Robert Tombs’s appearance on the BBC’s HistoryExtra platform promoting Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story About Britain, co-written with Nigel Biggar, matters for reasons that extend far beyond the merits of another popular history of Britain. The central issue the book and its promotion raise is not whether every aspect of British history should be condemned, nor whether historians should acknowledge achievements as well as crimes. It concerns something far more fundamental: whose history is being written, which social forces are concealed when “Britain” is treated as a unified historical subject, and why a rehabilitated national narrative has acquired renewed political importance.
Biggar and Tombs make no secret of wanting to challenge what they regard as an excessively negative conception of British history. Swift Press describes their book as a challenge to a supposedly “fashionable” narrative that emphasises the worst of Britain’s past while neglecting its best. The publisher goes further, describing the volume as an “antidote to contemporary cynicism” and declaring that the authors seek to tell a “better story about Britain”, one that recognises achievements of “enduring value” that supposedly deserve “our appreciation and care”. Our Islands’ Story was published on 22 October 2026. [swiftpress.com]
That language deserves serious attention. “Our”, “inheritance”, “appreciation” and “care” are not merely neutral historiographical categories. They construct a relationship between contemporary readers and the British state’s history. The effect is to transform history from the critical investigation of past societies into an argument about national inheritance. Events separated by centuries and produced by antagonistic social classes can therefore be gathered under an encompassing national “we”.
The accompanying endorsements make the political thrust still clearer. Andrew Roberts praises the book for rejecting what he calls “corrosive woke self-hatred”. At the same time, John Gray commends its opposition to a supposedly “crude progressive mythology” depicting British history principally through oppression and exploitation. The question is therefore not whether the book has politics. Its presentation makes clear that it consciously intervenes in contemporary disputes over national identity and historical memory. The question is what politics these arguments express and what conception of history underpins them.
Who is the “our” in Our Islands’ Story?
The title itself poses the central problem. Who exactly are “our”? No single British historical experience exists. The aristocrat enclosing land and the peasant deprived of customary rights did not inhabit history in the same way. The plantation owner accumulating wealth through enslaved labour and the enslaved labourer were not participants in a common achievement. The Manchester mill owner and the child employed in the factory cannot be dissolved into a collective national “we” without concealing their social relationship.
The British Empire similarly cannot be understood as the collective accomplishment or collective crime of an undifferentiated British population. Its governing apparatus, military power and commercial expansion arose from definite social interests. The profits generated by colonial commerce, plantation slavery, finance and industrial exploitation accumulated overwhelmingly within the possessing classes. British workers could themselves absorb imperial and nationalist ideology, and sections of the working class could derive particular advantages from imperial supremacy, but this did not abolish the fundamental class division within British society.
That is why the apparently straightforward language of national inheritance is so misleading. Tombs has long defended a more affirmative interpretation of England and Britain. Yet the central Marxist objection to this approach does not depend upon establishing whether England has been, at one moment or another, relatively prosperous, politically stable or constitutionally liberal compared with other countries. The real question is how such developments arose and which social forces struggled over their direction.
A national narrative inevitably converts contested achievements into national attributes. Parliamentary government, civil liberties, trade-union rights and extension of the franchise appear retrospectively as components of an evolving British political tradition. What disappears is the struggle required to obtain them and, above all, the resistance mounted by property and the state against those demanding them.
The material foundations of British power
Britain did not become the “workshop of the world” because of some timeless national predisposition towards liberty, enterprise or good government. British capitalism emerged from profound transformations in property, agriculture, commerce, production, and class relations.
The enclosure and commercialisation of agriculture helped produce both an increasingly capitalist system of farming and populations increasingly dependent upon wage labour. Colonial commerce expanded alongside the Atlantic slave economy. Wealth generated in the Caribbean, commercial expansion in Asia, and the growing power of finance interacted with transformations taking place within Britain itself. The Industrial Revolution did not descend from the ingenuity of an undifferentiated British people. It developed inside a new system of class relations in which the means of production were increasingly concentrated in private hands while millions possessed primarily their capacity to work.
The resulting wealth was extraordinary. So too was its social cost. Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England lies precisely in this. Engels did not look upon industrial Britain and see a single national community becoming progressively richer. He perceived interconnected classes. The factory system that generated enormous wealth at one pole of society generated insecurity, exhausting labour, overcrowding and premature death at another. The splendour of capitalist civilisation and the misery of the proletariat were not two unrelated phenomena. They arose from the same social relations.
This is what disappears whenever national prosperity becomes the principal measure of historical success. To ask whether Britain was rich is consequently inadequate. One must ask who controlled the wealth, who produced it, under what conditions it was accumulated and how it was distributed. To speak of British power without these questions is to convert the history of a class society into a national success story.
Empire and the morality of the balance sheet
The same methodological difficulty becomes still more visible when discussion turns towards empire. Biggar’s attempt to reconsider the morality of colonialism rests upon the claim that the historical record should not be reduced exclusively to oppression and atrocity. Our Islands’ Story extends the broader intellectual project into a national history advertised as recovering positive achievements against pervasive pessimism. The publisher explicitly presents the book in these terms.
At first sight, the demand for “balance” sounds unassailable. Any serious historian considers contradictory evidence. British imperial rule differed across regions and centuries. Its administrators did not possess identical motives. Colonial subjects were themselves divided by class, caste, religion and political outlook. Institutions transported around the world could acquire meanings unintended by those who introduced them. None of this, however, answers the essential question: what was empire?
Empire was not an assortment of disconnected moral actions awaiting classification as beneficial or harmful. It represented systems of political domination constructed within a developing capitalist world economy. British imperialism secured strategic territory, commercial routes, markets, investment opportunities and access to labour and resources. The forms of this domination varied enormously, but you cannot understand the social relationship by placing railways, schools, and legal institutions in a positive column while placing famine, dispossession, and repression in a negative one.
Railways themselves illustrate the problem. Infrastructure that later becomes essential to the economic life of an independent society cannot retrospectively explain the social purpose for which colonial authorities and investors supported its construction. A material development may have contradictory historical consequences. Marxism has never required denying this. On the contrary, contradiction stands at the centre of historical development.
The problem begins when consequences are converted into moral credits attributed to “Britain”. The Irish Famine, Amritsar, the Bengal famine of 1943 and repression in colonial Kenya cannot simply be positioned alongside legal institutions and infrastructure before historians calculate whether empire generated a positive or negative final score. Instead, historians must locate such events within the economic and political relations of the societies in which they occurred. The issue is explanation rather than retrospective national judgement.
The struggle for democracy was a class struggle.
This distinction matters especially when discussing the genuinely progressive traditions in British history. There is an enormous democratic inheritance. But its most powerful episodes repeatedly emerged through struggle against the existing political and social order. The seventeenth-century English Revolution shattered forms of monarchical government and released political arguments of extraordinary radicalism. The Levellers demanded an extension of political participation far beyond what Parliament’s propertied leaders were prepared to concede. The Putney Debates revealed that even within the parliamentary military coalition, profound disagreement existed over property, political rights, and the revolution’s meaning.
The radical tradition did not end there. The development of industrial capitalism produced a modern working class that created its own organisations and increasingly advanced its own political claims. Peterloo revealed how the state could answer demands for political reform. The Tolpuddle labourers demonstrated the hostility directed against collective organisation. Chartism created the first mass independent political movement of the working class, linking democratic demands with the experience of industrial society. The British political system eventually incorporated reforms once denounced as dangerous and revolutionary. But to transform that outcome into proof of Britain’s uniquely evolutionary genius is to reverse historical causation.
Rights conceded under pressure subsequently become celebrated components of a national tradition. The struggles that made concessions unavoidable recede into the background. This process of historical appropriation is crucial to understanding conservative national history. It does not necessarily deny popular struggle. More commonly, it absorbs its accomplishments. Democracy becomes British. Parliamentary sovereignty becomes British. Freedom becomes British. The working population is subsequently invited to identify with institutions whose democratic content was expanded precisely through generations of struggle against privileged elites. Marxism insists upon restoring that conflict to the centre of historical interpretation.
The working class has a history, not a national myth.
The alternative to conservative nationalism is therefore not national self-loathing. Workers living in Britain today have no reason to experience personal guilt for imperial crimes committed before they were born. A child in present-day Manchester is no more personally responsible for Amritsar than an Indian worker today is responsible for the actions of former Indian ruling classes. Collective hereditary guilt is an intellectually bankrupt approach to history. But collective national pride mirrors the same error. If contemporary workers are not personally guilty of the crimes of empire, they cannot logically inherit personal credit for Britain’s victories, imperial conquests or ruling-class achievements either.
History is something to understand, not something into which individuals should be conscripted in search of either inherited innocence or inherited guilt. This is where the conflict between Marxism and both sides of the conventional culture war becomes important. Racialist theories may present “whiteness”, “Europeans” or “the British” as collective historical subjects bearing responsibility across generations. Conservative national history responds by taking the same national categories and reversing the moral verdict. Instead of collective guilt, it offers collective pride. The apparent opponents consequently share far more than either acknowledges. Both can dissolve class antagonisms into identities extending across generations. Both obscure the fact that the decisive divisions in capitalist society arise from social relations of production, property and power. Marxism rejects the choice.
From the 1619 Project to History Reclaimed
This is also why opposition to racialised interpretations of history must not be surrendered to the political right. Legitimate criticisms of racial reductionism give Tombs and other conservative historians part of their intellectual opportunity. When enormous and complicated histories are rewritten as essentially eternal confrontations between racial categories, the resulting distortions make nationalist counterattacks easier. But the answer to racial essentialism cannot be national essentialism.
The history of Atlantic slavery, for example, becomes incomprehensible if the fundamental historical agency is relocated from class relations and developing capitalism into a timeless conflict between “white” and “black” people. But it becomes equally incomprehensible if the fact that Britain later participated in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade is employed to establish a moral credit for the British national story.
Historical materialism asks different questions. What economic relations generated racial slavery? Which classes accumulated wealth through it? How were racial ideologies developed to legitimise exploitation? Which economic, political and social transformations contributed to abolition? What interests subsequently shaped Britain’s use of anti-slavery in its international policy? Those questions lead away from moral competition between national pride and national shame and towards historical explanation.
Why resurrect the imperial inheritance now?
The timing of the dispute matters. Britain in 2026 is not the Britain that dominated nineteenth-century world commerce. Nor is it the imperial power that once controlled enormous territories. It is a capitalist society marked by intense social inequality and political disaffection, operating within a global system increasingly characterised by military confrontation and geopolitical instability. Under such circumstances, the ideological significance of national history increases.
A state demanding social sacrifice must perpetually present national interests as interests shared across class lines. Military expenditure must become “our” defence. Geopolitical objectives become “our” security. International competitors become threats to “us”. The tremendous disparities separating wealth and poverty disappear temporarily behind the image of national community. History provides this political vocabulary with a past. Empire consequently becomes more than a historical question. If the imperial past can be reinterpreted as on balance constructive, a source of institutions and values worthy of appreciation, then the contemporary British state can present itself as inheritor of a fundamentally progressive national tradition.
This was one of the central arguments in my earlier A Trumpet of Sedition article, “Biggar and Tombs’ Our Islands’ Story: An ideological brief for an empire preparing for war”. Published on 15 October, the article argued that the rehabilitation of empire should be considered within a wider ideological turn towards militarism and national cohesion. , [keith-pers…ogspot.com]
The BBC and the limits of “neutral” history
In principle, I have no objection to the BBC interviewing Tombs. His position deserves examination, particularly because it sits at the centre of a major contemporary historical controversy. The problem arises when a deeply political interpretation is treated principally as an exercise in correcting excessive negativity rather than subjected to sustained scrutiny of its assumptions. The questions to ask of this interpretation are not difficult to formulate.
What is gained and what is lost when Britain itself becomes the subject of history? Who possesses the collective inheritance repeatedly invoked in discussions of the national past? How can the accomplishments of ruling classes and the victories secured against them legitimately be incorporated into the same narrative of national achievement?
Does the parliamentary system demonstrate an inherent British attachment to liberty, or does its development reveal centuries of conflict over who possessed political rights? Can empire be morally evaluated apart from the economic system that shaped imperial expansion? And above all, what does the word “our” mean in a society divided by class? A genuinely searching discussion would have forced the national narrative to confront these contradictions. Instead, the danger of the “history wars” framework is that the argument is organised between two positions that reinforce one another: Britain as historical villain and Britain as historical benefactor. Once debate takes this form, Marxist historical explanation disappears almost completely.
Our Islands’ Story and the politics of historical memory
The publisher’s presentation of Our Islands’ Story is particularly revealing in this respect. The book is not advertised simply as offering discoveries about Britain’s past. It is offered as a corrective to attitudes towards the past. Readers are encouraged to recover something worthy of “appreciation and care” and to carry valuable elements of the inheritance “into the future”. That is an argument about historical consciousness.
The difference matters because history and memory perform different intellectual functions. Historical investigation should challenge inherited assumptions. National memory frequently seeks continuity. History disaggregates supposedly unified communities and discovers conflicts beneath them. National mythology instead tends to turn contradictory experiences into a common inheritance. Marxist history’s task is precisely to uncover those contradictions.
We should therefore reject the argument that criticism of empire involves hating Britain just as emphatically as we reject claims that acknowledging cultural or political achievements requires defending empire. Shakespeare does not belong to imperialism. Newton does not require colonial apologetics. The Levellers do not belong to the historical tradition of the British ruling class simply because their struggles occurred in England. Chartism cannot be transformed into an ornament of British constitutionalism without doing violence to the social conflict that created it. Cultural achievement, scientific discovery and democratic struggle are part of humanity’s inheritance. The history of ordinary people struggling to improve their conditions belongs most profoundly to those continuing the struggle for human emancipation.
Against both national shame and national pride
The choice facing historians is therefore not between denunciation and celebration. Neither category provides an adequate method. The British Empire should not be studied so that contemporary Britons can be instructed to feel ashamed of themselves. Nor should it be studied so they can emerge feeling reassured that the national ledger ultimately remains in credit. Both approaches subordinate historical explanation to contemporary moral identity. The materialist historian instead seeks to reconstruct the social relations from which events arose.
This means examining Britain’s transformation through agrarian capitalism, colonial expansion and industrialisation. It means tracing the formation of classes and the relationship between domestic accumulation and international exploitation. It means investigating the state as an instrument shaped by historically developing property relations rather than imagining it as the political embodiment of a timeless national character.
It also means paying attention to resistance. The enslaved person who rebelled against plantation slavery, the Irish tenant resisting landlordism, the Indian opponent of colonial domination and the British worker confronting the factory owner do not belong in separate moral histories. Their experiences were connected through the developing world capitalist system. This is precisely why Marxism possesses an international conception of history fundamentally at odds with conservative nationalism.
There was never one British story.
Finally, no single British story can reconcile these experiences without distorting them. The history of the landowner is not the history of the dispossessed agricultural labourer. The imperial administrator did not have the same historical experience as the colonised population. The millionaire and the docker inhabited the same country without occupying the same social world. The attempt to merge them produces precisely that mystified entity Marxism exists to penetrate: the nation conceived as a community standing above class.
Biggar and Tombs want the reader to recover confidence in national inheritance. The description issued by Swift Press leaves little ambiguity on this score, presenting Our Islands’ Story as an uplifting corrective to cynicism about the British past. But workers need no such reassurance. They possess a historical inheritance far richer than the achievements of their rulers. It includes those who resisted enclosure and dispossession; those who carried the English Revolution beyond the limits acceptable to its propertied leadership; the Levellers who argued over political equality at Putney; the reform movements brutally confronted at Peterloo; the Tolpuddle labourers; the Chartists; generations of trade unionists, socialists and anti-imperialists; and all those who insisted that ordinary men and women were capable of directing society themselves. This history cannot be made the property of the British state. Nor is it exclusively British. Its greatest significance lies precisely in its connection with the struggles of workers and oppressed populations internationally.
A better history requires abandoning the national myth
The weakness of Our Islands’ Story ultimately lies in its title. A “better story about Britain” remains organised around Britain as its fundamental historical subject. But the history that genuinely needs recovering is the history concealed when the nation takes centre stage. Britain certainly has a past. That does not mean everyone who lived within it shared the same historical interests.
The critical question for history is not whether “we” should be proud or ashamed. It is who constituted this “we” in the first place. Who owned the land? Who worked it? Who owned the factories? Who laboured inside them? Who profited from colonial expansion? Who administered the empire? Who experienced its domination? Who controlled Parliament, and who struggled for admission into political life? Who accumulated the wealth, and who produced it?
Once those questions are asked, the harmonious national picture begins to disintegrate.
That is why the current rehabilitation of national history has contemporary political significance. A society divided ever more visibly between immense private wealth and widespread insecurity requires ideological mechanisms that can assert an overriding community of interests. National history provides one such mechanism. It takes the conflicts through which modern society developed and transforms their outcomes into common property. The state ceases to appear as a product of historical struggles and becomes the guardian of a supposedly shared inheritance.
The possibilities contained in British history are far greater than that conservative narrative allows. They lie not primarily in the state’s continuity but in repeated challenges to established authority. From the revolutionary ferment of the seventeenth century through Chartism and the establishment of an organised working-class movement, Britain’s most enduring contribution to human progress cannot be separated from struggles waged from below.
Workers and young people therefore require neither an education in national guilt nor lessons in patriotic pride from historians seeking to restore confidence in Britain’s past. They need history in its most rigorous sense: the reconstruction of the social forces, material interests and class struggles through which the present world came into existence. Tombs and Biggar’s “better story” responds to the crisis of national confidence by attempting to repair the national narrative. Marxist history begins from an altogether different premise. The task is not to produce a better national myth, but to dispense with the myth that rulers and ruled ever possessed one common history. What deserves to be recovered is not an imperial inheritance but the revolutionary and democratic tradition that repeatedly challenged property, privilege and empire. That inheritance belongs to neither Westminster nor the British state. It belongs to the international working class.
Bibliography and further reading
Biggar, Tombs and the current controversy
Biggar, Nigel and Robert Tombs. Our Islands’ Story: A Better Story About Britain. Swift Press, 2026. The publisher gives 22 October 2026 as the publication date and explicitly advertises the book as an antidote to contemporary pessimism concerning Britain’s history.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. London: William Collins, 2023.
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. London: Allen Lane, 2014.
Tombs, Robert. This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2021.
Marx, Engels and imperialism
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.
British capitalism, empire and the working class
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.
Kiernan, V. G. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso, 1997.
From A Trumpet of Sedition
A Trumpet of Sedition. “Biggar and Tombs’ Our Islands’ Story: An ideological brief for an empire preparing for war.” 15 October 2026. This is particularly worth retaining in the bibliography because the present article works naturally as its companion: the earlier essay focuses on the ideological rehabilitation of empire and argues that this must be located within a wider turn toward militarism. [atrumpetof…dition.org],
Publisher material
Swift Press. Our Islands’ Story, publisher’s description and endorsements. [swiftpress.com]
The Guardian Bookshop. Our Islands’ Story, publication details and author biographies. Its listing identifies Biggar as Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas and Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford, noting that he entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer in January 2025; it identifies Tombs as Emeritus Professor of French History at Cambridge and a Life Fellow of St John’s College. [guardianbookshop.com]
