Nor would the ‘island’ narrative have proved so enthralling had medieval English kings not created such a strong state, which they then tried to impose by force on their neighbours. The Welsh were incorporated in the 1530s, the Scots not until 1707, but thereafter – during the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries – the London government effectively directed the whole of ‘our’ island of Britain. Yet making the ‘other island’ across the Irish Sea ‘British’ as well proved a far more difficult task. The English failed to do so, but the struggle ebbed and flowed for centuries, costing several million lives through war and famine. At points along the way the ‘Irish Question’ also tested the unity of Britain itself – in the 1640s, for instance, when it was the catalyst for civil war, and in the Home Rule crisis before 1914. In 1920, after the brutal war of independence, it resulted in the partitioning of the island of Ireland in two between an independent Catholic state and an embattled, Protestant-dominated Ulster clinging on to its Britishness within the UK.
In the mid-1960s the rancorous issues of partition and sectarianism escalated into the three-decade long ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, whose brutal violence was quelled only by the Good Friday agreement of 1998. This brought a ragged peace to Ulster and also redefined the political geometry of Ireland, opening up the border between the two states. Yet during the EU referendum debate, the Conservative and Unionist Party closed its eyes to recent history. Only after the vote to leave the EU did it start to grapple with the profound implications that Brexit would have for Northern Ireland, the peace process and the unity of the UK.
By the end of the twentieth century, both the Good Friday agreement and the institution of devolved governments in Scotland and Wales presaged a different set of relationships between and within the two main islands. In England the apparent indifference of London to the socio-economic problems of the regions, especially in the north, played a significant part in the Leave victory in 2016, and the failure of the Westminster Parliament to resolve – or even address – the challenges of Brexit aggravated this sense of alienation. Yet the saga of Britishness – forged by war and burnished by retelling – continues to exert immense power, whether deployed by politicians or dramatised in movies. Equally potent are the individual national stories of the Scots, Welsh and Irish – even of the English without the others[9] – all reinvigorated by the crisis of the Union. In a struggle for the future, the past really matters. Yet not just the past of the two islands and their tangled relations with continental Europe. The global dimension is equally important.
Developing as a seafaring nation from the sixteenth century, the English used their relative security from the Continent as both a sanctuary and a springboard. Exploiting their growing naval reach they were able to prey on foreign rivals, profit richly from the slave trade, open up markets and create settlements – first in the Caribbean and North America; later in the Indian subcontinent, Australasia and Africa. The wealth thereby generated played a critical part in Britain’s precocious industrial revolution. It also drew the country gradually and messily into a patchwork of formal empire, which the British then struggled to rule on the cheap in the face of bigger and stronger international challengers. By the 1970s, after two world wars and an often violent process of decolonisation, the British Empire has disappeared. But the UK remained a global economy, shaped by its commercial and financial past, and the stories of global greatness, now somehow disconnected from the empire project, still appealed to political and public nostalgia. More problematic legacies of empire, such as the slave trade or mass immigration, tended to be ignored in the grand narrative of our island’s worldwide reach.
Those simple words ‘island’ and ‘stories’ are, therefore, worthy of close examination. To do so we need to engage with ‘big history’ and the longue durée in ways which do justice to the English stamp on these islands’ histories without being narrowly Anglocentric. And although Island Stories has been prompted by the Brexit imbroglio, it reflects deeper concerns. There is now a profusion of innovative and detailed scholarly research, based on analysis of new sources and fresh insight into old sources. But much of this work takes the form of micro-histories, addressing narrow topics for an academic audience, and a good deal of it has been shaped by the ‘cultural turn’ – which privileges food, dress, and gender relations and frowns on political history as being antiquated and irrelevant. As a result, big-picture narratives have been left to popular writers skimming the surface, or to politicians advancing their own agenda. This short book is an attempt by one professional historian to start filling this gap, at a time when political and international history really matter.
The four main chapters outline and probe four alternative, if overlapping, ways of telling our island stories in the era of Brexit. They draw on some of the narratives that have been offered by famous voices of the twentieth century, such as Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Hugh Gaitskell and Margaret Thatcher, and also by politicians of our own time including Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. But the chapters range far beyond the problems and personalities of the twentieth century, and offer some very long views to offset the national fixation with 1973 and 1940.
Each chapter explores an overarching theme, reflecting on the history of the last millennium. The first chapter ‘Decline’ looks at how and why Britain’s place in the world has changed in recent centuries, and whether the turn to Europe represented realistic statesmanship or a failure of national will. I also consider the country’s assets – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power – in the Brexit era and the powerful hold of ‘heritage’ in the national culture. The second chapter looks more closely at Britain’s engagement with Europe, going back beyond the Protestant Reformation to the Anglo-Norman kings, and exploring that ambiguous role of the Channel as both barrier and bridge. The third chapter turns to the long history of Britain, tracing the impact of English empire-building on the archipelago and assessing the two Acts of Union in 1707 and 1801 that brought Scotland and then Ireland into the United Kingdom. The chapter also discusses the impacts of two world wars, 1990s devolution and the Brexit vote on the unity of the Union. The fourth chapter, ‘Empire’, emphasises the role of slavepower as well as seapower in making Britain great, but also examines how the ideology of freedom both promoted the empire and eroded it. In the last section of this chapter, ‘The Empire comes home’, I offer a historical context for the impassioned Brexit debate on immigration and reflect on a post-imperial country in which racist attitudes coexist with multiculturalism.
In the concluding chapter, ‘Taking Control of Our Past’, I reflect more generally on what the political feuding since 2016 reveals of Britain’s deeper problems in dealing with Brexit and also in coming to terms with its past. This is, of course, a personal view – on topics that are highly contested, for history has become an integral part of political argument in Brexitoxic Britain. Island Stories is a contribution to that fevered debate.
Of every reader, the attention will be excited by an history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.
Edward Gibbon, 1788[1]
Thus began the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus The History of the Rise, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume one had appeared in 1776, just as the American colonies declared independence from Britain and proclaimed themselves a republic. The sixth and last volume was published in 1788, a year before ancien régime France was engulfed by revolution. Its fratricidal anarchy would spawn Napoleon’s continental empire.
Gibbon’s