British History
in 50 Events is a book in the Hourly History series. The book was offered to me
for free on Kindle on the last page of my copy of Adolf Hitler: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History and
out of curiosity, I just continued with the series and read this book.
The book starts
from the time of Stonehenge till the 2012 London Olympics and the events are arranged
in Chronological order. At least a paragraph is dedicated to nearly every major
event in British history, such as Battle of Hastings, Armada, Industrial Revolution,
Gunpowder treason, the Battle of Waterloo, Battle of Britain, etc. The book has
done a good job of compressing nearly 3000 years into around 50 pages touching
upon several significant events.
But then, I have
used the phrase ‘several significant
events’ because a lot of important events were given a miss (the surprise
miss being the lack of mention of Horatio Nelson). I also felt the author tried
too hard to not show Britain in a bad light throughout the book such as; while
the book tried to project the Hundred Years War as a status quo ante bellum, for all practical purposes, it was a defeat
for the English considering the French managed to push them to a corner in
Calais while managing to secure their kingdom and crown their king; the British
exploits in their colonies also didn’t receive any mention and some of it even
had a bearing on the Isles; the Iraq war was also conveniently given a miss and
these are just a few that I could think of. Additionally, I also couldn’t avoid
noticing that the author continued to refer to the country as England even for events after the Act of
Union (example: the author refers to Falkland War as a war between England and
Argentina) that beyond a point, I felt that I was reading something written by
someone from the far right English Democrats Party. That
is also perhaps the reason why there was absolutely no mention of Harold
MacMillan, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.
Despite the
shortcomings that I have mentioned, I wouldn’t say that the book was so bad to
warrant a four rating from me but I would award it a neutral five considering
that it did manage to tell me the brief history of Britain in an hour.
Rating – 5/10
Have a nice day,
Andy