A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900.

Read an incisive review by Keith Windschuttle of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts at the New Criterion. Here's an excerpt:

Eventually, Roberts says, just as historians now see no fundamental discontinuity between the republican and imperial eras of Rome, they will not see a great distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republican-led periods of English-speaking world dominance between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Indeed, the author quotes the distinguished Indian economist and historian Deepak Lal who declares the English-speaking peoples’ rise to predominance the most important event in the history of the past millennium. The spread of their common political culture has been, Roberts says, the most significant historical development since the invention of gunpowder and the printing press.

Hence, rather than “the century of the common man” or “the American century,” Roberts calls it the century of the English-speaking peoples, and emphasizes that it is far from over. Having seen off the major challengers to their supremacy, his subjects today have no rival in might, wealth, or prestige—though they have plenty of enemies. “We are part of the hegemonic power that the Arabs, Africans, and Europeans so self-referentially loathe.”

[English speaking people] [America] [Britain] [imperialism] [hegemony]