In the concluding chapter, ‘Taking Control of Our Past’, I reflect more generally on what the political feuding since 2016, and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, reveal 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 the country’s Brexitoxic political argument. Island Stories is a contribution to that fevered debate. And by taking a long view, it also offers an unconventional history of Britain.
Of every reader, the attention will be excited by an history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.
Edward Gibbon, 1788[1]
Thus began the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus The History of the Rise, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume one had appeared in 1776, just as the American colonies declared independence from Britain and proclaimed themselves a republic. The sixth and last volume was published in 1788, a year before ancien régime France was engulfed by revolution. Its fratricidal anarchy would spawn Napoleon’s continental empire.
Gibbon’s chronicle of the Pax Romana became a literary classic during the nineteenth century, as Britain saw off the Napoleonic challenge and grew into a global power – spanning the world from India to Africa, from the Near East to Australasia. By the end of the century the term Pax Britannica had entered the vernacular. But there were also creeping fears of imperial mortality – captured by Rudyard Kipling, the bard of empire, in his fin de siècle poem ‘Recessional’:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre![2]
An 1879 Punch cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull the ox carrying the world’s woes on his back – Russia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Scotland (a recent financial scandal in Glasgow), a striker and a gleeful African warrior from the costly Zulu Wars.
Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian leaders sought strategies that might save their unlikely empire from a Roman fate. How best to deal with jealous rivals? By military confrontation, or selective appeasement? The first could sap the nation’s wealth and power; the latter risked letting in the barbarians by the back door. They also wrestled with the Roman tension between libertas and imperium, of civic virtues supposedly corrupted by militarism and luxury. Would British imperialism undermine political liberty at home? Conversely, would a freedom-loving people have the backbone to resist the jackals of the global jungle? These dilemmas became acute during the era of the two world wars.
On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples.[3]
Ideologists of ‘decline’
Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’.[4]
Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’[5]
Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’[6] But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower.[7]
Winston Churchill was another politician who, in later life, became obsessed with Britain’s decline – doing so, like Chamberlain, when in opposition and with one eye on gaining power. Conviction and calculation conjoined. After a spectacular political rise on either side of the Great War, culminating in Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the age of 50, the premiership seemed within Churchill’s grasp. But then, for a decade from 1929, he was cast out into the political wilderness, regarded as a wilful opportunist too mercurial for inclusion in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s son. To attract attention he campaigned loudly on various causes, from Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis to air rearmament against Germany. It is the latter for which Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’ are now best remembered. But the underlying issue for him – and the one that sustained the rest