Norman Davies, The Isles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1200 pp., $45.
Future historians of Europe will marvel at the speed of Britain's disintegration in the sixty years that followed its finest hour in 1940. They may well conclude that this disintegration was the price paid for that brief, astonishing moment when one country, bankrupt and all but beaten, still held the pass against the combined powers of tyranny. Today, few, especially in the United States, realize that a great nation has already ceased to exist, and that its fragments are about to be rearranged in an utterly different form. However, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland the first shock of dissolution has already passed, and the writing of epitaphs, obituaries and eulogies of the departed nation has become a flourishing industry.
Norman Davies, author of a powerful account of Poland's past and of an original, energetic and encyclopedic history of Europe, has produced a timely and cunning reworking of what British people rather sentimentally used to call Our Island Story. The key to his approach is found in the title itself, which flatly refuses to use the standard term for the group of damp, green, cramped islands off the French coast. Davies accurately points out that large parts of this archipelago are not now British at all, that they were only united under one crown for a brief 120 years, and that the process of disintegration is likely to accelerate in the near future. Correct as it may be, this attitude is calculated and probably mischievously intended to annoy traditionalists and even many who did not think of themselves as traditionalists, who will say that he is quibbling and pedantic -- while wondering whether he is right.
