Far from seeking to abolish history, critical re-examinations of Britain’s past can deepen our understanding of the present. In Britain Alone (Faber), Philip Stephens shows that the last 70 years have exposed the nation’s fears about sovereignty and a lost past. Britain has often romanticised its place in the world. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland (Viking) argues passionately that our identity has been shaped for the worse by empire, and that we must do more to debunk national myths. For example, Britain defeated Hitler in the Second World War only with the help of thousands of soldiers from the empire.
Along with soldiers, the colonies supplied precious artefacts, like the bronzes plundered from Benin in what is now southern Nigeria. Barnaby Phillips’s damning account Loot (Oneworld) also covers the clandestine history of the Benin Bronzes on the western market. Wander round a country house and you will often find unlabelled Arab, Persian or Indian objects. As Fatima Manji discovers in Hidden Heritage (Chatto), such paintings and carvings “serve as evidence for the sons and daughters of the Orient that there are roots connecting us to these islands hundreds of years before we were born.” On a similar theme, in his charming Minarets in the Mountains (Bradt), Tharik Hussain travels in the footsteps of Ottoman gentleman Evliya Çelebi to discover the forgotten stories of Muslims in eastern Europe.
Serhii Plokhy made his name writing about Chernobyl. Now he tackles the Cuban missile crisis in Nuclear Folly (Allen Lane), a terrifying account that brings the reader nose-to-nose with Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro as they bluffed through weeks that could have destroyed humanity. Louis Menand doesn’t mention the crisis in his colossal history of thought in the Cold War, The Free World (Fourth Estate). Instead, he describes how the traffic of ideas between the US and non-communist Europe was accelerated by the wartime alliance.
Similarly wide-ranging is Linda Colley’s The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen (Profile), a book about how written constitutions were formed, from Pitcairn to post-revolutionary France. Famously, the UK lacks a codified constitution. The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations (Allen Lane), Julian Hoppit’s history of taxation from 1707 to 2021, points out that after the Second World War, the UK bequeathed the Germans a federal system and a written constitution. We just never thought to design one for ourselves.
Should the tax system reward achievement? Adrian Wooldridge’s The Aristocracy of Talent (Allen Lane) is a forthright defence of meritocracy, an idea attacked in recent books by Michael Sandel and Daniel Markovits. One of meritocracy’s virtues, argues Wooldridge, is its self-correcting nature. Whenever the system looks like it is stagnating, reformers have found better ways to discover talent.
No matter how idealistic, alternative societies always have hierarchies. The Utopians by Anna Neima (Picador) examines six breakaway groups, including one led by Rabind-ranath Tagore in West Bengal, where the poet’s “patrician instincts” clashed with its democratic ideals. Four philosophers who challenged the consensus on ethics at Oxford—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley—are the subjects of Benjamin Lipscomb’s revelatory The Women Are Up to Something (Oxford).
The flip side of utopianism is catastrophising. As Niall Ferguson says in his entertaining Doom (Allen Lane), expectations of disaster are based more on fear than reality—despite earthquakes and tsunamis we somehow keep going. But natural disasters are one thing: man-made ones quite another, as shown in Empire of Pain (Picador) by Patrick Radden Keefe, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 1996, the Sackler family company introduced a new pain relief drug: OxyContin. It generated $35bn in revenue but proved hugely addictive. Twenty-five years later, 450,000 Americans have died from opioid-related conditions. This is one historical injustice that is far from over.
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