevant to Britain’s explosive economic growth. Yes, English wages didn’t rise all that much initially—because they were already high relative to world standards, and then they proceeded to take off. Tombs veiws Dickens as the mirror of his time (as he earlier examines Shakespeare for related, though not identical, purposes), and focuses on the beginning of various forms of social welfare legislation, about which he says a great deal in the second half of the book, along with other forms of social unrest and reform. On the other hand, Tombs clearly thinks that the picture we have of England as covered entirely with “dark, satanic mills” is too negative, and that the 19th Century was the apogee of England in many ways, with increasing wealth, health, population, power, political participation, and social reform.
Here, and throughout the book, Tombs does an excellent job explicating various religious movements, their interactions, and their critical impact on the society as a whole—at this later stage, especially as they were the drivers of social reform and poor assistance. Maybe related, the hand of government was both extremely light and extremely competent, with “perhaps the smallest central-government machinery every found in an industrial society.” Most government was conducted on the local level, embodying the principle of subsidiarity—although it was far from laissez-faire in certain areas, notably sanitation and factory working conditions, in which central laws were quite aggressively enforced, for the time at least.
Similarly, Victorian England was not bad at all—it was pretty good, in fact, and most of what we think of as stereotypically “Victorian” is a false stereotype. “Victorians were probably less prudish than Americans and in some ways (for example, the freedom given to young women of all classes) more permissive than the French.” (Tombs in numerous places in the book notes that English law, from earliest times, gave vastly more legal rights to women than generally believed, and that informal rights of women, in practice, were greater still.)
Other topics come and go, each covered with verve and interest, if not in extreme depth. These include Ireland and Scotland; the role of sport in Empire; changes in crime and criminality (a frequent, if unheralded, theme in this book, and seemingly used as a proxy for the civilized nature of the English through history); the campaign against slavery; the campaigns for global free trade (more for the benefit of the globe and peace than for Britain, Marxist scholars be damned). In this latter part of the book, as announced up front, Tombs focuses on Empire. Nothing is particularly new, but it is all pulled together well, with fascinating statistics: “The Colonial Office numbered 113 clerks in 1903—half the UK Ministry of Defence’s press office today—to oversee an empire that consisted of over 100 separate political units (not including some 600 Indian princely states).” Like the United States for a few brief years in the 1990s, in the 19th Century was functionally a global hegemon that was in practice invulnerable. In the nature of things, this hegemony eroded over time, for many reasons, presaged by problems in India, the Boer War, and other rumblings.
Which, of course, culminated in the disastrous 20th Century—disastrous for the world, and most especially disastrous for England. Tombs covers World War I, again with fascinating and illuminating tidbits: “The preliminary bombardment for the third battle of Ypres (1917) lasted nineteen days, using 321 train-loads of ammunition totaling 4.3 million shells—a year’s output of 55,000 munitions workers, costing £22m (almost the whole army budget in 1914).” “Men were not constantly in the trenches. . . . Siegfried Sassoon—‘Mad Jack,’ winner of the Military Cross, warrior, poet and protestor—spent less than a month at the Front.” The inter-war period passes; World War II arrives, bringing with it, and in its wake, enormous social upheaval and change (as war always does, and typically not for the better). Here, the only possibly controversial part of Tombs’s analysis is his firm contention that area bombing was extremely effective in bringing the war to a close, something that has long been in dispute.
Tombs notes the end of Empire, with its mixed benefits and costs for both the mother country and its former colonies, and the start-stop accession of Britain to the EU, which he treats as tortured yet inevitable because needed to stem what the ruling class otherwise saw as a certain decline to irrelevance (he wrote prior to Brexit, and does not seem to have contemplated that England could ever leave the EU). Here, as elsewhere, Tombs thankfully eschews agonized navel-gazing about alleged societal guilt, a topic that seems to interest him very little.
Finally, Tombs addresses, with a mostly mildly negative answer, whether the period since World War II has been “An Age of Decline?” He acknowledges that the nearly universal perception is that it has been such an age. He begins by adducing figures showing how United Kingdom GDP per capita has, as with the rest of the West, continued to grow exponentially. This is a bit of a red herring—there is little doubt that the UK is much wealthier today even than a few decades ago. The prophets of decline complain not of poverty of pocket, but poverty of culture and morality, and many probably regard wealth as part of the cause of decline, rather than a sign of strength. To be fair, though, it’s not that Tombs thinks that modern liberal democracy is all that awesome; in fact, the reader senses a certain jaundiced view of the modern English political elite in particular. It’s just that Tombs thinks that decline is overstated, just as frequently the unpleasantness of medieval life is overstated. This is not to say that Tombs refuses to take stands and issues namby-pamby “on the one hand, on the other hand” analysis; quite the contrary. He’s just more willing to see the silver lining than a lot of more ideologically driven authors.
In this last section, Tombs spends some time on an area that I have never really focused on—the difference between the UK “constitution” and the American Constitution. Of course, the UK has no constitution—it has the common law, and for at least the past few hundred years, has operated under a doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy. “When it is said that the United Kingdom has no constitution, it really means that no entrenched fundamental text defines and limits the powers of the various branches of government, above all the legislative power of Parliament.” By Americans, at least, this has often been treated as a distinction without a difference, which effectively means pointing to the generally parallel set of liberties accorded citizens in both countries, and implying that this is the necessary result. But, of course, given the fundamental differences in the underlying structures, this is either a mere coincidence, or only the result of close parallels of culture, such as use of the common law, which have actually diverged over time. (And, of course, the parallels are somewhat exaggerated—for example, freedom of speech in Britain has never had anything close to the American level of protection.)
The supremacy of Parliament in England until very recently was on the path to elimination, since accession to the EU meant that English courts began to treat EU law as supreme, and, less visibly but perhaps even more perniciously, resulted in “causing [judges] to apply broad principles, balancing ‘competing values,’ and making ‘value choices’ in the Roman law tradition, rather than invoking precedent, scrutinizing the precise wording of legislation, or interpreting ‘the will of Parliament’ as sovereign, as in the Common Law approach.” With Brexit, the formal subordination of Parliament to the EU bureaucracy will presumably end; and with luck, the common law will be restored (although the common law is only as good as the society from which it is generated, so perhaps this is a vain hope).
Americans tend to recoil from the idea of Parliamentary supremacy, addicted as we are to the theory of formal division of powers, with what is commonly regarded as the core component of judicial review of legislative acts, supposedly needed to effectuate the guarantees of the Constitution, especially as regards minority rights. But this fails to appreciate that what we actually have today in the United States is not divided powers, but judicial supremacy, where the legislative role for all important social and cultural issues, as well as for many other critical matters ranging from governmental structures such as administrative law, judicial creations such as immunity for government officials, and even military operations, are dictated by the federal courts acting as a super-legislature. The vast majority of these legislative diktats are devoted to advancing left-wing causes and principles. Conservatives both do not control the courts and, to the extent they have do in some areas, are usually (foolishly, in practice) philosophically opposed to this method of government. Legislative supremacy, or even putting the legislature back on an equal footing with the judiciary, would be a huge improvement over what the United States has now, which is in effect a judicial tyranny.
[Review finished as first comment.]
March 23, 2018
I really enjoyed this book. It's hugely long and hugely detailed, a brilliant overview of English history. I especially loved the sections about cultural history and the formation of English identity, traditions and language. I highly recommend.
February 13, 2015
I can recommend this as about the best recent general history of England in one quite heavy volume. His judgements are well founded if on occasions perhaps outwith what has been a consensus.
Shelved as 'dnf'
August 24, 2022It’s with a heavy heart I condemn this book to the dnf shelf. It was gifted to me by my wife who’s not a massive reader (although massively read if that makes sense). She usually racks up the hits, expanding my view with books I never would have gotten to on my own. Also, I’m a totally unashamed Anglophile (even living here now) and I’m a sucker for history.
What can ever be wrong then, you ask. Well, the density of it. Really. It’s absolutely impenetrable for normal humans. It’s a bit like reading the bible in the same way you find yourself on the same page for a quarter of an hour and then you realise it’s literally thousands of them…
So, some book critics got this (as any other book) a week or so before publication. Their judgement can be read in the blurbs. I call bullshit. No human can even skip read as fast as they claim to have done.
All of this is unfair to the author and the book. The pages I managed over this massive amount of time taught me a lot and was interesting. I just can’t stand it on my shelf anymore.
I’m taking this to the charity tomorrow - please don’t tell my wife.
What can ever be wrong then, you ask. Well, the density of it. Really. It’s absolutely impenetrable for normal humans. It’s a bit like reading the bible in the same way you find yourself on the same page for a quarter of an hour and then you realise it’s literally thousands of them…
So, some book critics got this (as any other book) a week or so before publication. Their judgement can be read in the blurbs. I call bullshit. No human can even skip read as fast as they claim to have done.
All of this is unfair to the author and the book. The pages I managed over this massive amount of time taught me a lot and was interesting. I just can’t stand it on my shelf anymore.
I’m taking this to the charity tomorrow - please don’t tell my wife.
February 14, 2020
Revisionist and congratulatory, this is more a political, economic, and cultural appraisal of England than an actual history. The author ignored or brushed over anything that didn't fit his narrative, didn't bother to fully research the things he wasn't interested in, and passed off casual opinions as facts.
For someone who isn't well-versed in historical knowledge of the UK, this is actually a very frustrating book, as Tombs rarely bothers to go into any detail whatsoever about important events, and often makes references to historical markers without actually explaining them. As an American with a fairly decent background in European history, I found this book immensely frustrating for what it lacked, not to mention extremely aggravating for what it contained. The author clearly was lacking in education about American history, which I have no problem with, except he kept referring to American historical events as benchmarks of comparison for England. If you're going to do that, more research is in order. My knowledge of continental European history is not great enough to critique his comparisons of England with Germany and Scandinavia, but I imagine they were equally lacking. (The author's background is in French history, so I suppose that history was the best researched and written.)
I am baffled by the almost universal appreciation for this book, because it is frequently hysterically opinionated, vaguely imperialist, and almost psychotically upbeat. The author lacks nuance and frequently comes off as pompous and self-righteous.
And yet I read the whole thing, as it did have some narrative value.
For someone who isn't well-versed in historical knowledge of the UK, this is actually a very frustrating book, as Tombs rarely bothers to go into any detail whatsoever about important events, and often makes references to historical markers without actually explaining them. As an American with a fairly decent background in European history, I found this book immensely frustrating for what it lacked, not to mention extremely aggravating for what it contained. The author clearly was lacking in education about American history, which I have no problem with, except he kept referring to American historical events as benchmarks of comparison for England. If you're going to do that, more research is in order. My knowledge of continental European history is not great enough to critique his comparisons of England with Germany and Scandinavia, but I imagine they were equally lacking. (The author's background is in French history, so I suppose that history was the best researched and written.)
I am baffled by the almost universal appreciation for this book, because it is frequently hysterically opinionated, vaguely imperialist, and almost psychotically upbeat. The author lacks nuance and frequently comes off as pompous and self-righteous.
And yet I read the whole thing, as it did have some narrative value.
Read
April 30, 2015I've got no idea how to rate something like this. First of all, obviously, it isn't for me. That doesn't mean it isn't worth reading, or that I couldn't understand it, but the title says it all; "The English and Their History." To receive the full impact of a book like this, I think I'd have to have been raised in England, to have an insider's knowledge not just of history and how it is taught, but also how that history has effected everything around me, from culture to religion to the economy, and to reframe all of that from an English, as opposed to a larger British, perspective. To identify what is unique, distinct and particular about the English and England, rather than the United Kingdom. Tombs is also setting out to rectify and revise "Whig History", what he calls the propaganda of one political party that gradually became the nation's semi-official history.
It was incredibly infuriating at times. Take the lengthy investigation of the Industrial Revolution, and whether the "optimistic" or "pessimistic" view should be taken on. Tombs argues strongly for the former, and his grudging concessions that the Industrial Revolution may have been a tad unpleasant for the lower classes often come across unintentionally I think) as callous. Statistics such as the decline in life expectancy are bizarrely handwaved away while others are used as examples of greater prosperity, such as the rising birthrate amongst the working class - even though in the previous chapter a [i]declining[/i] birthrate in 18th century England was cited as evidence of growing prosperity and liberty. At other times, Tombs' narrative gives a much needed counterbalance to 'official' versions of events, such as the American Revolution - pointing out that the American colonies had the lowest tax rate in the Empire and that the "liberties" many of the founding fathers were fighting so stubbornly for included the "freedom" to own slaves, or the "right" of further conquest over the Native American tribes to the West, who had been guaranteed certain safeties by the British government (while admittedly also glossing over the more obvious point that both the Native Americans and the African slaves would have been far better off being left alone by both sides) - or the Second World War, dispelling the condescending myth that the UK was nothing more than a "junior partner" in the conflict.
There were many other instances like these, sometimes small examples, sometimes much larger overarching narratives that I either disagreed with strongly, or found incredibly interesting and thoughtful. It's a pretty immense work, impressive for the sheer scope if nothing else, and certainly a welcome and much needed challenge to Whig History. But it also made me genuinely mad at times so I don't know that I can recommend it wholeheartedly.
Maybe I should have just spared everyone the tldr and just given the damn thing 3 stars.
It was incredibly infuriating at times. Take the lengthy investigation of the Industrial Revolution, and whether the "optimistic" or "pessimistic" view should be taken on. Tombs argues strongly for the former, and his grudging concessions that the Industrial Revolution may have been a tad unpleasant for the lower classes often come across unintentionally I think) as callous. Statistics such as the decline in life expectancy are bizarrely handwaved away while others are used as examples of greater prosperity, such as the rising birthrate amongst the working class - even though in the previous chapter a [i]declining[/i] birthrate in 18th century England was cited as evidence of growing prosperity and liberty. At other times, Tombs' narrative gives a much needed counterbalance to 'official' versions of events, such as the American Revolution - pointing out that the American colonies had the lowest tax rate in the Empire and that the "liberties" many of the founding fathers were fighting so stubbornly for included the "freedom" to own slaves, or the "right" of further conquest over the Native American tribes to the West, who had been guaranteed certain safeties by the British government (while admittedly also glossing over the more obvious point that both the Native Americans and the African slaves would have been far better off being left alone by both sides) - or the Second World War, dispelling the condescending myth that the UK was nothing more than a "junior partner" in the conflict.
There were many other instances like these, sometimes small examples, sometimes much larger overarching narratives that I either disagreed with strongly, or found incredibly interesting and thoughtful. It's a pretty immense work, impressive for the sheer scope if nothing else, and certainly a welcome and much needed challenge to Whig History. But it also made me genuinely mad at times so I don't know that I can recommend it wholeheartedly.
Maybe I should have just spared everyone the tldr and just given the damn thing 3 stars.
November 29, 2015
long but worth the time investment and an example how history books should be written; highly recommended
March 13, 2015
At around 900 pages this book is a weighty tome, but despite its length it is well written and accessible to general reader. Worth saying at this point that I have a degree in History & Economics, but I learned a lot from the broad sweep and ambition of this book that joins the dots of much of English history. However, the disadvantages of this approach become increasingly evident as the book progresses. When it got to periods of history that I knew well and have studied it became clear that the narrative can become a little simplistic at times and I found him weak on some of the economics and issues like the impact of imperialism on Britain and the Empire. I was also wholly unconvinced by his chapter on Thatcherism where his clear pro-Tory bias means he neglected to examine the huge problems it created in terms of growth of an underclass, benefit dependency and our dwindling manufacturing base, all of which have yet to be really addressed. I felt this and the chapters on the two world wars and the Empire lacked balance, with the positives over done and negatives hardly mentioned. It is this that makes in four stars rather than five.
Having said all this there is much to like about this book and he does succeed brilliantly in portraying the broad sweep of English history and blending narrative with a more thematic approach.
Having said all this there is much to like about this book and he does succeed brilliantly in portraying the broad sweep of English history and blending narrative with a more thematic approach.
July 12, 2021
Being very generous here as a lot of effort must have gone into the writing of this highly traditional, almost imperial view of the English history. Could have been perfect to keep the colonials in their place if taught in their schools back in Victoria's time. Some outrageous claims: England's prosperity was due to the expansion of its domestic market not expansion into the colonies. England was the sole force of goodness during the long struggle for the abolition of slavery. Nationalised industries were bad and hotbeds of strikes and industrial unrest which is true to seome extent but completely forgets to mention the privatised industries which are no better ripping us off left, right and centre while making us mindless consumers as well for good measure. The book stinks of self-righteous pride. Colonialism's atrocities are lightly mentioned if ever, repeated humiliations in Afghanistan are not detailed, the author even claims that India's textile industry was not destroyed by the colonial rulers. It just died and Manchester became the hub of global textile industry. There are countless instances of glossing over unsavory historical events and facts. Still a hearty yarn and not boring at all.
March 21, 2020
I don't get all these gushing reviews. The book is just a bland summary, nothing new, and not even particularly well-written. The parts I read had no interesting perspectives, no hard-won fresh takes. The book doesn't even explain the events it recites, it just kind of lists them without any context. I was just as ignorant about Aethelstan after reading the section on him than I was before. Finally, as other reviewers have mentioned, 3/4ths of this oversized book is focused on the 19th and 20th centuries. Why not just buy a better book that covers only those centuries!
Plus, there's not a single detailed map of England in the book! This in a book that mentions place names constantly. Unless you both live in England and are intimately familiar with its geography and geology, including the names of every town and region, you'll have no idea what he means.
I want my $20 back.
Plus, there's not a single detailed map of England in the book! This in a book that mentions place names constantly. Unless you both live in England and are intimately familiar with its geography and geology, including the names of every town and region, you'll have no idea what he means.
I want my $20 back.
January 23, 2018
Robert Tombs’s 2014 tome The English and their History weighs in at a hefty 1,000 pages, about 300 of which are notes and appendices. The book is subtly titled to convey it’s two goals: first, to describe what it is to be “English,” that is, what myths, social memories, and events define “Englishness.” Second, to detail the historical events that define England’s development as a nation. Thus, it is about both “The English” and about the English nation. His attention is directed to England proper. Ireland, Wales and Scotland, which together with England form Great Britain, appear only on the periphery when they are part of the major thread.
Tombs’s specialty is the history of medieval France. So why hasn’t he chosen the topic of France and its history? We have no answer, though Tombs notes that this book might not have happened if he had appreciated the complexity of the questions he wanted to address. But his venture into Englishness brings to the topic a keen mind trained in historiography, a fresh view, and extensive research in both primary and secondary materials. Reading this book is an education in itself, and I’ll leave it to historians to quibble about the details.
Most of us have read a fair amount about English history, though probably—as in my case—it has come in the form of historical fiction, works like Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful Saxon Chronicles that deals with the time of Alfred the Great of Wessex, or Phillippa Gregory’s Cousins Wars detailing the 15th century War of the Roses. For those steeped in that popular genre, this is a chance to buttress and deepen their understanding of England.
What Tombs gives us is a remarkably readable history that begins at the beginning—the very early period prior to Caesar’s invasion of the island in the first century A.D., a time when the island of Britain was populated by Picts and Celts in the north and Saxons in the south, all living a rude life of agriculture and trade in independent villages. The book carries its reader up to 2014. This review will not go so far—it will focus on the particularly formative period 1066-1800.
For those who appreciate a terse review, here it is:
Before the Norman Conquest, England’s history was one of independent Anglo-Saxon villages supported by Catholic churches and monasteries that were frequently raided by “Norsemen,” that is, Norwegians, Danes and Swedes. These raids left the island with less church treasure and with a Scandinavian heritage strangely mixed with Catholicism. The large areas of Northumbria and Mercia were most subject to Norse influence, while Wessex, under Alfred the Great (849-899AD), remained most purely Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, Alfred’s attention to creating an “Englalond” with a unique system of laws, and his development of a royal bureaucracy to administer Wessex, wove the beginning of the English national fabric.
1066AD-1700AD
The first of Tombs’s great benchmark years was 1066AD, the event was, of course, the Norman Conquest. England’s King Harold faced two simultaneous invasions: the Norwegian Harald Sigurdsson in the North and William of Normandy in the south. Harold defeated Harald in the north and immediately marched south to meet William at Hastings. The Normans trounced Harold’s depleted and exhausted army; suddenly the island was in the hands of a different set of Norsemen—not the chronically invading Norwegians, Swedes and Danes but Norse invaders who had settled earlier in England and later transplanted themselves to Normandy in what is now western France.
With William’s victory much was changed. French became the language of culture while English remained the language of the people. Norman laws were superimposed on the old Roman laws that arrived with Julius Caesar in the first century. William and his Norman successors created a myth legitimizing their rule by tracing their lineage back to Arthur, King of Britain in a time when England was a land of ancient freedoms, knightly honor, and peace. The English began to view themselves as having freedoms and personal rights that were never specified until Magna Carta in 1215.
At the time of the Norman invasion the English feudal system, with its strict obligations of loyalty and service between vassals, lords and kings, was the structural foundation of rural society; cities were generally free zones to which serfs (feudal slaves) could escape. This distinction weakened as England became a “community of the realm,” in which each citizen had a public service obligation—serving on courts, maintaining fields and roads, and other forms of community service. The prior system of services due in-kind to the lord—fieldwork, housework, maintenance, serving in a local militia, and strict obedience—were gradually transformed into money payments as trade expanded. Magna Carta, signed in 1215, strengthened individual rights against the rule of lords, and baronial rights against the rule of kings, but it was often honored in the breach. (Here Tombs disagrees with modern interpretations of Magna Carta as a toothless document signed by King John to get the barons off his case.)
The Conquest created a turbulent political history that shaped English history for centuries of war. William the Conqueror was Duke of Normandy and, therefore, a vassal to the French king. But he was also the King of England with obligations to his barons and English subjects. The result was tension in the relations between France and England: the French king demanded obeisance from the English king but refused the English king’s right to Normandy; the English king rejected the claims of France to Normandy and refused to be the French king’s vassal. This conflict in feudal obligations led to wars between France and England, and it was a seed for the later series of invasions of one by the other. It also created a mortal fear of one for the other. Perhaps even more disruptive was its effect on royal succession—the intermarriages between French and English royalty both before and after William’s kingship created future conflicts between the two nations over who were the legitimate successors to the French and English thrones.
Perhaps the best known example of this political instability was the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between France and England, which started over a question of succession: when the French king died his daughter—the mother of England’s King Edward II—was the legitimate heir to the French throne. By tradition, this made England’s Edward II her legitimate successor. To prevent this, the French argued that Salic Law prevented passage of the French crown through a maternal line. Thus, Phillip IV was crowned King of France, setting off a long series of contested successions that included Henry V’s later invasion of France to reclaim his rightful place as its king through Edward II, an invasion that slaughtered the best and brightest of France at the Battle of Agincourt.
After the Conquest, and in spite of frequent wars with continental powers, England became a rich land and a stable society. This was, in part, the salutary effect of uncertainty about succession on the power of the king: uncertainty meant that the king had to pay attention to the needs of his subjects, that is, he had to have popular support. In contrast, popular support was not required in France, where succession was on firmer grounds, giving its kings more unilateral authority.
English wealth was based not only on a productive agricultural system but also on the production of fine wool and on vigorous trade with the continent. But disaster arrived from several directions in the 14th century. Overlaid on top of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, were disastrous crop failures from a Little Ice Age during which gin became a popular remedy. This affected the Continent as well as England, spreading scarcity across so wide a swath that trade in foodstuffs couldn’t mitigate the effects. In the midst of famine, an Asian flea carrying the bacterium yersinia pestis arrived: the result was bubonic plague, called the Black Death that killed half of England’s population, an effect matched on the Continent. However, Tombs argues, yersinia pestis also brought improvement in the conditions of the working class: as the number of surviving workers plummeted, wages increased and relative affluence spread downward in the social structure.
The 15th and 16th centuries were, as we know, a time of political turbulence. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) between the Houses of York (White Rose) and Lancaster (Red Rose) caught the country up in a thirty-year civil war. All parties to the royal contest were Plantagenet descendants of John of Gaunt (1340-99), Duke of Lancaster and the third son of King Edward III. In 1398 King Richard II declared John’s eldest son, Henry Bolingbroke (House of Lancaster and Richard’s cousin)) a traitor and confiscated all of his property. Richard exiled Bolinbroke to France and Bolingbroke returned with an army that defeated Richard. Bolinbroke became King Henry IV and the Lancastrians held the throne until Henry VI’s death in 1455.
Henry VI’s death sparked the thirty-year Wars of the Roses which ended with the 1487 victory of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor over the Yorkist Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII and adopted an emblem called the Tudor Rose, a mix of the white and red roses. Henry then married Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian lines.
Henry VII was a dour, rapacious, and unpopular king who subjected England to a reign of terror in order to control his opposition, tax the peasantry, and loot the affluent. On his death in 1553 his son became Henry VIII, and on his death in 1547 his son, Edward, became Edward VI. On Edward’s death in 1553, Henry VIII’s wife Lady Jane Grey was crowned but Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon, Mary, quickly deposed Jane Gray and became Mary I. Mary’s reign was harsh: she attempted to undo her father’s establishment of the Church of England and to restore England to Catholicism. The result was bitter religious struggle and the widespread smell of Protestants burning. At Mary’s death in 1558 the throne passed to her half-sister Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
As we know, Elizabeth I’s reign was long and relatively peaceful—she resisted (not always successfully) being pulled into disputes on the Continent, and she saw herself as the people’s defender. At her death in 1603 the son of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, was on the Scottish throne as James VI. He was quickly crowned James I of England and called James VI/I. This united the kingships of England and Scotland although the two countries remained very different and often mutually hostile. At his death James VI/I' his son, Charles I, succeeded him. Like his father, Charles believed in an absolute monarch designated by God. His discomfort with argument and his autocratic style created a long period of disputes about the relative powers of King and Parliament, the latter holding the power of the purse. The proximate cause was Charles’s requirement of funds to support both his royal expenses and wars abroad, including involvement in the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648). When Parliament resisted Charles’s demands he simply disbanded Parliament and levied taxes on his own authority.
The results was a major governance crisis which, when added to Charles’s marriage to a Catholic and consequent popular fears of Popery, led to a rebellion. (Tombs notes that “popery” was a code word for French influence as well as a reference to the Catholic church.) The intensity of the disputes between the King and Parliament increased as the king rejected parliamentary meddling while the puritanical and freedom-loving parliament rejected the king’s arrogance and indifference. In 1642, Civil War broke out between Parliament (the Roundheads) and the Royalists (the Cavaliers). The English Civil War (1642-1649) was in three parts: 1642-46, during which Royalists contended with the Long Parliament. Parliament was victorious but it left Charles I in place and subject to it's power; 1648-1649, when the Long Parliament and Royalists fought again after Charles had fomented a Welsh rebellion and a Scottish invasion—Charles was beheaded in 1648 and there was no successor; and 1649-51 when Royalists fought the Rump Parliament. Cromwell’s New Model Army—England’s first standing army—soundly defeated the Royalists in 1651.
The end of the Civil War began an interregnum period with the governance of England, Ireland and Scotland resting solely in the English Parliament. But intense disputes within Parliament grew to the point that need for a central authority was acknowledged. Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord Protector (a position of military dictatorship) until his death in 1658. A brief attempt to place Cromwell’s son in that position failed and inherited faux monarchy was back in favor. In 1660 Parliament bit the bullet and invited Charles I’s eponymous son to be crowned King of England, Ireland and Scotland. Charles agreed and was crowned Charles II. Charles II had a more benign personality than his father—he was open to argument, relatively liberal in his view of his kingship, and a hedonist who developed a better relationship with Parliament. Though his wife was Catholic and there were new charges of popery, Charles II’s amenability to Parliamentary powers and his demeanor and concern for the people made him a popular king.
When Charles II died in 1685 his brother became James VII/II of Scotland, Ireland and England. James VII/II, like his grandfather, insisted on the absolute right of monarchy in all matters and he never convened Parliament. This was a giant step back from the parliamentary monarchy of Charles II, in which Parliament retained strong powers including the selection of kings. James was also was widely suspected of popery, reducing his popularity even further.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 put an end to the governance disputes. James VI/II’s son–in-law, the Dutch William of Orange, invaded England, defeated the forces of England and Scotland, and was crowned. William was a very different king: he and his wife (James’s daughter) were staunch Protestants, William was committed to Parliamentary limits on the powers of a king, and he saw kingship as public service. The Restoration was the last great event of the 17th century.
Out of this chaos grew the first permanent political parties in England. The members of Parliament were split between the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories were conservatives who believed in the monarchy, obedience to the monarch, and centralization of economic, social and political authority. The Whigs were liberals who wanted a more decentralized system with civil and economic freedom, unfettered private enterprise, absence of corruption and self-dealing, and public service as the proper goal of politics.
Tombs considers the 16th century as particularly pivotal: with the permanent shift in power from the monarchy to the people (or, at least, to the gentry in Parliament) the country was transformed: Civil liberties increased, peace reigned, and the foundation for new and more inquisitive ways of thinking were laid. The result was the English Enlightenment of the 18th century.
1700-1815
The economic and political freedom gained in the 17th century combined with new scientific and literary discoveries to form a springboard for a remarkable explosion of debate and discovery. This was the hallmark of the 18th century’s Enlightenment.
Scientific achievements from members of the newly formed (1660) Royal Academy—like Isaac Newton and Robert Hook—set the foundation for an English renaissance. The science of “natural philosophy,” what we now call the physical sciences, was created as a combination of Newton’s mathematical and theoretical insights and Hook’s emphasis on experimentation in biology. This was the heyday of the amateur scientist.
Developments in the English language arose from 17th century works like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. These established the English language on a firm foundation and altered the way the English communicated ideas. A new literary form rose from the ashes of the previous restrictions on publishing—the novel, that brought books out of the poetry and religious genres and into the hearts and lives of the people. The decline in printing costs combined with more widespread abilities to read (and write) extended literature to a broader population. Now people could move beyond local conversations to the written word, expanding access to new ideas.
Art and Architecture flourished. The Rococo movement shifted visual arts from stiff and linear classic design to a more fluid and asymmetrical vision that reflected the general relaxation in intellectual thought. Christopher Wren guided the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in in 1666. This allowed a redo of a city that had grown without plan and was choking on itself. It introduced and encouraged advances in materials and construction methods, and it ushered in a new city plan that organized carriage and pedestrian traffic more efficiently. Landscape architecture flourished with figures like Capability Brown converting England to a nation of gardeners. Intellectual Societies were founded to share ideas—literary societies, exploration societies, scientific societies, philosophical societies, and so on. This was an early form of adult education for the English aristocracy.
There were also significant political advances. In 1707 the Acts of Union were passed—England and Scotland had long shared a common king, but the Acts made Scotland a part of England, creating the United Kingdom of England. Scotland retained its own religion (Presbyterianism) and its own parliament (though its acts required approval by the English Parliament). This did not end frictions between the two kingdoms—in 1745 the backers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, supported (as always) by France, started the Jacobite Rebellion to restore the Stuarts to the English throne. There was a feeble invasion of England that quickly died out when the population failed to rise in support.
These quantum changes occurred over the normal backdrop of wars. England’s eternal contest with France carried on in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) that involved territory from India to North America: the first World War. The spark was the notorious Salic Law: using Salic Law, France and Prussia objected to enthroning the daughter of the Holy Roman Empire’s Charles VI. While England wasn’t the major combatant, it was deeply involved in countering this international French threat. Add to that the American Revolution (1776-83), the Seven Years War (1756-1763, a repeat of the War of the Austrian Succession), the culmination of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), and you have a lot of English blood in play. In each case the prefatory comment might well have been
Five stars, slam dunk!
Tombs’s specialty is the history of medieval France. So why hasn’t he chosen the topic of France and its history? We have no answer, though Tombs notes that this book might not have happened if he had appreciated the complexity of the questions he wanted to address. But his venture into Englishness brings to the topic a keen mind trained in historiography, a fresh view, and extensive research in both primary and secondary materials. Reading this book is an education in itself, and I’ll leave it to historians to quibble about the details.
Most of us have read a fair amount about English history, though probably—as in my case—it has come in the form of historical fiction, works like Bernard Cornwell’s wonderful Saxon Chronicles that deals with the time of Alfred the Great of Wessex, or Phillippa Gregory’s Cousins Wars detailing the 15th century War of the Roses. For those steeped in that popular genre, this is a chance to buttress and deepen their understanding of England.
What Tombs gives us is a remarkably readable history that begins at the beginning—the very early period prior to Caesar’s invasion of the island in the first century A.D., a time when the island of Britain was populated by Picts and Celts in the north and Saxons in the south, all living a rude life of agriculture and trade in independent villages. The book carries its reader up to 2014. This review will not go so far—it will focus on the particularly formative period 1066-1800.
For those who appreciate a terse review, here it is:
And then there was a war with France.600AD-1066AD
Before the Norman Conquest, England’s history was one of independent Anglo-Saxon villages supported by Catholic churches and monasteries that were frequently raided by “Norsemen,” that is, Norwegians, Danes and Swedes. These raids left the island with less church treasure and with a Scandinavian heritage strangely mixed with Catholicism. The large areas of Northumbria and Mercia were most subject to Norse influence, while Wessex, under Alfred the Great (849-899AD), remained most purely Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, Alfred’s attention to creating an “Englalond” with a unique system of laws, and his development of a royal bureaucracy to administer Wessex, wove the beginning of the English national fabric.
1066AD-1700AD
The first of Tombs’s great benchmark years was 1066AD, the event was, of course, the Norman Conquest. England’s King Harold faced two simultaneous invasions: the Norwegian Harald Sigurdsson in the North and William of Normandy in the south. Harold defeated Harald in the north and immediately marched south to meet William at Hastings. The Normans trounced Harold’s depleted and exhausted army; suddenly the island was in the hands of a different set of Norsemen—not the chronically invading Norwegians, Swedes and Danes but Norse invaders who had settled earlier in England and later transplanted themselves to Normandy in what is now western France.
With William’s victory much was changed. French became the language of culture while English remained the language of the people. Norman laws were superimposed on the old Roman laws that arrived with Julius Caesar in the first century. William and his Norman successors created a myth legitimizing their rule by tracing their lineage back to Arthur, King of Britain in a time when England was a land of ancient freedoms, knightly honor, and peace. The English began to view themselves as having freedoms and personal rights that were never specified until Magna Carta in 1215.
At the time of the Norman invasion the English feudal system, with its strict obligations of loyalty and service between vassals, lords and kings, was the structural foundation of rural society; cities were generally free zones to which serfs (feudal slaves) could escape. This distinction weakened as England became a “community of the realm,” in which each citizen had a public service obligation—serving on courts, maintaining fields and roads, and other forms of community service. The prior system of services due in-kind to the lord—fieldwork, housework, maintenance, serving in a local militia, and strict obedience—were gradually transformed into money payments as trade expanded. Magna Carta, signed in 1215, strengthened individual rights against the rule of lords, and baronial rights against the rule of kings, but it was often honored in the breach. (Here Tombs disagrees with modern interpretations of Magna Carta as a toothless document signed by King John to get the barons off his case.)
The Conquest created a turbulent political history that shaped English history for centuries of war. William the Conqueror was Duke of Normandy and, therefore, a vassal to the French king. But he was also the King of England with obligations to his barons and English subjects. The result was tension in the relations between France and England: the French king demanded obeisance from the English king but refused the English king’s right to Normandy; the English king rejected the claims of France to Normandy and refused to be the French king’s vassal. This conflict in feudal obligations led to wars between France and England, and it was a seed for the later series of invasions of one by the other. It also created a mortal fear of one for the other. Perhaps even more disruptive was its effect on royal succession—the intermarriages between French and English royalty both before and after William’s kingship created future conflicts between the two nations over who were the legitimate successors to the French and English thrones.
Perhaps the best known example of this political instability was the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between France and England, which started over a question of succession: when the French king died his daughter—the mother of England’s King Edward II—was the legitimate heir to the French throne. By tradition, this made England’s Edward II her legitimate successor. To prevent this, the French argued that Salic Law prevented passage of the French crown through a maternal line. Thus, Phillip IV was crowned King of France, setting off a long series of contested successions that included Henry V’s later invasion of France to reclaim his rightful place as its king through Edward II, an invasion that slaughtered the best and brightest of France at the Battle of Agincourt.
After the Conquest, and in spite of frequent wars with continental powers, England became a rich land and a stable society. This was, in part, the salutary effect of uncertainty about succession on the power of the king: uncertainty meant that the king had to pay attention to the needs of his subjects, that is, he had to have popular support. In contrast, popular support was not required in France, where succession was on firmer grounds, giving its kings more unilateral authority.
English wealth was based not only on a productive agricultural system but also on the production of fine wool and on vigorous trade with the continent. But disaster arrived from several directions in the 14th century. Overlaid on top of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, were disastrous crop failures from a Little Ice Age during which gin became a popular remedy. This affected the Continent as well as England, spreading scarcity across so wide a swath that trade in foodstuffs couldn’t mitigate the effects. In the midst of famine, an Asian flea carrying the bacterium yersinia pestis arrived: the result was bubonic plague, called the Black Death that killed half of England’s population, an effect matched on the Continent. However, Tombs argues, yersinia pestis also brought improvement in the conditions of the working class: as the number of surviving workers plummeted, wages increased and relative affluence spread downward in the social structure.
The 15th and 16th centuries were, as we know, a time of political turbulence. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) between the Houses of York (White Rose) and Lancaster (Red Rose) caught the country up in a thirty-year civil war. All parties to the royal contest were Plantagenet descendants of John of Gaunt (1340-99), Duke of Lancaster and the third son of King Edward III. In 1398 King Richard II declared John’s eldest son, Henry Bolingbroke (House of Lancaster and Richard’s cousin)) a traitor and confiscated all of his property. Richard exiled Bolinbroke to France and Bolingbroke returned with an army that defeated Richard. Bolinbroke became King Henry IV and the Lancastrians held the throne until Henry VI’s death in 1455.
Henry VI’s death sparked the thirty-year Wars of the Roses which ended with the 1487 victory of the Lancastrian Henry Tudor over the Yorkist Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII and adopted an emblem called the Tudor Rose, a mix of the white and red roses. Henry then married Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the Yorkist and Lancastrian lines.
Henry VII was a dour, rapacious, and unpopular king who subjected England to a reign of terror in order to control his opposition, tax the peasantry, and loot the affluent. On his death in 1553 his son became Henry VIII, and on his death in 1547 his son, Edward, became Edward VI. On Edward’s death in 1553, Henry VIII’s wife Lady Jane Grey was crowned but Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon, Mary, quickly deposed Jane Gray and became Mary I. Mary’s reign was harsh: she attempted to undo her father’s establishment of the Church of England and to restore England to Catholicism. The result was bitter religious struggle and the widespread smell of Protestants burning. At Mary’s death in 1558 the throne passed to her half-sister Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
As we know, Elizabeth I’s reign was long and relatively peaceful—she resisted (not always successfully) being pulled into disputes on the Continent, and she saw herself as the people’s defender. At her death in 1603 the son of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, was on the Scottish throne as James VI. He was quickly crowned James I of England and called James VI/I. This united the kingships of England and Scotland although the two countries remained very different and often mutually hostile. At his death James VI/I' his son, Charles I, succeeded him. Like his father, Charles believed in an absolute monarch designated by God. His discomfort with argument and his autocratic style created a long period of disputes about the relative powers of King and Parliament, the latter holding the power of the purse. The proximate cause was Charles’s requirement of funds to support both his royal expenses and wars abroad, including involvement in the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648). When Parliament resisted Charles’s demands he simply disbanded Parliament and levied taxes on his own authority.
The results was a major governance crisis which, when added to Charles’s marriage to a Catholic and consequent popular fears of Popery, led to a rebellion. (Tombs notes that “popery” was a code word for French influence as well as a reference to the Catholic church.) The intensity of the disputes between the King and Parliament increased as the king rejected parliamentary meddling while the puritanical and freedom-loving parliament rejected the king’s arrogance and indifference. In 1642, Civil War broke out between Parliament (the Roundheads) and the Royalists (the Cavaliers). The English Civil War (1642-1649) was in three parts: 1642-46, during which Royalists contended with the Long Parliament. Parliament was victorious but it left Charles I in place and subject to it's power; 1648-1649, when the Long Parliament and Royalists fought again after Charles had fomented a Welsh rebellion and a Scottish invasion—Charles was beheaded in 1648 and there was no successor; and 1649-51 when Royalists fought the Rump Parliament. Cromwell’s New Model Army—England’s first standing army—soundly defeated the Royalists in 1651.
The end of the Civil War began an interregnum period with the governance of England, Ireland and Scotland resting solely in the English Parliament. But intense disputes within Parliament grew to the point that need for a central authority was acknowledged. Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord Protector (a position of military dictatorship) until his death in 1658. A brief attempt to place Cromwell’s son in that position failed and inherited faux monarchy was back in favor. In 1660 Parliament bit the bullet and invited Charles I’s eponymous son to be crowned King of England, Ireland and Scotland. Charles agreed and was crowned Charles II. Charles II had a more benign personality than his father—he was open to argument, relatively liberal in his view of his kingship, and a hedonist who developed a better relationship with Parliament. Though his wife was Catholic and there were new charges of popery, Charles II’s amenability to Parliamentary powers and his demeanor and concern for the people made him a popular king.
When Charles II died in 1685 his brother became James VII/II of Scotland, Ireland and England. James VII/II, like his grandfather, insisted on the absolute right of monarchy in all matters and he never convened Parliament. This was a giant step back from the parliamentary monarchy of Charles II, in which Parliament retained strong powers including the selection of kings. James was also was widely suspected of popery, reducing his popularity even further.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 put an end to the governance disputes. James VI/II’s son–in-law, the Dutch William of Orange, invaded England, defeated the forces of England and Scotland, and was crowned. William was a very different king: he and his wife (James’s daughter) were staunch Protestants, William was committed to Parliamentary limits on the powers of a king, and he saw kingship as public service. The Restoration was the last great event of the 17th century.
Out of this chaos grew the first permanent political parties in England. The members of Parliament were split between the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories were conservatives who believed in the monarchy, obedience to the monarch, and centralization of economic, social and political authority. The Whigs were liberals who wanted a more decentralized system with civil and economic freedom, unfettered private enterprise, absence of corruption and self-dealing, and public service as the proper goal of politics.
Tombs considers the 16th century as particularly pivotal: with the permanent shift in power from the monarchy to the people (or, at least, to the gentry in Parliament) the country was transformed: Civil liberties increased, peace reigned, and the foundation for new and more inquisitive ways of thinking were laid. The result was the English Enlightenment of the 18th century.
1700-1815
The economic and political freedom gained in the 17th century combined with new scientific and literary discoveries to form a springboard for a remarkable explosion of debate and discovery. This was the hallmark of the 18th century’s Enlightenment.
Scientific achievements from members of the newly formed (1660) Royal Academy—like Isaac Newton and Robert Hook—set the foundation for an English renaissance. The science of “natural philosophy,” what we now call the physical sciences, was created as a combination of Newton’s mathematical and theoretical insights and Hook’s emphasis on experimentation in biology. This was the heyday of the amateur scientist.
Developments in the English language arose from 17th century works like Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. These established the English language on a firm foundation and altered the way the English communicated ideas. A new literary form rose from the ashes of the previous restrictions on publishing—the novel, that brought books out of the poetry and religious genres and into the hearts and lives of the people. The decline in printing costs combined with more widespread abilities to read (and write) extended literature to a broader population. Now people could move beyond local conversations to the written word, expanding access to new ideas.
Art and Architecture flourished. The Rococo movement shifted visual arts from stiff and linear classic design to a more fluid and asymmetrical vision that reflected the general relaxation in intellectual thought. Christopher Wren guided the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in in 1666. This allowed a redo of a city that had grown without plan and was choking on itself. It introduced and encouraged advances in materials and construction methods, and it ushered in a new city plan that organized carriage and pedestrian traffic more efficiently. Landscape architecture flourished with figures like Capability Brown converting England to a nation of gardeners. Intellectual Societies were founded to share ideas—literary societies, exploration societies, scientific societies, philosophical societies, and so on. This was an early form of adult education for the English aristocracy.
There were also significant political advances. In 1707 the Acts of Union were passed—England and Scotland had long shared a common king, but the Acts made Scotland a part of England, creating the United Kingdom of England. Scotland retained its own religion (Presbyterianism) and its own parliament (though its acts required approval by the English Parliament). This did not end frictions between the two kingdoms—in 1745 the backers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, supported (as always) by France, started the Jacobite Rebellion to restore the Stuarts to the English throne. There was a feeble invasion of England that quickly died out when the population failed to rise in support.
These quantum changes occurred over the normal backdrop of wars. England’s eternal contest with France carried on in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) that involved territory from India to North America: the first World War. The spark was the notorious Salic Law: using Salic Law, France and Prussia objected to enthroning the daughter of the Holy Roman Empire’s Charles VI. While England wasn’t the major combatant, it was deeply involved in countering this international French threat. Add to that the American Revolution (1776-83), the Seven Years War (1756-1763, a repeat of the War of the Austrian Succession), the culmination of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), and you have a lot of English blood in play. In each case the prefatory comment might well have been
And then there was a war with France.Wait! Wait! There’s More!! But I’ll have to pass the baton to you. The time spent reading this will be time well spent. Start now! Life is short!!!
Five stars, slam dunk!
April 16, 2017
A timely read in the thick of Brexit.
In 'the English and their History', Professor Tombs narrates historic events over 2000 years with arresting details and gives perspective to current affairs.
There is one abiding enigma throughout the book - what is English.
For Tombs, the concept of the English went all the way back before their Norman conquerors. It was enriched throughout the tumult of the Reformation, the agonies of Industrial Revolution, under the wrath of Napoleon and Hilter and so on.
Thus, the core component of Englishness is, "respect for tradition and preference for gradual change”.
The modern idea of Euroscepticism also has its root back to the decades of conflict with the French, Dutch, Irish, Hanoverians and the Scots before the 17th century, when foreigners were seen as threatening English traditional values of individual liberty, religious pluralism and symbolic loyalty to the Crown. In one word - Englishness.
“Euroscepticism is a form of British nationalism, mostly confined to the most “British” island nation, the English.” Tombs concluded. He also notes the oddity that Eurosceptics, whose complaints focus on sovereignty and the law, are most numerous in England, which is not a sovereign nation.
Joining in European integration is just a remedy for the post war torrent of declinism, especially for the elites who fear becoming merely 'a greater Sweden'.
But, 'England would never agree to “shut itself up” in Europe' - said Charles de Gaulle when he vetoed British membership of the Common market in 1963. As he observed correctly that 'not because it was isolated, but because it was too connected with the rest of the world'.
(Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised when the English voted 'leave'. )
This book triumphs for it allows us to examine the history horizontally and vertically. It doesn't provide solutions to current crisis but it certainly helps us to understand the issues better.
In 'the English and their History', Professor Tombs narrates historic events over 2000 years with arresting details and gives perspective to current affairs.
There is one abiding enigma throughout the book - what is English.
For Tombs, the concept of the English went all the way back before their Norman conquerors. It was enriched throughout the tumult of the Reformation, the agonies of Industrial Revolution, under the wrath of Napoleon and Hilter and so on.
Thus, the core component of Englishness is, "respect for tradition and preference for gradual change”.
The modern idea of Euroscepticism also has its root back to the decades of conflict with the French, Dutch, Irish, Hanoverians and the Scots before the 17th century, when foreigners were seen as threatening English traditional values of individual liberty, religious pluralism and symbolic loyalty to the Crown. In one word - Englishness.
“Euroscepticism is a form of British nationalism, mostly confined to the most “British” island nation, the English.” Tombs concluded. He also notes the oddity that Eurosceptics, whose complaints focus on sovereignty and the law, are most numerous in England, which is not a sovereign nation.
Joining in European integration is just a remedy for the post war torrent of declinism, especially for the elites who fear becoming merely 'a greater Sweden'.
But, 'England would never agree to “shut itself up” in Europe' - said Charles de Gaulle when he vetoed British membership of the Common market in 1963. As he observed correctly that 'not because it was isolated, but because it was too connected with the rest of the world'.
(Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised when the English voted 'leave'. )
This book triumphs for it allows us to examine the history horizontally and vertically. It doesn't provide solutions to current crisis but it certainly helps us to understand the issues better.
February 4, 2017
I read this as a sort of antidote to the recent Hitler bio - which was excellent, by the way, but somewhat depressing. There's something uplifting about this book, and the English people, too. They're Hitler-proof, in a way. This book is well written but pretty massive, taking in just about all of English history, and at the same time, in parallel, following the history of what the English thought about themselves. Full of fascinating facts. Here are two: Elizabeth I had horrible teeth, her smile black by middle age. And Shakespeare, whom we can read pretty easily, would have had just as much trouble reading Chaucer as we do.
December 30, 2020
Masterfully written with an excellent choice of content, Professor Robert Tombs tells the fascinating history of the English (as opposed to the British) from Neolithic times until the present day. It is the extraordinary story of how one nation on a small rainy island came eventually to dominate the world seemingly “in a fit of absence of mind” (in the words of Seeley), and largely due to the cultural, political, and moral strength it had built over past centuries. Tombs’ narrative combines great breadth with impressive depth (including discussions of the historiography) without becoming bogged down in tedious detail. In the face of unrelenting (and often envious) scrutiny of England’s record, Tombs demonstrates how the English established for themselves and subsequently bequeathed to other nations institutions such as the rule of law, religious toleration, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and of enquiry to name but a few. These unprecedented and monumental achievements set the English apart, and represent a cultural legacy which the English are right to be proud of.
November 29, 2017
This book is spectacular! You get to know English history like your favourite teacher ought to have taught you: In an engaging, intellectually rigorous and well researched way. You get to read from the pre-historic English national formation and how incredibly multicultural the establishment of the nation was to the Scottish referendum (Indref). I couldn't put it down. It reads like an amazing epic. Which it is.
Having picked up a copy in my local library, I am now considering buying a copy for my own reference. It's a book that should be in anyone interested in English history's library. 5 stars.
Having picked up a copy in my local library, I am now considering buying a copy for my own reference. It's a book that should be in anyone interested in English history's library. 5 stars.
July 23, 2021
Книжка добре написана і добре структурована, тому прочиталась швидко як на свої тисячу сторінок. Але як же бісили постійні відступи автора на тему "Англію в цій ситуації критикували, однак це незаслужено, тому що..." і далі різні виправдання, здебільшого "а ось на континенті було ще гірше". Сам він критикує щось в англійській політиці лише з того моменту, коли вибори почали вигравати лейбористи.
May 5, 2018
Robert Tombs has written what will likely become the standard history of the English people, at least for the next decade or so. From Cro-Magnons to UKIP and everything in between, Tombs has produced an exhaustive, well-researched, and immensely readable book on probably the most studied people in history.
England and the English are the subjects of his work, not Britain and not the British Empire, although given England’s dominance of the Union and Commonwealth, it is difficult always to separate the three. Not that the English are a homogeneous, monolithic people; Tombs notes that Englishness “was not based on notions of ethnic purity or cultural uniqueness” (p. 892) a fact that has allowed the nation to be an inclusive, expansionist, and mostly tolerant society. England has a history of invasion, civil violence, and military dictatorship, but an even longer history of political stability, prosperity, and participatory governance. It is probably true that, as Tombs quotes Liah Greenfeld, “The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation; it was the birth of nations.” It is also true that the English are wracked by social, economic, and political divisions, most enduringly that between Tories (Anglicans) and Whigs (Nonconformists) (p. 897). English history is one of contradictions, hypocrisies, and ironies (p. 892), which perhaps make their accomplishments all the more remarkable.
Tombs’ work is an example of what I like to think of as “forensic history.” He doesn’t merely recite the facts—as we know them—but he also attempts to resolve many riddles about the English and their history, of which there are a great many. Some of his answers will likely rile a few readers. For example, he argues that the Black Death was beneficial to England in the long run (p. 126) and that the English did all they could to ameliorate the Irish potato famine; “the real English responsibility lies in the dysfunctional aspects of Irish society” (p. 454). The Great Reform Act of 1832 actually made Britain less, not more, democratic (p. 442). The Industrial Revolution wasn’t that all “bleak” for urban workers (p. 460). Victorian England wasn’t really laissez-faire but instead gave rise to what today we would call the “nanny state” (p.476). Moreover, the Victorians weren’t all that prudish (p. 482). Tombs also finds time to examine some outrageous conspiracy theories: Harold didn’t die at Hastings! (p. 58).
Tombs’ claims about the role of the English in World War II raised my eyebrows a bit. “The story that the [German] raid [on Coventry] was allowed to proceed by Churchill to prevent the Germans from realizing their codes were breakable is now recognized as a fable,” according to the author (p. 712). Britain had been “relatively generous” in admitting Jewish refugees and “accusations that the Allies could have done significantly more” to stop the Holocaust ignore the fact that, upon examination, “such courses of action … [had] been in fact undertaken, or else to have been impossible, useless, of never thought of by anyone at the time” (p.742). Tombs concedes that “the Air Ministry privately accepted that deliberately bombing [German] civilians was ‘contrary to the principles of international law’” (p. 744) and chose to downplay the carnage in public. D-Day was prepared by “mainly British planners” and British forces carried the brunt of the battle (p. 749). Eisenhower is mentioned only in passing.
Tombs is kinder to Margaret Thatcher than to Tony Blair. His observations on contemporary English politics, however, are troubling. He finished the book after the 2014 Scottish referendum but before the 2016 Brexit vote. Both exacerbate the dangers of Tony Blair’s “devolution” initiative. In brief, the devolution of local authority to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland has created the untenable reality that MPs from those constituencies have a vote about English affairs in Parliament, but English MPs have no vote on the affairs of the three British partners. This has made England, in Tombs’ opinion, “the largest nation without its own political institutions,” resembling in some ways a much bigger “Flanders, Catalonia or Castile” (p. 885). With the exception of London, the English mostly supported Brexit while Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. The withdrawal of Northern Ireland from the EU would violate the “open border” agreement reached on Good Friday, 1998, as well as the EU policy on open borders between Ireland and Ulster.
It is not hard to image that an England dissatisfied with devolution and a Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland determined to remain in the European Union could unravel the United Kingdom within the next decade. Whether this would be good for the English, Europe, and indeed the world is beyond my ability to say.
England and the English are the subjects of his work, not Britain and not the British Empire, although given England’s dominance of the Union and Commonwealth, it is difficult always to separate the three. Not that the English are a homogeneous, monolithic people; Tombs notes that Englishness “was not based on notions of ethnic purity or cultural uniqueness” (p. 892) a fact that has allowed the nation to be an inclusive, expansionist, and mostly tolerant society. England has a history of invasion, civil violence, and military dictatorship, but an even longer history of political stability, prosperity, and participatory governance. It is probably true that, as Tombs quotes Liah Greenfeld, “The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation; it was the birth of nations.” It is also true that the English are wracked by social, economic, and political divisions, most enduringly that between Tories (Anglicans) and Whigs (Nonconformists) (p. 897). English history is one of contradictions, hypocrisies, and ironies (p. 892), which perhaps make their accomplishments all the more remarkable.
Tombs’ work is an example of what I like to think of as “forensic history.” He doesn’t merely recite the facts—as we know them—but he also attempts to resolve many riddles about the English and their history, of which there are a great many. Some of his answers will likely rile a few readers. For example, he argues that the Black Death was beneficial to England in the long run (p. 126) and that the English did all they could to ameliorate the Irish potato famine; “the real English responsibility lies in the dysfunctional aspects of Irish society” (p. 454). The Great Reform Act of 1832 actually made Britain less, not more, democratic (p. 442). The Industrial Revolution wasn’t that all “bleak” for urban workers (p. 460). Victorian England wasn’t really laissez-faire but instead gave rise to what today we would call the “nanny state” (p.476). Moreover, the Victorians weren’t all that prudish (p. 482). Tombs also finds time to examine some outrageous conspiracy theories: Harold didn’t die at Hastings! (p. 58).
Tombs’ claims about the role of the English in World War II raised my eyebrows a bit. “The story that the [German] raid [on Coventry] was allowed to proceed by Churchill to prevent the Germans from realizing their codes were breakable is now recognized as a fable,” according to the author (p. 712). Britain had been “relatively generous” in admitting Jewish refugees and “accusations that the Allies could have done significantly more” to stop the Holocaust ignore the fact that, upon examination, “such courses of action … [had] been in fact undertaken, or else to have been impossible, useless, of never thought of by anyone at the time” (p.742). Tombs concedes that “the Air Ministry privately accepted that deliberately bombing [German] civilians was ‘contrary to the principles of international law’” (p. 744) and chose to downplay the carnage in public. D-Day was prepared by “mainly British planners” and British forces carried the brunt of the battle (p. 749). Eisenhower is mentioned only in passing.
Tombs is kinder to Margaret Thatcher than to Tony Blair. His observations on contemporary English politics, however, are troubling. He finished the book after the 2014 Scottish referendum but before the 2016 Brexit vote. Both exacerbate the dangers of Tony Blair’s “devolution” initiative. In brief, the devolution of local authority to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland has created the untenable reality that MPs from those constituencies have a vote about English affairs in Parliament, but English MPs have no vote on the affairs of the three British partners. This has made England, in Tombs’ opinion, “the largest nation without its own political institutions,” resembling in some ways a much bigger “Flanders, Catalonia or Castile” (p. 885). With the exception of London, the English mostly supported Brexit while Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. The withdrawal of Northern Ireland from the EU would violate the “open border” agreement reached on Good Friday, 1998, as well as the EU policy on open borders between Ireland and Ulster.
It is not hard to image that an England dissatisfied with devolution and a Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland determined to remain in the European Union could unravel the United Kingdom within the next decade. Whether this would be good for the English, Europe, and indeed the world is beyond my ability to say.
February 16, 2016
Over the course of 900 pages, Cambridge historian Robert Tombs lays out the stunning history of a people, the English, who have had an outsize effect on the world. From pre-history to 2014 A.D., Tombs tells a succession of gripping stories that will entrap experts and amateurs alike.
If Tombs' sprawling book has a theme, it is the upending of revisionist theories of English history. Neo-revisionism, I suppose you could call it. A typical passage might state that, on the whole, England bore no more responsibility than other nations (particularly Spain, Portugal, and later the United States) for the growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and did more than any of those nations to end it -- contra the revisionist narrative proffered by historians of the left.
Tombs holds up various previous historical ideas up to the light, and in his modest, incredibly well-researched way, finds them wanting. The "Whig version of history" fares particularly poorly. In this enduringly popular genre of historiography, as popular among American progressives today as it was for 18th-century English whigs, history is a story of rampant progress from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from ludditism to technological nirvana. This paradigm necessarily makes the past look pretty black, to make the gray present look good by comparison--and Tombs methodically dismantles this by showing how the past and present (or the past and the more recent past) were not as different as the Whig narrative maintains, and that it is damaging to believe otherwise.
The opposite of Whig historiography, at least in Britain, is "declinism," the largely post-1945 phenomenon of British journalists and historians writing off Britain as a world power, or even as a major force in Europe, due to much-publicized failures like the Suez crisis, deindustrialization, and (more recently) the fairly disastrous British contribution to the Iraq war. Tombs dismantles this narrative with equal quiet fervor, pointing out pesky facts that industrial decline (which no one can deny), happened just as quickly under the woman who is supposed to have doomed British industry (Margaret Thatcher, 1.9% yearly) as it later did under a man who by party affiliation at least was diametrically opposed to her policies (Tony Blair, 1.8% yearly).
The British Empire, subject at various times to both Whig and declinist narratives, gets a fairer, middle-ground treatment here. In fact, that is the enduring value of Tombs' book. Unlike most academic historians (notably, in my limited reading, Piers Brendon), it is impossible to pigeonhole him as a man of the Left or the Right -- he skewers them both with quiet gusto when they need it, and praises them in turn. He does this without suspending moral judgment -- some things are certainly right, and others are certainly wrong, and some people belong in one camp or another for advocating such and such.
Tombs covers the English wars of religion evenhandedly and even gives Cromwell a fair hearing. However, at one point, he says something to the effect that the motivations of some English politicians of the early 19th century were difficult for us to understand because they harbored a fervent evangelical faith "nowhere in the modern world, except perhaps in the deepest reaches of the American Bible belt." Tombs' own book, much later, gives the lie to this statement by briefly mentioning the vibrant revival of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in London itself due to (largely black) devout Christian immigrants from the Commonwealth and elsewhere.
If you would learn about English history, I can't think of a better place to start. Tombs' book is more than the sum of its parts. It is the history of a people that is written with such evenhanded clarity that even its method, to say nothing of its well-researched conclusions, has implications for the study of history.
If Tombs' sprawling book has a theme, it is the upending of revisionist theories of English history. Neo-revisionism, I suppose you could call it. A typical passage might state that, on the whole, England bore no more responsibility than other nations (particularly Spain, Portugal, and later the United States) for the growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and did more than any of those nations to end it -- contra the revisionist narrative proffered by historians of the left.
Tombs holds up various previous historical ideas up to the light, and in his modest, incredibly well-researched way, finds them wanting. The "Whig version of history" fares particularly poorly. In this enduringly popular genre of historiography, as popular among American progressives today as it was for 18th-century English whigs, history is a story of rampant progress from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from ludditism to technological nirvana. This paradigm necessarily makes the past look pretty black, to make the gray present look good by comparison--and Tombs methodically dismantles this by showing how the past and present (or the past and the more recent past) were not as different as the Whig narrative maintains, and that it is damaging to believe otherwise.
The opposite of Whig historiography, at least in Britain, is "declinism," the largely post-1945 phenomenon of British journalists and historians writing off Britain as a world power, or even as a major force in Europe, due to much-publicized failures like the Suez crisis, deindustrialization, and (more recently) the fairly disastrous British contribution to the Iraq war. Tombs dismantles this narrative with equal quiet fervor, pointing out pesky facts that industrial decline (which no one can deny), happened just as quickly under the woman who is supposed to have doomed British industry (Margaret Thatcher, 1.9% yearly) as it later did under a man who by party affiliation at least was diametrically opposed to her policies (Tony Blair, 1.8% yearly).
The British Empire, subject at various times to both Whig and declinist narratives, gets a fairer, middle-ground treatment here. In fact, that is the enduring value of Tombs' book. Unlike most academic historians (notably, in my limited reading, Piers Brendon), it is impossible to pigeonhole him as a man of the Left or the Right -- he skewers them both with quiet gusto when they need it, and praises them in turn. He does this without suspending moral judgment -- some things are certainly right, and others are certainly wrong, and some people belong in one camp or another for advocating such and such.
Tombs covers the English wars of religion evenhandedly and even gives Cromwell a fair hearing. However, at one point, he says something to the effect that the motivations of some English politicians of the early 19th century were difficult for us to understand because they harbored a fervent evangelical faith "nowhere in the modern world, except perhaps in the deepest reaches of the American Bible belt." Tombs' own book, much later, gives the lie to this statement by briefly mentioning the vibrant revival of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in London itself due to (largely black) devout Christian immigrants from the Commonwealth and elsewhere.
If you would learn about English history, I can't think of a better place to start. Tombs' book is more than the sum of its parts. It is the history of a people that is written with such evenhanded clarity that even its method, to say nothing of its well-researched conclusions, has implications for the study of history.
August 29, 2017
There are so many English people in this book, it's disgusting. See, if I were writing a history of the English, I'd spice it it up a bit. After the Battle of Hastings I'd say, "we're going to delay Norman integration and talk about my high-score in pinball last night" or, "What's their to say about Agincore, that couldn't be summed up in a short discussion of Radiohead's music video of 'Lotus Flower' I liked York's dancing but it seems nobody else did." And lots of stuff like that.
Anyway, the thing about this book is that's it's a Tory's view of history, no question about that. Lots of unpleasant situations from the Peasants Revolt, the War of the Roses, the Glorious Revolution, Colonialism at large, all these events can be tucked under the awning of "It wasn't really that bad." Anything less than the finest cucumber sandwich its because a lot of the history is written by Whig's who like playing everything down. Our image of the industrial revolution the consequence of liberal historian reading too much Dickens. (Except for the Luddites, the Luddites apparently didn't think machines came from the Devil's elbow, to borrow the Old Man's expression in Blood Meridian, but rather a fair wage. In towns where the bosses paid the workers better machines were hailed as being, "cool as tits"). Even declinism, was a, a, state of mind. England didn't decline in any material way, but in people's minds, you see, another brilliant scheme of the left, Tombs didn't point out that declinism was a wonder elixir for rock and roll and subsequently punk I'm sure. Ol Tomps needs to take his gaze off of his Capability Brown landscape for second and cast his net of values on the other side of the bosco if he wants a fuller return on his Civilization (at the very end Tomb's mention's that there are even WWII computer games...2014 book here). It's the whole Kenneth Clark business only not as delightful miniseries.
Anyway. Why, would I listen to a thousand page English history from a Tory historian?, you may wonder, well, as Balzac's infamous villain Vautrin says, it's all in my line of work.
Also, I was the only person in Seattle checking out this audiofile. I assumed somebody was going to mess with me, but nobody did. I'd walk into fashionable cafes and say, "You ever listen to Tomb's The English and their History? NO! Cause I'm the only soul in this godforsaken city listening to this damnable Tomb's and his damned English and their damn History!"
Anyway, the thing about this book is that's it's a Tory's view of history, no question about that. Lots of unpleasant situations from the Peasants Revolt, the War of the Roses, the Glorious Revolution, Colonialism at large, all these events can be tucked under the awning of "It wasn't really that bad." Anything less than the finest cucumber sandwich its because a lot of the history is written by Whig's who like playing everything down. Our image of the industrial revolution the consequence of liberal historian reading too much Dickens. (Except for the Luddites, the Luddites apparently didn't think machines came from the Devil's elbow, to borrow the Old Man's expression in Blood Meridian, but rather a fair wage. In towns where the bosses paid the workers better machines were hailed as being, "cool as tits"). Even declinism, was a, a, state of mind. England didn't decline in any material way, but in people's minds, you see, another brilliant scheme of the left, Tombs didn't point out that declinism was a wonder elixir for rock and roll and subsequently punk I'm sure. Ol Tomps needs to take his gaze off of his Capability Brown landscape for second and cast his net of values on the other side of the bosco if he wants a fuller return on his Civilization (at the very end Tomb's mention's that there are even WWII computer games...2014 book here). It's the whole Kenneth Clark business only not as delightful miniseries.
Anyway. Why, would I listen to a thousand page English history from a Tory historian?, you may wonder, well, as Balzac's infamous villain Vautrin says, it's all in my line of work.
Also, I was the only person in Seattle checking out this audiofile. I assumed somebody was going to mess with me, but nobody did. I'd walk into fashionable cafes and say, "You ever listen to Tomb's The English and their History? NO! Cause I'm the only soul in this godforsaken city listening to this damnable Tomb's and his damned English and their damn History!"
August 25, 2017
This tome spans 900 pages and covers 1000 years of English history.
There is incontravertibly too much English history to be covered in ten volumes let alone one. Tombs succeeds in part by choosing which historical events to emphasize.
I feel that the chapters he wrote on the Reformation, Revolution (English Civil War), Dickensian England, WW1, and Storm and Stress (covering Margaret Thatcher) are all impeccably researched and highly informative.
It should be noted that his history largely focuses on the political, social, economic and sovereign aspects of English history. There is also some military history but very little in the way of England's outsized achievements in literature, science, the arts or technology which is disappointing. No doubt incorporating these aspects do not dovetail well with socioeconomics and politics.
There are parts of this history that are 5 star quality but most chapters are between a 3 and 4. Since this is a book about the English and their history there is little analysis of English impacts and influence on the rest of the world. I felt the chapter on English imperialism was weak, at least morally speaking, given England's mistreatment of the people of India and Ireland.
The author does a good job of consistent narration in a voice that is largely balanced. The explanations and descriptions surrounding the English Reformation and the ramifications that led to their Civil War are the best that I have read covering much of the 17th century.
There is incontravertibly too much English history to be covered in ten volumes let alone one. Tombs succeeds in part by choosing which historical events to emphasize.
I feel that the chapters he wrote on the Reformation, Revolution (English Civil War), Dickensian England, WW1, and Storm and Stress (covering Margaret Thatcher) are all impeccably researched and highly informative.
It should be noted that his history largely focuses on the political, social, economic and sovereign aspects of English history. There is also some military history but very little in the way of England's outsized achievements in literature, science, the arts or technology which is disappointing. No doubt incorporating these aspects do not dovetail well with socioeconomics and politics.
There are parts of this history that are 5 star quality but most chapters are between a 3 and 4. Since this is a book about the English and their history there is little analysis of English impacts and influence on the rest of the world. I felt the chapter on English imperialism was weak, at least morally speaking, given England's mistreatment of the people of India and Ireland.
The author does a good job of consistent narration in a voice that is largely balanced. The explanations and descriptions surrounding the English Reformation and the ramifications that led to their Civil War are the best that I have read covering much of the 17th century.
April 3, 2019
I enjoyed this history. It covers the history of the English people from as far back as anything is known up to 2014. So it misses Brexit, but it is clear that the UK leaving the European Union has been seriously considered before.
The history up until 1700 is covered in about the first quarter of the book. And the history from WWI until 2014 takes nearly the last half.
The book is written by an Englishman to an English audience, and he puts a more positive interpretation on many items of past history than they typically get . . . things like the state of things in the middle ages, and the British empire. But he gives very good reasons and evidence to support these claims, and so I found myself believing him.
The book is long. It is 1000 pages (43 hours in audiobook form) But it took me quite a bit longer than a novel of similar length would take to read. I was very often backing up and re-listening to parts to try and remember dates, names, and explanation better. It's not that the writing is in any way unclear or difficult to understand, it is just that there is so much information here, and it is information I would like to learn and remember.
The history up until 1700 is covered in about the first quarter of the book. And the history from WWI until 2014 takes nearly the last half.
The book is written by an Englishman to an English audience, and he puts a more positive interpretation on many items of past history than they typically get . . . things like the state of things in the middle ages, and the British empire. But he gives very good reasons and evidence to support these claims, and so I found myself believing him.
The book is long. It is 1000 pages (43 hours in audiobook form) But it took me quite a bit longer than a novel of similar length would take to read. I was very often backing up and re-listening to parts to try and remember dates, names, and explanation better. It's not that the writing is in any way unclear or difficult to understand, it is just that there is so much information here, and it is information I would like to learn and remember.
February 17, 2019
I mainly picked this up to remove gaps in my knowledge on English history. Most of it I knew of mostly from stories. I was especially interested in the first thousand years.
I should have realized that much of that early history is lost in history.
Despite this, I found it worthwhile reading. I wish more things had been defined as he mentions groups of people I had heard the names of - but had not the historical context. I wanted those filled in so resorted to Wikipedia a number of times.
As he approached more modern history and then modern times I could tell he was working rather hard to be fair-minded and try to approach both sides of a questions. Mostly I found his approach on this to be solid. Not that I didn't detect what I feel were his views on a subject.
Some of more modern history was more annoying with political correctness side effects. Multiple instances of talking about Islamophobia, and never about jihad.
I should have realized that much of that early history is lost in history.
Despite this, I found it worthwhile reading. I wish more things had been defined as he mentions groups of people I had heard the names of - but had not the historical context. I wanted those filled in so resorted to Wikipedia a number of times.
As he approached more modern history and then modern times I could tell he was working rather hard to be fair-minded and try to approach both sides of a questions. Mostly I found his approach on this to be solid. Not that I didn't detect what I feel were his views on a subject.
Some of more modern history was more annoying with political correctness side effects. Multiple instances of talking about Islamophobia, and never about jihad.
September 1, 2015
I'm not nearly enough of an expert to be able to properly review this book, but it seems to me that Tombs does an admirable job of compressing over a thousand years of history into an interesting a digestible book. It is interesting how much of politics come through -- I tend to disagree with him on some of his interpretations of very recent events, and it makes me wonder how much I'd disagree with his interpretation of the older events if I were to study them in more detail.
October 16, 2015
Pointless and formless, a thousand pages of unscientific and insular pomposity.
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