ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006) ("Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognised that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common--and enough that separated them from everyone else--that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity. A Martian landing on our planet might find linguistic or geographical factors more useful than ethnic ones when it comes to analysing the different groups of earthlings; the countries whose history this book covers are those where  the majority of people speak English as their first language." Id. 1-2. "The English-speaking peoples . . . today know no rival in might, wealth or prestige. The most likely future challenger on the far horizon is China--not a contender in 1900--which still has very far to go before she can threaten to supplant them. A few fanatical malcontents from the former Ottoman Empire have proven their ability to strike a painful blow to the heart of the greatest city of the English-speaking peoples, it is true, but their fury is a mark of their enemies' primacy rather than a serious threat to it. Even were terrorists to strike a further, perhaps chemical, biological or nuclear blow against one of the English-speaking peoples' principal cities, it would not destroy that primacy. As George Will has observed, 'Al-Queda has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Queda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity." Id. at 647 (citation omitted). "The English-speaking peoples . . . today . . . are the last, best hope for Mankind. It is an the nature of human affairs that in the words of the hymn, 'Earth's proud empires pass away'. and so too one day will the long hegemony of the English-speaking peoples. When they finally come to render up the report of their global stewardship to History, there will be much of which to boast. Only when another power--such as China--holds global sway will the human race come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self-sacrificing imperium." Id. at 647-648.). 

WINSTON CHURCHILL'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume I, The Birth of Britain, with an introduction by Roy Jenkins (London: The Folio Society, 1956, 2003) ("The British thought themselves as good as Roman as any. Indeed, it may be said that of all the provinces few assimilated the Roman system with more aptitude than the Islanders. [] There was a sense o pride in sharing in so noble and widespread a system. To be a citizen of Rome was to be a citizen of the world, raised upon a pedestal of unquestioned superiority about barbarians and slaves." Id. at 31. In the twenty-first century, where is "Rome," "who are the citizens of Rome"?).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume II, The New World (London: The Folio Society, 1956, 2003)("Liberty of conscience as conceived by Cromwell did not extend to the  public profession of Roman Catholicism, Prelacy, or Quakerism. He banned open celebration of the Mass and threw hundreds of Quakers into prison. But such limitations to freedom of worship were caused less by religious prejudice than by fear of civil disturbance. Religious toleration challenged all the beliefs of Cromwell's day and found its best friend in the Lord Protector himself. Believing the Jews to be a useful element in the civil community, he opened again to them the gates of England, which Edward I has closed nearly four hundred years before. There was in practice comparatively little persecution on purely religious grounds, and even Roman Catholics were not seriously molested. Cromwell's dramatic intervention on behalf of a blaspheming Quaker and Unitarian whom Parliament would have put to death as well as tortured proves he was himself the source of many mitigations. A man who in that bitter age could write, 'We look for no compulsion but that of light and reason,' and who could dream of a union and a right understanding embracing Jews and Gentiles, cannot be wholly barred from his place in the forward march of liberal ideas." Id. at 263.).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume III, The Age of Revolution (London: The Folio Society, 1957, 2003) ("On the morning of January 8, 1815, Pakenham led a frontal assault against the American earthworks--one of the most unintelligent manoeuvres in the history of British warfare. Here he was slain and two thousand of his troops were killed or wounded. The only surviving general officer withdrew the army to its transports. The Americans lost seventy men, thirteen of them killed. The battle had lasted precisely half an hour." "Peace between England and America had meanwhile been signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. But the Battle of New Orleans is an important event in American history. It made the career of a future President, Jackson, it led to the belief that the Americans had decisively won the war, and it created an evil legend that the struggle had been a second War of Independence against British tyranny." Id. at 312.).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume IV, The Great Democracies (London: The Folio Society, 1958, 2003).

KING ARTHUR, OR THE MATTER OF BRITAIN

T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958) (From the White's comments on the bookjacket: "In have had the Matter of Britain on my hands for twenty years. That is what it has been called since before the days of Malory, and it is a serious subject. I have tried to deal with every side of it--with the clash between Might and Right, man's place in nature, the problem of war, the racial background which is an important part of the story, and with King Arthur's personal doom: The Aristotelian tragedy which made Malory call his long book the Morte d'Arthur. I have tried to look at it through the innocent eyes of young people, because I don't very much believe in the modern theory that the whole object of life is gratified desire. Malory didn't either. I have tried to make the seriousness acceptable by getting as much fun as possible out of the comic characters. I have invented a love-affair for king Pellinore--the only addition to Malory, except that he did not say that Lancelot was ugly. Almost all the people in this book are in his wonderful one, and have the same characters in both. I hope the moral is not to heavy, but the story was always a deep one. After all, it the major British epic--more so than Milton's Italian excursion. English writers, including great ones like Tennyson, have been mulling it over for a thousand years, and for that matter Milton himself thought of doing it before he decided to deal with Adam.".).

Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (New York: The Modern Library, 1994).

FRANCE, DEATH AND The ENLIGHTENMENT

John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1981).

POLITICAL LOSS

Marguerite Duras, Green Eyes, translated from the French by Carol Barko (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1990) (From "Political Loss": "For many people the true loss of political meaning is to join a party unit, to submit to its rule, its law. For any people, too, when they talk about an apolitical stance, they are primarily talking about an ideological loss or shortcoming. I can't speak for you, for your thoughts. For me, political loss is primarily the loss of self, the loss of one's anger as much as of one's gentleness, the loss of one's hatred, of one's faculty for hatred as much as of one's faculty for loving, the loss of one's imprudence as much as one's moderation, the loss of excess as much as loss of measure, the loss of madness, of one's naivete, the loss of one's courage like one's cowardice, like that of one's horror in the face of everything as much as that of one's confidence, the loss of one's tears like the one's joy. That's what I think." Id. at 6, italics in original.).

GOT TO REVOLUTION

Lin-Manuel Miranda & Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton The Revolution, Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (New York: Grand Central Publishing/Melcher Media, 2015) ("It tells the stories of two revolutions. There's the American Revolution of the 18th century, which flares to life in Lin's Libretto. . . .  There's also the revolution of the show itself: a musical that changes the way that Broadway sounds, that alters who gets to tell the story of our founding that lets us glimpse the new, more diverse America rushing our way." Id. at 10. It is ironic, at least to me, that a truly revolutionary musical should be a hit in a political climate where the presumptive nominees from the two major parties are, on one side, a complacent pragmatist and, on the other, a reactionary demagogue. The most important revolutions are the resolutions of the mind; that is, revolutions in how we think. I fear Americans are not prepared for a revolution in their thinking. And Hamilton The Revolution, I fear, will slowly but surely become mere entertainment, appropriate for high school musicals, Peoria, Illinois, and Main Street. Get the CD, and listen to its content and message, carefully and critically.).

ENLIGHTENMENT ANTICOLONIALISM?

Sunil M. Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India end Haiti, he demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution--the defining event of modernity--was shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, he nonetheless challenges recent understands of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, Agnani asks what it means to critique empire 'proper;y.' Drawing his method from Theodor W. Adorno's quip that 'one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly,' he proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment." This is a challenging read. I don't think I absorbed it fully, and will have to revisit it in the not-so-distant future.).