The first is England's relations with its neighbours. To me, two threads run through this narrative. They showed a confidence, sometimes an arrogance, which in the 19th and early-20th centuries led them briefly to bestride the globe, with an imperial countenance they still cannot shed. The English were, on any showing, a remarkable people, asserting their power and spreading their culture first across the British Isles and then round the world.
No country has such an eventful past, from the time when Germanic Angles and Saxons first pushed westwards across ancient Britain after the Romans withdrew in the fifth century. History must be continuous, building from cause to effect and reaching a crescendo in the present day.Įngland's narrative flow should be exhilarating and empowering. But they are history neutered of argument, uncreative, essentially dumb. Sturdy tales of slavery, gender oppression and the defeat of Germany yield anecdotes that may raise the reader's blood pressure. The story of the nation in which we live is not a stage set crowded with isolated tableaux: the Norman conquest followed by Henry VIII, Charles I, the Industrial Revolution and finally leaping to Hitler. When the British tried to rule southern Iraq in 2003 and to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2006, they also ignored history.
When Margaret Thatcher imposed a poll tax on the Scots in 1989, she seemed blind to the history of such taxes – disastrously so. Without history, politics is fumbling in the dark. The reason for learning history is not to hear stories but to follow themes that might help us understand the world about us.
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