“A History of Britain, Volume III: The Fate of the Empire 1776 - 2000”, by Simon Schama

576 pages, Hyperion, ISBN-13: 978-0786868995

This is the third of Simon Schama’s A History of Britain trilogy. The subject of this volume may be British imperial history (especially in Ireland and India) but the particulars of that history remind one of all the great debates the world has been having since the Enlightenment – or, to be more precise, all the competing philosophies that people have killed, rioted and rebelled for throughout most of the world in the last, oh, three centuries, or so: equality vs freedom; economic security vs dynamism; rule by oligarch or by democracy; universal vs limited franchise; imperialism vs national self-determination; etc., etc., etc. The debate over the aesthetics of the environment are even represented as Schama shows throughout the book, from beginning to end, how political the act of perceiving and traveling through the English countryside has been over the years since writing this series began. But this book, even though it touches on all those issues, isn’t detailed enough to provide any conclusive answers to any side of those arguments, a point that Schama acknowledges up front. Rather, this volume reads more like a collection of personal essays on Britain than a detailed history. To be sure, you do get an overview of British history up through WWII, and to an American like me, it was nice to see some details about the actual philosophies of Disraeli and Gladstone, the complexities of Winston Churchill’s thought and shifting loyalties, Prince Albert’s contribution to Victoria’s reign, the controversies of rule in Ireland and India, and on and on. Still, I got the sense I was exposed to some elliptical references that only an educated Brit would know. Like many general histories, though, it left an appetite for learning more details.

All is not well with this penultimate work, however, as when Schama repeats that hoary feminist myth about a legal “rule of thumb” sanction for husbands to beat their wives. A running theme throughout Volume III is the use of British history, from Macaulay to Churchill and George Orwell, and how their perceptions of what the British past was guided their visions for the future, their notions of what war must preserve. Schama, though a modern-day Labourite, describes himself a “born-again Whig”; he didn’t just mean subscribing, in part, to a great man of history (although you can find that in his portrayal of the great, contradictory Churchill and his defense of the man, warts and all); he makes clear he mostly means Macaulay’s notion of an empire bringing democratic liberalism to the world, teaching its subjects, and then releasing them to become brothers in a common culture. Schama well-nigh rhapsodizes about this gift of empire at the end. In some ways, this book reminded me of Niall Ferguson’s Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power: both attempt to rehabilitate the British Empire while acknowledging its often emphasized downsides. Unlike the preceding volume, Schama lists many crimes of the British Empire; if he doesn’t genuflect at the altar of Imperial Guilt, he pauses for several moments of silence. Unlike Ferguson, he doesn’t quite come out and say it was, as a whole, all worth it. Still, Schama approvingly notes we get lovely Indian novels in English, West Indians in London, and Pakistanis breathing liberty in the Sceptered Isle.

Schama explicitly rejects the notion that what it means to be British is racially based; rather, it is what, in American terms, is called a proposition nation. While I appreciated the details of British history Schama gave me, I don’t buy this notion of nationhood, a notion that Schama is so passionate about that he lapses, at book’s end, into a brief, uncharacteristic bit of incoherence. Empires less liberal than Britain seem to have had trouble with diverse populations. Mass immigration, democracy, and multiculturalism are as unsustainable a combination in Britain as anywhere else. And Enoch Powell, deliverer of the infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech against mass immigration, now seems less the paranoid ranter of Schama’s description and more of a Cassandra.

“A History of Britain, Volume II: The Wars of the British, 1603 – 1776”, by Simon Schama

544 pages, Hyperion, ISBN-13: 978-0786867523

This is the second of Simon Schama’s A History of Britain trilogy. This volume begins promisingly by borrowing from Conrad Russell’s important argument concerning the causes of the English Civil War. Russell placed considerable importance on the existence of “multiple kingdoms”, each of which exhibited its own set of interests during the early to mid-17^th Century; ultimately, these interests combined with Scottish and Irish rebellions to push the British Isles into bloody civil war. Although the multiple kingdom argument might have been used as a starting point for a history explaining interactions between these kingdoms, Schama spends the remainder of his book retelling tried and true stories of English high politics. It is true that readers learn about Stuart efforts to create a British identity in the early 17^th Century, the Darien scheme, the Glencoe Massacre, the Battle of the Boyne, and the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions, but Scotland and Ireland are otherwise missing from this book (apparently, as far as Schama is concerned, Wales was entirely integrated into England by this point, an argument that many Welsh historians would disagree with). Although these events are exceptionally important, they remain but a few chapters in a long relationship.

Just as a truly “British” dynamic is missing from the book, so, too, is any substantial recognition that British history constitutes more than high politics. Social and cultural developments are also extremely important; unfortunately, the social history covered here is limited to interesting accounts of prostitution in 18^th Century London, alcohol consumption, and the growing popularity of tea and sugar. The infamous Black Acts are also mentioned, but Schama’s treatment is limited to elite motives for the growing number of capital offenses on the statute books and the growing importance of landed wealth under Walpole. There is nothing incorrect in Schama’s treatment, but in some ways it misses the point by failing to acknowledge that 18^th Century Britain was at least as divided by class as it was by national identity (if national identity is even the right term). Class was an important factor standing in the way of the development of a British identity, a factor that should not be limited to a few pages (indeed, if “modernization” theorists are correct in linking the industrial revolution to the development of nationalism, then class should be an essential topic of discussion).

All this having been said, it is important to note that Schama has not attempted to write a scholarly history of the British Isles. His book was written as a companion to a multi-part television history of Britain (as stated in my review of Volume I) and so limits itself to well-known stories that make for good television. Most readers/viewers probably do not care very much about British versus English history, or even the role of social and cultural history in its development; I imagine that most want to be entertained and to learn something along the way. Schama’s book certainly meets such criteria. Perhaps as a result of its intended popular audience, Schama does not include footnotes; this provides a considerable headache for those interested in the sources from which he has drawn his stories. At various points Schama tells tales of poisoned enemas, hemorrhoids suffering generals, and other behind the scenes dramas (this reader, for one, was interested in learning more about where the author had found these stories). More troubling, Schama borrows arguments from scholars like Linda Colley and Conrad Russell yet, while both are listed in the bibliography, they are never listed in the text as the originators of the ideas being presented. Footnotes would assure these scholars the credit they richly deserve. To his credit, Schama’s book is entertaining, readable, and fun, to say nothing of the numerous beautiful color illustrations; amateur history buffs will find much to enjoy when reading it and glancing through the pictures, the facts presented are generally accurate and the stories told often fascinating – but scholars interested in learning more about the development of British identity, or even the evolution of British history should look elsewhere.