I have been to England several times and recently took a two week hiking trip there. While there I read A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins. I had picked up a fair amount of English history from various courses as a student, other biographies and histories and just general reading. So here is my sense of modern England and of England’s history, going way back to before it was formally England.
England, like most countries, is largely rural. It is a very green, rolling hills countryside, filled with farms and small villages. When you get outside of the cities, you find a very kind, friendly, helpful, well-informed populace. The pace of life is less hectic. The traditional ethic of working hard and being devoted to friends and family still predominate. Unfortunately, as in most countries, the rural population is a minority and its values, which made most countries great, are in national decline. Young people in Britain look a lot like many young adults in the US–dispirited, purposeless, easily detoured into lifes of drugs, alchohol, gaming and radical politics. British public schools are to blame in large part, but so are the usual social media and other villains.
England and the island that is Britain has a very long history. The early tribes had a meager subsistence and change came as various somewhat more advanced tribes invaded from the continent, largely from what is now Scandanavia. Then the Romans came and conquered and created some infrastructure and some sense of larger governance than the regional tribal level. The Roman empire fell, as all empires do, and some level of anarchy existed as the island was repeatedly invaded from the continent and had internal warfare. In fact, if you look back 2000 years, the most apparent aspect of British history is the constant warfare, with very short periods of any level of peace. How it became a great nation, despite this constant waste of human and other resources, is an interesting aspect of its history. But this level of conflict is the story of most countries.
The other prong of English history worth studying is the continual move of power away from one person or a few people to the larger population. The notion of a government requiring the consent of the governed was a notion that took hold in Britain and gradually moved it to democracy, although the United States, a far younger country, is actually an older Democracy than any in Europe. But the ideas that motivated people to emigrate to America and to build the government that was created here, arose in England.
England’s empire was built on hard work and some luck. It was a brutal empire at times, but also one that attempted to enlighten the populations it ruled. India today has a solid basis from which to grow because Britain left it with a good educational system and some infrastructure. The decline of the English empire and the country itself is also worth understanding. Like most nations, wealth brought sloth. The populace demanded more and more “benefits” from the government, which caused more and more spending and debt; accompanied by a decline in work ethic. We see the same pattern at work in the United States today, but a fundamental truth is that no country, and no country’s leaders, ever learn from history. But it is still worth studying.
