Since Brexit, I had always wanted to read about the peculiarity of Euroscepticism in England, and the reasons England voted in stark difference from Scotland on the Remain/Leave referendum. I started with the single-volume history of England — The English and Their History by the historian Robert Tombs. As an engineering grad, I did not take a formal course in history. Reading this book would be an enjoyable learning experience and rectify that mistake.
The Brexit referendum would impose that the whole of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) exits Europe. The term Brexit, of course, refers to the exit of Great Britain. In truth, it was a slim majority of older, working-class England that was itching to leave the European Union. In the figure below, you can see a stark Remain/Leave demarcation on the Scotland/England border.
England has had a dominant influence on literature, popular culture, and political structure. The ethos of my current home, the United States, has a predominantly Anglo-centric worldview. India, where I spent my first twenty years, was the crown jewel of the colonial British Empire. Hence, indirectly England has cast a long shadow on my education and life choices — not only the choice of English as a medium of communication but also the love of cricket, trains, and tea with milk — even though the time I have spent in England has been the few tourist visits passing through London. With travel restricted everywhere during covid, the next best thing we have is history.
The English and Their History is a delightful book to read, especially when you consider its length, a thousand pages with a hundred pages of notes. The book focuses on English history (as against British history) starting from the Roman invasion in BCE to Cameron’s Prime Ministership in 2014. As David Frum notes, England is the “largest nation in Europe to lack a state of its own”. Tombs discusses this anomaly (elsewhere, he notes the lack of English folk arts) head on,
the idea that England does not or should not have its own history is interested given and rather strange: it is unimaginable that the same argument can be made about Ireland, Scotland or France.
It is an excellent, well-researched book and, to be sure, an opinionated view of English history. Tombs does not hesitate to go against the grain of accepted wisdom. I found his narrative style scholarly but pithy, and the writing is adorned with his playful social commentary. I highly recommend the book, both for its readability and its ambitious scope.
Tombs is an academic historian of medieval France and views himself as an outsider historian, and not a natural candidate to write the book. He quotes Thomas Hobbes:
a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without a country, living under his own law only.
Despite emphasizing the title as “their” history, Tombs very much admires England and Englishness.
Tombs notes that the United Kingdom (properly, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) has never become “united” in the sense of the French Republic, which is “one and indivisible”. Even now, many people often mistakenly speak of “England” when they mean Great Britain or the United Kingdom.
This lack of union is amazingly visible in modern sports. The “home” nations — England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — have different football teams. All four teams played in the 1962 FIFA World Cup as separate countries. Three (England, Scotland, and Wales) teams in the Rugby Six Nations Cup are a part of the UK, but Northern Ireland Rugby plays for the All-Ireland Rugby team. The English Cricket Team is actually the “England and Wales” Cricket team. Scotland has a separate cricket team. Northern Ireland cricket (like rugby) plays as a part of the All-Ireland cricket team.
It is always curious to see many nations of the UK compete in myriad combinations and then combine as a nation for the Olympics. The modern national identity has slowly usurped the English identity in Britain, as it has happened in “unified” countries such as Italy, Spain, and Indonesia. Britishness as opposed to Englishness has become an increasingly dominant national identity in the last century. For instance, Indians who settled in the UK, think of themselves as British rather than English.
English vs. French: Kingdoms and Languages
For the entirety of English history, since the Norman conquest in 1066, France has persisted as England’s constant enemy. England and France were almost always at loggerheads throughout history. For a while, England – as the Angevin Empire – ruled almost half of modern France, the land bordering the Bay of Bissau from Normandy to the Pyrenees. The debate over the ownership and ascendancy of the French court culminated in the Hundred Years War. A series of conflicts including the American Revolutionary war, the Seven-Year War, the Napoleonic Wars, and many skirmishes in colonies everywhere — the Americas, India, and Africa — then followed. Although there were the occasional alliances of convenience (usually through marriages among royals), the First World War was the first time the rivals allied against a common enemy. Even after that, there were displays of prickliness, notably when Charles de Gaulle repeatedly denied the UK entry into the European market. Now the level of denial has reversed roles.
The English language irreversibly changed after the Norman conquest. Despite the rich literature in Old English (Beowulf) that even preceded French literature, the English language came to be subjugated and relegated to peasant life.
The Normans eradicated written English as the language of government and undermined it as the language of literature, and spoken English ceased to be the language of the elite society. […] It was long believed that English largely disappeared except as a peasant dialect. Walter Scott in Ivanhoe (1819) made the famous point that English became the language of the farmyard (swine, ox, calf) and French that of the table (pork, beef, veal).
In England, the nobles spoke French and the clergy, Latin. The peasants spoke English. To see how chasm in class difference persists — visualize in your mind’s eye, how “hearty welcome” (originating from Old English) sounds compared to a “cordial reception” (originating from French). French was the language of the elite in England. The English King George I (who was originally Georg Ludwig Von Braunschweig-Luneberg, the prince of Hanover) spoke no English.
I have previously speculated that the humble beginnings of the English language gave it nimbleness to become a global language. English thrives as a popular language partly because of its ability to borrow words to fit circumstances, instead of limiting itself under the hegemony of purist ideals.
The accents specify geographic origins even to the day — likely because of the limited geographical reach of the working-class communities. While most people are familiar with the Received Pronunciation popularized by the BBC newsreaders and political leaders, the English accents are multitudinous. In fact, English accents are much more diverse — and some of them arguably carry more baggage — than American accents. You might have come across the working class “northern accent” when Director Fiona Hill described her mining family roots during the Trump impeachment hearings. Cricket fans are very familiar with the Yorkshire accent in the commentaries of Geoff Boycott. Also, see the captioning team on Stephen Colbert’s Daily show struggle with Jodie Whittaker’s accent.
Industrial England
China and India had ancient civilizations and advanced societies during various periods, but the modern Industrial revolution “took off” in England. Why did the modern Industrial Revolution begin in England, and not in France or Spain, notwithstanding their enormous efforts and ambitions? Tombs attributes the success to four reasons that went hand-in-hand: Technology, Wages, Consumption, and Energy.
First, there was a burst of new technologies and inventions — the steam engine, the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the condenser, and the “mule” — which helped harness energy through coal and steam. High wages in England (which were higher than the wages in other contemporary cities of note, Amsterdam, Vienna, Florence, and Delhi) made these productivity improvements imperative. Because of the educated working class within England, a ready-made consumption market was available. Finally, assisted by breakthroughs in technology, coal mining gave an opening to industries to scale up the energy production for growing demand.
Imperial England and India
Tombs argues that Imperial England was a force of good for most parts of the world — by comparing wages and growth in colonies before the British colonization — except in India, where he concedes the debate is complicated and ongoing. This seems to be a bit of academic hand wringing. Not to mention that the conclusion relies on the premise that the colonial rule in India is substantially atypical.
The Anarchy by William Dalrymple argues how the British East India Company was essentially the first “too big to fail” company of the world — funded and backed by the ruling class in Britain, who profiteered gigantically from the private effort. Almost no one denies that the social and economic costs of large-scale famines of the 18th century, but the debate usually meanders into territories on whether the British were worse than the Mughals — part academic, and partly driven by ethnocentric concerns.
A concatenated debate is whether that things improved when India transferred from East India Company to the dominion of the British crown. While Tombs’s take is positive on the impact of imperial England on economic growth, he does not shy from describing the acts of atrocities that the British committed during sepoy mutiny, the doctrine of lapse, or later, Gen. Dyer’s atrocities in the 20th century. He attributes the costs of the imperial and colonial disasters to the British elite — 1.5% of the British population — instead of English people.
Anti-Slavery
Despite its complicit participation in the globalization of the slave trade, English people were among the earliest to begin abolitionism, which was the earliest anti-racist movement. Hurried by the impeachment of Hastings, the anti-slavery movement was a homegrown working-class sensitivity to the darkest sides of Britain’s “imperial aggrandizement” — a naval power sustained but the profits of colonial trade. Here, too, he attributes the development to the British masses, the early Quakers, and other activists. Losing the American colonies, Tombs argues, made the public less willing to overlook the “buccaneering immorality of slavery”. This effect, he proposes, continues even today in the ethnic and racial integration of Caribbean, Indian, and Pakistani immigrants in the fabric of Britain.
Evolution of Culture, Travel & Sports
The confluence of various facets of the industrial revolution (technology growth, educated working class, and relatively high wages) democratized leisure, which led to more reading, travel, and sports.
Newsletters are the rage nowadays. They all seek to upstage the Grey Lady in quality of writing, precisely when NYT is undergoing a renaissance of sorts in building a monolith platform of writing talent. But the newspapers had humble beginnings as low-quality books, going back to days when books appeared as installments. (“Lord Chesterfield advised his son to take a few torn-off pages of Latin poetry to the lavatory to read before putting them to practical use”, Tombs remarks with redolent wit). The earliest newspapers, Norwich Post (1701) and Courant (1702) began fledgling in England, and within fifty years, there were more papers circulated in London than in any other capital in the world.
Smokestacks of the industrial revolution meant many English people lived in dense urban areas — while the posh, manicured countryside was for the bourgeois few. In some sense, Europe, separated by the English channel, but not class, must have felt closer to the workers. Piqued, Englishmen and women traveled all over Europe. In the 1760s, over 40,000 English people traveled to Europe, mainly to France and Italy. Within a few decades, Thomas Cook began arranging itineraries for traveling crowds.
Organized sports are a direct outcome of urbanization (a market for spectatorship and newspaper publicity), labor regulations (shorter working hours, better pay), and improved transportation. Many of the top-flight English Premier League clubs rose from social gatherings of the working class: from pubs (Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur), churches (Aston Villa, Everton, and Fulham), and factories (West Ham, Arsenal). Playing for money, the working-class teams birthed the modern professional team sports.
The post-industrial revolution period was a Precambrian explosion of ideas for new codified competitive sports — cricket, baseball, football, badminton, field hockey, rugby, squash, and tennis. Sports also created an emphasis on toughness and mental strength (along with toxic masculinity and omertà). We see in this transition, the seeds of preference for physicality over intellectualism in the pursuit of leadership qualities.
The moralizing of athleticism has transplanted and continued unabated in America, perpetuating class barriers and bartering of profits among the coaches and university cartels by a romanticization of the victim: the amateur “student-athlete” as an ideal hero.
Non-violent Revolution
In a Burkean argument, Tombs suggests that since Magna Carta no major improvement came to England by violence. Much of the foundational pillars of liberty — trial by jury, habeas corpus, religious freedom — all arrived before the advent of representative democracy. Tombs makes a case that all organized political parties in England — Whigs, Liberals, Labor, Tories — emerged from religious predilections, rather than ideological differences. He expresses admiration for both Disraeli and Gladstone, as laying the seeds of parliamentary democracy in the isles.
The book glitters with provocative thoughts. For instance, even as he argues monarchy was not a stabilizing influence on England, he warns against the fetishization of democracy.
Democratization however fundamental it may seem to us, never generated great excitement. Victorians did not claim that British constitution was ‘democratic’, a word suggesting extreme Continental ideologies and American vulgarity; but they thought it provided effective government, guaranteed liberty, and was broadly representative of society.
Tombs stresses upon the effectiveness of state institutions deftly built on the religious sensibilities and communal participation of the English working class, and the understanding of landed gentry. In his view, England is one of the most ambitious societies to be built on these values.
For a book that seems to have some sympathies to the traditionalists (Toryism under Disraeli), Tombs has many unexpected post-war takes throughout the book. He admires Attlee (“nearest to secular sainthood of any modern politician”) and even likes the trade unionist Ernest Bevin. He criticizes Churchill (leader of backbench imperialists, “finest hour” speech was nonsensical) and Chamberlain (“advised to shoot Gandhi”). He recalls the protestations of doctors as Britain sets NHS up.
Tombs argues against the myth of Britain as a nation in decline. He views that contribution of Britain to the war, not just as a heroic participant — highlights of “Dunkirk spirit” and the stoicism during the Blitz — but also as a heroic overcoming of odds, and industrious effort of a nation that influenced and precipitated the fall of Third Reich.
I think there is no better place to start learning about England; There is much more to fill in here, but one can’t bind the memorable history of a proud nation in a thousand pages.
Some related books.
- E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
- William Dalrymple, The Anarchy
- W. Churchill, The History of English Speaking Peoples
- A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains