Keith Windschuttle: The English-speaking century
In the past one hundred years, four successive
political movements—Prussian militarism, German
Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and international
Communism— mounted military campaigns to conquer
Europe, Asia, and the world. Had any of them
prevailed, it would have been a profound loss for
civilization as we know it. Yet over the course of
these bids for power, a coalition headed first by
Britain and then by the United States emerged not just
to oppose but to destroy them utterly.
From the long perspective of human affairs, these
victories must stand as among the most remarkable of
the past three millennia. They were as decisive for
world history as the victories of the ancient Greeks
over Persia, of Rome over Carthage, and of the Franks
over the Umayyad Caliphate.
Moreover, military triumph has been complemented by
economic success. The policies of free-trade
liberalism, which in the nineteenth century made
Britain the economic powerhouse of the world, were
revived in our own time to achieve the same for the
United States and its trading partners. In the past
fifty years, much of the world has been economically
transformed to a greater degree than in the previous
thousand. Most of Asia has enjoyed unprecedented
economic growth, with both China and India propelled
from socialist penury to future world-power status by
the demands of America’s booming technology and
consumer markets.
The great achievement of British historian Andrew
Roberts’s new book, A History of the English-Speaking
Peoples Since 1900, is to put the significance of
these feats into their proper perspective.[1] Instead
of emulating other historians who have portrayed the
twentieth century as a cesspit of almost uninterrupted
warfare, slaughter, and misery, Roberts snubs reproach
and defeatism. His tale is of the triumph of light
over the forces of darkness. He is even more at odds
with his peers by identifying the common culture of
the victors as the principal reason they prevailed.
The definition of his subject originated in Winston
Churchill’s 1950s four-volume series of the same name
that took the story up to 1901. Roberts treats the
United States and Britain not as separate nations but
as members of a common political culture, which also
includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the
English-speaking Caribbean—though not Ireland, which
he shows has a very different identity.
Eventually, Roberts says, just as historians now see
no fundamental discontinuity between the republican
and imperial eras of Rome, they will not see a great
distinc- tion between the British Empire-led and the
American Republican-led periods of English-speaking
world dominance between the eighteenth and
twenty-first centuries....
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political movements—Prussian militarism, German
Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and international
Communism— mounted military campaigns to conquer
Europe, Asia, and the world. Had any of them
prevailed, it would have been a profound loss for
civilization as we know it. Yet over the course of
these bids for power, a coalition headed first by
Britain and then by the United States emerged not just
to oppose but to destroy them utterly.
From the long perspective of human affairs, these
victories must stand as among the most remarkable of
the past three millennia. They were as decisive for
world history as the victories of the ancient Greeks
over Persia, of Rome over Carthage, and of the Franks
over the Umayyad Caliphate.
Moreover, military triumph has been complemented by
economic success. The policies of free-trade
liberalism, which in the nineteenth century made
Britain the economic powerhouse of the world, were
revived in our own time to achieve the same for the
United States and its trading partners. In the past
fifty years, much of the world has been economically
transformed to a greater degree than in the previous
thousand. Most of Asia has enjoyed unprecedented
economic growth, with both China and India propelled
from socialist penury to future world-power status by
the demands of America’s booming technology and
consumer markets.
The great achievement of British historian Andrew
Roberts’s new book, A History of the English-Speaking
Peoples Since 1900, is to put the significance of
these feats into their proper perspective.[1] Instead
of emulating other historians who have portrayed the
twentieth century as a cesspit of almost uninterrupted
warfare, slaughter, and misery, Roberts snubs reproach
and defeatism. His tale is of the triumph of light
over the forces of darkness. He is even more at odds
with his peers by identifying the common culture of
the victors as the principal reason they prevailed.
The definition of his subject originated in Winston
Churchill’s 1950s four-volume series of the same name
that took the story up to 1901. Roberts treats the
United States and Britain not as separate nations but
as members of a common political culture, which also
includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the
English-speaking Caribbean—though not Ireland, which
he shows has a very different identity.
Eventually, Roberts says, just as historians now see
no fundamental discontinuity between the republican
and imperial eras of Rome, they will not see a great
distinc- tion between the British Empire-led and the
American Republican-led periods of English-speaking
world dominance between the eighteenth and
twenty-first centuries....