Making History
Sir Bernard Crick’s essay The Making of the United Kingdom comprises the history element of the Home Office’s pamphlet for new citizens. It begins, “To understand a country well and the character of its inhabitants, some history is needed.” Though a seemingly anodyne document, it represents a significant moment in our official approach to history.
For the first time, certain parts of our story are being highlighted as representative of national identity. Despite claims that the document is there to help people understand conversational references to “Dunkirk spirit”, history in the hands of the Home Office has become a powerful tool. The past is being mobilised to assist the government’s campaign for greater integration. The multiculturalism of the 1980s and 90s, with its emphasis on the validity of indigenous and adopted cultures, is being abandoned in favour of a codification of Britishness.
Charged with such an onerous responsibility, how does Crick do? Well, quite rightly, he prefaces his narrative with a warning about the subjective nature of his approach. “Any account of British history is ... an interpretation. No one person would agree with another what to put in, what to leave out, and how to say it.” With that out of the way, Crick then launches into a Whiggish chronicle of the “making” of modern Britain.
And, as predicted, there is something here to infuriate and please all audiences. At times, the narrative appears superficial; at other times overcomplicated. Radicals will quibble with Crick’s characterization of Oliver Cromwell as a “God-fearing dictator” and certainly dispute his rosy view of empire. Traditionalists might raise an eyebrow at the single paragraph devoted to the Industrial Revolution. They might also find undercurrents of bias in his treatment of the Thatcher and Blair administrations.
To my mind, there is not enough intellectual history or a proper account of the role of religion. There are plenty of Kings and Queens, but no Thomas Hobbes or Charles Darwin. Cultural historians will be disappointed by notable absences in their field.
But given every critic will have an axe to grind, Crick has done a magnificent job of presenting Britain’s complex, multifarious past in a comprehensible and intelligent way. He appropriately positions the UK within both a European and global perspective. Above all, this history reads well. Thankfully, it does not seem to have been hacked together by committee. Instead, it enjoys an authorial tone which carries the reader along.
Nonetheless, behind The Making of the United Kingdom lurks an official agenda. Underpinning the narrative is an argument about Britain being a nation of migrants who, over the past centuries, have successfully come together by carefully combining their indigenous traditions with a new British identity. “We have been, after all, a multinational and multicultural society for a long time now without losing either our overarching British identity or our Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English cultural and national identities.”
Thus, new citizens are reassured that they comprise but the latest chapter of our national story. Immigration and integration are as redolent of British history as John Bull, the Battle of Trafalgar and the Blitz spirit. But, Crick rightly reminds them, “It all works reasonably well so long as no identities are asserted as exclusive of others.”
One of the best-selling history books of the last few years was George Courtauld’s traditionalist polemic, The Pocket Book of Patriotism. Upset by the state of history teaching in schools, Courtauld successfully packaged together an arbitrary collection of dates and details to remind his readership of the building blocks of the British past. Crick’s pamphlet is an altogether more sophisticated answer to such worries in an age of ever greater migrant flows. And, truth be told, if new citizens were to absorb his rich and subtle account of British history, they would be in a stronger position than many “native” undergraduates.
TRISTRAM HUNT, BBC HISTORY