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.
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