The Isles: A History

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Summary: some subjects are too big for one volume
Review: Davies book is massive, which is necessary for a topic as large as History of British Isles from the beginning. Much of his early history adds light to a poorly understood topic & seems worthwhile. When we get to more modern times, in my view he seems to want to pile on history of various different institutions with only passing reference to people. For example there are discussions of British common law, the evolving importance and then waning of importance of the Royal Navy, the size of the British Armed forces including the Army, the history of Imperial measures such as pounds and the mile ( as opposed to the metric system). Yet he has only minimal mention of such figures in the evolution of the British Empire as Clive or Cecil Rhodes. When he does mention them, it is often grouped together with others as part of an abstract discussion of some general trend. There are brief discussions of some of the key explorers of this century, Scott of the Antarctic, Mallory , the team of Hillary and Norgay on Everest. Davies correctly summarizes the failure of Scott to learn how to use specialized equipment, such as dogsleds, as being the key to his failure while Amundsen succeeded. There is a great deal of discussion of the fact that the Royal Family are of German extraction, that the only thing about Diana that they did not criticize was her Englishness. I think many people would find a book more satisfying that spoke somewhat more about stories of individuals and less about the evolution of institutions as abstract concepts. Perhaps Davies is reacting to the fact that most history is told about individuals, so he wishes to correct this by describing abstractions and institutional developments. In one sense this may be correcting an imbalance. Yet it seems difficult to warm to this mode fo telling a story.

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Summary: Good piece of history.
Review: Davies does not discover in his new book. He doen't go to places he mantions and try to see things unseen before. He sits in his comfortable chair in Australia, then England and reads books. Reads writes and critizies. But he does it with grace!

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Summary: The Isles: A History
Review: Excellent book, again! I liked very much the format, it allowed (and helped) reflections. It also demonstrated very clearly, how "mixed and matched" every nation is. How many factors were influencing history of the Isles in every phase of it? It was a delight to read, and think over and over again. Much could be said in praise, but I would like to express it in Mr. Davies'es second language - "sto lat niech zyje nam!" and keeps writing books!

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Summary: "The Isles" doesn't compare favorably with "Europe"
Review: Having read "Europe", I enthusiatically anticipated Davies' treatment of his homeland's history. I was a bit disappointed, as this book was neither as readable nor as approachable as its predecessor.

While Davies' style, research and conclusions make reading this book a worthwhile endeavor, one should scrutinize the author's strategy. He overreaches in his attempt to survey the whole of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and, to a lesser extent, French history, in a single volume.

His approach would be more favorably regarded if he'd chosen to publish this survey in multiple volumes. Perhaps one covering the history up until the arrival of Christianity, another covering the so-called "Dark Ages" and pre-Renaissance period and possibly a third starting with the 100 Year's War and concluding with the present.

Generally, Davies provides a unique perspective on the subject by de-emphasizing the traditional focus on England and the English. In a broader sense, he achieves what very few historians even bother to attempt, namely breaking down historical confluences into their constituent elements rather than treating a particular subject as a monolith.

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Summary: A flawed masterpiece
Review: Mr Davies' book is an excellent introduction to the history of the British Isles. The author is at pains to use terms like "British" and "English" only in their proper contexts, and is so careful to avoid anachronism that he refers to historical figures and places only by the names current at the time. King William I, for example, is "Guillaume" in the book. The separate and inter-dependent histories of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales are treated in depth. Unfortunately, the book is marred by several egregious errors of fact; notably the assertion on page 905 (hardback) that the Irish civil war was won by Eamon de Valera's anti-treaty forces. The edition I read also suffered from a lack of proofreading that showed up on almost every page. The concluding chapter on the "Post-Imperial Isles" consists of a series of essays documenting various strands of modern society. These essays are very strongly informed by events of the late 1990s and are somewhat out of keeping with the overall scope of the work. All in all however, for the tolerant reader this book is a most enjoyable route to a solid knowledge of British history.

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Summary: A RAMBLING AND DISJOINTED HISTORY
Review: Norman Davies is a knowledgeable historian, but I found this book to be unsatisfactory. As an overview of UK history, the narrative wanders aimlessly, pre-occupied with certain issues while brushing over critical themes with little more than oblique references. Professor Davies' ideological agenda explains some of this, since he seems determined to debunk traditional Anglo-centric versions the history which have failed to emphasize the French and Germanic roots of the British ruling class, and which have ignored or distorted history of the Celtic regions. While probably fair enough at some level, the author's attitude results in a book that reads at times more like a rambling and opinionated history of British history than a disciplined account of how England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales came to be what they are today. Adding to the difficulty are stylistic problems which mar the book. I found much of the first 600 pages almost unreadable, given to endless displays of factual virtuosity without much effort to place anything into perspective. Since I find it hard to explain exactly what I mean here, to give an idea let me quote more or less randomly (this from page 285): "After that the marriage of Alexander (r.1107-24) to an illegitimate daughter of Henri I, and Henri I's marriage to Edith-Matilda, daughter of Malcolm III and Margaret, and sister to four Scottish kings, tied the dynastic, political and cultural strands of the knot for several generations. David I (r. 1124-53), youngest son of Malcolm and Margaret, was brought up at the English court as David fitzMalcom, Earl of Huntington and Northhamton." There are places where Davies goes on like this for pages on end, and I defy anyone not already well-versed in the history to make much sense out of it. Anyone who is well-versed, of course, doesn't need this sort of book in the first place, raising the question of what audience Professor Davies is trying to reach. He changes gear abruptly in the latter half of the book, and from there on the narrative becomes more readable, although the problem of idiosyncratic focus if anything gets worse, the text devolving more or less into a series of essays on loosely-related historical topics. He starts to number his sections at this point, devoting one each to the British civil service, the aristocracy, the economy, sports, currency, demographics, the monarchy, language, parliament, the navy, and so forth. Through all this, major historical figures - Victoria, Churchill, Disraeli, others, along with a bewildering array of minor ones - appear seemingly out of nowhere in the context of one topic or another, then they disappear again without any sense of who they were or what impact they had on the evolution of their nation. The major wars in which Britain fought are mentioned, but again out of context. The author devotes more space to describing the rules of cricket at one point than he does to recounting the political or military history of the Napoleonic wars or the American Revolution. Even the great world wars of the twentieth century get less space than do expansive quotations from novels, poems and old histories which the author reproduces with abandon throughout the book. In the last few pages, Davies begins to pontificate openly, "taking off the mask", as he describes it. He announces his belief that the disintegration of the United Kingdom is imminent. This is clearly the conclusion to which he's been driving for over 1000 pages, and he may well prove right about this if the political leaders of the UK suffer from his same inability to focus on critical issues. I also read this author's single-volume history of Europe, to which I had many of the same objections. In his introductions, he proclaims himself a champion of popular, big-picture history, and declares his distaste for the trend among his peers for writing "more and more about less and less". I keep reading his work because I happen to share this point of view, hoping vainly to find a "big picture" in all this jumbled detail. I probably don't feel quite as negative about this book as all this sounds - I did learn from it. However, I would suggest to prospective readers that there must be easier ways than this to get an overview of British history

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Summary: Dissapointing Work from a Fine Historian
Review: Norman Davies, a distinguished Historian who has written several books on European history (including the brilliant 'History of Europe' volume) is surprisingly dissapointing in this huge tome on the history of what Davies deems 'The Isles.'

Davies manages to capture the history of the British Isles with enough accuracy to pass the grade. But nowhere to be seen is the lively, curious and intelligent writing style which made the 'History of Europe' so readable, except perhaps in his presentation of the Celtic peoples. Davies seems to spend far too much time on obscure figures and trivialities without indulging in the more important aspects of British history. He writes in immense detail, for example, about the history of various English and Scottish monarchs, but gives other equally, if not more, important events such as the Industrial revolution scant and superficial treatment.

The book certainly could have used some judicious editing and a much shorter length (about 5-600 pages), and better judgement on the part of the author on what to include and what to reject on grounds of relevance. It is certainly a surprisingly bland effort from an otherwise wonderful writer on European history.

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Summary: More than meets the eye...
Review: The British Isles are a unique geographical location in the world, having been provided by nature with advantages and problems unique in the world, and peopled by various groups who have worked together and against one another for domination of the Isles. Only for the briefest periods in history did the Isles truly represent a unified group, and even these times were more of an appearance of unity rather than actual unification.

Norman Davies, author of the critically acclaimed 'Europe: A History', has put together an interesting history of the British Isles, trying to portray them as a group that, while lacking unity, should be at least addressed as a unified group, always influencing and co-dependent upon each other.

Davies is rather modest in his self-description of the book:

'This book necessarily presents a very personal view of history. Indeed, by some academic standards, it may well be judged thoroughly unsound. As I wrote in relation to a previous work, it presents the past 'seen through one pair of eyes, filtered by one brain, and recorded by one pen'. It has been assembled by an author who, though being a British citizen and a professional historian, has no special expertise in the British historical field.'

Davies self-criticism is really far too strongly expressed here, for he does an admirably thorough job at documentation, reporting, and theorising. Taking a cue from other historians who worry about the increasing lack of historical knowledge of the general public coupled with the increasing specialisation which causes people to lose proper perspective, Davies has put together a comprehensive history of the British Isles which strives to escape at least some of the problems of previous histories.

For instance, it has only been within the last generation that 'English History' has come to be seen as an inaccurate term for discussion of the affairs of all the Isles, or even for the history of the largest island, Great Britain. To this day, anomalies exist that confuse the status of the islands (all cars in the United Kingdom, for instance, carry the plate coding GB, even those cars in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom that is not part of Great Britain, etc.). Davies takes great care to distinguish English from Scot from Pict from Irish from British, which has a meaning close to the commonly-used term for only the most ancient and the most modern British events.

This does, I must confess, occasionally get in the way of the narrative history. While explaining his reasoning up front in the introduction or preface makes sense, the constant referring to this state of affairs interrupts the flow of the narrative a bit more than it perhaps should.

Davies takes a long-term approach, starting with prehistorical evidence for inhabitation of the areas which are now the British Isles (which used to be connected to the mainland), getting into real substance with the arrival of the Celts in the British Isles (the longest-tenured remaining people in the Isles, pushed to the periphery but still influential in many ways), which for a period of six to seven centuries may have the been the longest period of unity and stability the Isles have ever, or will ever, know. However, even these groups were not unified in a political sense, and tribal warfare was common on all the main islands among competing groups.

Davies proceeds to explore the history of the British Isles under the Romans, during the Germanic invasion/migrations, during the Norse/Viking invasions/raids, during the Norman conquest, and then to the period of English hegemony. The period of English hegemony consists of three primary period: the 'Three Kingdoms' period (England, Ireland, and Scotland); the Union period (which various includes Ireland in union with a unified England and Scotland), and the post-Imperial time, which has seen an increasing move toward devolution, beginning with Irish independence and continuing toward separate parliaments for the 'nations'.

'In all but name, therefore, the policy of devolution had been accepted by the Thatcher government in the cultural and educational sphere many years before it was adopted in the constitutional sphere by 'New Labour'. The cumulative effects were bound to be far-reaching. The Scots and the Welsh, and to some extent the Northern Irish, were given a strong injection not only of self-esteem but also of separation.'

Davies tackles difficult questions and problems that are not typical of standard histories, especially where speculation into the possible future of the British Isles is concerned. As the United Kingdom has never been a nation-state in the same sense as continental nations, what does this mean for the future of the Union? Will the British Isles once again become a collection of peoples, owing more allegiance to the broader, historically-newly forming European Union than toward each other politically, while still maintaining trade and social ties that are incredibly strong? Only time will tell.

A biased history, to be sure, but a very unique insight, and well worth reading for a broader perspective on the history of the peoples of the British Isles than most 'British history' or 'English history' books will give.

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Summary: An impressive polemic
Review: This book isn't a primer: you need a nodding acquaintance with the facts before you read it, or you may come away with a partial (in both senses) view. Unkind readers might say this is a 1200-page exercise in ax-grinding; I prefer to call it a very long polemic. Nothing wrong with that, provided you understand what's going on. The spectacle is impressive if a little alarming, like watching an expert woodsman enthusiastically chopping up an ancient oak tree for firewood.

It's true that Britishness is a working arrangement, not an organic growth (you can be naturalized British, but to be Scots, Welsh or English you have to be born that way). The author thinks the arrangement isn't working any more if it ever did; and he may be right. His book starts with the Stone Age and goes up to 1999. The main thrust is how Britishness has been invented and reinvented over the centuries to serve the interests of elites, who typically boil down to Anglos, and they wrote the histories. Revisionism on these lines has been attempted before but never so comprehensively or with such loving attention to detail. If you want to hear how Bad King Edward managed to beat William Wallace thanks to Welsh and Gascon mercenaries, but the English (minus the Welsh and Gascons) got their comeuppance at Bannockburn ("the flower of English chivalry perished"), Prof. Davies is your man. There's a lot more where that came from, most of it as interesting as it is one-sided. Coming to modern times, he thinks in the 1st edition that De Valera's republicans won the Irish Civil War, which has annoyed Irish purists and Michael Collins fans who thought the Free-Staters won. Some readers have detected a cavalier attitude to social and economic issues, but they miss the point: that isn't part of the game plan. The really interesting question, though, is left hanging: why did the English, whose language and institutions went around the world, make such a botched job of cultural imperialism in their own backyard? Most of the Scots and Welsh (including Prof. Davies, in spades) are Anglophone, but they are not English. Why not?

It isn't a silly question. Consider France, that grand cultural monolith. Who ever heard a murmur from the Bretons, historically as distinct from the French as the Welsh are from the English - where is the Breton Prof. Davies, inveighing against 'Francocentric' history? (is there even such a word, or would it be tautologous?). Who but medievalists know or care about the Languedoc high culture destroyed by the North French invasion of the thirteenth century, and when will Hollywood be making an Albigensian "Braveheart"? La Grande Nation even acquired a German province in the seventeenth century, and when it was taken away in 1871 all France was outraged; fortunately the injustice was put right with a little help from the Anglo-Saxons.

Time to fess up. As a native of the Isles who is not Welsh, Scottish or Irish, descended from more of the same not-persons from way back, I have to confess that I am, well, English. What I would like to see is another work, twice as long, showing in more detail exactly where we went wrong, with many interesting curiosities and some catchy songs. Seriously: agree or disagree, his scope is amazing. "The Isles" isn't as brilliant as "Europe", but then what is? And the maps are the right way round this time. No one does it like Prof. Davies.

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Summary: Lots of good things to know herein
Review: This is a nice big book: 1058 pages of text, 31 pages of notes, and 90 pages of appendices. It is also a fascinating book, telling of the history of what I call the British Isles. (The book spends a bit of time discussing what they should be called.) The book is excellent, tho the history before 1066 does not interest me much. He concludes that Britain will disintegrate into four nations. The appendices are most interesting and varied. Never before had I seen a list of the 57 living persons bypassed to make George I king. One even can find the words and music for Danny Boy! This book is a treat to read and own.