Abstract
Strange and unhealthy visions of the past gained popular currency during Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union and were elaborated upon by commentators in its acrimonious aftermath. These stories were infused with nostalgia – particularly for the Second World War – and proclaimed the specialness of the British state and its people and their supposed indefatigability in the face of hostile outsiders. They were predominantly English in nature and misunderstood or ignored the different national identities and histories which uneasily co-existed within the United Kingdom. They were also – as James Vernon asserts in his new Modern Britain: 1750 to the Present – duplicitous about Britain’s relationship to the wider world. The Brexit debate contained a sinister racialised undercurrent which erased the imperial past. It was ‘conveniently forgotten that Britons had long enjoyed freedom of movement within their Empire, emigrating in vast numbers to “settle” in its colonies at the expense of indigenous populations. Colonial subjects also migrated to Britain as Commonwealth citizens after the British Nationality Act in 1948. They were “over here because we were over there”’ (p. 513). Accordingly, Vernon’s history sets out to locate three centuries of British history within their global context demonstrating that rather than making the modern world – the world helped make modern Britain.
This global process was, Vernon explains, closely related to the rise, fall and reinvention of the liberal political economy – defined as a ‘cluster of assumptions about how governments, populations and empires worked best in relationship to each other when markets were made to operate freely’ (p. xxii). To chart this in a manner comprehensible to students, the textbook is structured into five chronological parts, which contain thematic sections that move from politics to economy and society. Each chapter is designed to explain a key transformation that reshaped the lives of individuals. For example, the fourth section of the book is concerned with what was eventually revealed as the temporary eclipse of the liberal political economy by the rise of social democracy in the wake of the Great Depression. But as the author explains, his global history of Britain is largely one of tragedy. It demonstrates how political economies that promised emancipation and prosperity to Britons, colonial subjects and others across the globe rarely delivered either, were frequently secured by violence, and have resulted in ecological crisis (p. xxvii).
The book also functions as, and is explicitly positioned as, a sharp corrective to whiggish visions of British history, which – the author asserts – have remained surprisingly dominant. Despite the rapidity of its industrialisation, urbanisation and imperial expansion, Britain was said to have avoided major social conflict. The United Kingdom was depicted in these narratives as a peaceful and stable kingdom, with credit usually given to its people’s unusual predilection for tolerance and pluralism or to the adaptability of its institutions and ruling class (p. xxvii). Instead, Vernon’s textbook presents a global history of the rise, fall and reinvention of economic liberalism. The claim that Britain was and is a uniquely tolerant and stable polity seems particularly incongruous considering the experience of Brexit and the malign political and cultural forces which it has unleashed. Furthermore, Vernon’s is explicitly a history of Britain that critically considers the relationship of the union state with the three other nations that are uncomfortably included within the British polity: Scotland, Wales, and since 1921, Northern Ireland. As he highlights at several junctures in the book, the continued ascendancy of nationalism in Scotland means that the future of the union is far from secure.
The various sections of the textbook are bookended by substantial academic bibliographies which offer suggestions for students for further in-depth reading. These are comparatively minor issues, but I would query whether the work of Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter questions whether the sixties were a transformative moment in terms of changing sexual culture. In fact, their oral history of heterosexuality in England positions the sixties as the cut-off point for an earlier culture of moral restraint. Also, the suggested ‘further reading’ for sexualities in the mid-twentieth century entirely comprises work that discusses England. Reference could have been made, for example, to the ground-breaking work of Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis on the medical and moral politics of sexualities in Scotland (p. 471). Some of the choices for illustrations accompanying the more contemporary chapters are also less than inspired and perhaps these could have been improved to match the quality and originality of the text. However, in the round this is an excellent new textbook which frames a narrative of British history since 1750 around the rise, fall and reinvention of liberal ideas about markets, governments and empires. It provides a timely re-assessment of modern Britain which will be of value to undergraduates. In an age in which a government minister (right-wing parliamentarian Jacob Rees-Mogg) can compose a self-congratulatory version of British history seen through the supposedly pivotal actions of various ‘great white men’ – and in which large numbers of the population of England have been enraptured by Brexit – James Vernon’s warning that without a critical view of the past, we fall prey to the triumphalist and whitewashed versions of national history championed by politicians, is pertinent.