This Little Britain
Page 27
Since I obviously don’t understand these issues, I’ll return instead to the question that opened the book: Who are we? Britain has obviously been something of a historical oddity for quite some length of time, but what is it exactly that lies at the heart of its distinctiveness? The American economic historian David Landes, in asking that question about the narrower topic of industrialization, listed the social and political attributes that would, ideally, be manifested by an industrial or proto-industrial society: the need for personal liberty; for rights of property and contract; and for stable, honest, responsive, moderate and efficient government. Back at the birth of the industrial age, it was clearly Britain which came closest to meeting these needs. As Landes writes:
Britain, moreover, was not just any nation. This was a precociously modern, industrial nation…one key area of change: the increasing freedom and security of the people. To this day, ironically, the British term themselves subjects of the crown, although they have long—longer than anywhere—been citizens…
This was a society that shed the burdens of serfdom, developed a population of cultivators rather than peasants, imported industry and trade into the countryside, sacrificed custom to profit and tradition to comparative advantage. With mixed effect. Some found themselves impoverished but on balance incomes went up. Many found themselves landless, but mobility was enhanced and consciousness enlarged.
England gave people elbow room. Political and civil freedoms won first for the nobles (Magna Carta, 1215) were extended by war, usage and law to the common folk. To all of these gains one can oppose exceptions: England was far from perfect…But everything is relative, and by comparison with populations across the Channel, Englishmen were free and fortunate.
Landes’s comments here are pitch perfect. Here, in a nutshell, are the common themes behind such things as Bazalgette’s sewers, Newton’s Royal Society, Pitt’s tax collectors, Edward I’s parliaments, Norfolk’s farmers, Anson’s navy, Henry II’s judges and all the rest. By contrast with the rest of Europe, Britons were freer than most for longer than any.
This freedom wasn’t the freedom of anarchy; it wasn’t the freedom of the Wild West or Yeltsin’s Russia. On the contrary, this freedom came with—and was intricately reliant on—a minutely ordered society. Those Victorian Britons decided that London would benefit from sewers, so they had them built. Then, on seeing their effectiveness, they rolled out the same public health innovations all across the country, doing so in a way that was legal, democratic and simultaneously attentive to costs and responsive to need. That combination of central consultative authority and disciplined local effect was equally visible in the Elizabethan Poor Law, Henry II’s common law and indeed in the hundreds and shires of Alfred’s England.
The mention of Alfred suggests the final triumvir of British distinctiveness: alongside liberty and order, we need to mention age. Our institutions are old. Alfred’s England didn’t just rejoice in its shires and hundreds, it had its sheriffs, courts, gelds and fyrds too, each of which institutions survived the Conquest, and some of which are still going strong today. No other country has maintained, unbroken, such old state structures. We know something of the institutions of Alfred; much farther back than that, and our knowledge starts to dissolve into speculation. All the same, hints are there: early legal codes, early evidence of orderly and effective state power, early government through consultation, early evidence of land and service assessments. In short, the best guess is that our institutions and habits of mind have origins that are literally prehistoric.*
Ours, then, is a uniquely old, free and orderly country, which you’d think would be a fairly good recipe for a confidently positive sense of national identity. Yet there’s a general sense, and I suspect an accurate one, that confidence in our identity has declined sharply over the past few decades. That decline is at the same time easy to understand and hopelessly inappropriate. As late as 1950, it would have been easy for any Briton to believe in British distinctiveness. That belief would hardly even have been a delusion. Certainly, the British Empire was reduced (after India) and much weakened, but it was still the world’s largest such entity. Closer to home, with democracy still young in Germany and Italy, absent in Spain and Portugal, shell-shocked in France, then the depth of British democratic traditions must certainly have seemed distinctive, to put it mildly. Within a generation or two, however, the empire vanished and democracy triumphed utterly (inside ‘old’ Europe, anyway), as have the rule of law, industrial capitalism and all the rest.
After centuries of believing ourselves, with reason, to be different from ‘abroad’, Britain suddenly finds itself looking very much the same as our counterparts elsewhere in the rich world. Though we’re certainly a bit more American than most (think of our labour markets, our scientists or our jails), broadly speaking we’re just the same as everyone else, a bit better here, a bit worse there, not really so distinctive at all. Indeed, we’re also having to get used to the fact that some of our ideas and institutions haven’t just been widely disseminated, they’ve been improved in the process and are being re-exported back, old friends in new clothes. A free press, for example, may have first taken root in Britain, but it took European legislators to enshrine freedom of speech in law, and it wasn’t until 1998—some three hundred years after the lapse of the Licensing Acts—that the right came to be enshrined in British law and actionable through British courts. Again, we may have invented the sport of football, but it’s we who are seeking to emulate the technical gifts and tactical nous of our neighbours, not vice versa. In short, our ancient, cherished, much-vaunted uniqueness has vanished and is never likely to return.
Good. If we want to celebrate anything in our history, then nothing is more worthy of celebration than that loss of distinctiveness. To worry about it would be like a father getting upset by his son beating him at cricket, or a mother annoyed by her daughter’s sparkling university grades. Over a period of centuries—a millennium and a half, at least—the inhabitants of the British Isles came slowly to hammer out a concept of modernity that was largely free, fair, technically advanced, prosperous and peaceful. That was their second-greatest achievement. The greatest was simply this: to have exported that model so widely and so well that it no longer looks British at all.
* Those habits certainly came with the Saxons, but one can’t rule out the possibility that the Celtic Britons also knew something about how to run a state. To add to the long list of exceptionalisms noted so far in this book, here’s a last one to add to the pile: by AD 500, ‘barbarians had taken control of every part of the Western Roman Empire, excet one—Roman Britain, where an invasion was certainly in progress but still extremely partial. The invasion wouldn’t be finally complete until Llewellyn’s defeat by Edward I in 1282.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
History, more so than fiction, is a collaborative sport. I’ve been hugely indebted to Maurice Keen, Prof Donald Read, Mary Welstead, and Tom Bingham for extensive comments on various drafts of the book. Between them, they’ve added wisdom and saved me from many an inaccuracy. Those that remain are my responsibility, of course. Thanks too to Simon Ager for his Shavian expertise, Victoria Whitworth for her Anglo-Saxon, David Franklin for his Latin and Joshua Rey for his forklift truck know-how. Bill Hamilton has been an outstanding agent, Mitzi Angel the best of editors. My thanks to them both, and to all at Fourth Estate.
SOURCES
A scholarly bibliography of the material covered in this book would be substantially longer than the book itself, and in any case good bibliographies on the various topics addressed are not hard to find elsewhere. I’ve therefore limited myself to listing sources for material directly quoted in the text. My thanks to all copyright holders for their kind permission to reprint their material. Where texts are readily available online, I’ve noted as much.
Introduction
Page xi, ‘How about a couple of yobs …’: The Times, August 2005
Page xiii: ‘British industry came t
o lead …’: Home Office, Life in the United Kingdom, TSO, 2004
Page xvi, ‘Be advised …’: Seamus Heaney, Open Letter, Field day Pamphlet no. 2 1983
Page xviii, ‘Many modern writers …’: N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, Penguin, 2004
Shaw’s Potato
Page 11: Shavian alphabet: sample reproduced by kind permission of Simon Ager at Omniglot.com
Declining to Conjugate
Page 15, ‘Ic selle the …’: example quoted from McCrum, MacNeil & Cran, The Story of English, Faber, 3rd ed., 2002
A World of Squantos
Page 17, ‘And for the season …’: William Bradford, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth from 1602 to 1625, Alexander Young (ed.), Little, Brown, 1841. Available in full online
Lashings of Pop
Page 29, ‘This is perhaps one way …’: UNESCO website, 2006
Of Cows and Beef
Page 33, ‘In off the moors …’: Seamus Heaney (tr.), Beowulf, Faber, 1999
Page 35, ‘Foy porter, honneur garder …’: Guillaume de Machaut, ‘Foy porter’. Available online
Page 35, ‘Summer is y-comen in …’: anon, ‘The Cuckoo Song’ in Helen Gardner (ed.), The New Oxford Book of English Verse, OUP, 1972. Available online
Page 36, ‘I caught her with a rope …’: Ted Hughes, ‘February 17th’, New Selected Poems, 1957-1994, Faber, 1995
Page 37, ‘Yet fifteen years ago …’: Philip Larkin, ‘At Grass’, Collected Poems, Faber, 1988
Half-Chewed Latin
Page 38, ‘Priests cannot be found …’: quoted in Simon Schama, A History of Britain, BBC, 2000
Page 38, ‘were there a hundred popes …’: Robert Vaughan (ed.), Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe, Wycliffe Society, 1845. Available online
Page 39, ‘Blisful the man …’: this and other versions of the Bible referred to are all available online
The Rustics of England
Page 57, ‘We hear that you forbid …’: quoted in Christopher Hibbert, The Roots of Evil, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963
From the Same Mud
Page 71, ‘As of auncient and long tyme …’: Thomas Harman, Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, vulgarly called Vagabonds. Available online
A Bettir Lawe
Page 80, ‘Be it enacted by the Queen’s …’: this and subsequent snippets can be found in Ronald Butt, A History of Parliament: The Middle Ages, Constable, 1989
Page 83, ‘[King Edwin] answered that …’: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England, tr. J.A. Giles, HG Bohn, 1847. Available online
Page 86, ‘So a cloth merchant …’: Simon Schama, A History of Britain, BBC, 2000
Page 86, ‘The first kynge mey rule …’: Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, Clarendon Press, 1885. Available online
No Remote Impassive Gaze
Page 88, military manpower: data from Geoffrey Parker, ‘“The Military Revolution” — a Myth?’ in The Military Revolution Debate, Westview Press, 1995
Page 91, ‘a system of government which …’: N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, HarperCollins, 1997
Page 93, ‘Jack … turned aft …’: Patrick O’Brian, The Far Side of the World, HarperCollins, new edn 2003
Good King Frank
Page 96, ‘Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste…’: Most of this verse appears to be traditional — I haven’t succeeded in locating an author. The last two lines are my own.
A Most Strange and Wonderfull Herring
Page 103, ‘A most Strange and wonderfull …’: Fritz Levy, ‘The Decorum of News’, in News, Newspapers & Society in Early Modern Britain, Joad Raymond (ed.), Frank Cass, 1999
Page 103, ‘Proude heart, wilt thou not …’: Quoted in A History of News, Mitchell Stephens, Penguin, 1989
Page 104, ‘But now beholde …’: Quoted in A History of News, Mitchell Stephens, Penguin, 1989
Page 108, ‘And though all the winds of doctrine …’: John Milton, Areopagitica, Clarendon Press, 1874. Available online
Page 109, ‘Sirs unto me …’: ‘The Character of a Coffee House’, quoted by Joad Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere’, in News, Newspapers & Society in Early Modern Britain, Joad Raymond (ed.), Frank Cass, 1999
Invasion
Page 125, ‘six or eight men …’: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Nelson, 1852. Available online
Page 130, single ship encounters: data from N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World, HarperCollins, 1986
How to Be a Superpower
Page 134, warships: data from Jan Glete, Navies & Nations: Warships, Navies & State-Building in Europe and America, 1500-1860, Alriquist & Wiksell, 1993
Page 136-7, ship building and capture: data from ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution, 1690-1815’ by Daniel Baugh in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, J.R. Hill (ed.), OUP, 1995
Lacking Elan
Page 139, bellicosity: data reported in Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus, Penguin, 2001
Page 142, ‘[At the outset of war] it was starved …’: General Sir David Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, Cassell, 1983
Page 144, ‘The effect was to maintain …’: John Keegan, The First World War, Random House, 1998
Page 146, ‘To read this story …’: Niall Ferguson, Empire, Penguin, 2003
President Monroe’s Trousers
Page 148, ‘that we should consider any attempt …’: President Monroe’s Annual Message to Congress, 1823. Available online
The First Scientist
Page 157, ‘Gilbert’s work contains …’: William Whewell, quoted in Pumfrey & Tilley, William Gilbert: forgotten genius, Physicsweb.org, available online
Page 157, ‘To you alone, true philosophers …’: William Gilbert,De Magnete; see The Scientific Revolution: The Essential Readings, Marcus Hellyer (ed.), Blackwell, 2003
Ex Ungue Leonem
Page 161, ‘In November [1665, I] had …’: Isaac Newton, Correspondence — quoted in Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500-1750, Longman, 1983. Other Newton quotations drawn from Isaac Newton, James Gleick, HarperPerennial, 2004
Page 162, ‘Spread over a series of years …’: Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500-1750, Longman, 1983
Page 171, ‘Nature was to him …’ Isaac Newton, Optics, foreword by Albert Einstein, Courier Dover Publications, 1952. Available online
The Last Scientist
Page 174, ‘I do remember a particular moment …’: Michael Green, quoted in The Elegant Universe, presented by Brian Green, PBS, 2003. Transcripts available online
Raising Water by Fire
Page 187, ‘All right, but apart from …’: Chapman, Cleese et al, Life of Brian, Handmade Films, 1979
Page 192, ‘I was thinking upon the engine …’: James Watt, quoted in Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine, Icon Books, 2002
Page 195, ‘cannot boast of many inventions …’: quoted in Peter Mathias, ‘Skills and the Diffusion of Innovations from Britain in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 25, 1975
Page 196, ‘In short, in the history …’: Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, OUP, 1990
Colossus
Page 209, footnote ‘The delta stream of …’: Paul Gannon, Colossus, Atlantic Books, London, 2006
Page 210, ‘They [Bletchley Park] didn’t commission me …’: ibid.
Page 211, ‘The first modern electronic computers …’: quoted in Georgina Ferry, A Computer called Leo, HarperCollins, 2003
Whose Land?
Page 221, ‘In perusing the admirable treatise …’: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748. Available online
Page 223, ‘Oh England, England …’: Sir John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects, 1559 quoted in Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, Blackwell, 1978
The Monster with 10,000 Eyes
Page 225, population and GDP: data from Angus Maddison, The World Economy, V
ols I & II, OECD, 2006
Page 227, ‘Taxes upon everything …’: Sidney Smith, Edinburgh Review, 1820. Available online
Wheat Without Doong
Page 233, ‘The power of population …’: Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798. Available online
Page 235, calories per worker: data from James Simpson, ‘European Farmers and the “agricultural revolution”’, in Exceptionalism and Industrialisation, de la Escosura (ed.), CUP, 2004
Page 236, ‘Where peason [peas] ye had …’: Thomas Tusser, 1573, quoted in Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, CUP, 1996
A Wave of Gadgets
Page 241, GDP change: data here and subsequently from Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Vols I & II, OECD, 2006
The Food of the People
Page 255, tariffs: Data from Bordo, Eichengreen & Irwin, ‘Is globalisation today really different from globalisation a hundred years ago?’ Brookings Trade Forum, 1999
Page 257, capital invested: data from Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Vols I & II, OECD, 2006
Page 259, ‘How far, how just …’: Richard Cobden, Speech to House of Commons, 1842. Available online
The Gates of Mercy
Page 270, ‘many times by several nations …’: Richard Jobson, quoted in Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade, Picador, 1997
Page 271, ‘white men, with horrible looks …’: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789. Available online
Page 272, ‘The only plea they offer …’: Philip Quaque, quoted in The Economist, Feb 2007