The recent book Mr Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer by Peter Clarke is fundamentally about the writing of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples and the beliefs that surrounded it.It made a great impact when it was published in four handsome volumes in the mid-1950s. Churchill came to believe that the shared language, culture and history of the English-speaking peoples provided a platform for the future beyond Empire. Of course, his mother was American.
This was an idea that had first gained wide currency with JA Froude’s Oceana of 1886. A celebrated English historian, now substantially forgotten, Froude travelled extensively through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and America in 1884-85. The Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has written: “I know of no travel book of the nineteenth century which paints our part of the world with such brilliant prose… his best sentences are music.”
At the heart of Oceana, Froude could see that a centralised imperial model would not do, the colonies “will never submit again to be ruled from England”, and that America would clearly have a greater and greater role in all things.
Neither Froude nor Churchill called for formal political union, but the cultural heritage (which now includes the Indian sub-continent, much of South-East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere) has been, as they envisaged, immense.
Above: Oceana (1897) by the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal
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