An Antidote to British Oikophobia – David Conway

The names of well-known battlegrounds loom giant within the histories of virtually all states and nations. These days, nevertheless, historical past has turn into a collection of fiercely contested battles in an ongoing tradition battle in America and Britain.

Within the case of America, an early salvo was fired by Lynne Cheney in October 1994. In an op-ed within the Wall Road Journal entitled “The Finish of Historical past,” Cheney excoriated within the strongest attainable phrases the proposals UCLA’s Nationwide Middle for Historical past in Faculties put ahead for America’s public faculties. Cheney was involved about its politically appropriate account of American historical past, which she characterised as:

George Washington makes solely a fleeting look and is rarely described as our first president. … Probably the most usually talked about topics … is McCarthy and McCarthyism. The Ku Klux Klan will get its fair proportion, too. … Harriet Tubman, an African-American who helped rescue slaves … is talked about six occasions. Two white male contemporaries of Tubman’s, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, get one and nil mentions, respectively. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and the Wright brothers make no look in any respect.

Cheney received that spherical within the tradition battle, because the publication she criticised received nowhere in faculties. Maybe the creators have been simply forward of their time, although, as a result of all of the traits Cheney decried are on full show within the far-more-successful 1619 Mission. In the meantime, a equally bitter dispute has been brewing throughout the Atlantic because the Seventies. This was when child-centered progressives succeeded in substituting a “new historical past” for the fact-based curriculum that had lengthy been taught. The sharp decline in historic data amongst British residents led to one thing of a pushback beneath the Conservative-led coalition authorities of David Cameron. Between 2010 and 2013, Michael Gove, as Secretary of State for Training, succeeded in renewing a fact-based chronological strategy in direction of British historical past from its earliest occasions, although his undertaking remains to be unfinished and could be discarded with the appearance of the brand new Labour Authorities of Sir Keir Starmer. 

A member of the working group tasked with producing this mannequin historical past curriculum is Robert Tombs, Emeritus Professor of French Historical past on the College of Cambridge. Tombs has labored to fight the adoption by Britain’s faculties, universities, and museums of a posture in direction of its nationwide historical past that obsesses over the evils of colonialism to the exclusion of most else. The comparisons to the 1619 Mission are apparent.

As Tombs defined in a lecture delivered final September, he got here comparatively late to the problem. He didn’t turn into totally conscious of how virulently antipathetic Britain’s universities had turn into in direction of Britain’s previous till a succession of occasions triggered by the George Floyd riots in Could 2020. He was alerted to the disaster by the sudden de-naming of buildings (Liverpool College’s Gladstone Constructing and Edinburgh College’s Hume constructing), an enquiry by his personal college into its involvement within the slave commerce, and by campaigns to take away the statues of Sir Robert Peel and Cecil Rhodes from public areas. 

In 2021, Tombs created an organisation devoted to combating these traits, which he named “Historical past Reclaimed.” Historians Jonathan Clark and Niall Ferguson are amongst its present members. The first purpose is to not deny that colonialism entailed actual evils, however merely to dispute the concept solely hurt was delivered to Britain’s colonies. Tombs and different members of Historical past Reclaimed have sought to instill steadiness by highlighting a number of the advantages the British delivered to these whom they colonised, in addition to to stress how concerned Britain was in pioneering the ending of the slave commerce and slavery.

Tombs’s much-feted work, The English and Their Historical past, was initially revealed in 2014, a number of years earlier than he took up literary arms within the present historical past wars. In that first version, Tombs devotes appreciable area to England’s early involvement within the slave commerce in addition to to its pioneering function in ending it. He additionally enumerates the harms that colonisation delivered to the indigenous populations of the territories it colonised together with the advantages. Populations have been decimated via the ailments the colonisers introduced towards which the indigenous populations had no immunity. They have been additionally usually topic to forcible uprooting and displacement from their conventional homelands, and in a number of situations merely massacred upon the slightest pretext. Nevertheless, as Tombs factors out, had the English not colonised the territories, different European powers most probably would have, with equally malign penalties when it comes to illness and destruction.

Within the unique version of his guide, Tombs is preoccupied with different points than the present historical past wars. He provides a simple narrative account of the historical past of England because the arrival of the Angles and Saxons within the fifth century. However Tombs additionally sought to clarify the manifold methods through which, over the centuries, the English have “remembered” their historical past, via monuments, artistic endeavors, music, and literature, however above all of their historic writings. 

The earliest such historic work Tombs cites is the Ecclesiastical Historical past of the English Individuals, an eighth-century work initially composed in Latin by the English monk, the Venerable Bede, cited by Tombs as having currently been heralded as “arguably the best English historian of all time.” Tombs additional relates how Bede assigned to the English “an mental and non secular significance … as one of many chosen Christian peoples … in God’s plan to unfold Christianity.”

In the course of the ensuing three centuries following Bede, the Anglo-Saxons got here to develop a unified kingdom, marked by a excessive degree of literacy and a particular language. Their nice nation-builder was Alfred the Nice, who, within the ninth century, succeeded in driving out marauding Vikings from a number of beforehand unbiased principalities in southern and jap England which he united beneath his rule.

Of Alfred’s seizure of London from the Vikings in 886, Tombs writes: “If we would like a start date for an English kingdom that is nearly as good as any. … He referred to his folks not as Saxons however as ‘Angelkcynn’—‘Englishkind’—Their language was ‘Englisc.’ … As Father of the Nation he due to this fact has a lot to suggest him.”

Neither Alfred nor his successors succeeded in completely driving out the Vikings from England earlier than 1066. This was when the ill-fated and newly topped King Harold defeated a military of invading Norwegian Vikings instantly earlier than he was defeated and killed in battle by the forces of William of Normandy, who invaded England claiming that Harold’s predecessor, Edward the Confessor, had promised the crown of England to him.

The Norman Conquest, as William’s profitable invasion and takeover of England is thought, is the primary of 4 successive historic episodes whose memorialisation by the English folks is of central significance to Tombs. In every case, Tombs is at pains to contest endemic myths which have grown up about them. 

Within the case of the Norman Conquest, the “reminiscence” whose accuracy Tombs seeks to dispute considerations the alleged imposition on the English folks of a infamous “Norman yoke.” It supposedly did this by forcibly depriving the English of their “historical liberties” which they didn’t start to get better till the Wonderful Revolution of 1688. Drawing on medieval and fashionable historians, Tombs seeks to put to relaxation the notion that the Norman Conquest was an unmitigated catastrophe for the English folks. He writes:

The system of presidency remained … as a result of it labored, and helped … [the Normans] to rule. Nevertheless it … differed essentially from … [those] on the Continent. … First, it was pretty uniform … and so tended to counteract the fragmentation of authority that had splintered European kingdoms and empires. … Second, it had a large diploma of participation … [s]o historical types of illustration … survived in England.

Many who consider England’s historical liberties have been extinguished by the Norman Conquest additionally consider that they started to be regained via the English Civil Conflict together with its aftermath, the “Wonderful Revolution” of 1688. In accordance with this view, Parliament’s deposition and execution of Charles l and the following deposition of his youthful son, James ll, marks the triumph of constitutionally restricted authorities over their makes an attempt at despotic rule. This extensively held method of “remembering” England’s tumultuous seventeenth century kinds the kernel of the so-called “Whig interpretation of historical past.” Considerably surprisingly, this interpretation was first propounded by a Frenchman, Paul Rapin de Thoras, a Huguenot soldier in William of Orange’s invading military. Of Rapin’s interpretation of England’s historical past, Tombs writes:

Rapin’s grew to become the usual … view of English historical past as a steady wrestle to defend historical freedoms. … [Its] climax … was the Wonderful Revolution, re-establishing Anglo-Saxon liberty. … This Whig historical past … grew to become the nationwide historical past, not solely of England, however of Britain and the US. … In England and America it nonetheless permeates textbooks, political rhetoric and in style historical past.

To this nonetheless extensively held view of English historical past, Tombs attaches little credence. Its demolition is alleged to have begun with David Hume’s six-volume Historical past of England (1757) through which, Tombs relates, Hume set about “demolishing each Whig shibboleth with grim relish”: 

Anglo-Saxon England [was] … “extraordinarily aristocratical,” oppressive and violent. There was no “Norman Yoke”: the Conquest had been helpful. … Liberty … got here not from resistance to the Crown … however from its rising energy. … Within the Civil Conflict, the royalists had been proper to defend authorized authority, on which true liberty depended. … True liberty … was not historical however fashionable, a consequence particularly of the expansion of commerce and cities. It was not, due to this fact, an historical Teutonic inheritance.

After explaining how, regardless of Hume’s Historical past, the Whig interpretation gained ascendancy via such advocates because the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and his great-nephew, George Macaulay Trevelyan, Tombs describes the way it ultimately was laid to relaxation by later historians, most notably Herbert Butterfield: “The fashionable consensus,” writes Tombs, “exhibits putting similarities to the interpretation of … Hume. The Civil Conflict was a political accident. … The final within the collection of European wars of faith. … Parliament was not pursuing a centuries-old constitutional wrestle of liberty towards tyranny.”

The following episode in English historical past of central curiosity to Tombs is its acquisition, largely within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of an enormous international empire. Right here once more, there’s a mainstream view of what occurred that Tombs is inclined to dispute. Lastly ending simply after the Second World Conflict, the British Empire has come to be remembered in two conflicting methods, each doubtful in Tombs’ view. One customary account, Tombs explains, is a legacy of the Whig interpretation of British historical past. On this model: 

The British noticed themselves as having duties in addition to pursuits, and, like different highly effective folks, noticed their pursuits because the pursuits of all. … It was strongly felt to be an obligation to offer management and help the forces of progress … by power if vital. … The ideological foundations of [this] international coverage have been above all Whig concepts of English historical past because the triumph of progress. 

The British, in different phrases, understood it as their vocation to be rulers of an enormous abroad empire. Tomb’s view of this stance is damning: “There was deadly conceitedness right here, mixed with naively optimistic generosity, believing that the liberty and prosperity England had not too long ago secured must be unfold.” 

Tombs is equally impatient, although, with those that view the British Empire because the epitome of evil. As remarked earlier on this evaluate, it’s a view that has gained traction among the many British solely comparatively not too long ago. Regardless of their manifold ethical failings in direction of these amongst whom they settled and colonised, Tombs refuses to just accept this adverse verdict on the British Empire. He writes:

Financial historians principally agree that having an empire on steadiness made little distinction, both good or unhealthy. Free commerce neutralized imperial possession, and Whitehall wouldn’t privilege British corporations. … The massive gainers … have been the nations supplying British and European markets, whether or not inside or exterior the empire … [even in India’s case whose colonization arguably brought periodic famine and much misrule] after 1880 Indian industrial manufacturing grew by [a rate] … comparable with Germany. 

Lastly, Tombs addresses the rising conviction amongst many sections of English society that Britain is a nation in decline, now not match for or suited to political independence. This view started to emerge within the latter days of empire, however grew to become particularly pronounced on the finish of it. Tombs writes:

For many individuals, from Tory radicals to left-wing journalists, decline has formed their imaginative and prescient of England as a decaying relic. … “Declinism” grew to become a set of concepts and assumptions … extensively taken as self-evident, and so they retain some affect right now.

Tombs, nevertheless, could have none of it. He writes:

Declinism … focuses on a deeply pessimistic view of postwar England’s weak spot contrasted with a grossly overblown picture of its earlier energy. … When Britain emerged as a big power, after the Conflict of Spanish Succession in 1713, it was the smallest and but most international of the world’s half-dozen or so strongest states. … It occupies the same place three centuries later. … Nor has England declined economically. … The change has been that just a few different nations have caught up.

Tombs revealed a revised version of his guide in direction of the top of 2023, including two new chapters. The primary introduced the narrative as much as and past the loss of life and burial of Queen Elizabeth ll in September 2022 to the coronation of her son Charles in Could 2023. Tombs concludes that chapter by observing that the funeral and coronation “present that England and the UK usually are not simply an enormous shopping center, a ‘UK’ plc. … We stay a neighborhood, a fancy of countries and areas centred on England.”

Tombs concluded the revised work by reflecting on the significance of correcting the distorted historical past that progressives have currently propagated by focusing solely on its darkish facet and on the nation’s shortcomings. He writes:

At present lively makes an attempt are made to magnify … evils and to repudiate a lot of nationwide and certainly Western historical past. … Lately this has been accentuated by a selective narrative obsessive about slavery and racism. … However this can be a distortion. … By the requirements of humanity as an entire, England over the centuries has been among the many richest, most secure and finest ruled locations on earth. … Not uniquely so: the lot of the entire Western world has been comparable. … However for that, too, the folks of England during the last 400 years can take a share of credit score: for his or her financial and technological labours; for his or her pioneering of the rule of legislation, of accountability and illustration in authorities, of non secular toleration and of civil establishments; and for his or her decided function within the defeat of contemporary tyrannies.

Turning into conversant with these details is among the advantages that the English can derive from dispassionate research of their historical past. It’s misplaced when its research is deserted or corrupted by accounts that exaggerate the adverse features. Undoubtedly, one thing very comparable will be stated of the comparably optimistic contribution America has made each to its residents and to the world extra typically. This makes its research, when undistorted, as doubtlessly as edifying and unifying for Individuals because the undistorted research of their nationwide historical past can and must be for the English.