Reviews in The Round Table

W. David McIntyre - The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48.

W. David McIntyre - The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48.

The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48.

It is a principle of scientific research that the observer should never intrude upon the experiment. The issue rarely arises for historians since we usually study past events and completed episodes. However, the evolution, disintegration or prestidigitation (take your terminological pick) of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations constitutes an exception, since there was a substantial scholarly input into the on-going process. Indeed, it might be argued that historians in the first half of the twentieth century were more involved in speculating about the future of the Empire than their successors have proved to be in unravelling its past. The liquidation of the British Empire was much less painful and definitely less messy than it might have been because force was wrapped in formulae and power politics clothed in the proclamation of principles ─ and if that sounds too flowery, compare British decolonisation with Japanese hegemony in east Asia or Portuguese rule in southern Africa. The input of intellectuals, or at least of intellectualism, was vital to this humane narrative. For W. David McIntyre, the magic fluid is called the 'Britannic Vision'. From dreaming spires and ivory towers came the finest minds of the English-speaking world, and the upshot was a discourse that focused around that most theological of all constitutional issues: how many Dominions could dance on the preamble to the Statute of Westminster?

Thus the decision by one of the most experienced and authoritative of Commonwealth historians, W. David McIntyre, to examine the contribution of the historians can only be welcome.

The seventeen personalities to whom he introduces us are a mixed bag, although masculinity and Oxford notably recur. Some were academics who strayed into the public sphere, others were politicians who had done time in universities and a few combined university life with bureaucracy, a form of multi-tasking that would make them ideal for the modern degree factory. Broadly, they divide into centralisers, who dreamed of imperial federation, and autonomists, who yearned for independence or sought to strip the Commonwealth illusion of its figleaf of fantasy. First comes Arthur Berriedale Keith, Colonial Office enfant terrible, Reader (not professor) of Sanskrit at Edinburgh and champion of Dominion self-assertion. There follows Oscar D. Skelton, history professor turned Canadian civil servant and suspicious foe of the perfidious British. Confronting them is Lionel Curtis, the prophet of organic imperial union. Drawing his inspiration from ancient Athens, Alfred Zimmern challenged Britain to reconcile democracy and the founding of daughter states. H. Duncan Hall was an Australian who dodged the extreme alternatives and talked of free co-operation. He would eventually publish a doorstopper of a tome that lovingly chronicled all the declarations and incantations which shaped the evolution of dominion status. Leo Amery was primarily a politician ─ sorry, statesman ─ but he tapped into the academic discourse through his fellowship at All Souls, an Oxford college so elevated that not even Inspector Morse ever managed to nab one of its inmates. Sidney Low came up with the striking formula that the Statute of Westminster turned George V into 'Seven Kings in One' (p. 37), an intriguing phrase which combines a hint of blasphemy with the image of a railway station on the Liverpool Street line. Reginald Coupland was a formidable scholar of Empire who foresaw African dominions and advised governments on the future of Burma, Palestine and, most notably, India. Kenneth Wheare was an Australian who conquered Oxford and monitored the tweaking of dominion status from grown-up colonial to unfettered nation state. W.K. Hancock embodied the concept of global Britishness, moving as effortlessly and brilliantly between his native Australia and England's major universities as he did through the histories of the Commonwealth and its component countries. H.V. Hodson moved from All Souls to become editor of the Round Table: need we say more of his wisdom and influence? Nicholas Mansergh was an Irish gentleman (and, as a fervent admirer, I triple-underline that old-fashioned noun) who was equally at home and influential in both Irish and Indian affairs and, even more remarkably, moved seamlessly from Oxford and to a Cambridge chair and college mastership. Yet another Oxford don, Patrick Gordon Walker was the Commonwealth Relations Secretary who helped find the formula that kept republican India in the Commonwealth. This did not please Enoch Powell, whose passionate patriotism mourned the abandonment of Empire and scorned the embracing of Commonwealth. Powell's presence in the team may surprise those who forget his early posting as professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. In a splendidly chivalric gesture, he flew home in September 1939 to enlist in the war against Hitler. (Years later, I found one of his colleagues from Sydney's tiny classics department still grumbling because he had inherited the marking Enoch's abandoned examination scripts.) Next comes the little-known John Coatman, an LSE economics professor who shared Powell's distaste for evasive metaphysics. The cavalcade rounds off with two mighty Oxford figures, Vincent Harlow and Margery Perham. Harlow was a formidable scholar whose theory that there were two British Empires, one before 1776 and the other after 1783, left open the door to a third manifestation of equal import under the guise of Commonwealth. Perham is not included as the token woman, for she penned twenty books on the dependent Empire from Africa to Samoa, although the focus of her work placed her on the periphery of those who speculated about the evolution of the overall association.

Seventeen luminous personalities, and they peer and frown at us from a section of black-and-white photographs. What does McIntyre tell us of their cumulative contribution to the continuing redefinition of the Empire-Commonwealth? Overall, less than perhaps we might expect. Any book by W. David McIntyre will do what it says on the can, and his nominated historians duly appear at unofficial conferences and key moments. The problem is that it is necessary once again to tell the story of the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth in order to embed the role of the academics. It is a tale McIntyre has magisterially recounted in the past, yet he can still find fresh quotations and new twists of insight as he escorts us along that familiar path. It is perhaps the very efficiency of his narrative that limits our opportunities to get to grips with the detailed ideas of the historians: even the towering Hancock appears only fleetingly. I had never heard of Coatman, but the introduction made him sound an intriguing character blessed with a tactless ability to offer sartorial comment on naked emperors. Alas, he is barely mentioned in the subsequent account. There is no extended attempt to review the contribution made by academics, or even to return to the original rugby squad to assess which of them should be regarded as scholarly commentators and which must be redefined as polemical activists. Reviewers should avoid being obtusely unhelpful, but it does seem that McIntyre either chose too many historians or too few. The study might have gone back into the nineteenth century and anchored two rival camps to Goldwin Smith, the shallow Oxford separatist, and the inevitable J.R. Seeley, the Cambridge imperial federationist. Conversely, the work might have homed in on a smaller number, say Harlow, Perham, Hancock and Mansergh, looking in more detail both at their published writings and their policy-shaping memoranda. As it stands, this book represents another impressive statement of McIntyre's scholarship on the evolution of the Commonwealth, while representing an intriguing reconnaissance of a subject that merits further study.

Ged Martin

National University of Ireland, Galway

Aaron Donaghy - The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79

Aaron Donaghy - The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974-79

Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. xiii + 270, ISBN 978-1-137-43250-6

To describe a book as a doctoral monograph too often signals that it is narrow and heavy. Aaron Donaghy merits congratulation for a well researched and cogently argued analysis of the handling of the Falklands issue by the 1974-79 Labour government. Noting that the pre-1982 first volume of The Official History of the Falklands Campaign by Sir Lawrence Freedman is considerably shorter than its sequel, on the conflict itself, Donaghy challenges several areas of omission and contests other interpretations.

            Decolonisation in the remote South Atlantic ought to have been a minor footnote to the end of empire, but Britain found itself trapped between a failing community and a failed state. Donaghy traces the 1970s impasse to a disastrous ministerial visit to the Falkland Islands by Lord Chalfont in 1968, which revealed the depth of islander opposition to transfer to Argentine rule, and galvanised a Falklands lobby in London which regularly mobilised over 100 MPs against concessions. Thus, as former foreign secretary David Owen admitted in 1982, "the only way we could get a negotiated settlement was by squaring the Falkland Islanders, who would then square Parliament." (212) As an official recalled, the islanders "completely outsmarted the Foreign Office." (212) This was hardly statesmanship: two thousand people would not be permitted to block an urban motorway in London, and 1400 non-white people on Diego Garcia were no obstacle to the construction of an American air base. Indeed, the Falklanders (unlike today's vibrant population) barely deserved to be labelled a community. Almost three quarters of young adults were male, social problems and marital breakdown were endemic (which, incidentally, made unattractive cession to a jurisdiction which banned divorce). Unfortunately, the counterpart to the Falklands rock was an increasingly hard place, a collapsing Argentina, whose inflexibility worked against its own interests. Had Buenos Aires normalised relations, immigration would probably have tipped the balance towards union with the mainland.

            While Argentina had no valid claim to the Falklands, there was no reason why the Islands should not be transferred as part of a general dismantling of empire. However, it was unthinkable to hand over the islanders themselves to such an increasingly unstable country. Robust policy-making needed to separate these two issues, by offering a resettlement scheme with the Machiavellian by-product of dividing the population. The idea was occasionally mooted but, it seems, never costed, probably because even a hypothetical £10,000 per capita hand-out pointed to a potential £20 million bill. With Britain in hock to the IMF, such an outlay was impossible. There would be no help from equally bust Argentina, which regarded the islanders as a "temporary population" who had no right to be there. (11) A faint glimmer of a solution perhaps appeared in 1976, when Argentine foreign minister Alberto Vignes floated a comprehensive agreement, involving hand-over of South Georgia and the Dependencies with a transitional leaseback of the Falklands to Britain, under Argentine sovereignty. Callaghan was attracted by the possibility of an "eventual package" (67), but Vignes was ousted soon after, and the military coup ended any prospect of a deal. Seven foreign ministers in Argentina and three in Britain ought to have made no difference where chancelleries embodied settled national interests, but absence of both urgency and strategy in Whitehall made changes in personnel damaging: Owen was not told for four months of an Argentine incursion on Southern Thule. Donaghy insists that the Wilson-Callaghan government should be regarded a discrete political entity, and not simply lumped in with the pre-1982 diplomatic minuets. But it inherited its sterile approach from the Heath administration, and it seems unlikely that its strategy of stringing Buenos Aires along ("We were just playing it long," Owen recalled, 206) would indefinitely have staved off the 1982 tragedy.

            Faced with Argentine sabre rattling, in 1977 Callaghan and Owen quietly sent a naval force to the south Atlantic, an episode which Donaghy regards as "curiously overlooked". (2) Censured by Owen in 1982 for failing to take similar countermeasures, Tory ministers dismissed the initiative: if covert, it could not have deterred aggression. Two questions arise: did Argentina know in 1977, and could the British force have repelled an invasion? Donaghy's answers are No and Yes, but the reverse seems more likely. The Americans, who were pointedly not informed, would certainly have tracked the ships. Washington had no interest in confrontation between two allies and would surely have warned Argentina off. The task group itself comprised three warships. The nuclear-powered submarine on station could not have issued the graduated warnings specified in the rules of engagement. The two frigates were exercising over the horizon, thirty hours sailing from the Falklands. Neither the surface vessels nor the Islands themselves had air cover. Their positioning was a gesture of British resolve, not a serious counter-measure. Indeed, the symbolism invested for years in the retention in the South Atlantic of the icebreaker Endurance was an almost comical manifestation of post-imperial weakness.

            Scholars who like their history gendered will observe that women appear only rarely and in stereotype roles in this masculine mess. By emigrating, Falklands women failed to provide breeding stock. Isabella Perón could not control rising levels of chaos (but could anybody have coped?). In 1976, Britain considered sending FCO junior minister Joan Lestor to Buenos Aires: Wilson argued that she "would deter anybody." (62)

            The Falkland Islands Company (FIC) remains a shadowy and an unexplained influence against compromise. Donaghy labels the role of this dominant landowner and major operator of infrastructure as "feudal". (14) Yet, elsewhere in the empire, major corporations came to terms with decolonisation, and the FIC's opposition to transfer of power requires explanation. More to the point, was there no way that government could neutralise the pervasive veto of this middling size corporation, itself the wholly owned subsidiary of two successive investment houses?

            One final reflection. The ultimate location of the Falklands problem lay in the toxic combination of Peronist posturing and comic-opera militarism that constituted Argentina's political culture. If Britain had found a formula to solve the Falklands dispute in the 1970s, its disengagement would have been greeted in Buenos Aires not as statesmanship but as defeat, a balm to the "sense of inadequacy" that Donaghy identifies. (196) The most likely sequel of perceived triumph would have been full-scale war with Chile. Remarkably, by 1977 Argentine invented grievances included complaints that Britain, notional arbitrator in the Beagle Channel dispute, had not stacked the award in their favour. Being branded as a colonialist whipping boy by the united voice of Latin America remains an irksome and tedious legacy of the Falklands dispute. But, on the sticks and stones principle, it is perhaps a burden worth bearing if it has substituted for a trans-Andean conflict that would have exploded seismic divisions across the continent. However, as Donaghy proves, a monograph does not have to be dull, but it has no duty to be counter-factual.

Ged Martin

National University of Ireland Galway

Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Post-war Commonwealth

Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Post-war Commonwealth

Philip Murphy   

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xiv + 240, ISBN 978-0-19-921423-5 (hardback)

Philip Murphy attempts the bold task of assessing the relationship between the British monarchy and the Commonwealth, tracing the connection from the evolution of dominion status, through transition to a multi-racial association and onward to contemporary uncertainties.

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Keith Jackson and Alan McRobie, Eds. - Historical Directory of New Zealand

Keith Jackson and Alan McRobie, Eds.

Historical Directory of New Zealand: Second Edition

Historical Directories of Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, No. 56

Lanham (Maryland), Toronto and Oxford, the Scarecrow Press Inc., 2005, pp. lxxx + 451, ISBN 0-8180-5306-X

 

“Hastings, Battle of, 1066. Normans [qv] won.” Historical dictionaries notoriously either state the obvious or disinter the arcane: context and causation are not their strong points. In this case, a note bizarrely buried in the cataloguing data demonstrates that the challenge is even greater. “Readers should note that the New Zealand flag differs from the Australian flag”, it begins, before sketching the differences in pointed stars. Readers are evidently not assumed to be New Zealanders.

But this revised edition of a 1996 publication welcomed in these columns is far from a textbook for a Kiwi trivia quiz. There are maps, and a chronology which emphasises events of the past decade. An essay provides a concise overview of the country’s history, highlighting the Maori renaissance (there is also a short glossary of Maori words) and recent changes to the political system, which the editors, both distinguished political scientists, are highly qualified to handle. Appendices provide basic statistics and list ministries. (The government raised almost $20 million by selling off the national vehicle testing service.) I was disappointed that the hefty section on bibliography omitted the British Review of New Zealand Studies from its list of useful journals, but there is compensation in two pages of key web-sites.

The core of the dictionary remains the 353 pages of short factual entries, generally impressive in their cogency and cross-referencing. Grumbles are minor. “Glasgow, David Boyle” conflates a title with a surname, while cricketer Greg Chappell becomes “Chapple”: serves them right for being a Lord and an Aussie. According to its web-site (and web-sites surely cannot lie) Auckland University of Technology gained university status in 2000, not 1996 as stated. It is not clear why there are entries for four of the original six provinces, with Nelson and Taranaki omitted. The dates for the short-lived secession of Southland are included under “Provinces” and supplied on a map inset. I tracked down the 1968 sinking of the inter-Island ferry, the Wahine, under “Disasters”. The middling cities of Hamilton and Dunedin rate entries, but not Invercargill (fair enough, what would you say?) and Napier  or indeed, its twin town, another Hastings. Then there is Lyttelton, which is not marked on the maps. Readers puzzled by the New Zealand flag are unlikely to know that it is the port of Christchurch.  I would have welcomed entries about the writer Robin Hyde and the historians J.C. Beaglehole and Keith Sinclair  not least because expatriates such as Frances Hodgkins and Ernest Rutherford win places. An entry on New Zealand’s Scandinavian pioneers would have been appropriate, but as neither the Scots nor the Irish rate specific mention, this may be too much. The general heading of “Religion”, with specific cross references to Jews, Ratana and Ringatu, seems piously correct: some whisper that Catholicism and Protestantism contributed (not always helpfully) to the country’s development. But we all have our preferences, and librarians will welcome this new edition.

Ashley Jackson - Churchill

Ashley Jackson - Churchill

Churchill

Ashley Jackson

London: Quercus, 2011, v + 424 pp., ISBN 978-1-84916-547-1. Hardback

Ideally, biographies would be three-dimensional. As we follow the surface life story from left to right, we might press buttons to be taken deep behind the scenes in thematic excursions: perhaps technology could rekindle the discursive footnote? In the page format of the traditional book, it is hard for the biographer to stop the narrative and roam profoundly. For one exhilarating chapter, I thought Ashley Jackson had mastered the trick in his new study of Churchill. Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, seat of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough. Of necessity, his biographies begin with a toccata of nativity, noting that he arrived suspiciously soon after his parents' wedding, before moving on through childhood. Jackson pauses to give us a fugue, "Landscape for a Lifetime", arguing that Oxfordshire "shaped him profoundly." (11) In fact, we do not hear much about Dark Blue County thereafter, not least because it did not really figure much in Churchill's life. (He spent a dozen weekends at a local mansion in 1940-42, not out of nostalgia but because he needed to be close to London but as far from the Luftwaffe as possible.)

Far from infusing Jackson's book with a new and insightful interpretation, the Oxfordshire theme "works" more by highlighting two negative elements. First, Churchill himself chose to live in Kent. He imbibed his enthusiasm for the Garden of England from his nurse and surrogate mother, Mrs Everest, who was a proud native of the county. The offspring of a couple with the parenting skills of codfish, he coped by creating a private universe of his own – as he would again when, as a young Tory MP, he rejected most of the policies the Conservatives stood for. Many of us create our own inner worlds; Churchill was unusual in going to live in his. The second point requires us to look beyond the schooldays legend of the dullard genius consigned to one of the less cerebral regiments of the Army, and focus on the fact that his weak Latin ruled out going to Oxford. (The door to Cambridge, where maths remained the core curriculum, was even more firmly bolted.) Churchill was a ferocious competitor, but only when he thought he could win. For neither his father nor his son did the Oxford experience operate as a charm school. Oxford, especially one of its gilded butterfly colleges, would have made Winston even more of the "social wastrel" that his father so roundly condemned. (37) One key to understanding Winston Churchill was not that Oxfordshire was in his blood but rather that Oxford was not on his CV.

There could be variations on that Blenheim toccata. Churchill's career was book-ended by lost dukedoms. Until the age of 22, he was heir presumptive to the dukedom of Marlborough, in succession to his cousin "Sunny". (The earldom of Sunderland was one the family's courtesy titles.) The American heiress imported to shore up the Marlborough fortunes was given stark birthing orders by her new mother-in-law: produce a male heir to block the odious Winston from inheriting. In the golden glow of his final years, many speculated that he should be rewarded with a ducal title of his own – perhaps London, or maybe Chartwell? Churchill's secretary, Jock Colville, established that the old man was against the idea: a title would not fit his son's (fading) hopes for a career in the House of Commons. (The obverse was also true: the most appropriate form of address for Randolph was surely "Your Disgrace".) Accordingly, the Queen was advised that the offer could be safely made during the resignation audience with confidence that it would be declined. Churchill's romantic monarchism almost wrecked the choreography, as he momentarily felt he could not disobey his young and beautiful monarch. Seeing Churchill as a duke manqué can make some sense of his constant postures of greatness. He saw the post-1945 world as dominated by three overlapping circles, the Anglo-American, the Empire-Commonwealth and the European, with Britain as the sole member of all three. But there is also a sense in which he personalised those three circles to place himself at the controlling heart of affairs. He once light-heartedly rebuked Field Marshal Slim for condemning a potential British-American weapons scheme as a "mongrel project" (350), but overall he took remarkably little interest in his half-Yankee identity, only seriously seeking to exploit it during the second world war. Rather, he redefined the Americans within his own construct of the English-speaking peoples. Similarly, as Jackson points out, he unquestioningly thought of the Empire as a prop to British power. It was not merely that he refused to buckle to Indian nationalism. Appointing his cabinet in 1951, he sought to reassemble his wartime team, even calling Earl Alexander of Tunis back from Ottawa to take on Defence. Canadians were no longer colonials, and summoning their governor-general was hardly tactful: Alexander would be the last British appointee. Churchill was a "European" in a sense of the term before it was hijacked by Brussels, but his Europe was very much a theatre for Winstonian greatness. Jackson gives us a splendid photograph of Churchill escorting the Kaiser at German army manoeuvres before the first world war – or is the other way around? The ducal context perhaps helps to explain Winston's insistent confidence in his own greatness. We are all worms, he told Asquith's daughter, but he was a glow-worm.

The more specific Blenheim connection lies in Winston's relations with his father, the ducal younger son Lord Randolph Churchill, whose meteoric and mercurial political career crashed when he backed his demand for budget cuts by resigning from the Treasury. "Grandolph", as Punch called him, was a demanding and aloof father, a biographical element that Jackson deftly handles. Winston himself believed that they had only four close and amicable conversations, and his father's illness and early death left him with a lifelong feeling of deprivation. This was illustrated by a fantasy that he penned in 1947, and locked away, in which Lord Randolph appeared to him and they discussed the way the world had evolved through the previous half century. The death of his father, when Winston was just twenty, compounded his sense of loss, since Churchill persuaded himself that in a few more years he could have emerged from immaturity to become Grandolph's political Sancho Panza. We now think of Lord Randolph as Winston's father, but for much of Churchill's life the emphasis was the other way around. An elderly lady once told me a story from her mother, who had been a skivvy at Harrow School. On the day he arrived, young Winston had adopted a theatrical pose at the head of a staircase, proclaiming to the other boys, "I am young Randy!" They threw him down the stairs. But if Lord Randolph remained an unattainable void in Churchill's emotional life, he also represented a convenient policy vacuum which Winston could fill as he chose. In 1904, Churchill persuaded himself that his father's trajectory would have carried him beyond his quarrel with the Tory leadership and out of the party altogether, thereby validating his own decision to defect to the Liberals. Twenty years later, the inheritance eased his way back into the party. Baldwin needed an orthodox finance minister to provide reassurance after his brief fling with Protection. Winston returned to the Conservatives as a prodigal son, but Lord Randolph's son would not be prodigal Chancellor – and Churchill could even garb himself in his father's official robes. Did he ever fully return to the Tories? Recalling Sir John A. Macdonald's leadership of a Liberal-Conservative party in Canada, he had dreamed of a centre party, and campaigned as a Constitutionalist in 1924. His wife definitely clung to her Radical roots. "I hate Tories," Clementine told the astonished junior minister Henry Willink in 1940.

Each of the eight volumes of the exhaustively official Churchill biography is double the length of Jackson's book, so the challenges here are of selection and highlighting. The right buttons are generally touched, but the understandable temptation to omit the boring stuff can unwittingly distort the story. Jackson passes over Churchill's tinkering with the local government rating system (modern governments please note, not all changes are "reforms") which landed many voters with increased bills on the eve of the 1929 election, and himself with blame for the party's defeat at the polls. Selection can sometimes create confusion. Did Churchill run Britain's war or not? "Churchill's impact on the conduct of the war was immense," Jackson tells us (260), even though many of his "harebrained schemes ... were stinkers" (239). Yet we are told, on Ismay's authority, that Churchill never overrode a purely military decision (312). What are we to believe? Oddly precise detail can sometimes be puzzling too. In the summer of 1940, Britain produced "almost 352 new fighters" each month. (270) What on earth was the use of half a fighter?

With so many lives of Churchill on the shelves, the revisionist biographer must guard against the suspicion that he is proposing novelty by being merely perverse: we have always believed that episode X was a failure, far from it, it was a resounding success, trust me, I'm a biographer. Jackson makes large claims for two periods of Churchill's life that are generally regarded as barren territory. The first relates to the so-called wilderness years, the decade after 1929 when he was out of office and out of favour. Not so, we are told. His warnings against Hitler made his country home, Chartwell, "a major centre of resistance to the Nazis." (233) Churchill himself "remained an important national figure in touch with official circles, not a spurned soothsayer". (225) This not only seems overstated, but it is divorced from context. Jackson sees the Churchill of the 1930s as "a beacon of resistance and reason" – resistance, certainly, but contemporaries assessed the rationality of his warnings about Germany in the context of his diehard campaign against devolution in India. Even Jackson, in a deplorable lapse into homeliness, recognises that there were "moments when it seemed he'd done a Lord Randolph and shot himself in the foot", such as his support for Edward VIII in 1936. (221)

Although in recent years, historians have generally repudiated the slur that Churchill was gaga by 1951 and that his second period as prime minister, to 1955, was merely a joke, it is hard to dismiss the impression that he clung on for too long and to no good purpose. However, Jackson insists that his "laissez faire" leadership (355) was justified by his attempts to strike a deal with Russia: "Churchill played a unique role in preserving world peace." (356) To claim this is to assume, first, that the United Kingdom was still able to play a determining role on the global stage and, second, that no other British politician was willing or able to pursue détente. The real point here is that Churchill's frenetic activity misled him into exaggerating the influence of his personal diplomacy. Few recall Churchill's visit to Ankara in 1943 to plead with the Turks to enter the war. Leaving aside the small matter of Gallipoli, which did not make Churchill the ideal envoy, the simple fact that the second most important personality in the Western Alliance had come to beg their help naturally encouraged his hosts to submit a large equipment wish-list and a promise to think about it all. Flying off to placate the Russian Bear was simply a mug's game, giving Stalin first-hand opportunities to abuse Britain for allegedly failing to provide enough support, while bypassing his British visitor to negotiate with the Americans. Churchill's attempts at summitry in 1953-4 were primarily a continuation of his wartime self-delusion.

As I sometimes commit inexactitudes, to use a Churchillian term, in my own writing, I tread carefully with Jackson's occasional errors of date or fact. What does it matter that Christ Church was not Lord Randolph's Oxford college, or that he did not join the cabinet in 1883? However, I take issue with his statement that Churchill remained "a member of parliament until 1959" (367), since he was re-elected that May. Indeed, I saw the member for Woodford from the gallery of the House of Commons as he took his seat on 30 November 1959, coincidentally his 85^th birthday. He was unexpectedly small, a bent beetle of an old man in morning dress. And I also recall the anguish of a Woodford woman in the early 'sixties. Her daughter suffered from an endemic health problem, and Authority determined to take the child into care (yes, it happened then too). My parents counselled resistance: go to your MP, they urged. Her eyes filled with tears as she shrugged and replied, "My MP is Churchill." Perhaps a rubber-stamped signature on a letter drafted by a constituency helper might have put a firework under some broad bureaucratic backside, but I cannot forget a terrified woman who felt she paid too high a price for the honour of being represented by the Greatest Living Englishman.

Jackson's achievement is to have written a book that conveys Churchill's personality, gives us a sense of what it was like to work with him – and against him. Of the traditional biographical duality of "Life and Times", this study earns its points for the former. Jackson is refreshingly provocative even when his enthusiasm does not completely persuade. Rightly he rejects those who carelessly dismiss Churchill as a stranded Victorian. Few people embraced change so eagerly as the Victorians; few endured it so stoically as the post-Victorians. As Churchill himself wrote, almost all the immutable shibboleths of his early life were swept away, while the improbable fantasies became horrid realities. Jackson set himself the target of looking beyond the rival caricatures of Pooh Bear and Mr Toad, of avoiding the simplistic censure of a dynastic dinosaur. I do not foresee a new triptych of Englishness – Elgar Malverns, Housman Shropshire, Churchill Oxon, but this is, above all, an enjoyable book to read.

Ged Martin

National University of Ireland Galway

Camilla Schofield - Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

Camilla Schofield - Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. x + 371, ISBN 978-1-107-00794-9 (hardback)

Camilla Schofield has written an impressive book about the political thought of Enoch Powell, particularly re-examining the roots of his notorious April 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech. Schofield endorses those who trace Powell's motivation to the collapse of British imperial power, especially the loss of India where he had served from 1943 to 1946, which disturbed him deeply. However, she contends that this is only half the story. By the 1960s, Powell was equally driven by his felt need to resist the undermining of domestic structures of authority, preaching the imperative of strengthening the state in the face of perceived "anarchy". Schofield persuasively grounds Powell's thinking in a concept of nation and the experience of the second world war -- particularly his own interpretation that it was fought for survival and empire. The contextual limitation of previous studies, she argues, lies in their failure to integrate "postwar" with "postcolonial" -- hence the coupling in her title.

            This challenging book confidently handles a broad range of contextual allusion, both intellectual and political. Although it traces Powell's ideas chronologically, it does not aspire to be a conventional biography. Hence, one down side is the relative lack of emphasis upon his political career. After thirteen months as a junior minister, Powell became Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1957, resigning in 1958 with Chancellor Thorneycroft in protest against Macmillan's refusal to curb government spending. A three-year term as Minister of Health ended when he refused to serve under Douglas-Home in 1963, a stance that clearly aimed at a bounce-back to the party leadership, an office he unsuccessfully contested in 1965. Few politicians are so unimportant as an under-secretary for Housing: Powell was even forced to defend the government's refusal to control immigration. Yet to achieve the post of Financial Secretary, the government's chief accountant, within seven years of entering parliament was a tribute to his ability, and an education in the running of the machinery of state. There is a echo here of Stanley Baldwin, who rose to leadership from the same office. Baldwin, a Black Country industrialist, also used the rhetoric of rustic nostalgia, but his appeals to a mythic "England" were designed to manage change that he could not prevent. Factoring in Powell's political career reminds us that his ideas were not formed in isolation. (He was dismissed from the Tory front bench in 1968 because his "Rivers of Blood" blatantly violated Shadow Cabinet solidarity.) Thus throughout the traumatic years that began with Suez and rushed into decolonisation, Powell was either gagged in office or positioning himself for a come-back, making it difficult to determine the boundary between high principles and high politics. As Powell showed in a series of thinly anonymous newspaper articles in 1964, philosophy was a weapon in the acquisition of power.  

            Schofield argues persuasively that Powell made possible the 1970 Conservative victory by detaching a section of traditional Labour supporters from their allegiance, thus leading, if indirectly, to Thatcherism. The impact of Powellism is undeniable, but was there a complete equation of attitudes between the begetter and his myriad admirers? Schofield emphasises that he never rebuked any correspondent for racist views, but Powell did not see his role as a moraliser. There was some motivational mismatch. As Schofield demonstrates, those who supported Powell believed their wartime sacrifices entitled them to the welfare state. War was fundamental to Powell's sense of identity, but in the sense of tempering national will, the exercise of power in the pursuit of survival. He had spent his war mainly overseas: even when he was training in Britain in 1940, he suspected that Churchill exaggerated the invasion threat for political effect. British populist outbursts invariably seek to correct those in authority for failing to take actions seen as vital by the masses. Generally, the outcry is articulated by a marginal and renegade member of the elite. Powellism conformed to the pattern, and its leader resembled Lord George Gordon in 1780, or Gladstone over Bulgaria. Yet Powell also resembled the Russian populists of late Tsarist days, the narodniks, urban reformers who sought to educate the people. "He went round to shopkeepers and others and talked to them in an intellectual way," observed Tony Benn, Powell's counterpart on the Left. (222) It was here that Powell made one crucial error. Although eternally tagged with the hateful phrase, he never spoke of "rivers of blood". Rather, and wholly unnecessarily, he intruded a Virgilian image of the spurned prophet into his speech, an allusion to the Tiber flowing with blood. More Up Pompeii! than Nuremberg, it belonged to the common room not the platform.

            We need to be more specific about the influence of "empire" upon Powell. In India, he believed that the British formed part of an organic unity with the sub-continent's peoples, a structure he was not prepared to see replicated in Wolverhampton. By contrast, he felt no identification either with Australia, where he was fleetingly professor of Classics at Sydney University in 1938-9, or with Egypt, where he was based from 1941 to 1943. White settlers seemed peripheral to his world view. His 1964 dismissal of the Commonwealth as "humbug" and "gigantic farce" (172) might have been modified had he appreciated the importance of the association to Canadians, not least as a barrier against Americanisation which, as Schofield shows, was another major thread in his thinking. Powell objected to the grafting of Commonwealth symbolism on to the United Kingdom crown, but Canada's internalisation of the institution as a key element in its own governmental structure showed that this essentially British symbol could be creatively adapted. Canadian constitutional evolution pivoted on the precise concept of responsible government. Powell's 1959 Commons speech on the Hola massacre remains a great parliamentary event, but -- career politics again -- its defence of colonial secretary Lennox-Boyd was also an attempt to mend political fences. Running through the speech was one of Powell's Humpty-Dumpty words, whose shifting meaning only he was permitted to define: responsibility. The blame for what happened at Hola, he insisted, lay with officials in Nairobi, and "the assignment of responsibility" was "the very essence of responsible government." (Hansard, 610, 27 July 1959, 237) But in Canadian terms, indeed in the whole Commonwealth constitutional tradition, Kenya certainly did not possess "responsible government". Yet six years later, he opposed involving the United Nations in the UDI crisis because "the responsibility lies directly on this country". (195)           

            My major reservation about Schofield's cogent analysis is that she risks presenting too integrated a portrait of Powell's ideas. Rather, and disturbingly often, for every dictum there was a countervailing contradiction. Authority stemmed from long-matured institutions, but it also rested upon opinion and acceptance. Empire, once fundamental to national power and identity, he flippantly dismissed in 1966 as something that "never existed". (149) He praised Wolverhampton's Jewish community for combining their loyalty to Britain with their support for Israel, but refused to contemplate the duality of being Black and British. Often, he sought to escape through wordplay, for instance when he denied that his opposition to immigration had anything to do with race. In 1968, I debated against Powell in the Cambridge Union, on a motion condemning the power of the state. I claim no influence on the intellectual climate, and it was undeniably a historical privilege to have encountered his almost Martian charm. But reading his pronouncements about the scope of government, I perceived a paradox. When nasty things had to be done, such as taxation and regulation, the culprit was the "state"; but cuddly activities, like caring for the old and sick, were outcomes willed by the "community". But how, I asked, did the community act, at national level, if not through the state? Interestingly, he echoed the point himself two years later, defining the state as "the agency by which the community discharges its responsibility to ensure a tolerable livelihood" for the people. However, Powell's objection was that the state also determined which needs it "chooses to recognise", although how it took on this decision-making life of its own remained unexplained. (275) By the late 1960s, he was wrapping all these contradictions -- in his personal files if not in public pronouncements -- into a categorisation called "The Thing". (272) Cobbett had used the term for the conspiracy of greed and stupidity that paralysed the system of government. For Powell, The Thing manifested itself both from above, in bureaucratic arrogance, and from without, in the challenge of nihilistic anarchy. Only through paranoia could he integrate his own perceptions.

            I have an intellectual fantasy of Enoch Powell walking Southend Pier (unlikely, I accept, for a Midlander who was moved to tears by Housman's invocation of Shropshire). From the boardwalk, he perceives the land as an unfamiliar jumble of contours, while he trembles as he reflects how easily the stormy sea could smash the fragile structure. Ultimately, he must retrace his steps, but he repeats the exhilarating experience at Brighton, Blackpool, even -- as the Common Market looms -- at Clacton. Much mileage is clocked, but the journeys are never integrated -- authority, empire, community, markets remain separate explorations, internally contradictory, externally unrelated. I wrote to him after "Rivers of Blood", if only to balance the correspondence score. He advocated voluntary repatriation to rid Britain of its immigrants: what, I asked, would he do next, when voluntary schemes failed to dislodge the coloured community? As Callaghan pointed out, his logic pointed to compulsory deportation, creating precisely the totalitarian state that he claimed to abhor. But Powell had reached the end of that particular pier, without perceiving that it was no bridge to the future. Nobody seriously attempted to pay Black people to leave, so he could continue to preach an unworkable panacea.

            Since I reside in an authorial glasshouse myself, I comment carefully on presentation issues. We are all fallible, and major publishers should provide robust editorial support. In a thematic study, occasional overlaps are to be expected, but material on one of Powell's minor correspondents (not listed in the index) seems needlessly repeated . (250, 311) A few points grate. Alas, Dunkirk was not a battle. (44) The Queen confers MBEs, but she does not "award" them. (127) Just as an American Senator is not a Congressman, so a British officer is not a "serviceman". (56) Eric Lubbock was a Liberal MP, not Labour. (282) The popular 1972-75 Australian immigration minister, Al Grasby, was no more "Albert" than Blair or Hancock were "Anthony". (322) The editorial process should have corrected "aggravated" (for "infuriated", 254), "forcibly" (for "forcefully", 12), the preservation of archives for "prosperity" (145) and "far more unanimous" (109).

            In Australia in the 1970s, I discovered that a senior colleague had begun his career as a lecturer in Classics at Sydney University. Testing the ground, I observed that, whatever one thought of Powell's policies, his quixotic decision to fly back to Britain and enlist in September 1939 seemed admirable. A third of a century of resentment flared in the indignant response: "I had to mark Enoch's examination papers!" People of principles often leave a trail of destruction. As collateral damage goes, a burdensome marking load is mild compared with the fate of British-born Black children, spat at in the streets after Powell had characterised them as "piccaninnies". This distinguished book illuminates the origins and complexity of Powellism. However, my overwhelming impression remains not, as Schofield wishes to convey, the toxicity of Powell's ideas, but rather their ultimate incoherence.

Ged Martin

National University of Ireland Galway

           

Lawrence Freedman - The Official History of the Falklands Campaign

Lawrence Freedman

The Official History of the Falklands Campaign.

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, Whitehall Histories: Government Official History Series, 2005,

2 vols, pp. xviii + 253, xxxi + 849. ISBN (set) 0-415-36431-0.

 

To Sir Lawrence Freedman, official history is neither definitive nor propagandist, but  a scholarly account based on the ‘quite marvellous’ experience of access to government documents: he generously thanks his researcher, Christopher Baxter, for simplifying his task. Where there is no documentation, he offers only tentative opinion. Thus he has ‘found no references’ to the use of nuclear weapons (II, 58). Since the Treasury was excluded from running the war, he accepts that it was paid for out of a mysterious ‘contingency fund’, which presumably re-filled by magic each night. Nobody, he insists, has attempted to influence him, and it is his own firm (and welcome) judgement that it is ‘simply not true’ that the Belgrano was sunk to destroy a negotiated peace. (II, 736).

            The two volumes are of unequal length, the second giving four times as much coverage to 1982 as the first allocates to the preceding two centuries.  Freedman’s cogent survey of the sovereignty issue perhaps conveys more uncertainty than the British position warrants: by 1982 there was title based on 149 years of occupation. The Falklands (‘like Dartmoor on a bad day’) hardly invited settlement. In 1771, London and Madrid agreed a compromise similar to the formula-fudging attempted 211 years later by those whom Freedman calls ‘do-gooders’: each tacitly recognised the claims of the other while denying their validity. The British soon withdrew their settlement but not their claim. Spanish governors remained until Madrid’s authority crumbled in 1806. By 1811, the Falklands were uninhabited. When Argentina declared its independence, barely half a million settlers struggled to control a million square miles. Perforce, the new republic ignored the desolate archipelago 300 miles from its coast. In 1829 an entrepreneur secured appointment as Argentina’s governor. A British diplomat protested and an American warship evicted him. In 1833, the Union Jack was raised once again.        

Argentines were hardly obsessed with the issue: they even offered to trade their claim against a defaulted loan, and did not serious press it until 1884. Still later, Buenos Aires suddenly noticed that it owned Britain’s sub-Antarctic islands: South Georgia was claimed in 1948. More often, there was practical acceptance of the status quo established when Spain finally recognised Argentine independence, with no mention of the Falklands, in a rapprochement brokered by Britain in 1859. From 1972, a subsidiary of the Argentine air force ran a service to Stanley: Imperial Airways did not fly into Jersey after 1940.

            Holland does not covet Belgium; Mexicans accept the loss of Texas. Why are Argentines unable to move on? Three elements in their experience are central to understanding this dispute. First, in 1980 the country accounted for 0.5 percent of global population, but Buenos Aires was the world’s fourth largest city: when politicians could not deliver bread, they provided circuses. Secondly, the country’s military culture is absurdly disproportionate to its defence needs. A legacy of the nineteenth century, when Argentines fought each other and exterminated their aboriginal population, the military intervened in politics for self-preservation. Together, demagogues and generals fostered the politics of imagined enemies and dramatic gesture. A third element was the recent immigrant background of the population: Argentines yearned to be respected as a European nation, even a world power. Perversely, the Falklands dispute was a by-product of unrequited Anglophilia.

            How, then, could Britain respond? To dismiss the ‘Malvinas’ claim as preposterous would be similarly to damn Argentina for its obsession. Hence Britain had to negotiate, and negotiation meant concession. With India and Africa gone, why hold on? The problem was the opposition of the Islanders, and their lobby in London. Everyone now agrees that British governments should never have conceded the Falklanders an effective veto. If their voice was to be heard, Islanders deserved at least an informed idea of their own vulnerability. Late in the day, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) began to talk of ‘education’ and sometimes of ‘making their flesh creep’ (I, 135) with predictions of Argentine nastiness should they refuse to co-operate. The strategy was internally flawed.

            Freedman does not say much about the Falklands population. He reports 1813 of them in 1980, but not how many were locally born. In passing we learn of expert opinion that the community (if that is the right word for such a troubled group) could not be sustained below 1500, and that many believed it to be heading that way fast. Nor do we learn much about the Falklands Islands Company (FIC) which owned much of the land. The FIC, it seems, made money for its shareholders and the UK Treasury, but was under-performing even in relation to the limited economic potential of the Islands. Twice in the 1970s it changed hands. Could there have been a unilateral British package, permitting Argentine investment in the FIC, a transition period on sovereignty, and resettlement grants for those Falklanders who wanted to leave? There are worse fates than state-sponsored emigration to New Zealand (‘euthanasia by generous compensation’, Sir Rex Hunt called it). Surely it was better to test Islanders’ resolve with British money than with British blood. But it did not happen. Transnational investment was not the fashion in the 1970s, and the British economy could hardly afford hand-outs. Far from Whitehall pressuring the FIC, the company was a force behind the Falklands lobby. Instead, the FCO dreamed of ‘lease-back’, Argentine ownership with British tenancy, a curious example of the policy-making process stuck in a cul-de-sac. Decolonisation offered an elegant way of abdicating burdens. Lease-back would invert this, combining unwelcome responsibility with uncertain control. Argentina would eventually allege some violation of the lease and evict the administration in circumstances just as humiliating as 1982 but without possibility of redress. For Argentina was now ruled by a Junta: inflation was hitting the sky, and dissidents were falling from aeroplanes. ‘It would be a sorry business to give over British subjects of UK origin to the whims and changes of a South American dictatorship,’ wrote one minister (I, 104). As Freedman writes, ‘if there was no Argentine will to compromise what was the point of encouraging the islanders to embrace a specific proposal?’ (I, 123).

            Without endorsing Callaghan’s view that it was a ‘whitewash’, Freedman dismisses the Franks Report verdict that nobody could have foreseen the invasion of 2 April 1982. True, the Junta only took the key decision the previous day, but warships and troops do not appear from nowhere. Thatcher’s defence cuts had sent the wrong message, while the approach of the 150^th anniversary of British occupation made a crisis likely. Freedman criticises Britain’s response to the escapade of the Argentine scrap-metal dealers. ‘First steps in the South Georgia crisis were taken without thinking through what the second and third steps might be.’ (I, 224)  Whitehall assumed the Junta would behave like a law-abiding democracy: they were ‘much too intelligent to do anything so silly,’ reported the Buenos Aires embassy (I, 167). Equally, the Junta assumed that Thatcher would respond like a rational dictator, and accept defeat over islands she did not want. So, after a brief skirmish, the world saw pictures of British marines lying face-down in surrender. However much Thatcher distinguished herself as a war leader, she remains the prime minister who lost the Falklands.

            At this point, enter Sir Henry Leach ─ literally, bursting past a Westminster policeman join a crisis meeting of pole-axed ministers. With wartime service in the South Atlantic, the First Sea Lord declared that a Task Force could be sent, adding that it should be sent. It was, Freedman concludes, ‘a critical point in the whole Falklands story’ (I, 210). Thatcher could look parliament in the face; Britain could look the world in the eye. Everything flowed from that single decision. ‘At each stage of the campaign, going back was politically unthinkable, staying still logistically impractical, so the only option was to move on to the next stage, without any firm plan for the stage after that.’ (II, 445). The Task Force could not toss about in southern winter storms, so the troops had to land. The landing had to be on East Falkland, as far as possible from mainland airbases and the Stanley garrison. This meant a northerly sweep into Falkland Sound, which pointed to the sheltered beaches of San Carlos. Happily, British deception and Argentine immobility ensured that the landings were unopposed but, once ashore, British forces were virtually programmed to seize the Goose Green isthmus ─ and so on.

            Battle narratives are notoriously muddled. Freedman’s robust style ensures that the fog of war does not vanish deeper into the fog of analysis. Volume Two is divided into sections that separate the military and the diplomatic, and the author is deft in his handling of the bulk of material.  In a touch of genius, he captures the atmosphere of uncertainty by citing a horoscope sent, unasked, to Thatcher (who corrected the grammar). The Americans wrongly believed thought Britain’s cabinet was divided, Freedman dryly explains, thanks to Thatcher’s ‘normal forms of discourse’ with colleagues. Washington was split, equally dreading the Soviets in Buenos Aires and Michael Foot in Downing Street.  Kirkpatrick at the UN was blatantly pro-Argentine, Haig and the State Department wobbled but, thankfully, Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon was solidly pro-British. Argentine decision-making remained mysterious. ‘It is not clear who is in charge here’, Haig reported from Buenos Aires. (II, 165). The bellicose Navy quickly retreated inshore, leaving the unprepared Air Force to launch ‘near Kamikaze’ raids.

            Like Waterloo, the Falklands campaign was a close-run thing. The precipitate despatch of the Task Force, the biggest long-distance operation since the Berlin airlift, meant that much equipment was incorrectly loaded, and had to be ‘cross-decked’ at sea. The loss of Atlantic Conveyor reduced helicopter reserves to a bare minimum. At the moment of victory, some British units were almost out of ammunition. Command structures were not always clear: at Fitzroy, there were five separate decision centres, stretching over seven thousand miles back to Fleet headquarters at Northwood. Communications, especially with submarines, were patchy ─ one excuse for tight control over the media ─ although one restive field commander thought them ‘too bloody good’ (II, 729). Intelligence was mixed, and Freedman discounts reports that the British used American satellite surveillance. It was good fortune that one officer collected information on the Argentine air force as a hobby, and that another had lived in Costa Rica and spoke Spanish. A psychological profile of the Argentine commander was based on the wrong General Menendez. The Task Force depth-charged whales and almost shot down a Brazilian airliner. Both sides fired on each their own troops and aircraft. Few British officers (and, presumably, hardly any Argentines) had battle experience. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Terence Lewin, who had served on both Malta and Russian convoys, bluntly warned that there was no point in having warships unless you were prepared to lose them. Combat proved a steep learning curve, as the disaster at Bluff Cove proved.

            Despite his disclaimers, Freedman cannot avoid the implication of praise and blame. It seems invidious to select, but undoubtedly Sir Anthony Parsons, Britain’s UN ambassador, did a superb job ─ at one point playing for time by reprinting of resolution to include the term ‘Malvinas’. Freedman’s consistently unemotional tone effectively underlines the heroism of British troops. He regrets the most celebrated act of sacrifice, by Colonel ‘H’ Jones, although he acknowledges that combat troops are led from the front. Freedman twice cites doubts about the suitability for command of a named senior officer who gallantly led his men to Stanley. In the gung-ho moment of victory, this officer offered ‘to take out Guatemala on our way home and so solve the Belize problem’ (II, 656) but he is also the source of a sombre tribute to Argentine bravery. If the doubts were overcome, should they have been mentioned? Or is it implied that a nettle remained ungrasped? Either way, the allusions seem invidious.

            British official histories now form part of the Whitehall History Project, published by Routledge. Unfortunately, the presentation here does not do justice to Freedman’s magisterial analysis. There are no photographs. The maps are uneven: some lack a scale, and several places mentioned in the text are omitted. A detailed map of East Falkland would have been useful. There is no mention of editorial support in Freedman’s punctilious acknowledgements. The text is hardly littered with errors, but there is a steady stream of infelicities in punctuation that editing should have eliminated: a senior scholar tackling so vast a project is entitled to such support. Freedman’s style is robust rather than elegant. Argentina can be both ‘they’ and ‘it’, the FCO and BBC ‘was’ and ‘were’, while soldiers are ‘who’ but prisoners are ‘which’. Thus: ‘the Navy was keener to keep Endurance running than they let on, and were preparing to argue [etc].’ Of the ship itself: ‘It carried two Whirlwind helicopters … but only had two 20mm guns of her own.’ (I, 61) Freedman also uses informal language, including ‘up the ante’, ‘blowing’ (for failure), ‘another go’ (for renewed attack), ‘leery’, ‘horrendous’. Nobody wants ponderous officialese, and some terms, such as ‘naval show’, convey the immediacy of service jargon, but more dignified terminology would have been preferable, especially as relatives of the dead are likely to read the book. Editing should have eliminated such glitches as ‘Public Records Office’ (I, 16), ‘Mr Neil Kinnock MP’ (II, 700) and ‘Privy Counsel’ (II, 716). William Whitelaw is inadvertently knighted (twice), while Vivian Fuchs undergoes gender realignment.

            The Falklands have moved on. Investment projects ruled impossible before 1982 because of Argentine hostility became necessary afterwards for just that reason. But Buenos Aires remains stuck in what Falklanders term ‘auto-brainwashing’. In 2004, Argentina’s sovereign dignity expressed itself in blocking a Falklands team from playing cricket in Chile. Even under democracy, the ‘Malvinas’ fixation symbolises a country incapable of purging its self-destructive political culture. Over 300 British personnel and three Islanders were killed in the campaign: they are listed by name. Other lives were scarred. Freedman’s text stands as a monument to the precarious snatching of military triumph from the tragedy of an unnecessary war. Sadly, Whitehall History has fallen short of producing the monument that the conflict deserves.

C.A. Bayly - The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914

C.A. Bayly

The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons

Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishing, 2004,

pp. xxiv + 540, ISBN 0-613-23616-3 (pbk)

 

Few scholars could be better qualified to write this book than Christopher Bayly. Professor of Imperial History at Cambridge, he has an exceptional grasp of the comparative history of empires and he wears his learning lightly. The present work develops the approach of his earlier overview, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (Longman, 1989), in which he set the British Raj in India not so much in the comparative filter of rival European projections upon the wider world, but rather within the context of the rhythms of rise and contraction among other Asian empires. The result is a giant of a book that will remain a landmark study.

            Bayly begins by playing down the notion of ‘prime movers’, pointing out, for instance, that American independence preceded industrialisation and so could not have been its by-product. Smiling politely upon the post-modernists, he defends the continuing utility of ‘grand narrative’. He is even agnostic about the label of ‘modernity’, preferring to search for elements of uniformity, a term which enables him, through a slight play on words, to work outwards from the presentation of the human body towards the systematisation of structures and philosophies. Thus it is clear from the outset that this is no minor intellectual skirmish but a massive assault delivered on a wide intellectual front, a Normandy invasion of a book.

            The story begins in the late eighteenth century with the crumbling of old regimes all across Europe and Asia (sub-Saharan Africa is harder to accommodate, the Americas are still subordinate). Thanks to ‘archaic globalisation’, the world of muskets and sailing ships was already beginning to cohere into a single community. In many societies, work patterns were increasingly harnessed to market economies, and these ‘industrious revolutions’ imposed the discipline that would facilitate factory production. Here is the ‘Age of Revolutions’ in an interconnected, global perspective. However, the new world order that emerged after 1815 was fragile, and the next half century was ‘a period of flux and hiatus’. Its chief achievement, the centrality of the state, prompts a discussion of the definitions and dimensions of that strange creature. On balance, Bayly concludes, the notion of the state acquired sufficient legitimacy to dazzle the minds of contemporaries, but its manifestations (especially in China) could  not always mobilise sufficient force to impose effective central control. Moreover, this mid-nineteenth century world was still one shaped by archaic globalisation, and only gradually moving towards full internationalisation. Bayly argues for the importance of the state ─ only then does he move to industrialisation and large-scale urbanisation as a prelude to consideration of nationalism. Twenty years ago, a book of this kind would have focused upon ‘imperialism’, but Bayly relegates this intellectual by-road to half a dozen pages, insisting that its manifestations are simply part of a chicken-and-egg, cause-and-effect circular process of nationalisms in conflict.

            By the late nineteenth century, Bayly is ranging even more widely, into the realm of ideas such as liberalism and socialism, the rise of science and the emergence of global idioms not merely in art and architecture but even in literature. In such a world of rationality and naked power, how did religion survive? Bayly dismisses the condescending marginalisation that sees religion as a form of primitive protest against change, arguing rather that the great faiths themselves embraced elements of modernity, using printing, mass education and systematisation of doctrine, to become ‘Imperial Religions’, often in partnership with local states and helping to articulate the nationalisms that they fostered: even the Church of England inflated itself into the Anglican communion.

            From 1880 onwards, everything speeded up. Elements of the old regime, such as monarchy and racism, died hard ─ one half-suspects that Bayly blames their obstinate survival for the First World War. Unfortunately, the cumulative and accelerating pace of change created an atmosphere of decay and crisis beyond the control of burgeoning internationalism, both economic and intellectual, and so it was that in August 1914 the guns shattered the remaining barriers to a single, integrated and unambiguously modernised world. How had it happened that north-western Europe and its American projection had come to drive the whole planet? Bayly acknowledges that they were more successful than the rest of the world, but he dismisses explanations that assert European ‘exceptionalism’, let alone assume innate European superiority or pronounce verdicts of failure elsewhere.

            ‘Historians keep themselves in a job by overthrowing received wisdom once a generation or so,’ Bayly remarks. Indeed, ‘they think they are at their best when challenging orthodoxy’. But this is no mere cussed inversion of previous dogma. Rather it is the conflation and extension of much recent scholarship to produce what the author terms ‘a reflection on, rather than a narrative of, world history’. Paradoxically, I have found it an extraordinarily difficult book to read, and my assessment is of necessity admiring rather than profound. Without doubt the block must be traced to shortcomings in the reviewer. Bayly writes well and, unlike more ponderous polymaths, he does not seek to humiliate the reader with the grinding force of his knowledge. Better surely to have this global grand sweep rather a historiography of empire composed of endless monographs on the inshore fisheries of the Marzipan Islands. Whence, then, my unease? Primarily it stems from one of Bayly’s undoubted strengths: he is a master pattern-maker. If patterns are made by joining up the dots, then everything depends on the selection of those dots. The problem is that, in any period, empires will be in the process of reforming centrally while they advance and retreat at the periphery, states will exhibit simultaneous symptoms of decadence and renewal. A broad and visionary intellect will identify contemporaneous similarities and parallels at opposite ends of the planet, but whether these represent trends or coincidence it is hard to know. Indeed, Bayly’s predominant unifying theme for much of the nineteenth century is one of transition, in which resilient survivals resist change in a stewing pot of flux and fluidity. Indeed, notwithstanding the book’s title, even modernity is a muted and almost tacit concept.

This in turn leads to two areas of unease about the terminal date, 1914. First, was the modern world born at or before Sarajevo? If modernity boils down to uniformity, to an interrelated planet, then surely the touchstone must be China. For much of the twentieth century, China was somehow relegated to the international sidelines, a cordoned-off and peeping spectator of external events. Only at the start of the twenty-first century has the Chinese economic boom, dreamed of for two hundred years, finally lured outside investment and impacted upon world raw material prices. It seems almost ungrateful to raise the second problem: Bayly has come closer than most historians to tackling the secret of the universe, and it is hardly fair to demand that he should have thrown in the causes of the First World War as well. But if a scholar can look back and so beguilingly discern the origins of our world today, surely the same hindsight ought to be able to trace the sub-text that led to Tannenberg and the Somme. Somehow, 1914 doubles as unexpected disaster and logical culmination. Perhaps Bayly will emulate Hobsbawm, whose work he admires, and give us a sequel for the twentieth century.

            The text is enriched by unusually well integrated and thought-provoking illustrations, plus a dozen maps which are helpful but not totally reliable. One dealing with religion has shunted Quebec City into Manitoba and eccentrically appears to equate Wellington with Lourdes and Mecca, an example perhaps of the overlap between pattern-making and shoe-horning. (If the aim was to avoid a blank space around New Zealand, why not select Anglican Christchurch or Free Kirk Dunedin?) Be in no doubt, you will read, mark and learn a great deal from The Birth of the Modern World. But the full process of inward digestion may require more than one journey through this intriguing text.