England's Hour: A Review of 'The English and Their History' by Robert Tombs - The Atlantic: "The dominant theme, tone, and message of British and English history writing since at least 1960 has varied between self-critical and self-accusatory. Over the past two decades, the indictment has only sharpened. “Britain’s Gulag” is the title of a history of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. That writer was one-upped by another who accused Britain of authorship of “Late Victorian Holocausts”—Holocausts plural. Even historians who don’t go quite so far as that still tell a story of mass suffering and exploitation up to 1890, and then decline and failure thereafter. Britain’s rulers are arraigned as snobbish chuckleheads at best; mass-murdering criminals at worst. There sometimes seems hardly a problem on this planet that somebody somewhere has not laid at Britain’s or England’s door"
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