Writer/host Simon Schama presents as complete "A History of Britain" (2000) as possible in 15 hour-long episodes. In order to do so, he had to make some cuts, wisely choosing to skip the first 4.5 billion or so years and kicks off the story in the village of Skara Brae in the northern Orkney Islands where some of the best evidence of Stone Age life anywhere in the world is well-preserved.
After a quick journey through Britain´s pre-history, the series jumps quite naturally to the Roman conquest of the isles in the earliest years of the millennium. This invasion reshapes British society in the vision of Rome, and helped set up an identity crisis that would plague the nation long after the end of Roman rule in the 5th century. The question of what was essentially British was complicated by the further problem that what we call Britain was (and is) several distinct nations and, for that matter, really a series of villages or small city-states that didn´t necessarily identify with a single national image.
From post-Roman rule, Middle-Age Britain was plagued by a series of succession crises, the struggle between Church and state as well as… the plague. That was a fun decade. But from the death of half the population emerged many of the aspects of modern British culture: an increasingly empowered labor class (post-plague aristocrats needed workers and couldn´t find many) and, ultimately, a system of laws independent of the monarchy. After that, it´s on to empire and the end of the empire. Curiously, no mention of the history of British cuisine made the final cut.
Howard Zinn might criticize the series for telling history largely in terms of kings, queens, politicians and aristocrats. However, Schama´s history (billed as a history, not the history of Britain) is multi-disciplinary in its focus. "The Wrong Empire" episode focuses on Britain´s shameful history of slavery. "The Forces of Nature" episode describes a revolution in thought by way of authors and philosophers from Rousseau to Mary Wollstonecraft to Wordsworth.
You pick some interesting tidbits along the way too. Henry VIII was a singer/songwriter in his own band (which I guess is when he wrote "I´m Henry the Eighth, I am.") Thomas Paine was sentenced to death and escape the chopping block only because a guard accidentally chalked an "X" on the inside of his prison door rather than the outside which is hardly a display of common sense.
The level of detail also raises the series from the level of "dates and names" to a more enlightening history. In the episode covering the American Revolution, Schama delineates Britain´s disastrous introduction of the Stamp Act. A seemingly innocuous bit of legislation, it attached a fee to every document used in the colonies which meant that it pissed off every lawyer, politician and landowner in the States, precisely targeting the very people with the power to fight back.
Writer/host Simon Schama presents as complete "A History of Britain" (2000) as possible in 15 hour-long episodes. In order to do so, he had to make some cuts, wisely choosing to skip the first 4.5 billion or so years and kicks off the story in the village of Skara Brae in the northern Orkney Islands where some of the best evidence of Stone Age life anywhere in the world is well-preserved.
After a quick journey through Britain´s pre-history, the series jumps quite naturally to the Roman conquest of the isles in the earliest years of the millennium. This invasion reshapes British society in the vision of Rome, and helped set up an identity crisis that would plague the nation long after the end of Roman rule in the 5th century. The question of what was essentially British was complicated by the further problem that what we call Britain was (and is) several distinct nations and, for that matter, really a series of villages or small city-states that didn´t necessarily identify with a single national image.
From post-Roman rule, Middle-Age Britain was plagued by a series of succession crises, the struggle between Church and state as well as… the plague. That was a fun decade. But from the death of half the population emerged many of the aspects of modern British culture: an increasingly empowered labor class (post-plague aristocrats needed workers and couldn´t find many) and, ultimately, a system of laws independent of the monarchy. After that, it´s on to empire and the end of the empire. Curiously, no mention of the history of British cuisine made the final cut.
Howard Zinn might criticize the series for telling history largely in terms of kings, queens, politicians and aristocrats. However, Schama´s history (billed as a history, not the history of Britain) is multi-disciplinary in its focus. "The Wrong Empire" episode focuses on Britain´s shameful history of slavery. "The Forces of Nature" episode describes a revolution in thought by way of authors and philosophers from Rousseau to Mary Wollstonecraft to Wordsworth.
You pick some interesting tidbits along the way too. Henry VIII was a singer/songwriter in his own band (which I guess is when he wrote "I´m Henry the Eighth, I am.") Thomas Paine was sentenced to death and escape the chopping block only because a guard accidentally chalked an "X" on the inside of his prison door rather than the outside which is hardly a display of common sense.
The level of detail also raises the series from the level of "dates and names" to a more enlightening history. In the episode covering the American Revolution, Schama delineates Britain´s disastrous introduction of the Stamp Act. A seemingly innocuous bit of legislation, it attached a fee to every document used in the colonies which meant that it pissed off every lawyer, politician and landowner in the States, precisely targeting the very people with the power to fight back.
No comments:
Post a Comment