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A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Andrew Roberts reintroduces us to Churchill’s long-delayed epic work, which was written with the assistance of a former editor of History Today.
«In broad principle I shall be willing to undertake to write “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, their origins, their quarrels, their misfortunes and their reconciliation for the sum of £20,000», wrote Winston Churchill to Newman Flower, the managing director of Cassell & Co, on October 30th, 1932. The project would take four or five years, he expected. Yet because of the great events that overtook not only Churchill but also the English-speaking peoples themselves, this four-volume work (The Birth of Britain, The New World, The Age of Revolution and The Great Democracies), comprising almost 1,500 pages, was not published for another quarter of a century.
Churchill was, in October 1932, in the first few months of that period of internal Tory opposition which he dubbed his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he came up with the idea of writing a work whose ‘object was to lay stress upon the common heritage of the peoples of Great Britain and the United States of America as a means of enhancing their friendship’. It was an act of Themistoclean foresight, for a decade later those two countries, along with their dominions and dependencies, were to be in the forefront of the struggle to prevent ‘a new dark age’ and to save Civilisation.
By Andrew Roberts | Published in History Today Volume: 52 Issue: 5, 2002
