Just Finished Reading: A Brief History of Britain – 1851-2010: A Nation Transformed by Jeremy Black (FP: 2010)

This was the last book in the History of Britain series bringing us bang up to date (or almost). Covering 160 years in 326 pages in enough of a challenge for any period but the 160 years in question had a lot of history to cover. Not only did it cover both world wars – WW1 making it to just over 5 pages and WW2 making it to just under 13 – it had to cover the rise and fall of the British Empire, the India Mutiny, the full impact of the Industrial Revolution, the huge social, political and economic changes that brought about Britain’s present position in the world, the development of the train as a major source of transport, the growth of suburbia, the emergence of the new political elite and the urban proletariat, the emergence of the modern novel and modern art, the growth of newspapers, the ever increasing political franchise, the Irish problem, the new political parties, the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the General Strike of 1926, the advance of science and medicine, the change in the position of women, religious changes and the steady decline of organised religion, the rise of consumerism, immigration issues, the National Health Service, changing class structure, the Cold War, the emergence of the Commonwealth, closer ties with Europe, Northern Ireland (the Troubles), the influence of American culture, the idea of Multiculturalism, the 1960’s and the Thatcher years to mention just some of the highlights!

As you can imagine the author had his work cut out for him covering this amount of territory. To his credit he did manage to weave it all together into a consistent narrative. Through necessity he did have to paint some sections with a very board brush looking at trends rather than events. But the idea was to give the overall flavour of the times and only focus in on smaller events when they helped to illustrate the much bigger picture. It did feel a bit dry in places and from time to time focused a little too much on who won what election rather than the why of things, but I guess this is for me to follow up in more detail in other books less constrained by having to cover so much in such a comparatively small volume. The author is also clearly no fan of closer European integration and, I think, towards the end of the volume let his personal views colour his analysis too much. That’s always the problem with writing about the present or near present – lack of distance doesn’t allow much in the way of context and anything said tends to be more emotional and less dispassionate than it should be. Without the perspective of time it is easy to lose focus on the important things. Only with hindsight can you really see things as clearly as they need to be for this sort of thing.

Despite my qualms – few and far between actually – this has given me a fairly good skeleton to guide me in filling in the gaps and going into more detail of the bits I’m interested in. A good ending to a very good series.