James Hawes - The Shortest History of England

While researching all the places to go in the UK I had to face up to some major gaps in my knowledge about the country ("country")'s history, and I needed a way to get up to speed without losing myself in palace intrigues or War of the Roses-type sagas...

Enter The Shortest History of England. Just shy of 300 pages, it is indeed short considering the scope (millennia!). So that's already a big plus for me. 

I found it incredibly well-written, too. None of the fusty academia language found in most history books, but also not childish like the A Little History of... series.

But the best thing about this book is that it didn't read like a laundry list of events, wars, elections, etc. I actually gained an understanding of the ancient tensions and relationships between the North and South of the UK. North = Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England north of the River Trent (Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds upwards).

This geographical divide maps onto divisions across economic (industry-based Northern vs finance-based Southern economies), political (Tory vs Labour), and cultural (Celtic history vs. Anglo-American identity) spheres. One point that jumped out - that I look forward to learning about in real life when we visit - is the differences in place names.

At times the North-South divide thesis is overdone - and that reminds me that it's really just a thesis. 

Nonetheless I found it very interesting to think about the possible origins of certain British peculiarities, like the archetypal rivalry of Blur vs Oasis, and why the English language is so different from Welsh.

Of course this book isn't a complete history of England. It's more like a table of contents, a menu from which you can pick the bits of history that interest you enough to do further reading on. 

I gained one valuable meta insight from this book though: the limits of travel. I travel hoping to learn more about cultural nuances and histories of different peoples and classes, but unless there's been an event of intense trauma (e.g. Holocaust) there won't be an actual tourist attraction you can visit to learn about it. So the kind of travel I want to do has to be at least partly through books like this.

I'm looking forward to reading the other books in the Shortest History of series, especially the Europe and China ones.

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