The Isles: A History

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 p

The Isles This is in some ways a rather strange history. Generally one would expect a book of this type to be a narrative history of Great Britain. The book is some 880 pages and in reality that is a rather small book to cover the historical detail of the period which is from the stone age to the present. Instead the book is an attempt to look at British history in a new way. In the past most British history suffered from being Anglo centric that is focusing on England as the main player and teleological, that is seeing history as part of an evolutionary process to a given end. This book is a sustained and logical attack on both approaches. Firstly the book attempts to be a history not only of England which is about a third of the British Isles but also Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Secondly it demolishes myth after myth that used to be the staples of English history. These myths one of the most important which is a notion of a continuing quality of "Englishnes" in the place that we now know as England. The author clearly shows how prior to the Norman invasion in 1066 Britain was part of the Viking world. With the Norman invasion it became part of the French world. The Plantagenents spoke French regarded themselves as French and were by and large buried in France. England started to develop the use of its vernacular after the defeat in the Hundred Years war and the driving of the English Kings from the continent. The book is readable and interesting but if falls short of being a history of England and is rather a lengthy discussion about what should be the history of England. As such it may disappoint some. I found it to be challenging interesting and towards the end quite amusing. Other readers seem to have found the earlier parts more interesting and this is the part in which the historical narrative is most clear. Generally it is a long but entertaining and interesting book.

It is a rare and exhilerating experience to have one's long-held "truths" overturned and ingrained images altered so thoroughly by a single book as mine have been by "The Isles" . The author's stated purpose was to produce a single-volume general history, surveying the peoples and states that have occupied the archipelago known today as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland from 7000 BC to the present day. If Norman Davies has an ideological bias it may be "continentalism". His previous work has been in European History. At the start, he points out that Canyon Man, whose remains were found near present-day Cheddar, lived 9000 years ago--when the archipelago was still attached to the european continent. He was not Celt, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane nor Norman. He predated them all. Yet his DNA is a very close match to that of a teacher living in Cheddar today! Throughout the balance the book Davies stresses that the continuity and insularity of Great Britain's history is a myth; psychological rather than genetic; legendary rather than real. The last section of book is an argument for the UK's pursuing a continental polcy in the future. Davies maintains that anachronistic nomenclature of geography is part of the myth-making. "History of England" and "History of Great Britain" are used interchangeably (even by the Oxford Univerity Library Index), even though England never covered more than the southern half of Great Britain and neither term subsumes Ireland and both make Scotland and Wales invisible. This is more than a semantic quibble. Davies mantains that anachronistic use of place names has helped skew historical perspective. It fostered, at least from the 16th century onward, a monolithic, xenephobic sense of "Englishness" running back to Roman times. In fact, 16 diffent states have occupied the archipelago since 43 BC and the one known as the Kingdom of England existed only from the tenth century to 1536(and that did not include Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Most English historians,from the Tudor era onward, have found it politically convenient to minimize the contributions of the Medeival Irish, the Danes, and even the Normans to the culture and government of Great Britain. They have created a picture of english cultural unity beginning with Alfred and running unbroken and little-changed down to Elizabeth II. A sort of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny. They tend to gloss over the fact that Alfred paid religous homage to the pope or that Richard the Lion Hearted spent only 6 months of his 10-year reign in his island kingdom and was a french-speaker to boot. Davies' book is dense with information aimed at giving the reader a "holistic" view of the history of the archipelago. It teems with people and events not found in the standard works on "English" history. One's view of historical figures are transformed. For example, in the section about the United Kingdom of the present day, he d

Davies writes a superb book which is a wonderful antedote to all the horrendous old anglocentric histories I remember reading years ago. In my opinion Davies correctly emphasises the importance of all the constituent parts of the Isles. The book begins by examining the prehistory of the isles and I note that one other reviewer states that he felt this chapter to be a waste of time, concentrating on the minutae of an obscure academic argument. The opening chapter and its discussion readily puts over the point that when talking about place names etc. we cannot remove ourselves from a preconception of history and inevitably produces bias. If that reviewer had persisted with the book I suspect he/she may have got the point by the end. However the book then enters a more traditional history beginning with the Celtic domination of the Isles and proceeding through Roman, Saxon, Norse, Norman and Plantagenet eras of (attempted) domination. With each period there is a three part chapter consisting of a "scene setting" episode, the meat of the history and then a review of conceptions, misconceptions and previous views on those eras. The first part of the chapters are always excellent, the second as good but the third parts tend to be inconsistent, some good some rather tedious. Overall though the layout is good and the appendices at the end are wonderful, having the lyrics and music to various "nationalistic" tunes is a wonderfully original idea. Criticisms of the book are minor in comparison to its overall impact, but here goes. There appeared to me numerous typos in the book ranging from mis-spelling to factual inaccuracies. Whilst this can be forgiven, they did seem to get more frequent towards the end as if the proofreader had gone to sleep. There were inaccuracies and omissions in some of the genealogies notably the suggestion that James II and VII was the son of Charles II, that the old pretender was Charles and many others. The other criticism is that I would have preferred to see more on the more modern history of the non-English parts of the Isles (a large part of the tradition of South Wales for example depends on its mild rebelliousness, eg. Chartist rebellion (Chartism got one sentence), Rebecca riots (never mentioned) and the rise of the unions. These aspects of modern history are far more resonant to the people of South Wales than the musings of early 20th century Welsh language poets important as the language issue is. The history of the struggle to free Ireland is also much too brief. Overall though I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in afair history of the Isles.

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.