Blainey November 07

War and words

Geoffrey Blainey

Andrew Roberts
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $59.95 hb, 752 pp, 9780753821749

It is such an obvious subject for a book. The two most powerful peoples in the world in the past thousand years have been the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, and in the past hundred years those speaking English have been the more influential. While Winston Churchill wrote four volumes, which were best-sellers in their time, on the history of the English-speaking peoples up to the year 1901, I know of no other book which has surveyed this century of their greatest power.

The book can’t have been easy to research and write: it is a big hamburger of a theme. The countries whose main language is English differ in size and influence, they are far apart and their loyalties are often in conflict. An historian who is a specialist on Britain is very unlikely to be also an authority on, say, the United States or New Zealand. Moreover, a historian tackling this theme has to be interested in military, political, economic and social history – now a rare combination of interests, academically.

A mainstream Australian historian would be unlikely to attempt to write such a book. At this phase of our nationalism there is uneasiness towards Britain: a mental sorting out is in process. Furthermore, in intellectual circles here, as in many nations, the United States is not in favour. It is the top dog in the economic and military spheres, and so other dogs bark. It is traditionally capitalist, which provokes some growling. It directs an armed force in the Middle East, and that presently lowers its potential popularity. It is fair to say that an Australian historian would be unlikely to handle Andrew Roberts’s theme because it also calls for an interest in New Zealand, British West Indies, Canadian and other histories. Even New Zealand history is not popular here, though it has much to offer.

So far I have met only one person who has read this book, and his first words were, ‘It’s not a panegyric.’ We read of the pogrom conducted in Limerick, Ireland, against Jews in 1904; and of the surprise Allied attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe in 1942, with massive Canadian casualties and a stain on the reputation of its organiser, Lord Mount-batten, who tried to blame others for his own failures. Roberts recounts a medley of other strange wartime and peacetime episodes, many of which were completely new to me. On Logie Baird, of television fame, and all kinds of English-speakers he is forthright. His list of débâcles in the English-speaking world is sobering, just as his list of achievements in that same world is formidable.

War is one of his major themes, especially because of the central role of English-speaking countries in the two world wars, in the Cold War, and in the current campaign against Islamic extremists. He offers generalisations about war, noting how often the major English-speaking democracies were ill-prepared for the opening phase of their wars, whether the United States–Spanish war of 1898, the Boer War in 1899, the retreat from Mons in 1914, the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour and Singapore in 1941, the fall of Seoul early in the Korean War, or the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War. Roberts concludes that they fit ‘into a long-established pattern of reverses that have befallen the English-speaking peoples in the opening stages of almost every war they had fought over the previous century’.

Another pattern he perceives is Americans’ attitude to heavy casualties. Generally, they will tolerate deaths on the battlefield if they see victory ahead. In the wartime years of 1864 and 1944, years marked by the highest war casualties in American history, the voters re-elected the president who was waging war.
Some readers will have reservations about this book because it does not fit in with their views about human nature, war, Australia, the United States, Britain or capitalism. Australian readers will notice that it misspells the birthplace of R.G. Menzies, or might regret that it criticises the ‘inexcusably disgraceful behaviour’ of some British and Australian combatants on the eve of the collapse of Singapore. But even those who are very knowledgeable about Australian history can gain from this book, not least its wider perspectives. On the wartime relations between Churchill and John Curtin, for example, it offers a pithy and well-argued conclusion. (Incidentally, more Americans saw Churchill’s funeral on television than saw President Kennedy’s funeral a year earlier.)

Roberts is not afraid to reach conclusions about such wide topics as Protestantism, feminism, inventiveness and values. He praises the set of values and institutions which, in his century, were usually strong in the English-speaking countries. They ‘led the world in embracing female suffrage’, he adds. It is a surprise to read that Pitcairn Island gave women the vote in 1838 and that England gave it to certain unmarried women at local government elections as early as 1869, followed by a similar innovation in Canada fourteen years later.

This is the kind of book which, if read hurriedly, could enable the reader to run away with the wrong impression. It is is not asserting that ‘the English-speaking people are inherently better or superior’. It is not claiming that they invented most of the ideas that ultimately helped them to succeed in modern times. Thus the concept of the law came from Rome, the idea of democracy (for free men, but not slaves or women) from Greece and especially from Athens, modern capitalism from the Netherlands, Protestantism from Germany, and the Enlightenment – Roberts maintains – arrived in the eighteenth century from France as well as Scotland.

Roberts points out that in the English-speaking world there were many accident-prone leaders as well as wise statesmen, and that sometimes the wise men were not listened to. In his view, one ultimately wise man was Lord Lansdowne, who in 1904, as foreign secretary, had placed his signature on the new Anglo–French alliance but who, when no longer in office, courageously recommended that 1916 was the appropriate year to try to end a deadlocked war by negotiating a compromise peace with Ger-many and Austria. In Britain he was vilified and censored for this suggestion. In Robert’s opinion, however, an early peace might indirectly have forestalled the Russian Revolution of 1917. A compromise peace treaty in 1916 would have been preferable to a harsh peace treaty in 1919. That treaty was not only resented deeply in Germany but was not even enforced by the victors at the crucial time when Hitler came to power. Roberts makes the reasonable sug-gestion that if there had been an open Anglo–American alliance in 1936, Hitler could not have rearmed Germany. At the same time, the combined power of the United States and Britain, when they
co-operated, was often crucial in safeguarding democracy from authoritarian threats.

The English language helped to bind these peoples and their governments. On the English language itself, Roberts is brief and relevant. Of the hundred English words used most commonly today, nearly all are part of that language carried to the British Isles by ‘Germanic warriors’ in the fifth century AD. As the first global language, English is widely seen as heading for an even wider dominance, but Roberts is wary of such a prediction. Other languages had seemed equally irresistible in their era and in their wide domain. Aramaic was dominant for four centuries – until Alexander the Great marched in. Greek, Latin and even modern French ‘seemed irresistible in their own day’, but their day has fled.

Andrew Roberts’s message is often unexpected. His theme is vast and slightly unwieldy even in his skilled hands, and some of his numerous conclusions can be debated endlessly. But his book is impressive.

Geoffrey Blainey recently wrote A Short History of the 20th Century (2005).