‘We might have been a free and great people together.’ -- Thomas Jefferson, 1776

‘I am here to tell you that, whatever form your system of world security may take, however the nations are grouped and ranged, whatever derogations are made from national sovereignty for the sake of the larger synthesis, nothing will work soundly or for long without the united effort of the British and American peoples. If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail. I therefore preach continually the doctrine of fraternal association of our two peoples . . . for the sake of service to Mankind and for the honour that comes to those who faithfully serve great causes.’ -- Winston Churchill, Harvard University, 6 September 1943

‘In today’s wars, there are no morals, and it is clear that Mankind has descended to the lowest degrees of decadence and oppression.’ -- Osama bin Laden, May 1998

‘The descendants of the 17th-century commonwealth, the mostly Protestant diaspora of English-speaking peoples, will always see the world through particular eyes.’ -- Sir Simon Jenkins, The Times, March 2004

‘September the eleventh was for me a wake-up call. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep.’ -- Tony Blair, July 2005

The Italians are rightly proud of the Cæsars and preserve the memory and relics of the Roman Empire with diligence and love. The Greeks venerate Periclean Athens as much as the Macedonians do the achievements of Alexander the Great. France’s moment of la Gloire under Napoleon is today burnished even by French republicans, just as the greatness of King Philip II is admired by Spaniards. The palaces of Peter the Great and Catherine the  Great are kept pristine by Russians. Egyptians still feel proud of the New Kingdom’s Pharaohs of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. Recollection of the reign of Gustavus Adolphus is uplifting for Swedes, and the highest decoration in Uzbekistan is the Order of Temur, named after the conqueror known to Westerners as Tamerlaine. The Portuguese esteem Prince Henry the Navigator and the Austrians their great Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V. A toast to ‘The Great Khan’ (Genghis) will still – despite decades of official disapproval – have Mongolians leaping to their feet. Indeed, there is no country, race or linguistic grouping that is expected – indeed required – to feel shame about the golden moment when they occupied the limelight of World History. Except, of course, the English-speaking peoples.

The fact that first the British and then the American hegemonies have held global sway since the Industrial Revolution is perceived as the source of profound, self-evident and permanent guilt. Ever since the 1960s, academics, the Left-liberal intelligentsias, and the social and political establishments of both countries have been united in the belief that English-speaking imperialism was evil. This is bad enough for Britain, whose time in the sun has been over for half a century, but the politics of the pre-emptive cringe is even worse for modern America, which is still enjoying her moment of world primacy, yet is being enjoined on all sides to apologize for it already, long before it is even over.

It was the Athenian historian Thucydides who first thought of uniting the four distinct but successive and related conflicts between Athens and Sparta from 431 bc to 404 bc into one great Peloponnesian War, the subject of his classic narrative composition. Similarly, the four distinct but successive attacks on the security of the English-speaking peoples, by Wilhelmine Germany, the Axis powers, Soviet communism and now Islamic fundamentalism ought to be seen as one overall century-long struggle between the English-speaking peoples’ democratic pluralism and fascist intolerance of different varieties.

Historians will long continue to debate precisely when the baton of world leadership passed from one great branch of the English-speaking peoples, the British Empire and Commonwealth, to the other, the American Republic, but it certainly took place some time between the launch of Operation Torch in November 1942 and D-Day in June 1944. It wasn’t handed over in any formal or official sense, of course, but the leadership of the Free World that lay in Churchill’s hands before Pearl Harbor was certainly held by Roosevelt three years later. The baton was not passed easily, as in a relay race, but neither was it forcibly snatched, as on most other occasions in history when one nation supplants another in the sun.

The way that the Suez crisis of 1956 italicised a power-shift that had already taken place raised an ire in Britain that has still not fully abated, yet it is naïve to hope that a world power will act against its own perceived best interests out  of linguistic solidarity or a feeling of auld lang syne for a shared wartime past. The fact that in retrospect it was clearly in America’s long-term interests to permit Britain and France to swat the nascent Arab nationalism personified by Colonel Nasser is ironic, but immaterial. The fact nonetheless remains that of all the peoples of the world who could have supplanted her, the British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, West Indian and Irish peoples were immensely fortunate that it was the Americans who did. The surprising phenomenon is not that the United States acted in her own perceived national interest immediately after the Second World War and at the time of Suez – any Great Power would have done the same thing – but how often over the century the genuine national interests of the English-speaking peoples have coincided; and never more so than today.

‘Collaboration of the English-speaking peoples threatens no one,’ wrote Churchill in 1938. ‘It might safeguard all.’ He was quite wrong, of course, both then and now. The collaboration of the English-speaking peoples threatened plenty of people, and still does. Just as it threatened the Axis’ ambitions and subsequently the Soviets’, today in very different ways Middle Eastern tyrants, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, rogue states, world-government uniglobers, Chinese hegemonists and European federalists have every right to feel threatened by what that collaboration might still achieve in the future.

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The foregoing is excerpted from A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Andrew Roberts. All rights reserved. Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022