Since the end of World War I, British commentators have largely overlooked Belgium, contributing to misconceptions about its cultural significance. In A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918, Marysa Demoor, professor emerita of English literature and culture at Ghent University and a former Visiting Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, successfully addresses that issue by exploring the intricate cultural ties between Britain and Belgium over the long nineteenth century. The book revisits and expands on the author’s previous work on the connections between Belgium, particularly Flanders, and the United Kingdom. Building on the convoluted relation between English and British identities, Demoor stresses the lack of attention to Europe’s role in shaping them. The study draws contemporary parallels, particularly through disrupted allegiances in the wake of Brexit, while recontextualizing Belgium’s historical connections, which have traditionally been seen through a francophone lens, by adding a vital British dimension.

The book cleverly moves beyond traditional depictions of British cultural interactions with Belgium, such as the Battle of Waterloo or World War I, and extends existing literary and political representations, adding substantial breadth to the dimension of Belgian-British/British-Belgian cultural reciprocity. Demoor demonstrates how Belgian battlefields, mudscapes, and mystic art intertwined with British literature to influence both nations’ identities. Focusing on art, literature, and historical memory, she uses the histoire croisée methodology to reveal long-standing cultural exchanges between Britain and Belgium (Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 [2006]: 30-51). Demoor’s study more implicitly but decidedly focuses on the ideas of othering and otherness and how that shapes the cultures involved. Through their interactions with Belgian culture, British writers and artists came to understand their own identity better. In the chapter “The Allure of the Middle Ages: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Meet Van Eyck, Inc.,” for instance, Demoor traces the shared language between British and Belgian artists in the nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt traveled to Belgium, drawing heavily on Flemish painters such as Jan Van Eyck and Hans Memling. Rossetti’s appreciation for the intertwined relationship between visual art and poetry during the Flemish medieval and Renaissance periods highlights that both painting and poetry were mediums that enriched each other and emphasized a shared cultural context. William Morris also crossed the Channel in search of the Low Countries’ medieval heritage, to the point that he even translated Old Flemish poetry. The Pre-Raphaelite focus on Flemish medieval art shifted British attention away from Waterloo’s legacies, turning Belgium into more than just a battlefield in British eyes. The chapter “Surrealist Entanglements” focuses on how British and Belgian cultures remained intertwined as well, but more through the specters of surrealism and the grotesque. Flemish art influenced British artists like Frederic George Stephens and Christina Rossetti, while Belgian artists such as Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor exemplified an imagined Belgo-British artistic community.

Battlefield memory is a key theme in the book. Demoor explores how British soldiers’ deaths on Belgian soil helped forge British national identity. She traces how the symbolism of Belgian battlefields—from Waterloo to World War I’s trenches—profoundly shaped British culture, contributing to a soil-based, art-driven interpretation of the long nineteenth century. British travel writers and poets, such as Frances Trollope, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron, depicted Belgium in ways that often related to the Battle of Waterloo. Demoor highlights how Waterloo’s legacy embedded itself in British identity, despite Belgium’s emerging as a nation-state only afterwards, in 1830. The First World War brought another layer to this cultural entanglement, with Flanders’s mud becoming a recurring motif in British poetry and literature, such as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (written in May 1915, published in In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems [1919]) and Isaac Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump” (written in May 1917, published in Poems by Isaac Rosenberg [1922]). The imagery of mud and death served as powerful symbols of loss and remembrance, with the poppy becoming a lasting emblem of memory carrying a transnational reciprocity.

Demoor also uses postcolonial theory to examine British identity in contrast to continental neighbors, particularly Belgium. She criticizes how the British perceived Belgium and other Catholic continental countries as inferior and frames these encounters within broader colonial ideologies. Through figures like the members of the Trollope family and William Makepeace Thackeray, Demoor shows how British cultural perceptions of Belgium extended beyond its role as a battlefield for British soldiers. The Trollopes had many associations with Bruges, where the family had moved in 1834. Anthony Trollope’s father and brother Henry were both buried there, and Frances Trollope was particularly keen on cities like Ostend and Ghent. Inspired by Frances’s accounts and guided by John Murray’s 1838 guide A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent, Thackeray went on a reconnaissance tour of Belgium himself.

The book ties in battlefield memory with cultural legacy, but it also focuses on political ties between the British and Belgian monarchies, as they shaped relations between the two nations, particularly the 1816 marriage of Princess Charlotte to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, later Belgium’s first king. Demoor contrasts these royal connections with more grounded cultural exchanges, such as Charlotte Brontë’s time in Brussels, the then-bustling but predominantly francophone capital of the young Belgian nation. However, the relationship between Britain and Belgium deteriorated with the unmasking of Leopold II’s brutal exploitation of the Congo.

By revisiting shared histories, Demoor draws subtle contemporary parallels that challenge the cultural isolationist currents that contributed to Brexit. A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium weaves together the cultural history of the two nations, from 1815 to 1918, revealing how deeply intertwined their identities still remain today.

Demoor’s study emphasizes Belgium’s unique role in constructing British identity, tracing how British reactions to Belgian battlefields and culture helped refine British national identity through literary and artistic responses. At a time of rising cultural isolation, Demoor’s work—which can serve as selective reading but also works effectively when read in sequence—is a timely reminder of the relevance and importance of cross-cultural histories, and no doubt the work reshapes the understanding of British-Belgian connections.