Product Description

Written by one of the most brilliant and provocative historians at work today, The Isles is a revolutionary narrative history that presents a new perspective on the development of Britain and Ireland, looking at them not as self-contained islands, but as an inextricable part of Europe.
This richly layered history begins with the Celtic Supremacy in the last centuries BC, which is presented in the light of a Celtic world stretching all the way from Iberia to Asia Minor. Roman Britain is seen not as a unique phenomenon but as similar to the other frontier regions of the Roman Empire. The Viking Age is viewed not only through the eyes of the invaded but from the standpoint of the invaders themselves--Norse, Danes, and Normans. In the later chapters, Davies follows the growth of the United Kingdom and charts the rise and fall of the main pillars of 'Britishness'--the Royal Navy, the Westminster Parliament, the Constitutional Monarchy, the Aristocracy, the British Empire, and the English Language.
This holistic approach challenges the traditional nationalist picture of a thousand years of "eternal England"--a unique country formed at an early date by Anglo-Saxon kings which evolved in isolation and, except for the Norman Conquest, was only marginally affected by continental affairs. The result is a new picture of the Isles, one of four countries--England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales--constantly buffeted by continental storms and repeatedly transformed by them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #903447 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1296 pages

Amazon.com Review
When did British history begin, and where will it all end? These controversial issues are tackled head-on in Norman Davies's polemical and persuasive survey of the four countries that in modern times have become known as the British Isles. Covering 10 millennia in just over a thousand pages, from "Cheddar Man" to New Labour, Davies shows how relatively recently the English state was formed--no earlier than Tudor times--and shows, too, how a sense of Britishness emerged only with the coming of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. A historian of Poland, and the author of an acclaimed history of Europe, Davies is especially sensitive to the complex mixing and merging of tribes and races, languages and traditions, conquerors and colonized that has gone on throughout British history and that in many ways makes "our island story" much more like that of the rest of Europe than we usually think. Many myths of the English are dispelled in this book, and many historians are taken to task for their blinkered Anglocentrism. But the book ends on an upbeat note, with Davies welcoming Britain's return to the heart of Europe at the dawn of the new millennium. --Miles Taylor, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
Following his acclaimed Europe: A History, British historian Davies has written a wondrous, landmark chronicle of the British Isles--already a bestseller in the U.K.--that challenges conventional Anglocentric assumptions throughout. Davies situates prehistoric Britain as part of a Celtic world stretching from Iberia to Poland to Asia Minor. Unlike most historians, who stress Britain's Anglo-Saxon heritage, Davies shows that the isles' fourfold division into England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales arose from a complex mixing of peoples in a constantly fluctuating patchwork of ethnic communities, statelets and kingdoms. Bursting with fresh insights on nearly every page, this magisterial narrative, scholarly yet down-to-earth and engrossing, reveals Davies at his iconoclastic best. He declares that the Viking legacy is much greater than traditional historians admit, and that the Battle of Hastings in 1066 was not a famous showdown between the English and French, but an intricate scramble for the final Viking spoils in England (valiant English King Harold II was leader of the Anglo-Danish party). The dense narrative really hits its stride with serial wife-slayer Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and Davies gives full play to the distinctive yet intertwined cultural, economic and political affairs of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Plumbing the roots of English (and British) prejudice, parochialism, xenophobia and imperialism, Davies includes vastly illuminating mini-essays on such sundry topics as class divisions, the loss of empire, race relations, the rise of organized sports, and the steady advance of a standardized English language. He closes with a provocative forecast: "The breakup of the United Kingdom may be imminent," a prediction he bases on the resurgence of nationalist consciousness and the fact that what he sees as the U.K.'s raison d'etre--the perpetuation of empire--has vanished. An advocate of Britain's full integration into the European Union, he chastises the U.K. for clinging to America's apron strings, yet he adds that a fuller embrace of the Continent might only hasten the U.K.'s breakup. No one who cares about Britain's past or future should miss this superb book. Color and b&w photos, maps. 50,000 first printing; author tour. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
For a specialist in Eastern European history like Davies (emeritus, London Univ.) to attempt to write a synthesis of British history from the Stone Age to the present might seem reckless. As in his last book, Europe: A History, Davies will likely engage some of his readers while enraging the rest. Davies examines how the various component parts of "the Isles"--England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales--interacted with one another and the rest of the world. Consequently, a great deal of attention is given to the English colonization of Ireland, Scotland's relationship with England before and after union, and the creation of empire. These interactions, which form the crux of the book, are well argued and conceptually sound. Davies also recounts how men such as Thomas Babbington Macaulay used their historical writings to create an image of "Great Britain" during the 19th century. Davies's use of popular culture, such as music, is well integrated into the text and appendixes. The result is enjoyable reading that is well researched in the secondary literature--but it's not the revolutionary narrative that its publicity claims. Specialists will likely criticize Davies on a number of points, for example, the brevity of his analysis of the English reformation. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A flawed masterpiece
Mr Davies' book is an excellent introduction to the history of the British Isles. The author is at pains to use terms like "British" and "English" only in their proper contexts, and is so careful to avoid anachronism that he refers to historical figures and places only by the names current at the time. King William I, for example, is "Guillaume" in the book. The separate and inter-dependent histories of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales are treated in depth. Unfortunately, the book is marred by several egregious errors of fact; notably the assertion on page 905 (hardback) that the Irish civil war was won by Eamon de Valera's anti-treaty forces. The edition I read also suffered from a lack of proofreading that showed up on almost every page. The concluding chapter on the "Post-Imperial Isles" consists of a series of essays documenting various strands of modern society. These essays are very strongly informed by events of the late 1990s and are somewhat out of keeping with the overall scope of the work. All in all however, for the tolerant reader this book is a most enjoyable route to a solid knowledge of British history.

The Isles - The last dregs of the English empire
Davies writes a superb book which is a wonderful antedote to all the horrendous old anglocentric histories I remember reading years ago. In my opinion Davies correctly emphasises the importance of all the constituent parts of the Isles. The book begins by examining the prehistory of the isles and I note that one other reviewer states that he felt this chapter to be a waste of time, concentrating on the minutae of an obscure academic argument. The opening chapter and its discussion readily puts over the point that when talking about place names etc. we cannot remove ourselves from a preconception of history and inevitably produces bias. If that reviewer had persisted with the book I suspect he/she may have got the point by the end. However the book then enters a more traditional history beginning with the Celtic domination of the Isles and proceeding through Roman, Saxon, Norse, Norman and Plantagenet eras of (attempted) domination. With each period there is a three part chapter consisting of a "scene setting" episode, the meat of the history and then a review of conceptions, misconceptions and previous views on those eras. The first part of the chapters are always excellent, the second as good but the third parts tend to be inconsistent, some good some rather tedious. Overall though the layout is good and the appendices at the end are wonderful, having the lyrics and music to various "nationalistic" tunes is a wonderfully original idea. Criticisms of the book are minor in comparison to its overall impact, but here goes. There appeared to me numerous typos in the book ranging from mis-spelling to factual inaccuracies. Whilst this can be forgiven, they did seem to get more frequent towards the end as if the proofreader had gone to sleep. There were inaccuracies and omissions in some of the genealogies notably the suggestion that James II and VII was the son of Charles II, that the old pretender was Charles and many others. The other criticism is that I would have preferred to see more on the more modern history of the non-English parts of the Isles (a large part of the tradition of South Wales for example depends on its mild rebelliousness, eg. Chartist rebellion (Chartism got one sentence), Rebecca riots (never mentioned) and the rise of the unions. These aspects of modern history are far more resonant to the people of South Wales than the musings of early 20th century Welsh language poets important as the language issue is. The history of the struggle to free Ireland is also much too brief. Overall though I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in afair history of the Isles.

A New Look at "Merry Old ________"
It is a rare and exhilerating experience to have one's long-held "truths" overturned and ingrained images altered so thoroughly by a single book as mine have been by "The Isles" . The author's stated purpose was to produce a single-volume general history, surveying the peoples and states that have occupied the archipelago known today as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland from 7000 BC to the present day. If Norman Davies has an ideological bias it may be "continentalism". His previous work has been in European History. At the start, he points out that Canyon Man, whose remains were found near present-day Cheddar, lived 9000 years ago--when the archipelago was still attached to the european continent. He was not Celt, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane nor Norman. He predated them all. Yet his DNA is a very close match to that of a teacher living in Cheddar today! Throughout the balance the book Davies stresses that the continuity and insularity of Great Britain's history is a myth; psychological rather than genetic; legendary rather than real. The last section of book is an argument for the UK's pursuing a continental polcy in the future. Davies maintains that anachronistic nomenclature of geography is part of the myth-making. "History of England" and "History of Great Britain" are used interchangeably (even by the Oxford Univerity Library Index), even though England never covered more than the southern half of Great Britain and neither term subsumes Ireland and both make Scotland and Wales invisible. This is more than a semantic quibble. Davies mantains that anachronistic use of place names has helped skew historical perspective. It fostered, at least from the 16th century onward, a monolithic, xenephobic sense of "Englishness" running back to Roman times. In fact, 16 diffent states have occupied the archipelago since 43 BC and the one known as the Kingdom of England existed only from the tenth century to 1536(and that did not include Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Most English historians,from the Tudor era onward, have found it politically convenient to minimize the contributions of the Medeival Irish, the Danes, and even the Normans to the culture and government of Great Britain. They have created a picture of english cultural unity beginning with Alfred and running unbroken and little-changed down to Elizabeth II. A sort of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny. They tend to gloss over the fact that Alfred paid religous homage to the pope or that Richard the Lion Hearted spent only 6 months of his 10-year reign in his island kingdom and was a french-speaker to boot. Davies' book is dense with information aimed at giving the reader a "holistic" view of the history of the archipelago. It teems with people and events not found in the standard works on "English" history. One's view of historical figures are transformed. For example, in the section about the United Kingdom of the present day, he drops in the perception-bending fact that Princess Diana was the first woman of English descent to marry a King of Britain (meaning 1707-2000) or an heir apparent. Whaoo! Say what! check it out.