The English-speaking century

Features

February 2007

The English-speaking century

On Andrew Roberts' History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.

In the past one hundred years, four successive political movements—Prussian militarism, German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and international Communism— mounted military campaigns to conquer Europe, Asia, and the world. Had any of them prevailed, it would have been a profound loss for civilization as we know it. Yet over the course of these bids for power, a coalition headed first by Britain and then by the United States emerged not just to oppose but to destroy them utterly.

From the long perspective of human affairs, these victories must stand as among the most remarkable of the past three millennia. They were as decisive for world history as the victories of the ancient Greeks over Persia, of Rome over Carthage, and of the Franks over the Umayyad Caliphate.

Moreover, military triumph has been complemented by economic success. The policies of free-trade liberalism, which in the nineteenth century ma ...

Keith Windschuttle is an author and publisher who is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion and Quadrant. He is author of The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, which is now in its fourth edition from Encounter Books, and five other books on contemporary social issues. His book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, will be published by Macleay Press, Sydney, in November. He is publisher of Macleay Press, Sydney. He is a graduate in history from the University of Sydney and in politics from Macquarie University. He is a former academic who taught history, social policy and media studies the University of New South Wales and other Australian universities. His principal research interests are in historiography, especially of Australian and American history, and in the theories of history produced in the last two hundred years.