the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 13
Johnson. Sometimes in wielding that knife
Kuper gets carried away. Such as for exam-
ple when he likens the Oxford Leave gang
to the Cambridge spies of an earlier gener-
ation and concludes that, “though both
betrayed Britain’s interests in the service of
Moscow, the Brexiteers did it by mistake”.
It’s unworthy of him. Although it may not
be wrong.
One decent criticism of this book, obvi-
ously, is that Kuper is just as much a
product of Oxford as his subjects. This
book brims with quotes and anecdotes
from prominent contacts — Rachel John-
son, Sam Gyimah, David Allen Green —
whom one strongly suspects are Oxford
chums of his own.
To be fair, I suppose if you went to Oxford
and are writing a book about Oxford, it
would be a bit weird not to speak to any-
body you met at Oxford. He also freely con-
fesses to benefiting from the intrinsic
chumminess of his own white, male
Oxbridgeness, pondering a British ambas-
sador in a faraway land who greeted him
“like a friend I’d never met” and “ended up
giving me a briefing in his swimming pool”.
All of this I suppose is the stuff you take
for granted if you are in the club, and is en-
raging and preposterous if you are not.
Altogether, the picture he draws is of a
nation with a decadent and deeply unpro-
fessional ruling class, a diagnosis with
which it is impossible to disagree. And,
while Oxford University may not be the
only reason for the dim, entitled and
chummy flippancy that curses us, it does
seem to be the main one. You cannot help
but wonder in turn how much better off we
might be if the bloody place had never
existed, or at least if all these bloody people
had gone somewhere else. Also, just so you
know, I went to Cambridge.
DAFYDD JONES/OXFORD THE LAST HURRAHHow Britain became Top Nation
I
n 1807 Tsar Alexander met Napoleon
Bonaparte for the first time. His open-
ing line? “I hate the English as much as
you do.” A peace treaty and alliance
swiftly followed.
The conversation is apocryphal, Ian
Morris admits, but it sums up the extraor-
dinary story his book tells: how a rain-
swept set of islands, mere smudges on the
map of civilisation, rose to become the
world’s pre-eminent power before being
elbowed aside from centre stage.
Admittedly, reading the first few pages
of this book left me with the lowest of
hopes. Morris, who made his name in “big
history” with his 2010 book Why the West
Rules — For Now, opens with the Brexit
referendum, telling us that he decided to
write a book about what had happened the
very day after the result. By page three he
is drawing on a Nigel Farage speech to
spell out the core themes — identity,
mobility, prosperity, security and sover-
eignty — that he will explore. There looms
the grim prospect of trawling through
hundreds of pages and 10,000 years of his-
tory that boils down to yet another aca-
demic complaining about how awful Boris
Johnson is. There is even a shout-out to
Nick Clegg in the acknowledgments.
But Morris is a better, and subtler, histo-
rian than that. Despite its title, Geography
Is Destiny is not so much about geography
as geostrategy — he argues that the his-
tory of the British Isles was, for most of its
duration, about how we dealt with what
was coming at us from Europe, whether it
was ideologies, conquerors, technologies
or traders.
To that end, one of his key concepts —
and a word he repeats so much you suspect
he had some kind of bet with his editor —
is the “counterscarp”. This technically
means the outer slope of a moat, but Morris
uses it to suggest that Britain is secure only
when it has some kind of protection beyond
the cliffs of Dover. For example, in about
5200BC the new-fangled concept of farm-
ing swept across Europe, only to lose mo-
mentum about 50 miles from the French
coast. In that coastal region there were still
enough shellfish available to support the
hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That thin strip of
continental insulation — the counterscarp
— meant that for the next 1,000 years Brit-
ain could keep to the old ways. Yet once itcollapsed, agriculture crossed the seas with
extraordinary rapidity.
Morris’s argument, here and elsewhere,
is that the English Channel has historically
been less a moat than a highway. Until
Britain developed the technology to build
proper ships, and even more crucially the
bureaucracy and tax base to pay for them,
there was no possibility of keeping it closed
to outsiders.
Gaulish chieftains, Roman generals, Vi-
king raiders, Plantagenet monarchs and
Catholic missionaries all travelled back
and forth constantly, ensuring not just that
Britain remained culturally and economi-
cally part of Europe (if, as mentioned
above, a poor and backward part), but also
that we were constantly vulnerable to ex-
ternal threats — unless we could carve out
some kind of continental buffer zone to
protect ourselves. Hence, all those centu-
ries later, our insistence on Belgian neu-
trality and our entry into the First World
War to preserve it.
Morris divides his book into three sec-
tions, each themed around a map of the
world. The first, the Hereford Map,
created in the early 14th century, shows
that traditional picture of a world centred
on Jerusalem and the Mediterranean, with
Britain on the periphery. The second,
drawn by the geographer Halford Mackin-
der in 1902, is the imperial portrait of the
globe with Britain firmly in the centre.
This was, Morris says, the result of “the
grandest strategic pivot in history” as we
used our command of the seas and domi-
nance of trade to turn a newly secure Brit-
ain into the world’s dominant power.
For instance, advances in technology
meant we could slash the number of
hours required to produce a kilogram of
yarn from 5,000 hours to just three. By
1850, we had 2 per cent of the world’s
population, but produced half of its manu-
factured goods. The third map, showing
the modern world scaled according to
financial assets, illustrates how we have
since been eclipsed first by America, then
by China.
There is inevitably a certain John Bull
pleasure in reading Morris’s account of
how Admiral Hawke smashed the French
fleet in 1759, securing British rule of the
waves — although he does not shy away
from the human costs of empire and the
awful condition of many of its subjects in
Britain and overseas. But I was far more
captivated by the thousands of years
beforehand, partly because the story is
much less familiar and partly because this
is where Morris’s expertise lies.
An archaeologist by training, he traces
the fortunes of the British Isles’ inhabit-ants by their genetic make-up, their
height, their burial goods and even their
rubbish. Indeed, he gives the firm impress-
ion of a man who is never happier than
when inspecting the contents of a medi-
eval midden, or showing from the charred
seeds in a Stone Age oven or the disap-
pearance of dung beetles in an Oxford-
shire village exactly what kind of agricul-
ture was being practised at the time.
In Poundbury, Dorset, now home to
Prince Charles’s picturesque housing
developments, a 4th-century grave reveals
that “half the population was dead by the
age of five and most of the rest by 40, the
men chafing from years of digging and
pushing ploughs, the women half crippled
by housemaid’s knee”. Fast-forward to the
1280s and Richard of Southwick, a mer-
chant from Cuckoo Lane in Southampton,
is eating off delicate imported glassware
and throwing treats to pets including
a Barbary ape — “although, judging
from the well-preserved parasite eggs in
Richard’s cesspit, everyone was crawling
with worms”.
Some of the most striking facts, though,
are purely statistical, such as when the
Black Death reduced London’s population
from 100,000 to 20,000 in a single genera-
tion, or Oliver Cromwell killed or captured
13,000 Scots while losing just 20 of his own
troops (after a campaign in Ireland in
which the enemy commander was beaten
to death with his own wooden leg).
This isn’t a perfect book. When he
moves into the modern era, Morris does
often sound like someone who has been
observing the past 30 years of British poli-
tics from prestigious professorships at
Chicago and Stanford. He misrepresents
Michael Gove on Britain’s attitudes to-
wards experts, and there is an early figure
for inequality in present-day Britain that
is staggeringly wrong.
His ultimate conclusion that Brexit was
essentially a sideshow compared with the
challenge of how to deal with China may
be proved right by the century’s end,
but does feel condescending in the here
and now.
Yet at his core task of cramming 10,000
years of history into a single book, Morris
succeeds triumphantly. If you want to read
about Seneca triggering a 1st-century
credit crunch, or the connection between
Stonehenge and the World Economic
Forum, or the potential identity of Robin
Hood, or when London legislated to
outlaw defecating in the street, this is
the book for you. It certainly gave me a
new appreciation for how the world
shaped Britain — and how Britain in turn
reshaped the world.The Battle of Quiberon
Bay by Richard Paton.
The French fleet was
destroyed in the 1759
battle, establishing
British naval dominanceALAMYGeography
Is Destiny
Britain and the World,
a 10,000-Year History
by Ian MorrisProfile, 570pp; £25Robert Colvile enjoys
this fascinating gallop
through 10,000 years
of British history
The history
of the British
Isles was
about how
we dealt with
what was
coming at us
from Europe