This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

in football as two, in cricket as one team occasionally masquerading as an English county.

      It’s sometimes said that our identity confusion has been exacerbated by today’s multicultural society. Anyone reading today’s newspapers would almost certainly come away with an impression of a society uneasy with itself, a land where racial and religious tension seethes only inches beneath the surface. But if this is the case — and I doubt it — it’s certainly nothing new. Contemporary multiculturalism may pose challenges, but infinitely fewer than it posed in the past. The Viking version of multiculturalism generally involved a sword in the belly. The sixteenth-century version of a multi-faith society involved bonfires, stakes and heretics.

      In any case, our national confusion goes far wider and deeper than simply national, ethnic or religious issues. Recent reactions to the war in Iraq exposed long-standing divisions about the country’s attitudes to its past. When the British government chose to go to war, was it acting in its old role of imperialist bully? Or in its equally old role of global policeman and bringer of freedom? The national debate displayed both responses, both equally impassioned. The rise of the British Empire is arguably the most salient fact in the history of the modern world. Should we be proud of it or ashamed? Or perhaps the empire has nothing to do with us any more? For all our love of military adventure, are we perhaps just a glorified adjunct of the United States, a kind of East Atlantic Puerto Rico?

      Our own government is hardly keen to boast on our behalf. The Home Office recently published a booklet called Life in the United Kingdom, aimed at helping immigrants navigate the path to citizenship. It’s not a bad publication at all. It begins with a twenty-five-page history of the country, from Roman times to the present. The survey is balanced and accurate, if a bit on the bland side. But what it leaves out is peculiar. It does say, ‘British industry came to lead the world in the nineteenth century.’ But that hardly gets the point across. The fact is that at the peak of our industrial power, we dug two-thirds of the world’s coal, refined half its iron, forged five-sevenths of its steel, manufactured two-fifths of its hardware, and wove half its commercial cotton cloth. That’s not simply leading others. That’s being so far ahead of others that we were, in effect, imagining an entire new world into existence, a world that has utterly altered human expectations of health, wealth and technological possibility.

      Likewise, the booklet comments that ‘the railway engine [was] pioneered by George and Robert Stephenson’. Well, yes, so it was, but British inventors have also played key roles in developing the steam engine, the telegraph, aeronautics, the steam turbine, the microscope, the screw-driven iron ship, industrial steel, multiple-print photography, the electric light, the chain-driven bicycle, the electric generator, pneumatic tyres, the telephone, television, radar, the fax machine, the computer, the jet engine, the pocket calculator, and the World Wide Web. Those medical and public health innovations which Britons were most instrumental in developing — vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery and antibiotics — have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. Are these facts really not worth a mention?

      And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth’s surface, but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes, more than those in any country except the United States. The evolution of such things as habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process, the abolition of torture, and the rule of law aren’t purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government around the world. At the Royal Navy’s peak, it owned more than half of the world’s warships and made possible the nineteenth-century globalization of trade and finance.

      These aren’t small things. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the modern world has been more deeply shaped by Britain than by any other country. And we brought some good stuff to the party. Democracy, the limited state, the rule of law, free trade, industrialization, modern agriculture, modern finance, international law — none of these is exclusively British, but they’re all sticky with our fingerprints. To the (very considerable) extent that the world is now shaped by American power and American values … well, we know which country gave her birth. If the modern world is richer, freer, more peaceful, more democratic and healthier than it was, then Britain has played a leading role, often the leading role, in that transformation.

      This book is about just that. What follows is a series of observations about very particular aspects of our culture and history. But underlying these observations is a broader theme, that of British exceptionalism: the ways in which our history is most strikingly different from that of our neighbours. This book takes a particular interest in the many things that we did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do. It focuses especially on those of our oddities which spread across the world — everything from football to the rule of law.

      This isn’t meant to be a balanced way to view ourselves. A balanced view would take into account the many ways in which we were identical to our neighbours, or borrowed ideas and institutions from them. It would look at the ways in which we were last or worst or feeblest. Yet those viewpoints already have wide expression in our culture. Those ladettes in the gutter or the yobs dancing on the bonnet symbolize all that we already dislike in ourselves. This book is a reminder of the other side, the side that our grumbling too often ignores.

      Along the way, a picture of Britain emerges: one possible answer to the conundrum of Britishness, one way of answering that question, ‘Who are we?’ And if the book skates over much of what is least praiseworthy in our culture, then at least it aims to do justice to our joint creation: a world inconceivably better now than it was four hundred years ago. A world that, compared with that earlier age, is (mostly) prosperous, (mostly) free, (mostly) technically advanced. In short, a world that is (mostly) British.

      Before proceeding farther, a few caveats are in order. Readers wanting to race straight through to the action should do just that.

      The first caveat has to do with the horrendous complexity of the term ‘British’. Britain in its current shape dates from only 1707, and that’s to ignore all the complexities of Britain’s relationship with Ireland, and indeed its relationships with the overseas colonies and dominions. Before the Act of Union, there was a century in which the crowns of Scotland and England were joined, albeit with one or two rude interruptions, yet those two countries and Ireland were all importantly separate from one another. That separateness, indeed, was a crucial complicating factor during the turbulence of that century. Prior to 1603, old-fashioned histories of Britain are generally content to talk about England almost exclusively until a British identity starts to flicker into life in the early-modern era. This approach is a nonsense, of course. If Britain means anything at all prior to 1603, then it designates a geographical area that certainly includes Scotland. The most recent history to take these issues seriously was called simply The Isles, a title that squarely places geography ahead of politics.

      The complications of Britishness are perhaps most evident in relation to Ireland. That country was colonized by the British, and its citizens were for a long time both Irish and British. Which identity is paramount? It all depends on who you ask. When called an Irishman, the Dublin-born, London-dwelling Duke of Wellington is said to have replied that ‘Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.’ On the other hand, the Ulster-born, Dublin-dwelling Seamus Heaney refused to have his work included in a book of British verse, writing, ‘Be advised, my passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast The Queen’

      In this book, I haven’t attempted to solve this or any other identity problem. Indeed, I’ve simply avoided definitions altogether. If Scottish soldiers in Canada develop the sport of ice hockey, then that, for me, is an example of Britishness in action. If a French-born king of England (but not Wales or Scotland) develops the common law, then that too, for the purposes of this book, counts as an example of Britishness in action. There’s no neat logic in action here, but then if it’s logic you were after, you shouldn’t have bought a book about Britain.

      I’ve a further confession to make, namely that Scotland, Wales and Ireland don’t figure much in my account of exceptionalism in