Review : The Shortest History

I saw James Hawes' The Shortest History of England in an airport bookshop. I almost picked it up there and then, but something stayed my hand so it took several more months before I finally read this.

It's an interesting little book, and not at all what I was expecting. It's not actually that short, and anyone claiming to have actually followed the tagline and read it in a day is certainly a liar. Would they do the additional tagline of remembering it for a lifetime ? Probably not. It's good, but it's not that good.

These descriptions plus the copious use of illustrations gave me the impression that this might be designed as an entertaining, humorous read. It isn't. It's light reading, and I suppose it's entertaining in that it's interesting, but it's not funny and isn't supposed to be. While the illustrations do look superficially like they're dumbing things down, I actually found them in the main to be very neat, concise ways of summarising important points in a memorable way. It's almost like reading a set of revision notes for a history exam.

Early on I was dismayed by a profoundly stupid remark that the sea enabled mass migration to Anglo-Saxon era Britain in a way that wasn't possible elsewhere due to the harshness of overland routes. This doesn't make any sense to me at all. Early sea travel was profoundly dangerous, whereas the mass land migrations of the Huns and other Asiatic tribes didn't seem all that problematic centuries earlier. I still have difficulty in wrapping my head around this whole weird notion.

But, with one or two other weird oddities here and there, this is an exception to the general trend. The book is a good history in itself, though necessarily thrifty with details. The real goal, though, is not to provide a history per se, but to give the reader a distilled set of conclusions the author has obviously spent a good deal more time formulating (citations litter the work like sand on the beach). Sometimes I wished it had been considerably longer, although, I did find that reading it quickly was advantageous. This is not a deep analytic history where you can pore over every page, but one that you should read rapidly to get swept along by the general current. Try and run it over with a fine-toothed comb and you'll have a nasty time of it.

Throughout, Hawes is keen to emphasise what in his view has made England unique - both in good and bad ways. Not all his conclusions are convincing and it would benefit a lot from a more detailed look at the other countries he occasionally contrasts England with - without these, the reader just has to take it all on trust. He also seems to fall victim to a sort-of mythical golden age fallacy, where we are currently in an inevitable era of decline and fall. Making the history deliberately short has some considerable virtues, but it also makes its sweeping, grand narrative feel rather less carefully considered than it ought to. 

And yet, while there are innumerable details one could quibble over, and no small number of which deserve to be shot down in flames (the practise of grave goods ending within a generation is scarcely credible, we still do this today !), this would be to do the work a disservice. Instead I will withhold excessive pedantry and concentrate on the major conclusions instead.

Colonialism is a running theme throughout the book. England was born itself as a Norman colony, which enabled a kind of meritocratic social mobility - at least for a while. While the native English were replaced wholesale as political powers, many were sill rich. Whereas previously the established system meant that everyone's place was assigned through genealogy, the desire for young pro-Norman English to stay rich meant there was now a route to reclaiming something of their family losses through marriage. The colonial system meant that the primary means of social stratification occurred not through birthright, but a sort of cultural meritocracy : learn French language and culture, and you too could join the new elite.

This led, according to Hawes, directly to Parliament. He says :

If England had been a normal country with its own ruling class, Edward [I] might have tried to tame the aristocracy by giving the peasants (who could be taxed more easily) rights over their own property. This is exactly what happened in France in this era. But Edward, as a French-speaking king, could hardly side with English-speaking peasants against his own, French-speaking nobility. So he admitted that he needed to negotiate - parley - with them.

There's an awful lot to unpack there, but Hawes doesn't, because then it wouldn't be the shortest history.

Hawes is also a bit schizophrenic when it comes to the importance of the English populace at large, at various times insisting their entire way of life was "dead", only for the English to come out on top of the current elites again a few pages later. It's a bit odd.

Similarly, in later years (the Roman-medieval period taking up a disproportionately small section of the book) this led to a meritocratic Empire on England's part. Since England's wealth came from taxing businessmen, this led to a virtuous circle in which the rich elites were those who taxed themselves : their wealth fuelling the state, which was represented by the businessmen themselves, who fed the taxes back into investments in business. And the meritocratic, colonial nature of England itself held firm. The language of Gibbon "wasn't anybody's natural language; it was the property of no ethnic group. It was something that you had to learn - that anybody could learn if they had the right sort of education."

As for the Empire, Hawes subscribes to the popular notion that it happened only because life in England was so bad that everyone was desperately trying to escape it. Which is a bit at odds with the notion of such a meritocratic state. It also feels somewhat besides the point to claim that the rulers were loyal to a fictitious vision of England and so by extension couldn't be considered to be truly nationalists. Or indeed when he goes on to claim that Brexit wasn't about racial attitudes but against a foreign elite imposing their will on the down-and-out English. He's not wrong in that that's what Farage et al. claimed (Hawes, I should stress, does not have any real sympathy for the Brexiteers), but it seems strange in the extreme to claim that this explicitly anti-foreigner attitude isn't racism.

Hawes other major theme - indeed the major theme of the book - is the north-south divide. In Hawes view, this is the dominating factor in British society since time immemorial. He has innumerable maps illustrating the clear differences between the north-south divide, but he makes his case too strongly. His view is one in which the south of England is just innately better than the north, and has always been clearly dominant. This, frankly, is just nonsense, which I'll have more to say about in the next post when I review a very different book (Marc Morris : The Anglo-Saxons).

What I think he's doing here is a little bit of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy : he cherry-picks maps that support the notion of a divide, and ignores any commonalities that exist or any trends which are more complex than this. It doesn't mean he's wrong to say there isn't a difference. It's just that he heavily overstates the case. Every aspect of modern culture and politics, he says, is inherently dominated by this. For example on the formation of the BBC :

The new BBC, founded in 1922, adopted RP and by 1926, 2.25 million licensed radios were pumping out the accent of the public schools across the land. Yet again, the ambitious of England were told : come, talk like us, and set yourself apart from your own folk.

And politics :

At the 1924 election, former Southern Liberal voters went Tory, and stayed there; former Northern Liberal voters went with Labour, and stayed there. This finally locked down the political North-South divide... The Conservatives were no longer facing off against a genuine rival English party. The opposition now was the Party of Outer Britain (Northern English + Celts) a.k.a. Labour. This hardened the age-old suspicion among Southerners that the North was somehow not properly English.

This is too much ! Of course it ignores any other demographic factors that could be at work : the Tories dominate not the south but the countryside in general; Labour's heartlands are not any particular latitudes but the cosmopolitan cities dominated by working people. And a historian should most definitely know better than to say that a mere century ago things were "finally locked down".

Up until this point, Hawes is overall optimistic about Britain in general (some notable exceptions aside). But now he paints a picture of nothing but decline and fall. The North-South divide forms a perfectly vicious circle of polarising politics, while financial bailouts from the Americans after WWII came with the price of necessitating such huge amounts of defence spending that we inevitably remained financially crippled and little more than an American satellite state.

As the world thaws, these islands will resume the course charted in 1885. Soon, the UK will end. No doubt it will happen as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Eastern Bloc in 1989. With luck, it will be peaceful. The English will emerge from the empires of their elites, to find themselves alone, wondering who they really are after all this time - and as divided as they were when the North-South split was first noted by Bede 1,300 years ago.

As taxes rise, as the rhetoric of levelling up yields to reality, as Brexit goes wrong - and it is going very wrong indeed in Ultster -... is it time to admit that England on its own has rarely, if ever, been a functioning nation-state ?

All of which feels understandably but ludicrously pessimistic, even cynical - and worse, the kind of cynical pessimism that'd curiously loved by every single generation that's ever lived. I don't buy it.

I commend the author for trying to paint a broad-brush picture of history and trying to get at the underlying causes of what happened. We need more books that try to do this, to connect small-scale events to big-picture patterns rather than simply giving us the raw facts. The book I'm currently reading, Sarah Foot's Athelstan, is a plodding scholarly tome that is essentially compromised of nothing but useless dates and events. Hawes' work is far, far better than that. 

But while his conclusions are provocative, and surely not wholly wrong, I have to consider this ultimately a failure. It would have been a lot stronger if he'd picked some cases which transcend the North-South divide and then explain exactly what causes this and therefore the general conditions under which we can expect to see North-South influences and when other factors ought to dominate. Likewise, it needs a lot more contrasting examples to illustrate exactly what was unique to England.

Finally, other historians definitely don't agree with Hawes' conclusions. No hint of an inherent North-South divide is event in Marc Morris; Francis Pryor argues that many British traditions date back even before the Romans, a period Hawes ignores completely. Full marks for effort, Hawes, but you need to show your working. 7/10 from me.