The English & Their History
Proceedings of the Anglofuturist Reading Circle, 29 January 2025
This review of The English and Their History by Robert Tombs was written following a highly enjoyable and lively discussion at the first meeting of the Anglofuturist Reading Circle, which took place on Wednesday 29th January 2025 at The King’s Head in Mayfair, London.
“We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet.”
G.K Chesterton, The Secret People (1908)
Summary review
Tombs’ tome has been described by one reviewer as a “surprisingly approachable doorstop.”1 It is indeed an eminently readable text despite its ambitious scope. In short, it surveys the historical and linguistic continuity of the English people from ~600 AD to the present day (either 2014 or 2023 depending on your edition).
Why read this book?
Perhaps due to the extent and richness of England’s history, our knowledge of it is often deficient and goes unremedied given the constraints of the British educational system’s curriculum. While most of us will have had the opportunity to study Henry VIII, far fewer will be well acquainted with The English Civil War and The Glorious Revolution, or, for that matter, transformative legislative reforms such as The Corn Laws and The Reform Acts.
For my own part, reading this account of English history from its origins to the present day in a single continuous sweep has clarified my sense of chronology, cemented the dates of monarchs’ reigns, and filled in several critical gaps in my knowledge.
The book is roughly 1,000 pages of brisk historical prose. In the obligatory pursuit of brevity, the account omits some important events, personalities, and ideas. Nevertheless, it seems to me to offer a fairly comprehensive primer on English history and to be well-researched and judiciously opinionated. My only real criticism is editorial: the text is cartographically deficient, lacking both clarifying maps as well as any charts that might more clearly illustrate dynastic genealogies and the succession of parliamentary figures.
The book is divided into sections that each contain several narrative chapters followed by a historiographical chapter that examines how the period has been remembered and represented.
This review will reflect on several themes of the book, including explorations of English identity, institutions, progress, and historiography. Specifically:
English identity:
On the nature and distinctiveness of the English identity;
Competing ideologies & consciences within English identity;
Emigrant and immigrant constructions of English identity.
English historiography:
English historians and other creators of memory.
The reception of British imperial history.
The mythology of English 20th-century decline.
It should be noted that Tombs himself explicitly elevates four “memory themes”, namely: the protracted legacy of the Norman Conquest; the Whig notion of progress arising out of the post-civil war settlement; the sometimes proud, sometimes toxic legacy of empire; and the myth of post-imperial decline.
Note on the Author
Robert Tombs is an emeritus professor of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge (where I once enjoyed his genial company while dining at High Table).
Most of Tombs’ writing and teaching has concerned European history. His specialist subject is France, Franco-British relations, and especially the century 1814-1914, a period of two empires, two monarchies, two republics, half a dozen wars, and a blossoming of artistic, literary, and musical talent.
Tombs grew up in Wolverhampton and describes himself as “Englishman with Irish connections who has spent most of his life studying France.” Being a historian of France, Tombs is particularly alert to the relationship between England and its European continental peers. Tombs is also a dual national, holding both British and French citizenship.
It is perhaps worth noting that, subsequent to the publication of this book, Tombs wrote This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe (2021), in which he shared the following information relating to his political views, particularly as regards Britain’s membership of the European Union:
I am old enough to have voted in the 1975 referendum (to stay), and although I was always suspicious of the ambitions and pretensions of European federalists, the EU seemed a fact of life, like the weather… After some hesitation, I voted Leave in 2016… Although a piece I wrote in 2017 explaining Brexit to the readers of Le Monde elicited a rather splenetic letter of denunciation signed by seventy-four colleagues – something of a badge of honour – I was still more a commentator than an advocate…
When it became clear that influential groups were trying to neutralise or overturn the referendum result… I led a tiny group of academics to set up a website towards the end of 2017 called Briefings for Brexit… to ensure that economic analyses contesting the prevailing anti- Brexit orthodoxy could be made public.
Tombs, Sovereign Isle, Preface: viii (2021)
This biographical context may help to explain the prominence of certain themes within Tombs’ history relating to identity, memory, and international relations.
On the nature and distinctiveness of the English identity
A central theme of Tombs’ history is the nature and distinctiveness of English identity.
Throughout his historical analysis, Tombs is keen to examine the characteristics that constitute English identity, seeking to establish both their essential nature and whether they are, in fact, unique.
Tombs locates the origin of the “English” identity as follows:
The concept of an “English people” (gens Anglorum) emerged in the 8th century, an English kingdom with its own land (“eard”) in the 9th, and that land acquired a name, England—or, rather, Englalond —around the year 1000 AD.
The people who took the name “English,”… and those who have lived there after them [have] thought of themselves as members of an English nation.
…
England had a troubled birth at a troubled time… transforming events of human history were taking place far away [in the Chinese Empire’s Tang Dynasty, in Justinian’s Roman Empire centred on Constantinople, and in the wake of Islam sweeping through conquest across western Asia and into the Mediterranean]… England became the most fragmented and paganised part of the former Roman Empire.
Introduction, pp.2 & 20
Tombs acknowledges that this is just one possible starting point. To that end, after a nod to the pre-history of Britain, he provides a brief narrative of the history of the peoples of the British Isles prior to that period from the Roman Conquest onwards. This encompasses Britons, Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes.
He also acknowledges the shifting and evolving nature of English identity, not least in terms of its connections and disconnections with the near abroad and wider world, as well as the continuities and discontinuities of its politics.
Tombs identifies longevity and success as amongst the most remarkable features of the English nation, a fact that Tombs attributes in large part to the nation’s geographical situation, climate, and natural resources.
There are few if any older “nation-states,” a political form of which the English turned out to be pioneers—a sizeable political community with some sense of kinship, cultural similarity, participation in government and some representative institutions.
Introduction
Besides this, he identifies as distinctive:
England’s particular common political and administrative institutions, wide political participation and shared identity.
An early linguistic homogeneity which survived even repeated conquest, and made possible a sense of cultural kinship (p. 127).
An early transition to the “European marriage pattern” of nuclear families, involving greater economic and social autonomy, and relative gender equality (p. 371).
A flattering self-image of ancient freedom most famously expressed in Magna Carta and its mythology (p. 881).
A show of stoicism or stubbornness that takes a kind of pleasure in adversity, combined with a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen (p. 881).
The view that the longevity and success of English identity was largely happenstance is reinforced by reference to Hume’s description of England: “A great measure of accident with a small ingredient wisdom and foresight.”
In that sense, England is perhaps akin to a yoghurt pot that has been forgotten at the back of fridge that has been allowed to ferment undisturbed. In other words, it has been a place of slow, organic cultural fermentation that happened in relative isolation which led to a particular, unique path of development. The analogy was also considered to have explanatory power in relation to certain aspects of English eccentricity.
As a related aside, Tombs offers a contrarian insight concerning the relative merits and demerits of insularity (in the littoral sense).
It is part of our national myth, thanks not least to Shakespeare, that the sea has been “a moat defensive” against invasion. In fact, there have been innumerable invasions over the centuries, some of them with profound effects, and very few of which could be prevented until recent times.
Prelude, p.9
In other words, it is only in the modern era that being an island has been a benefit to the defensibility of England, since, “unlike arrivals by land, whose usually slow and burdensome movements could be known, predicted, harried and blocked, seaborne incursions were swift and unpredictable, covering in hours what would take days on foot.”
To return to identity, Tombs also observes that many characteristics celebrated as quintessential to English identity are, upon closer examination, not particularly exceptional to England at all:
There have been many official attempts to list ‘British values’, which turn out to be not very different from everyone else’s… An obsession with class, for instance, commonly said to be central to English culture (though France and India to name only two would be comparable)…
A basic fault of traditional national history (and most history ever written falls into this category) is insularity: writing consciously or unconsciously as if the history of a particular nation were self-contained, unique and incomparable, whereas it is inevitably part of much wider ebbs and flows.
Conclusion, p.881
Synthesising the two points, with reference to the Victorian era, Tombs concludes that:
England was a pioneer: in its economy and technology, its social conditions and living standards, its political organisations, its ways of thinking about man, nature and religion, and its role as the core of a global empire. None of these characteristics was unique to England, but the combination of them probably was: no country became so early and so rapidly urban, industrial, rich, (semi-)democratic and intellectually pluralist.
Part 5, p.584
Tensions within English identity
Tombs is masterful in tracing the evolution of paradoxical tensions and competing ideologies around religious, social and political norms.
Rather than fragmenting English identity, his analysis suggests that these competing forces have instead crystallised into a distinctive character throughout the nation’s historical development. These distinctive ideological and intellectual currents, perhaps better understood as collective moral consciences, manifest in various interconnected and sometimes overlapping expressions, exhibiting complex patterns of continuity and discontinuity through the course of English history. In the most reductive telling, they can be boiled down to dichotomies such as Whig vs. Tory, Cavalier vs. Roundhead, Conformist vs. Dissenter, or Anglican vs. Papist.
One of the earliest threads that Tombs identifies from the dissenting side of these polar consciences is Lollardy, which appears in the 13th-14th centuries, notably in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In the aftermath of that uprising, capital punishment for heresy was introduced. Various noteworthy Lollards were executed, including John Ball, John Wycliffe, and John Oldcastle.
The contrast between polar moral consciences was perhaps most prominently laid bare by the split between the Parliamentarian Roundhead movement and Royalist Cavaliers that led to the English Civil War (1642-1651). Driven in part by a desire to purify the Church of England, Roundheads led by Oliver Cromwell, later Lord Protector, rejected established religious norms and sought to reshape society according to their beliefs. Fundamentally, the movement embodied the spirit of the non-conformist conscience through its Puritan roots and pursuit of religious reform within England.
Elsewhere, Tombs draws out further iterations of the same theme, which re-appears interchangeably as: the New Jerusalem vision in William Blake’s poetry and the Diggers’ commune at St. George’s Hill; through Radicals like John Lilburne and the Levellers who challenged authority during the Civil War, and later Thomas Paine whose Rights of Man shaped republican thought; articulated in the moral progress espoused by the abolition movement led by William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect; via Whigs such as Charles James Fox who championed parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation; through the Chartists whose People’s Charter demanded universal male suffrage and democratic reforms for the working classes; through the Liberals under William Gladstone, whose “mission to pacify Ireland” and opposition to imperial excesses in the Midlothian campaign embodied moral politics rooted in his devout Anglicanism, and later through the social reforms of Lloyd George and the “New Liberalism” that laid foundations for the welfare state; and finally through the evolution of the Labour Party from Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party to Clement Attlee’s post-war welfare state. Throughout these manifestations, the thread of dissenting Protestant traditions established by Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians continually resurface as a driving force behind English progressive movements.
It is not difficult to infer that Tombs may be indirectly commenting on contemporary manifestations of this “Whig-ish” ideological dissension via such historical precedents. One might compare the thesis of Tom Holland’s Dominion in relating Tombs’ analysis to the present-day English progressive movements insofar as they are a continuation of non-conformist Christian morality in the guise of secular political causes. To this end, Holland argues that Western secularism remains fundamentally shaped by Christian concepts — particularly the inversion of classical values that elevated the weak and marginalised. Holland, it seems to me, would likely map Christian moral universalism, in which victimhood is virtue, onto the dissenting traditions that are traced through English history by Tombs.
Tombs, meanwhile, characteristically opinionated, offers a disparaging assessment of the particular phenomenon of the progressive teleology espoused by ‘Whig history’:
“Whig history” and its offshoots, a story of progress through conflict… emphasises struggle, giving the Whig party, its adopted ancestors and its successors the glorious leading roles.
In the more radical versions of this myth, England’s history is one of oppression, exploitation and conflict in which every meagre advance in rights had to be seized by popular revolt.
Conclusion p. 886
In such a way, Tombs illuminates the long-lasting legacy of the persistent yet evolving tension between these two moral frameworks throughout English history.
He shows that a national identity such as Englishness possesses the remarkable capacity to embrace these seemingly contradictory ideological currents simultaneously. The last word on this subject in Tombs is given to Daniel Defoe, in his poem, The True-Born Englishman, which describes the English as a “mongrel half-bred race.”
“Which side would you have fought on at Marston Moor?” Having read Tombs, one reflects that perhaps a recurring feature of Englishness is the repudiation of extremism in favour of moderation.
Other related, persistent, and contrasting identities that Tombs draws out in the book are:
Local gentry vs. centralised Crown: tensions between London’s centralised royal administration and local gentry defending traditional rights and autonomy from crown interference;
North vs. South and urban vs. rural: separations between the industrial, working-class North and commercial, middle-class South; the machinery, infrastructure and institutions of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool versus the two-chamber parliament in London.
Further contrasts emerge in the English state’s sense of itself as a global maritime power vs. a player within continental Europe.
Emigration, immigration & English identity
A final aspect of identity that emerged from the discussion of Tombs’ book is the nature of English identity and its reciprocal relationship with migration patterns.
How is English identity perceived, maintained, and transformed by the process of migration? How do people involved in inward or outward migration to or from England conceptualise what it means to be English following that movement?
In relation to emigrants, such as those in the settler colonies (later Dominions), one might ask: “At what point did people begin to adapt their sense of Englishness and cease to consider themselves English?”
Tombs does not give a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, but does offer some historical narrative:
[English settlers in America] claimed full rights as “free-born Englishmen,” and wanted the empire to be an association of self-governing communities. Colonial Patriots stressed their loyalty to the Crown: what they rejected was rule by the Westminster Parliament…
The white colonies had been given increasing self-government since the 1840s (see this page) and saw no reason to give it up. The six Australian colonies federated in 1901, and those of South Africa in 1909…
One notable feature of Tombs’ argument is that Britain was often a reluctant imperialist. Expansion typically stemmed from local problems and, as Tombs explains, the British Parliament primarily sought “to control settlers; to restrain them from attacking natives; to defend them from reprisals when they did; to secure frontiers by pushing outwards, thus replacing existing problems with new ones; to fight wars against neighbouring entities seen as a threat.” Regarding American Independence, Tombs observes that “[American colonists]—who included several Founding Fathers—were impatient with London not because it was too imperialist, but because it was not imperialist enough.”
One might conclude that the rise of British identity in competition with (or complementary to) English identity is a notable feature of the imperial period. The lack of enthusiasm for imperial expansionism that Tombs identifies, coupled with a certain cautiousness regarding imperial responsibilities and the diversity of peoples under imperial governance, perhaps helps explain this shift in national self-perception.
Correspondingly, one might be interested to examine how immigrants into England develop their own understanding of and relationship with English identity.
Tombs is very clear that he understands Englishness to be a construct, rather than a genetic or ethnic identity.
My view is that most nations and their shared identities are modern creations, the products of literacy, urbanisation, and state-led cultural and political unification.
Introduction, p.1
Nations and identities are “constructed”: that is, made by people, and not determined by geography, genes or blood.
Part 1, p.24
[English identity] had no single ethnic origin, no common semi-legendary foundation event, no single ruler—and yet they all came to be called English.
Part 1, p.81
Relatedly, given the continuing preoccupation amongst recent commentators as regards the relationship between ethnicity and nationality, Tombs’ comments on “Englishness” and ethnicity are apposite:
In recent decades the English have largely accommodated the shifts brought by changing moralities and multi-ethnicity, incorporating them into new varieties of Englishness. Who could be more English today than Rita Ora and Dizzee Rascal, Jessica Ennis and Rio Ferdinand?
…
Change has been fuelled by globalisation, by the alarming dynamism of the City of London, and by consequent mass immigration. However new these things seem, they have grown out of England’s global and imperial past: its present multi-ethnicity is as much a part of its heritage as thatched cottages and cream teas.
…
We all have many forms of belonging: a nation is only one of them, and rarely among the most prominent except at times of external danger or sporting contests.
Conclusion p.884
Given that Tomb emphasises that Englishness is a social construct, it is perhaps unsurprising that his work does not contemplate at length the scale and consequences of the two huge discontinuities of peoplehood that have occurred in England’s history; the first being the Indo-European migration into the British Isles, and the latter being the large-scale multi-ethnic migration that has taken place in the United Kingdom over the past generation.
In this century, palaeogenomics has enabled historians to cast light on long-disputed questions about ancient populations. In Britain, we might ask: when were the British Isles first inhabited? where did those inhabitants come from? what genetic impact did the Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking invasions have on the population of the British Isles? and, how insular has the British population been since the Norman invasion of 1066?
Tombs’ work might have been enhanced by including this recent scholarship, which has contemporary relevance given that Britain is in the process of receiving the largest influx of immigration since that pre-historic era. That said, given that the author locates the origin of Englishness in the 8th century AD, arguably the discussion of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the British Isles is beyond the scope of his work. Its absence may also reflect the fact that many of the advancements in computational genetics that have enhanced our understanding of human prehistory have happened since the first publication of the book.
Nonetheless, Tombs might have contextualised the historical origins of England by including a richer description of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (c. 9600-4000 BC), whose seasonal foraging strategies and semi-permanent settlements along resource-rich coastlines and river valleys gradually transitioned to the early Neolithic farmers (c. 4000-2500 BC). That transition represented one of Britain's most profound cultural shifts, with the introduction of domesticated crops, livestock husbandry, and permanent settlements. These Neolithic populations, having migrated from Anatolia through the Mediterranean and Europe, developed the organisational complexity necessary for constructing the megalithic monuments like Stonehenge—massive communal projects requiring sophisticated understanding of astronomy, mathematics, and engineering.
Likewise, Tombs does not emphasise the significant genetic impact of the Bronze Age migration of Indo-European populations (often associated with Beaker pottery) around 2500-2100 BC. Recent palaeogenomic evidence indicates this migration resulted in approximately 90% replacement of the existing genetic profile within just a few centuries. The arrival of these Indo-European peoples represented not merely cultural diffusion but profound demographic change. Whether this occurred through conflict, disease, climate pressures, or assimilation remains uncertain. These newcomers introduced the precursors to Celtic languages to the islands, alongside transformative technologies including metallurgical techniques for advanced bronze-working, more intensive agricultural practices, extensive maritime trade networks, distinctive bell-shaped pottery, new burial customs emphasising individual status, hierarchical social structures, and cosmological beliefs.
By contrast, Tombs recounts other episodes of immigration assiduously, such as the Roman Conquest, Viking invasions, Norman Conquest, the Huguenots, Dutch and Jewish communities, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian Succession.
English historians and other creators of memory
As a historian himself, Tombs is acutely aware of the ways in which historical narratives fundamentally shape English identity formation and contribute to the nation’s understanding of itself. He recognises that history functions not merely as an academic discipline but as a powerful cultural force.
The very idea that such peoples or nations have continuous histories over many generations, which we take so much for granted in Western culture, owes much to the pioneering writings of Anglo-Norman clerics in the twelfth century as they tried to make sense of the Conquest.
Whether there really is a continuous and meaningful story of a place and its successive inhabitants over many centuries and through many changes is something this book attempts to explore.
Introduction
The title of the book’s prelude, The Dreamtime is a reference to this idea of collective memory and mythologising of the past.
At the end of each section of the book, Tombs surveys the period’s historiography, from Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, via William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Earl of Clarendon, to Macaulay, Trevelyan, Churchill, up to EP Thompson and Niall Ferguson.
Beyond traditional histories, Tombs is interested in identifying other creators and bearers of the memory of England. As a result, his definition of history creation is expansive and he discusses a broad range of texts that he considers to have had a profound influence on the English language, thereby contributing to cultural self-confidence.
For instance, Tombs includes discussions of administrative, legal, and political texts such as Domesday Book (1086), Magna Carta (1215), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and Paine’s Rights of Man (1691). Of particular importance to Tombs are several foundational religious texts that he believes played a key role in shaping the English language, including Wycliffe’s Bible (1380s), Tyndale’s Bible (1520s), Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer(1549), Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), the King James’ Bible (1611). Likewise, Tombs examines the role of consequential works of literature in the construction of an English national history, most notably Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the Henriad, the plays on the Wars of the Roses, and King Lear (1580-1620s), Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), as well as the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
For Tombs, the latter part of the 14th-century was marked by “the sudden emergence of English as the first language of public life and modern literature”. Similarly, Tombs reflects that, “The closeness to speech of the greatest literature of the 16th-century is surely a major reason why the written and spoken language has not fundamentally changed since” and “has left an indelible trace on human experience”.
Tombs also offers a commentary on his own approach to historiography:
I believe it is meaningless to attempt any description of a society—that it was rich or poor, equal or unequal, free or oppressed, stable or unstable— except by comparison with other human societies. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that “a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without a country, living under his own law only,” and this—despite occasional uses of “we,” “us” and “our” in these pages—has been my watchword. Besides, had I been a lifelong English specialist, I doubt I would have had the nerve to try it.
Introduction p.5
Elsewhere, Tombs is keenly interested in the particular durability exhibited by the English language, despite the influx of more privileged languages.
For instance, in the wake of the French invasion, moving from vernacular to officialese to law and poetry, becoming a “language for a nation.” Nobles spoke French, the clergy Latin, while only peasants spoke English. Similarly, William of Orange spoke Dutch, while King George I (who was originally Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Lüneberg, Kurfürst von Hannover) spoke no English.
The Normans eradicated written English as the language of government and undermined it as the language of literature, and spoken English ceased to be the language of the elite society. […] It was long believed that English largely disappeared except as a peasant dialect. Walter Scott in Ivanhoe (1819) made the famous point that English became the language of the farmyard (swine, ox, calf) and French that of the table (pork, beef, veal).
The reception of British imperial history
Another historiographical theme of the book is the contentious memory of the British imperial project.
For Tombs, the British Empire was a vastly complex phenomenon with “contradictory consequences that include the bad, the good and the indifferent”; to those who view it as an unambiguous evil, he counters that the “real alternatives to British hegemony would probably have been conquests by others, or perhaps global anarchy”. This nuanced thesis seems almost contrarian in the context of recent academic discourse.
As highlighted above, a notable feature of Tombs’ argument is that Britain was often a reluctant imperialist. Likewise, Tombs offers another contrarian perspective in relation to the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852). This catastrophe, which still haunts Ireland’s national memory today, saw Britain embark on what Tombs describes as the most ambitious programme of food aid and cash relief attempted by any nation to that point. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that these efforts fell tragically short of addressing the disaster’s magnitude.
Tombs also offers a series of contrarian, but well-reasoned, opinions in relation to the British Empire’s role in the Transatlantic slave trade. Tombs notes that the British, especially the English, are often attributed special guilt for their role in the Transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, Tombs makes clear that it was certainly the case that the British fiercely competed with French and Portuguese slavers to dominate the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, and that many English family fortunes were extracted from the unpaid labour of slaves, including that of the great Liberal prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone.
As one might expect, Tombs gives this argument short shrift. After all, Britain played a historically unprecedented role in abolishing the slave trade by outlawing slave trading in 1807, all 800,000 slaves in the British Empire were emancipated by an Act of Parliament in 1833—31 years before the 13th Amendment ended slavery in the United States. Notably, Britain also insisted on including a ban on slaving in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic wars, which Tombs provocatively describes as the first human-rights declaration in an international treaty. This provision was far from merely aspirational. Tombs notes that “the Royal Navy placed a permanent squadron from 1808 to 1870, at times equal to a sixth of its ships, to try to intercept slavers off West Africa. It was based at Freetown, the capital for the colony of freed slaves at Sierra Leone, which had the first African Anglican bishop, Samuel Crowther, rescued as a boy from a slave ship by the Royal Navy.” Throughout this period, Britain secured forty-five treaties with African rulers to suppress the trade at its source.
Likewise, Tombs notes that slavery was not an English invention, the practice having been common throughout human history, and that, as a cross-cultural phenomenon, it is notable that between 1530 and 1640 approximately 1 million Europeans, including English people, were abducted by North African raiders and sold in markets south of the Mediterranean. In relation to the Transatlantic slave trade, a too-often overlooked aspect of the trade is that it was a collaboration between European buyers and African sellers, and any assessment of responsibility also has to reckon with the role of African kingdoms that captured slaves and transported them to coastal markets.
A final observation on this theme might be that many later anti-slavery advocates were English people championed by the British Empire, such as E. D. Morel, who, in collaboration with Roger Casement, led a campaign against slavery in the King Leopold II of Belgium’s privately-owned Congo Free State.
The mythology of English decline
A final theme worth highlighting is Tombs’ examination of the prevailing narrative of post-war declinism. This popular discourse characterises England and Britain as nations in perpetual decline and propagates a predominantly negative view of England’s historical legacy and undermines claims of progress.
Tombs, characteristically contrarian, challenges this perspective, arguing that, “by the standards of humanity as a whole, England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify.”
As evidence, Tombs observes that “[England’s] living standards in the 14th century were higher than much of the world in the 20th... We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens, rich, peaceful and healthy.”
Tombs is particularly concerned about the consequences of the declinist narrative, which he suspects of having had a pernicious and detrimental influence on political decision-making. Indeed, one might argue that declinist narratives continue to militate against contemporary aspirations for progress. He writes, “If Britain’s rulers had not been so panicky about “decline,” would they have followed a different policy? Would a longer game, and less eagerness to “swallow the lot,” have secured a better and less troubled relationship with Europe? It is commonly said that Britain joined the Common Market too late. Perhaps, on the contrary, it joined too early—just before the European economies entered a period of stagnation, and before it had faced up to its own economic shortcomings.”
Such is Tombs’ assessment as he dismisses the literature of self-laceration, arguing that the declinist narrative conflates two historical facts with polemical exaggeration. First, the rise of the United States after 1917 to a global supremacy that Britain never achieved meant all European powers inevitably occupied a secondary position. Second, the economic resurgence of India and China to something of their historical prominence represents a global rebalancing rather than British decline. The relative reduction of British influence globally thus reflects geopolitical shifts rather than national failure.
Final reflections: The English voice, past & present
If Chesterton was correct to say the English ‘have not spoken yet’, Tombs reminds us that they still have much to say.
Understanding our historical inheritance is a crucial step in finding that voice and Tombs has delivered a masterful synthesis of English history to support us in tracing the evolution of English identity from its origins to the present day while charting the creation of English history itself.
What emerged most clearly from our discussion at the Anglofuturist Reading Circle was that English identity is far from static, and has always been characterised by productive tension and paradox. The persistent interplay between established order and dissenting conscience, between insular development and global engagement, has generated a distinctive cultural fermentation that continues into the present day.
In terms of historiography, Tombs’ contrarian stances on imperial history and the mythology of decline serve as a useful corrective to simplistic narratives that have dominated recent historiography. By presenting a more nuanced view, Tombs is able to acknowledges imperial excesses whilst highlighting Britain’s pioneering role in abolition.
For the Anglofuturist movement, Tombs’ work provides essential historical context. In understanding the paradoxes and institutional innovations that have shaped English identity, we might gain greater insight into how these traditions could be re-imagined for the future.
Bibliography
Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2014 (revised edition 2023). Penguin Books UK
Robert Tombs, This is England, The Guardian, November 2014
Robert Tombs, This Sovereign Isle, 2021. Allen Harper
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-tombs/the-english-and-their-history/
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Wonderful book by a fine historian.