INTRODUCTION
Fog in the Channel
When I was a boy, my grandfather told me – over and over again – that when he’d been my age, weather reports used to say ‘Fog in the Channel – Continent cut off’ (Figure 0.1). Like so many jokes, the humour was in the ambiguity. Was Grandad saying the country had gone to the dogs? Or that the English were comically self-important? Or both? Or neither? He never told. But forty-odd years on from the last time he shared it, the joke feels edgier. On 23 June 2016 the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Before the week was out, the prime minister had fallen (the third of four Conservative premiers in a row to go over Europe), the Labour Party’s Members of Parliament had voted no confidence in their own leader and $2 trillion of the world’s wealth had evaporated. Not funny.
I decided to write a book about what had happened the morning after the referendum. I knew that hundreds of other authors would be making or had already made similar decisions, and the first books on Brexit in fact appeared within weeks. What made me think this one was worth writing anyway was that I suspected it would be rather different from the rest. Most Brexit books focus on just the seven years between David Cameron’s announcement that he favoured a referendum in 2013 and Britain’s actual departure in 2020. Some go back to 1973, when Britain joined the European Economic Community, a few to the late 1940s, when the first practical plans for European federation were floated, and a handful start with the Reformation or Spanish Armada in the sixteenth century. My claim here is that none of this is enough. Only when we look at the entire 10,000 years since rising, post-ice-age oceans began physically separating the British Isles from the European Continent do we see the larger patterns that have driven, and continue to drive, British history.
I am not suggesting that we will find foreign-policy recommendations or eternal truths about Englishness etched in the rocks of Stonehenge. Archaeologists rightly mock people who say such silly things. However, it is only on a multi-millennium timescale that the forces driving Britain’s relationships with Europe and the wider world make themselves clear. Only when we put the facts into this framework do we see why Brexit seems so compelling to some, so appalling to others and where it might lead next.
Figure 0.1. Reg Philips (1906–1980), steelworker, humourist and occasional geographer, as he looked in the early 1930s.
Looking at the long run is hardly a new idea. Back in 1944 the part-time historian Winston Churchill advised that ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward’. However, decades then passed before full-time historians took much notice of his advice. Only since the early 2000s have historians really warmed to what we nowadays call ‘big (or deep) history’, studying trends spanning millennia and affecting the entire planet. Most big-history work, including several books of my own, pulls back from the details of what happened in particular times and places in order to tell a story at the planetary scale. Here, by contrast, I want to turn the telescope around, zooming in from the global to the local. History, after all, is made by real people, and the broad-brushstroke stuff isn’t worth the pixels it’s written in unless it helps us make sense of life as we actually live it. So, my plan here is to use the methods of big history to put post-Brexit Britain into the context of post-ice-age Britain’s multi-millennium relationship with Europe and the wider world.
Even now, three-quarters of a century after Churchill, looking at the long term remains a minority activity. When, for instance, the highly respected historian David Edgerton said in his excellent book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation that ‘Brexit is a recent phenomenon, with causes in the here and now’, having ‘nothing to do with deep history’, he set off no storm of controversy; but I think he should have done. In what follows, I will try to show that Brexit in fact has everything to do with deep history, that only a long-term, large-scale perspective can make sense of it and that big history can even show us what Brexit might mean in the coming century.
The Thing Least Spoken Of
Copyright © 2022 by Ian Morris