When his TV series and accompanying book, Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, were launched four years ago, popular British TV historian Andrew Roberts gave an in-person interview at length to David Thomas of the Daily Telegaph over a bottle of champagne. He was disarmingly frank about his largely drunken youth, out of which his mother, he said, pried him with a bribe dependent upon his straightening up and getting admitted to Cambridge.
This he did, to Gonville and Caius College, where he got a first, is now an Honorary Senior Scholar, and about which he boasts that it has produced more Nobel Prizes than any other institution.
He is fond of boasting, and fond of associating with famous people, and acknowledges these habits frankly. And now he has frankly helped himself to the title of Winston Churchill’s four-volume magnum opus, and declared that he is carrying on the job that the great man so notably began. Churchill was accused, upon the appearance of his Volume I, of writing a very big book disguised as history but really all about himself. And now critic Tim Gardan in The Guardian says of Roberts that he “has overlaid his narrative with a relentless, coarse polemic that diminishes the argument he seeks to make.” Stephen Howe in The Independent is even more severe, saying that the book “seems to me almost valueless, and I am genuinely astonished that so intelligent a person could have written it.” Critics elsewhere have found fault with the writer’s accuracy and his writing. And they are almost all, in this reviewer’s opinion, correct.
And yet they all write about this book at considerable length, they retail some of its intriguing and unusual anecdotes, and they reveal, willingly or not, that they have read it with interest. Well, so did I.
Churchill’s great account takes us to January 1901. Roberts’s overlaps slightly, getting up to speed so to speak. He opens by focusing on the way in which the United States, assisted by President Theodore Roosevelt’s finally building a significant navy, rapidly becomes a world power, so that soon after the U.S. enters the Second World War, Britain is no longer the engine of the English-speaking world; it is America.
He notes, parenthetically, that it was Roosevelt who promoted a simplified approach to English spelling, whose only significant result I think is the absence of the ‘u’ in words like ‘honour’ and the reversal of the ‘re’ ending in words like ‘centre’. This is one of the scores of sometimes charming, sometimes provocative anecdotal asides that will provoke an IDKT (I didn’t know that) from the reader and hold our attention through some of the heavier polemical passages.
Roberts declares early on-though this will only slightly mediate his primary motif, which is a paean to capitalism and the free-market system-that the English-speaking people’s world hegemony is rooted in an early commitment to shared values based upon respect for the person and especially for the rule of law, “free of two undue influences that have time and time again stunted other nations’ opportunities in the twentieth century: theocracy and military dictatorship.”
He does not refer-and I found this interesting given his overall conservatism-to the role the Church of England played in politicising these values, a story grippingly recounted by Lord MacAulay in the first volume of his monumental history where he tells of James II in 1688 imprisoning the bishops over the Declaration of Indulgence. It was the bishops’ courage that forced the reconvening of Parliament and ultimately led to the invasion by William of Orange and the banishment of the Catholic king. I do understand that this is not exactly part of the English-speaking peoples’ history since 1900, but it is such a major turning point in the limiting of absolute monarchy. In a book rejoicing in civil liberties and the triumph of capitalism I would have thought it deserved a mention.
But I digress. Let me come back to the IDKTs. Having come to like and admire New Zealand while filming there for my 1988 series, The Struggle for Democracy, I was struck by a passage in the first few pages of the book, where Roberts lays out his thesis about the hegemony of the English-speaking peoples:
“As the twentieth century dawned, New Zealand had every right to consider herself one of the most progressive and advanced nations on earth. She had obligatory conciliation and arbitration in all labour disputes; her state system of education was free, secular and compulsory; two-thirds of her 104,471 square miles were fit for agriculture or grazing; her legal system retained the best of English common law but added certain local addenda; and in 1898 Richard Seddon, the Lancashire born Premier . . . had introduced an old-age pension bill . . . In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.”
I didn’t know any of that.
Roberts goes on to apotheosise federalism, more or less in the U.S. style, as practised in Canada, Australia, and now being tried in Britain with Scotland and Wales. Individual states keep control of many major public enterprises (roads, schools), but cede some national matters, especially international affairs and the military, to the larger unified polity. He argues that this sharing of powers has demonstrated its effectiveness and is one of the great ‘inventions’ (he likes that word) of the English-speaking peoples.
But lest it sound as though we are dealing with a classic left Liberal here, focused entirely on rights and the common good, this is the time to point out that what he declares to be the greatest single invention of the English-speaking peoples, and the one that underlies and secures all of the above, is the “genius of capitalism,” the free market system, and especially the limited-liability joint stock company, which he credits as being the engine of English-language culture, and “the most important organization in the world.”
Although it had been invented in Holland in the 17th century, it was in Victorian Britain that it came into its own:
“. . . companies no longer had to have strict specific purposes, and limited liability ensured that investors could only lose the amount that they had originally put into the firm. That, along with the public trading of shares of equal value, opened up the modern capitalist system that has brought prosperity to every society that has ever properly adopted it, while civilizations that once outstripped the West but failed to develop private-sector companies-notably China and the Islamic world-fell farther and farther behind. Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1931, equated the invention of the limited liability corporation with that of steam locomotion and electricity . . . So long as they retain the technological edge in the military field, the only way they can be replaced as the world-hegemon is through another Great Power adopting an even more effective form of capitalism.”
Back to the IDKTs, odd little anecdotes that sometimes pop up at random, with little thematic connection to the theme at hand. And yet, curiously, this adds to the pleasure of reading what is an eccentric and often annoying book. A few examples:
A pogrom against the Jews of Ireland was launched in Limerick in 1904, with the slogan “Death To The Jews.” This pogrom was supported by Sinn Fèin and was not condemned by the Catholic hierarchy. It included physical assault, a boycott that shut down dozens of businesses, and in the end the total evacuation of the Jewish population of Limerick. According to Roberts this is the only known instance in the 20th century English-speaking world of the active persecution of Jews. (Curiously he does not mention the Briscoes of Dublin, a Jewish family who would give that city two lord mayors in the century under review.)
By the end of the first decade of the 20th Century the German High Command had developed a plan to shell Manhattan and land one hundred thousand troops on the coast of New England.
Germans had become England’s largest immigrant group after the Irish; during World War I, riots in London, Manchester, and Liverpool damaged some 250 shops and other buildings owned by German immigrants.
During that same war King George V personally intervened to recommend sending black troops (mostly from the Caribbean colonies) into combat, against the racist objections of the High Command and the War Office.
At the Admiralty, in Room 40, a room whose purpose was successfully kept secret throughout the war, Alfred Ewing, “The Sherlock Holmes of Whitehall,” put together an eccentric group of men and women whose cipher-breaking skills decoded tens of thousands of German radio communiqués. One member of that team would, a quarter century later, turn up at Bletchley and contribute to the cracking of Enigma.
The Allies, planning what became the Versailles Treaty, considered but failed to follow through on the partition of Germany into smaller autonomous states, probably (he argues) the one strategy that would have prevented the rise of Nazism. He also blames John Maynard Keynes’s powerful condemnation of Versailles in The Economic Consequences of The Peace for keeping the United States from ever ratifying that treaty, arguing that had the Americans come aboard fully, and assigned troops to patrol Germany for the next few decades as they did after 1945, World War II would never have happened.
Mongolia (to skip ahead to the end of the century) began its formal transition to a free-market economy, making English its official second language, in 1993, with a resultant spectacular growth of prosperity. Roberts repeatedly suggests that the use of the English language, with its great flexibility and huge vocabulary, has a lot to do with whether or not a nation moves forward economically and securely, and notes that by the end of the century there were, around the world, three non-native speakers of English for every native speaker of the language. All these bits were new to me, and striking.
War, not surprisingly, is a major concern of this work. Roberts begins his discussion of the century’s wars by declaring that globally the number of deaths in combat has by now drastically dropped. I guess he excludes the genocides in Africa from the category of combat, which is fair enough. He does treat warfare with a generally affectionate tone that will annoy some readers. His defense of General Dyer’s massacre at Amritsar in 1919 will enrage more than a few. So will his strongly argued approval of American interventions in Vietnam and Iraq.
He argues that the U.S. was right to fight in Vietnam, expresses contempt for Jane Fonda because she publicly opposed the war, and contempt for the several thousand Vietnam Veterans Against The War, but does not mention the fact that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would declare, in the early 1980s, that he had been wrong to promote that war, and his country wrong to fight it.
He defends both Bush and Blair on Iraq, saying that they acted in good faith and on the intelligence available to them (bad intelligence, he concedes). And of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Roberts says simply, “It was likely that he had them.” The name Hans Blix does not appear in the book.
He writes favorably of U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s absurd antiballistic missile SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) and its more recent and equally unworkable progeny. He is vigorous and angry about the U.S.’s failure to detect the rising threat of militant Islam, and argues persuasively that it had been clearly reported to the administration long before the World Trade Centre disaster, but (and this is repeated as a kind of leitmotif), “The English-speaking peoples slept on.” Until 9/11, when “Finally the English-speaking peoples woke up.”
He approves of the operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison and of Abu Ghraib. And in the end, while he effectively recounts a substantial list of the century’s failures, injustices, lapses, and screw-ups by the major English-speaking nations, “a long and at times shameful catalogue of myopic and failed statesmanship,” he then says simply, “most other powers have done worse.”
This book is a long and often frustrating read, and contains some weird mistakes, such as calling the great British liner The Lusitania an American ship. There is another error of such magnitude that we can’t help wondering about the reliability of the fact-checking: he states that the cost of the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 was four hundred thousand dollars. In fact it was four hundred million dollars.
Roberts’s use of the English language is often quirky, and for this reviewer not amusingly so. He repeatedly uses the word “imprecation” to mean a physical assault. He spells Al Qaeda “Al Queda”. He uses “presently” for “now” and “whereabouts” when”where” is the word wanted. He uses “suborned” as if it meant “undermined” or “damaged”.
Altogether the sloppy use of language is irritating. Of the last year of World War I he writes, “The British had lost 163,000 casualties.” A couple of pages later “45,000 American doughboys were killed and wounded in battle.”
There comes a sense of predictability after the first hundred pages or so. To quote The Guardian’s Tim Gardan again:
“At times, Roberts reads like 1066 and All That, without the jokes. People are either ‘disgraceful’ or ‘noble’. Good things include Teddy Roosevelt, Kipling, Reagan, General Pinochet, Nixon, Blair, Thatcher, Eisenhower, Ulstermen generally and the inventiveness of the English-speaking people in creating penicillin and lethal weapons systems. Bad things are Lloyd George (good at war, bad at peace), Wilfred Owen, the French, the Irish (in the First World War, with justification), Keynes, Heath, Wilson, Carter, Clinton, the United Nations, the European Union, Hollywood, Gandhi, Princess Diana and Mountbatten.”
But, although this book is intended as a paean to capitalism and the British way, Roberts does, with a measure of diligence, introduce some of the pertinent contraries:
“The inequalities inherent in imperial British society at the turn of the century were obvious, even at the time. Free-market capitalism, resilient and untrammeled, was able in April 1901 to launch the new White Star liner The Celtic, built at Harland and Wolff’s vast Belfast shipyard . . . the largest ship in the world. Yet in London that Christmas official returns show that there were no fewer than 107,539 people receiving poor relief in the capital of the Empire, 39,409 of whom were termed ‘outdoor paupers’ or tramps. . . . In one year alone-1905-when the Edwardians cracked down on brothel-keeping, no fewer than 944 women were charged with having sexual intercourse in the open air.”
And every once in a while, he comes up with a couple of lines that are original, witty, and striking:
“[John Major] was tape-recorded calling the three Euro-sceptics in his cabinet ‘bastards’ and ruined his nice-neighbour image by being caught on tape saying, ‘I’m going to fucking crucify the Right.’ In one sentence he thus managed to swear, blaspheme, split an infinitive and make a promise he could not keep.”
Now that’s good stuff. You have to applaud that. But there is not, alas, enough of it to justify the huge amount of time it takes to get through this massive work. So what does?
Well, two things, in the end. It is a fairly comprehensive survey of the subject, and especially for readers like me who lived through almost three quarters of the period, the prods to memory and the IDKTs are nourishing and often entertaining. And there are the occasional summary paragraphs of considerable weight and boldness:
“Staying at the forefront of all the major developments in automobiles, aeronautics, computers, finance, biotechnology and the information revolution-and of all of their key military applications-has enabled the English-speaking peoples to win and retain their global hegemony. That world leadership will only be conceded to whichever world power-possibly China or India-is capable of producing better products cheaper than they, in a similarly politically secure environment.”
But there is a more important justification. For the (likely) preponderant number of liberal-minded people who will be drawn to a history of the last hundred years, the brutally right-wing, pro-establishment arguments that this author brings to our habitual reading of controversial episodes in that history, from Amritsar to Baghdad, are presented strongly enough to force thoughtful readers to sit back and think-to re-examine the evidence and ask themselves whether our Received Standard Version of these events can stand up to Andrew Roberts’s analysis.
Patrick Watson (Books in Canada)
