James Holland: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah. We shouldn’t forget that, right? Third of the world is pink, as the saying goes. And that saying comes from the kind of atlas of the world where all British territories are kind of colored pink. And on top of that it has lots of extra imperial territories as well. So if you look at, there’s this incredible map of global shipping in 1937, and there’s these little landlines of ships going out, and one of the strongest landlines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down in Southern Atlantic, and there it is. And that’s because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge great farming estates and ranches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you didn’t even need an empire. You need the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you. And Britain not only has the largest navy, it also has the largest merchant navy. It has 33% of the world’s merchant shipping and access to a further 50% Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can access. So if you’ve got access to 80, in excess of 80% of the world shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position. And actually all sorts of other things have been going on. While they might not have been creating a huge army or producing enough Spitfires that they might want to, up until this point, what they have also been doing is stockpiling bauxite and copper and tungsten and huge reserves. And because Britain has this huge global reach and because it has its empire and its extra-imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike. So it can go into various countries around the world and can go, “Okay, I want you to guarantee me for the next five years every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the asking price to secure that.” And it’s doing that in the 1930s. So when war comes, it’s got everything it possibly needs. Now it always need more because it’s suddenly turning into a kind of proper global long drawn-out war. But that is a huge advantage. So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, “Okay, well, I’m not going to get a war over Czechoslovakia. Who cares about them? But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business.” Hitler’s going, “Who’s this stuffy guy with his white hair? I don’t give a toss about him. ” And he’s coming at it from a completely different perspective. And I think one of the things that’s so interesting from a dramatic point of view and from a historian’s point of view, or even a novelist’s point of view, in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations, which I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s terrifically good, it’s the fact you’ve got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points. don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s terrifically good, it’s the fact you’ve got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points. And I think it’s very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. The gold standard was tied to the pound, not the dollar. And so Britain was the number one nation in the world at that time, and it just was, and it’s so diminished by comparison today that it’s hard to imagine it. And I think one of the interesting things about the historiography, about the narrative of how we tell World War II is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945. And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s and ’80s and into the 1990s, is through a prism of a very, very different world. And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.