The names of famous battlegrounds loom large in the histories of practically all states and nations. Lately, however, history has become a series of fiercely contested battles in an ongoing culture war in America and Britain.

In the case of America, an early salvo was fired by Lynne Cheney in October 1994. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History,” Cheney excoriated in the strongest possible terms the proposals UCLA’s National Center for History in Schools put forward for America’s public schools. Cheney was concerned about its politically correct account of American history, which she characterized as:

George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president. … One of the most often mentioned subjects … is McCarthy and McCarthyism. The Ku Klux Klan gets its fair share, too. … Harriet Tubman, an African-American who helped rescue slaves … is mentioned six times. Two white male contemporaries of Tubman’s, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, get one and zero mentions, respectively. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and the Wright brothers make no appearance at all.

Cheney won that round in the culture war, as the publication she criticised got nowhere in schools. Perhaps the creators were just ahead of their time, though, because all the trends Cheney decried are on full display in the far-more-successful 1619 Project. Meanwhile, a similarly bitter dispute has been brewing across the Atlantic since the 1970s. This was when child-centered progressives succeeded in substituting a “new history” for the fact-based curriculum that had long been taught. The sharp decline in historical knowledge among British citizens led to something of a pushback under the Conservative-led coalition government of David Cameron. Between 2010 and 2013, Michael Gove, as Secretary of State for Education, succeeded in renewing a fact-based chronological approach towards British history from its earliest times, though his project is still unfinished and may well be discarded with the advent of the new Labour Government of Sir Keir Starmer. 

A member of the working group tasked with producing this model history curriculum is Robert Tombs, Emeritus Professor of French History at the University of Cambridge. Tombs has worked to combat the adoption by Britain’s schools, universities, and museums of a posture towards its national history that obsesses over the evils of colonialism to the exclusion of most else. The comparisons to the 1619 Project are obvious.

As Tombs explained in a lecture delivered last September, he came comparatively late to the issue. He did not become fully aware of how virulently antipathetic Britain’s universities had become towards Britain’s past until a succession of events triggered by the George Floyd riots in May 2020. He was alerted to the crisis by the sudden de-naming of buildings (Liverpool University’s Gladstone Building and Edinburgh University’s Hume building), an enquiry by his own university into its involvement in the slave trade, and by campaigns to remove the statues of Sir Robert Peel and Cecil Rhodes from public spaces. 

In 2021, Tombs created an organisation dedicated to combating these trends, which he named “History Reclaimed.” Historians Jonathan Clark and Niall Ferguson are among its current members. The primary aim is not to deny that colonialism entailed real evils, but merely to dispute the idea that only harm was brought to Britain’s colonies. Tombs and other members of History Reclaimed have sought to instill balance by highlighting some of the benefits the British brought to those whom they colonised, as well as to emphasise how involved Britain was in pioneering the ending of the slave trade and slavery.

Tombs’s much-feted work, The English and Their History, was originally published in 2014, several years before he took up literary arms in the current history wars. In that first edition, Tombs devotes considerable space to England’s early involvement in the slave trade as well as to its pioneering role in ending it. He also enumerates the harms that colonisation brought to the indigenous populations of the territories it colonised along with the benefits. Populations were decimated through the diseases the colonisers brought against which the indigenous populations had no immunity. They were also often subject to forcible uprooting and displacement from their traditional homelands, and in several instances simply massacred upon the slightest pretext. However, as Tombs points out, had the English not colonised the territories, other European powers most likely would have, with equally malign consequences in terms of disease and destruction.

In the original edition of his book, Tombs is preoccupied with other issues than the current history wars. He supplies a straightforward narrative account of the history of England since the arrival of the Angles and Saxons in the fifth century. But Tombs also sought to explain the manifold ways in which, over the centuries, the English have “remembered” their history, through monuments, works of art, music, and literature, but above all in their historical writings. 

The earliest such historical work Tombs cites is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, an eighth-century work originally composed in Latin by the English monk, the Venerable Bede, cited by Tombs as having lately been heralded as “arguably the greatest English historian of all time.” Tombs further relates how Bede assigned to the English “an intellectual and religious significance … as one of the chosen Christian peoples … in God’s plan to spread Christianity.”

During the ensuing three centuries following Bede, the Anglo-Saxons came to develop a unified kingdom, marked by a high level of literacy and a distinctive language. Their great nation-builder was Alfred the Great, who, in the ninth century, succeeded in driving out marauding Vikings from several previously independent principalities in southern and eastern England which he united under his rule.

Of Alfred’s seizure of London from the Vikings in 886, Tombs writes: “If we want a birth date for an English kingdom this is as good as any. … He referred to his people not as Saxons but as ‘Angelkcynn’—‘Englishkind’—Their language was ‘Englisc.’ … As Father of the Nation he therefore has much to recommend him.”

Neither Alfred nor his successors succeeded in permanently driving out the Vikings from England before 1066. This was when the ill-fated and newly crowned King Harold defeated an army of invading Norwegian Vikings immediately before he was defeated and killed in battle by the forces of William of Normandy, who invaded England claiming that Harold’s predecessor, Edward the Confessor, had promised the crown of England to him.

The Norman Conquest, as William’s successful invasion and takeover of England is known, is the first of four successive historical episodes whose memorialisation by the English people is of central significance to Tombs. In each case, Tombs is at pains to contest endemic myths that have grown up about them. 

The British Empire has come to be remembered in two conflicting ways, both dubious in Tombs’ view.

In the case of the Norman Conquest, the “memory” whose accuracy Tombs seeks to dispute concerns the alleged imposition on the English people of a notorious “Norman yoke.” It supposedly did this by forcibly depriving the English of their “ancient liberties” which they did not begin to recover until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Drawing on medieval and modern historians, Tombs seeks to lay to rest the notion that the Norman Conquest was an unmitigated disaster for the English people. He writes:

The system of government remained … because it worked, and helped … [the Normans] to rule. But it … differed fundamentally from … [those] on the Continent. … First, it was fairly uniform … and so tended to counteract the fragmentation of authority that had splintered European kingdoms and empires. … Second, it had a wide degree of participation … [s]o ancient forms of representation … survived in England.

Many who believe England’s ancient liberties were extinguished by the Norman Conquest also believe that they began to be regained through the English Civil War along with its aftermath, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. According to this view, Parliament’s deposition and execution of Charles l and the subsequent deposition of his younger son, James ll, marks the triumph of constitutionally limited government over their attempts at despotic rule. This widely held manner of “remembering” England’s tumultuous seventeenth century forms the kernel of the so-called “Whig interpretation of history.” Somewhat surprisingly, this interpretation was first propounded by a Frenchman, Paul Rapin de Thoras, a Huguenot soldier in William of Orange’s invading army. Of Rapin’s interpretation of England’s history, Tombs writes:

Rapin’s became the standard … view of English history as a continuous struggle to defend ancient freedoms. … [Its] climax … was the Glorious Revolution, re-establishing Anglo-Saxon liberty. … This Whig history … became the national history, not only of England, but of Britain and the United States. … In England and America it still permeates textbooks, political rhetoric and popular history.

To this still widely held view of English history, Tombs attaches little credence. Its demolition is said to have begun with David Hume’s six-volume History of England (1757) in which, Tombs relates, Hume set about “demolishing every Whig shibboleth with grim relish”: 

Anglo-Saxon England [was] … “extremely aristocratical,” oppressive and violent. There was no “Norman Yoke”: the Conquest had been beneficial. … Liberty … came not from resistance to the Crown … but from its growing power. … In the Civil War, the royalists had been right to defend legal authority, on which true liberty depended. … True liberty … was not ancient but modern, a result especially of the growth of commerce and towns. It was not, therefore, an ancient Teutonic inheritance.

After explaining how, despite Hume’s History, the Whig interpretation gained ascendancy through such advocates as the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay and his great-nephew, George Macaulay Trevelyan, Tombs describes how it eventually was laid to rest by later historians, most notably Herbert Butterfield: “The modern consensus,” writes Tombs, “shows striking similarities to the interpretation of … Hume. The Civil War was a political accident. … The last in the series of European wars of religion. … Parliament was not pursuing a centuries-old constitutional struggle of liberty against tyranny.”

The next episode in English history of central interest to Tombs is its acquisition, largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of a vast global empire. Here again, there is a mainstream view of what happened that Tombs is inclined to dispute. Finally ending just after the Second World War, the British Empire has come to be remembered in two conflicting ways, both dubious in Tombs’ view. One standard account, Tombs explains, is a legacy of the Whig interpretation of British history. In this version: 

The British saw themselves as having duties as well as interests, and, like other powerful people, saw their interests as the interests of all. … It was strongly felt to be an obligation to provide leadership and assist the forces of progress … by force if necessary. … The ideological foundations of [this] foreign policy were above all Whig ideas of English history as the triumph of progress. 

The British, in other words, understood it as their vocation to be rulers of a vast overseas empire. Tomb’s view of this stance is damning: “There was lethal arrogance here, combined with naively optimistic generosity, believing that the freedom and prosperity England had recently secured should be spread.” 

Tombs is equally impatient, though, with those who view the British Empire as the epitome of evil. As remarked earlier in this review, it is a view that has gained traction among the British only comparatively recently. Despite their manifold moral failings towards those among whom they settled and colonised, Tombs refuses to accept this negative verdict on the British Empire. He writes:

Economic historians mostly agree that having an empire on balance made little difference, either good or bad. Free trade neutralized imperial possession, and Whitehall would not privilege British companies. … The big gainers … were the countries supplying British and European markets, whether inside or outside the empire … [even in India’s case whose colonization arguably brought periodic famine and much misrule] after 1880 Indian industrial production grew by [a rate] … comparable with Germany. 

Finally, Tombs addresses the growing conviction among many sections of English society that Britain is a nation in decline, no longer fit for or suited to political independence. This view began to emerge in the latter days of empire, but became especially pronounced at the end of it. Tombs writes:

For many people, from Tory radicals to left-wing journalists, decline has shaped their vision of England as a decaying relic. … “Declinism” became a set of ideas and assumptions … widely taken as self-evident, and they retain some influence today.

Tombs, however, will have none of it. He writes:

Declinism … focuses on a deeply pessimistic view of postwar England’s weakness contrasted with a grossly overblown image of its earlier power. … When Britain emerged as a significant force, after the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, it was the smallest and yet most global of the world’s half-dozen or so most powerful states. … It occupies a similar position three centuries later. … Nor has England declined economically. … The change has been that a few other countries have caught up.

Tombs published a revised edition of his book towards the end of 2023, adding two new chapters. The first brought the narrative up to and beyond the death and burial of Queen Elizabeth ll in September 2022 to the coronation of her son Charles in May 2023. Tombs concludes that chapter by observing that the funeral and coronation “show that England and the United Kingdom are not just a huge shopping mall, a ‘UK’ plc. … We remain a community, a complex of nations and regions centred on England.”

Tombs concluded the revised work by reflecting on the importance of correcting the distorted history that progressives have lately propagated by focusing only on its dark side and on the nation’s shortcomings. He writes:

Today active attempts are made to exaggerate … evils and to repudiate much of national and indeed Western history. … Recently this has been accentuated by a selective narrative obsessed with slavery and racism. … But this is a distortion. … By the standards of humanity as a whole, England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best governed places on earth. … Not uniquely so: the lot of the whole Western world has been comparable. … But for that, too, the people of England over the last 400 years can take a share of credit: for their economic and technological labours; for their pioneering of the rule of law, of accountability and representation in government, of religious toleration and of civil institutions; and for their determined role in the defeat of modern tyrannies.

Becoming conversant with these facts is one of the benefits that the English can derive from dispassionate study of their history. It is lost when its study is abandoned or corrupted by accounts that exaggerate the negative aspects. Undoubtedly, something very similar can be said of the comparably positive contribution America has made both to its citizens and to the world more generally. This makes its study, when undistorted, as potentially as edifying and unifying for Americans as the undistorted study of their national history can and should be for the English.