.

The bad one is simply that this is a short book with a lot to do. By focusing on England, I was able to narrow the amount I needed to read about and write about. It was a labour-saving device, and nothing more. The better reason is that, in those earlier centuries, the most important elements of exceptionalism to arise anywhere in the British Isles had to do with the English language, the English common law and the rise of the English parliament. Since England would become the dominant partner in the subsequent political unions, those English oddities would prove more lastingly influential than comparable oddities elsewhere in the archipelago. In any event, it’s possible to get too hung up about all of this. I live in England, but spent huge chunks of my childhood in Wales. My grandfather was Protestant Ulster, his ancestors Scots and his wife Manx. My wife’s maiden name is Moroney, and her father Catholic Irish. I’m hardly exceptional in being this much of a mixture. If football fans of one home nation want to get all steamed up with those of another, then that’s up to them, but it’s not much different from the liver yelling insults at the pancreas, the heart giving aggro to the gall bladder.

      Finally, one last caveat. This book is rather unfashionable in celebrating British achievement. It suggests that the nation’s part in shaping the modern world exceeds the role played by any other country, not only in terms of the scale of its impact, but in terms of its benefits too. (That’s not to say there weren’t disbenefits also. There were, and very significant ones at that.) Any such celebratory tone can easily seem rather embarrassing, a display of bad taste akin to having a flagpole in your front garden or enjoying the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Personally, though, I’m not sure that questions of taste should determine what history to remember. The naval historian, Nick Rodger, had this to say about his own field of expertise:

      Many modern writers implicitly assume that the functions of the Navy were essentially aggressive, to win territory overseas. It seems for them to follow that sea power is nowadays both uninteresting, except to specialists in imperial history, and morally disreputable, something that the honest historian ought to pretend does not exist.

      A similar comment could be made more broadly about any view of Britain which lays too much emphasis on the positive, on the distinctive and on the world-shaping. This book certainly does lay too much emphasis on these things. I hope I’ve made it crystal clear that it is not intended as an even-handed survey. Yet honest historians ought never to pretend or imagine things away. History, like life, doesn’t make for easy moral conclusions. Any historian wanting to avoid a ‘morally disreputable’ and intellectually shallow patriotism risks biasing the picture in the other direction, overlooking facts that should not be overlooked. If this book has a serious purpose, then it’s this: to thump down on the table a whole collection of such facts. Included in the collection are some obvious but under-emphasized ones, such as British naval predominance, and some less obvious ones too — for example, facts connected with social welfare, homicide, sports or the health transition.

      What one makes of this collection is another matter altogether: a business for professional historians, not rank amateurs like myself. Having written a book built entirely on the scholarship of others, I’m as keenly aware as it’s possible to be of how much remarkable work is being done by historians today. I’m not just indebted to their work, I’m in awe of it.

LANGUAGE

       SHAW’S POTATO

      The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti:

      F: gh as in rough I: o as in women SH: ti as in nation

      Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato:

      P: gh as in hiccough O: ough as in though T: bt as in debt A: eigh as in neighbour T: pt as in pterodactyl O: eau as in bureau

      Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato.

       P as in hiccough

      The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.

       O as in though

      Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.

      English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to re-emerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.

      This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:

      Scae Sse Sche Shae Se Che Shee Zhee Sheea Sheh Shey Sha Sso Sco Scho Schoe Show Sho Shoy Schew Schw Shoe Shou She Su Scheo Sheo Zhe

      If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough,