David Reynolds is one of the United Kingdom's most widely respected historians. Author of twelve books on twentieth-century international history and presenter of numerous television and radio programs, he has long admired the idea (first proposed by the Harvard academics Richard Neustadt and Ernest May) of helping people to “think in time”—that is, to cultivate historical perspectives that enable people to think beyond the headlines and noise of the daily media, and to situate themselves instead within streams of historical consciousness. Island Stories: An Unconventional History of Britain is one such attempt at “thinking in time” for a public audience, placing the “Brexit imbroglio” within the longue durée of the multiple histories of the United Kingdom and its relationship, not just with Europe, empire and the world, but with itself, as a “shifting . . . historically conflicted archipelago” (7). Like Raphael Samuel before him, Reynolds plays on the title of Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall's Our Island Story (1905) to invoke the pluralism and complexity of the histories of the United Kingdom against unilinear, triumphal narratives.
The book begins and ends with Brexit, and this revised New York edition takes the story on from Boris Johnson's election to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019 up to his emphatic general election victory and the passage through Parliament of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement later that year. In this self-consciously “big history” Reynolds seeks to recover high politics and the long arc of historical narrative from what he considers the microhistories and cultural preoccupations of contemporary scholars. Historians, he argues, have abdicated the terrain of big picture narratives to surface-skimming popular authors and self-serving politicians. Island Stories is “an attempt by one professional historian to start filling this gap, at a time when political and international history really matter” (11).
Does such a gap exist? Evidently not. A cursory glance at the history sections of any major bookseller or library offers ample evidence of historians weighing into debates on Brexit, empire, and the archipelagic history of the United Kingdom with scholarly and accessible works, spanning both contemporary history and the longue durée. Indeed, one of the merits of Island Stories is how studiously Reynolds draws upon recent scholarship, without sacrificing the intelligibility and verve of his prose. His narrative is structured around four key themes, or ways of narrating the island stories of the United Kingdom, and each theme captures important insights from recent disciplinary debates.
The first is national decline. Reynolds charts the pervasiveness of declinist discourses in twentieth-century British politics and their continued potency in the ubiquitous heritage industry. He situates Brexiteer calls for a recovery of “global greatness” outside the European Union within this fatefully misleading lineage; what needs to be accounted for, argues Reynolds, is not decline but the “original supremacy” that gave Great Britain such a leading role in the nineteenth century (27). Relative decline, as other countries caught up and surpassed her, was inevitable and it did not matter very much, since living standards continued to rise. A better meta-narrative for postwar Britain than decline, and one that would help explain the Brexit vote in 2016, would be deindustrialization and the inequalities it engendered. Drawing on John Darwin's work, Reynolds argues that, in global terms, it was the catastrophic fall of Singapore in 1942, not 1940 or Suez, that marked the “real turning point,” in Britain's geopolitical fortunes (48).
The second theme is Britain's engagement with Europe, in which Reynolds is chiefly concerned with puncturing myths of British exceptionalism and splendid isolation, instead demonstrating how geography and history have tied her fortunes inextricably to the European continent. This is a story told well, with pace and sweep, but it is now well-traveled territory for historians, not an “unconventional history” as the subtitle of Island Stories suggests.
The third theme is the shifting nature of the United Kingdom, which takes as its starting point J. G. A. Pocock's famous “plea for a new subject” of British history, namely to study the kingdoms and nations of the Atlantic archipelago in their mutually constitutive, fractured and periodically violent interpenetration. One of the “many blindspots of the Tory Brexiteers” Reynolds contends, “was their Anglocentric neglect of the Pocock principle, namely that the four countries of the UK have not only acted individually to create the conditions of their separate existences but, by their interactions, have also modified the conditions of each other's existence” (159–60). Charting this history from the late thirteenth century onward, Reynolds arrives at a particularly acute irony of the Brexit project: the prospect that only the creation of a federal state might hold the United Kingdom together outside the European Union.
Reynolds's fourth theme is that of empire, which, he argues “was never a possession, more a project always in process—improvised and incomplete” (165). He accords a determinant place to the Atlantic slave trade in both the economic development and geo-political legacies of Empire, and dwells at length on how immigration has made and remade the United Kingdom. He also makes good use of the new scholarship on “Greater Britain” and its lineages what Winston Churchill termed the “English-speaking peoples” and the more recent “Anglosphere.” Reynolds wisely refuses to dismiss the Anglosphere as simple imperial nostalgia, and he accords it unquestioned soft power. Instead, he confronts it with the hard reality of global commerce and diplomatic diplomacy, against which it is found wanting.
The final sections on the Brexit referendum and its aftermath lapse into reportage, for which political journalists have better sources and more to offer. Reynolds is pungent and withering on the “gross political mismanagement of Brexit” but he ends on a sober and measured note, returning to the importance of fostering public conversation about the United Kingdom's plural and complex histories (242). As a preeminent and practiced public historian, Reynolds enjoins us to wrestle with conflicting interpretations of the past in order better to arrive at a shared future.
