David Reynolds - Island Stories - Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit

An 1879 Punch cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull the ox carrying the world’s woes on his back – Russia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Scotland (a recent financial scandal in Glasgow), a striker and a gleeful African warrior from the costly Zulu Wars.

Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian leaders sought strategies that might save their unlikely empire from a Roman fate. How best to deal with jealous rivals? By military confrontation, or selective appeasement? The first could sap the nation’s wealth and power; the latter risked letting in the barbarians by the back door. They also wrestled with the Roman tension between libertas and imperium , of civic virtues supposedly corrupted by militarism and luxury. Would British imperialism undermine political liberty at home? Conversely, would a freedom-loving people have the backbone to resist the jackals of the global jungle? These dilemmas became acute during the era of the two world wars.

On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples. [3] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’. [4] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’ [5] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’ [6] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower. [7] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.