A Useful History of Britain, by Michael Braddick

I am attracted by the idea of an author describing their history as “useful”, thus implying that others may be less so. But the word does raise obvious questions about to whom it is useful and what kind of usefulness it has. At first glance, the range and size of this volume – Stonehenge to Brexit in fewer than 220 pages of actual text – suggest that the target might be the intelligent and curious tourist on the plane to London, the sort of purpose for which I have often used the various series of specifically short histories to be found in the bookshops.

The tourist would find it of little use, however. There is a (very) potted chronological account of Britain in the seventh chapter, “Changes over time: phases in the history of political life”, but the book is really a set of essays assessing the importance of the various forces that determine the direction of history and that constantly range from Stonehenge or Rome to Brexit. The essays cover: the ideas of collective and individual power; the role of ideas in history; the importance of material conditions; and institutional capacities. To which one can only concur that, yes, they are important. At the end of the book, the author tells us that his aim has been to put “people, power and agency at the heart of political history”. But who doesn’t try to do this?

I had a sense, in reading this book, that there was a much more polemical and less equivocal essay in there somewhere trying to get out. In so far as the argument has targets, the principal one is nationalist history. Michael Braddick is right to point out that the activity of professional history mushroomed in the 19th century when it came easily to authors to tell a tale of the rise of nations and their institutions, in this case of Britain’s independence and vast influence, but also its “constitutional” monarchy and representative parliament. In extreme forms of such narratives, these come to be seen as a kind of culmination of the historical process, with no further progress possible. In opposition to this, Braddick is keen to point out that national and geographical identities are less long-lived and more arbitrary than we like to assume. He remarks that “the UK” may have a life no longer than the Kingdom of Wessex. This feels like a prolegomenon to an exhortation to move on and embrace a European identity, but actually his account of arguments about the European Union is scrupulously balanced.

The answer to the original question about the usefulness of this book is that it would accrue (only) to historians in search of a broader framework for the understanding of history. It is far more cognisant of political and economic ideas than historical writing used to be. It could pass as a book about political economy seen in a historical context. The trouble is that the account of ideas is fairly all-embracing and neither particularly original nor particularly clear.

I enjoyed Braddick’s comparison of the role of substantive theology in many earlier periods to that of quantitative economics now, especially as I am permanently sceptical of both, but it’s all been said before. I also enjoyed his quotation from Tacitus about the Romanisation of Britain: “the Britons call it civilisation when it is really all part of their servitude”. I would – naughtily – apply this to Europhiles.

Lincoln Allison is emeritus reader in politics at the University of Warwick.

A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of Getting Things Done
By Michael Braddick
Oxford University Press, 272pp, £20.00
ISBN 9780198848301
Published 22 July 2021