Britain Caught Between Two Worlds

In 1980, Paul M. Kennedy, now Director of International Security Studies at Yale, published an enormously important work on The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914. He argued in essence that imperialism, railroad rivalries, Eastern European Great Power competition, newspaper histrionics, domestic pressure-group activities, or even the German invasion of Belgium per se, while not unimportant, had only a limited bearing on the British decision to declare war on Germany on August 4, 1914. Of far greater importance was the well-grounded fear that a repeat of 1870 would leave a powerful German army and, even more frightening, a revamped and enlarged German navy, in control of the Channel, the Channel ports, Belgium, and northwest France. British security in the twentieth century could never allow such a catastrophe. A quarter century after Kennedy's thesis, Brendan Simms, a distinguished diplomatic historian and Professor of the History of European International Relations at the Center for International Studies at Cambridge, has explained the strategic outlook and decision-making processes of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British politicians and diplomats in a similar manner. Not mercantilism nor American, Indian, or West Indian conquest, nor imperial conflict across the globe pitting Britain against France (and often Spain), nor domestic factional politics at home, nor fiscal-military nation-building can explain Britain's foreign (or indeed much of its domestic) policy. Given that, unlike in 1914, France was usually the chief foe between 1689 and 1815, all major British statesmen were—or should have been—chiefly concerned with the security of the Low Countries and the barrier that they provided or with France's proximity to western and central Germany.

Brendan Simms is a leading member of a modern school of historians, both English and German, who suspect that since the 1837 separation of what they often term "Britain-Hanover," British scholars have ignored or belittled the political, strategic, economic, and even cultural importance of Hanover on the emerging British state. A few of the most important members of this coterie include Nick Harding, author of Hanover and the British Empire, 1700-1837 (2007); Clarissa Campbell Orr, editor of Queenship in Britain, 1660-1837: Royal Patronage, Dynastic Politics, and Court Culture (2002); Andrew C. Thompson, author of Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest (2006); and Torsten Riotte, author of Hanover in British Politics, 1792-1815 (2003). All of these historians stand in implicit or explicit opposition to Linda Colley's highly influential work, Britons (1992), which failed to factor in Hanover in its otherwise meticulous discussion of the British National Identity question after 1707. In Three Victories and a Defeat, Simms, while of course vitally concerned with "Britain-Hanover"—or as he sometimes terms it, "Hanover-Britain" (p. 194)—makes a compelling case that, even beyond the King of England's electorate, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation enjoyed equal importance to British policymakers. Indeed, Simms asserts that after the 1714 Personal Union, Great Britain was "whether she liked it or not . . . part of the Holy Roman Empire" (p. 132).

Simms' long volume is stimulating, daring at times in its assertions, always well written and well argued. He explicitly seeks to reorient British history (and the bulk of modern seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British historians) towards his view of the central and critical importance of Europe, and especially Germany, in the wider scheme of things. Simms makes few concessions to other historiographical traditions. When Sir John Sealey proclaimed, in The Expansion of England (1883), that the history of eighteenth-century England was in America and Asia, he was dead wrong. Sealey's scholarly naval and imperial successors, Arthur Bryant, Raphael Samuels, Alfred Thayer Mahon, Nicholas Rodger, David Baugh, Kathleen Wilson, Peter Marshall, and David Armitage have all gotten this orientation more or less wrong too. After 1714, if not before, the Elbe and the Weser were as crucial to British survival as the English...