A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
by Andrew Roberts
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2006, 736 pages)
Presidents and Prime Ministers are busy people. So the fact that, in recent months, it has been reported that both George W Bush and John Howard have been reading the same lengthy book might be considered surprising. In fact, the absence of any reports that Tony Blair has been a fellow reader is arguably more the surprise.
The reason for Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 Since 1900 being the set text for the "coalition of the willing" is that, in many ways, it reads as a lengthy historical rationale for the positions of Bush, Blair and Howard in relation to the Iraq war.
Somewhat immodestly, Andrew Roberts declares that his purpose is similar to what Thucydides did in linking the various conflicts between Athens and Sparta into one great Peloponnesian War. Roberts argues that "the four distinct but successive attacks on the English-speaking peoples, by Wilhelmine Germany, the Axis powers, Soviet communism, and now Islamic fundamentalism ought to be seen as one overall century-long struggle between the English-speaking peoples' democratic pluralism and fascist intolerance of different varieties".
In recognising antecedent historians, Roberts is more obviously following in the footsteps of Winston Churchill, whose four volumes of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples were published in the late 1950s. There is a thematic similarity between the two writers in that both emphasise political history, but there are also significant differences.
Churchill stopped his narrative nearly half a century before his time of writing -- Roberts has brought his as close to the current day as possible. While the fact that Churchill was writing about events including the English and American Civil Wars, the American War of Independence and the War of 1812 meant that he could hardly present the English-speaking peoples as a constant united force, Roberts has more symmetric interests to portray. Finally, their writing styles are very different. One critic wrote of Churchill's work that "one would gladly have sacrificed some of the carefulness of narration -- the product of many hands on many proofs -- for a few more of Churchill's own judgements on men and affairs". In Roberts' case the reverse very much applies -- fewer judgements and more hands on the proofs would have made this a much better book.
Roberts' penchant for passing judgement starts to grate after a while, especially as his hero-worship of some individuals, such as both Presidents Roosevelt, and his hatred of some others borders on the eccentric. Even when the issue is within the English-speaking camp and has no political overtones, Roberts will not let us make up our own minds -- he adjudicates, for example, on which of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey actually discovered penicillin.
The opinionated style also leads him to use lines that may be appropriate in certain contexts, but which jar in what is meant to be a serious historical work. For instance, he retrospectively "hopes that the great man (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) did indeed find some happiness with his lissom secretary" and later, when expressing scepticism about the benefits of the US space programme, comments that "Osama bin Laden was deeply irritated that "the Infidels survived the blasphemy of walking on the moon", so it wasn't all money wasted". There are also regular references to unusual bets between individuals at London clubs -- a leitmotif that is both distracting and irritating.
More "hands on many proofs" may have eliminated some of the book's far too many factual or typographical errors. The Brighton bombing which almost claimed the life of Margaret Thatcher was not in 1985, Nelson Mandela was not released from gaol in 1994 and the Twin Towers were not bombed in 2003. There is no city called Phnom Perth, nor does one travel east from London to get to Herefordshire. An Australian proofreader may have pointed out that Joseph Chifley was universally known as Ben and that Menzies was not Prime Minister in 1938. At least Roberts does correctly say that the twentieth century started on 1 January 1901, not 1 January 1900.
There is no doubt that writing any sort of global or broad history of this type makes the maintenance of a smoothly flowing narrative a challenge, but others have done a better job than Roberts. Roberts constantly changes topics. For instance, readers are asked to consider the Mabo judgment in Australia, American eating habits, the 1968 US Presidential election, and Man's landing on the moon all on just one double-page spread.
However, despite the fact that Roberts will probably not rank with Thucydides and Churchill when one assesses histories, he has nonetheless produced a book which, despite its various faults, is eminently readable. His writing is never dull and, while he may present too many arguments, it must be acknowledged that he often manages to be both entertaining and persuasive, especially when contradicting many of the received wisdoms of the day.
He justifies every war undertaken by the English-speaking peoples from the Boer War to Iraq and comments that usually things start badly before victory is achieved in the end. The only times when victories were not achieved were Suez and Vietnam, both of which were failures of will rather than arms. However, in relation to Vietnam, he does note that the prosecution of the war, even though it ended in defeat, gave the countries of South East Asia an invaluable twelve-year breathing space in which to develop their societies peacefully. Ironically, the price of holding the Communist threat at bay in Vietnam has been decades of ridicule of the domino theory from the Left.
As well as defending causes that have been treated unfairly by history, Roberts is a great defender of unfairly maligned individuals. Given Roberts' views on prosecuting wars to their conclusion, it is perhaps surprising that he wants to rehabilitate Lord Lansdowne, who sought a negotiated peace in 1917, but Roberts says that there were arguments in favour and that Lansdowne deserves credit for having pursued it "at the right time and in the right way".
More predictably, Roberts seeks to rehabilitate Rex Dyer, the subject of a recent biography entitled The Butcher of Amritsar. Roberts says that while Dyer was responsible for the deaths of 379 people, his actions in ordering the 1919 massacre at Amritsar, in India, prevented the deaths of many more. Roberts' argument on this incident foreshadows his justification of Hiroshima. In this regard, Roberts arguably achieves a consistency that eluded Churchill. Churchill shared Roberts' view of Hiroshima but, in volume two of his history, condemned Cromwell for the massacre of 3,000 soldiers who refused to surrender at Drogheda in Ireland, despite Cromwell (like Dyer and the Allies in 1945) arguing that the example of their deaths produced a net increase in the number of lives saved.
Although most of Roberts' book is devoted to the great assaults on the democratic West during the past 100 years, there is also some coverage given to economic issues, such as the Depression and the establishment of Britain's welfare state. On the latter, he points out how, in the lengthy debates in Parliament as its establishment was being considered, only a minuscule amount of time was spent considering the issue of how it was to be funded.
There is very little social history in the work, although when it does appear, Roberts is sound. He refutes suggestions that American gangsterism between the wars was the result of laissez-faire capitalism, commenting that "since it arose largely through the gross restraint of trade involved in Prohibition, one might more profitably blame the rise of gangsterism on the nanny state".
While the heroes of Roberts' work are select leaders of English-speaking countries, the villains are not only the Kaiser, Hider, Stalin and bin Laden, but "those amongst the English-speaking peoples prepared to appease, apologise for and even on occasion to laud and aid their mortal enemies". Certainly the well-deserved attacks on those in this category provide the most entertaining feature of the book. As well as a myriad of British and American examples, Australians are not forgotten, with Wilfred Burchett, Manning Clark, Germaine Greer, and John Pilger all being recognised.
But it is not just those on the extreme Left who incur Roberts' wrath. He particularly does not like Louis Mountbatten, John Major, Bill Clinton and almost anyone from Ireland. His vitriolic attacks on Ted Heath are classic invective.
While the references to the English-speaking countries beyond the United States and Britain occasionally seem a little contrived, he does sometimes work them into the main narrative effectively. In his discussion of Britain's role in the European community, he captures the frustration of Australians standing in the foreigners' line at Heathrow, while the nationals of countries who spent much of the twentieth century attacking English-speaking peoples breeze through the domestic line.
Before this work, Andrew Roberts was best known for his biographies of Halifax and Salisbury. While his transition to big-picture historian has not been an unqualified success, he should be commended for at least producing a work that goes some way towards rebalancing the history shelves of our bookshops and libraries that are currently weighed down by the tomes of Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Tariq Ali.
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