United Kingdom Books

This superb book studies the connection between slavery in West Africa and the British, and Quaker, firm of Cadbury, particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century.

From the 15th century, the slave trade was the foundation of the Portuguese empire. Even in the early 1900s, Angola was still a slave state, with half its people enslaved. The British Empire was an ally of Portugal, so it was complicit in the slavery. Portugal's islands of Sao Tome and Principe, 150 miles off Africa's west coast, had 40,000 slaves producing cocoa beans which Cadbury had been buying since 1886. From 1901 to 1908, Cadbury got half its beans from the islands.

A Foreign Office official noted, "The fact of the matter is that the system is neither more nor less than slavery but that we do not dare to say much as we might thus offend the Portuguese with whom we desire to stand well." In the 1900s, the British Empire was trying to recruit African labour from Portuguese Africa for its gold mines in South Africa. The Foreign Office warned against the "danger of learning inconvenient facts which might oblige us to make representations to the Portuguese Govt. which we don't want to do." So Britain, like Portugal, ignored the treaties obliging them to act to halt the slave trade. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury ordered, "Leave it alone."

In 1901, William Cadbury first heard rumours of slave labour on the islands. All the evidence that he later received confirmed that there was a brutal slave trade in Angola, that the labourers on the islands were forced, that the death rate was huge (often 20% a year), and that none was free ever to leave. Yet Cadbury did not boycott the products of slave labour until 1909.

The company claimed that discreet diplomacy, and continued purchase of Sao Tome's cocoa, would improve the workers' position. Their position, however, did not improve: 6,000 slaves died every year, though profits certainly increased, as did the number of slaves and the amount of cocoa exported.

Humanitarian pressure groups tried to get the British government to act in the labourers' interests. It responded with endless promises to press the Portuguese state to reform, and repeated investigations and commissions. This all proves the folly of relying on companies, pressure groups, treaties or governments to effect improvement. Angola and the islands used forced labour until they won independence from Portugal in 1975.

How we have progressed since then! Such outrages are long gone. Yet in 2001, the Financial Times reported, "Nestle and Cadbury were accused of turning a blind eye to child slavery in the cocoa industry." A 2002 study estimated that 284,000 children worked in West Africa's cocoa farms. Another study concluded that there were 15,000 child slaves in the Ivory Coast alone. Cadbury responded, "We were completely unaware of the allegations concerning cocoa growing in the Cote d'Ivoire." Plus ca change.

The USA spends $8.5 billion a year on chocolate products, Britain spends £4 billion, while the children who produce the chocolate toil in poverty and slavery.

This is an excellent piece of scholarship and a very readable translation. No collection of primary sources of the period is complete without it.

This is the final book in a series profiling the Plantagenet and Tudor Kings of England. David Loades, the editor, is a professor of History at the University College of North Wales and a leading authority on the Tudor Kings. Loades assembled a team of leading authorities to write 80 short essays on the Tudor Kings and the people, politics, manners, mores and customs of Tudor England. Contemporary chroniclers describe the key events in each monarch's reign in vivid detail.

This book is beautifully illustrated with 150 color and black and white illustrations and is accompanied by a detailed genealogical table covering the Tudor succession. The book also features four maps, a guide to the peers, a glossary and a bibliography of late 20th century books on the period.

I highly recommend this book and the others in the series to anyone interested in medieval history. The other books in the series (all edited by Elizabeth Hallam are: The Plantagenet Chronciles; Chronicles of the Age of Chivalry (also published under the title Four Gothic Kings) and The Wars of the Roses. Chronciles of the Crusades follows the same same superb format.

An exceptional look at how Chronicles were written in late medieval England and what uses they served. The scholarship is evident, if not omnipresent, throughout the work, which makes the prose very readable and interesting, but still leaving the extensive notes in the back of the book handy should the reader grow interested. That being said, this book is for those who are interested in history, the middle ages, or some combination of the two. Can also be read as a history of history of sorts, in late medieval England, a subject interesting in and of itself. To be fair, there is the chance of casual readers growing bored with the material.

This volume gives a series of fine studies on major turning points in early church history. Bonner traces the first real schism, the Donatist rebellion in North Africa, with its concerns about the requirements of church membership and the right of Christians to choose their own leaders. He follows the reasoning and concerns which led Rome's newly official state church to a series of painful choices. In response to a rebel, anti-colonial sect, the authorities basically denied the right of Roman subjects to choose or reject their appointed religious leaders. Bonner explores the ensuing series of fierce debates over sin and freedom, which altered the course of religious history for at least 1,500 years. With elegant dispassion he clarifies the clashes of thought and feeling behind the momentous events unfolding from North Africa to Northumbria.

--author of "Different Visions of Love"

This book is by far the most exhaustive text on the subject. It is wonderful in that respect. It is a difficult read and not for a casual entertainment in my opinion. Think more of a in depth study or someone seeking a deep understanding of the subject.

I intend to use this as one of my foremost references for AS Church research for quite some time to come.

By most reasonable standards, Sir Winston Churchill was one of the great leaders of the Twentieth Century - - if not the greatest.

Robbins portrays him as the ultimate conniving and opportunist whose only persistent idea was to 'Defeat Germany.'

As Robbins writes, "Indeed, Churchill had to admit that he very rarely detected genuine emotion in himself and normally lacked 'a keen sense of necessity or of burning wrong or injustice' such as would make him 'sincere'. It could be, therefore, that politics was an activity without values."

During World War I, Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote of Churchill and the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, "When the war came he saw in it the chance for glory for himself and has accordingly entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship it would bring to thousands, in the hope that he would prove to be the outstanding man in this war."

In retrospect, looking back for a hundred years, is such an attitude better or worse than the burning ideologi8cal certainty of leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Tse Tung, Hidekei Tojo and others who fanatically tried to inflict their beliefs on the world?

Maybe the opportunist, always trying to satisfy the latest wishes and whims of "the people", is the ideal leader for a democractic world.

Consider, for example, the impact of true believers such as the neo-cons of the Bush administrataion compared to the relaxed opportunism of the Clinton years.

As for Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain during World War I, he had no shame in sending hundreds of thousands of young British men to their deaths under the command of hopelessly inept but properly aristocratic generals in the trenches of Europe. Churchill at least tried an end run at Gallipoli, instead of constantly trying to bully through the middle in futile power plays.

Churchill may have blundered at Gallipoli; but, it's more likely the blunders were due to obstruction by Lord Kitchener and Sir John Fisher. Faced with a new idea, they doomed this innovative maneuver. Instead, their always seemed to favour the "glory" of a spirited rush by a mass of determined men to overwhelm defenders with machine guns.

Granted, Gallipoli wasn't Churchill's only blunder. He erred as badly in the spring of 1940 in assuming Norway could not be conquered, due to the presence of the Royal Navy in Scapa Flow. So, instead of invading by ship, the Germans used airplanes. The Royal Navy beat a hasty retreat, just as at Gallipoli.

A few weeks later, Churchill became Prime Minister.

Clearly, he was an opportunist - - always willing to respond to most of the people most of the time on most issues. It seems, right or otherwise, that's what democracy is all about. It's not the ideological purity and ansolute certainty of being always right all of the time on all issues; it's responding to the people, and having the courage to admit and correct mistakes when they occur.

Because, mistakes will occur. The true test of good government is not the mistakes, it is how they are corrected. This Churchill knew how to accomplish. The last century, like the dynasty of father-and-son Bush presidency, shows the perils of dynasties, ideologues and incompetents who cling to power.

Churchill, as Robbins makes clear, appreciated the British ability "to manage political change in such a way that bright stars who shone under one dispensation could continue to do so in very different political circumstances."

Sometimes, Churchill didn't shine very brightly. But, as Robbins eloquently portrays, he shone very brightly when a guiding light was most needed.

This analytical and thorough work builds nicely on the current critical look at Churchill's achievements. Carlton reminds us that Churchill, at bottom, was just another politician. Certainly, he believed passionately that the Soviet empire was evil and tyrannical; yet, in his zeal to be remembered as a world statesman (rather than just one of the protagonists in World War II) he was willing to flip flop whenever it suited him. Carlton also, repeatedly, reminds us that Churchill probably thought the Russians to be more wicked than the Germans and that he advocated the preemptive postwar use of nuclear weapons before the Soviets had developed a nuclear arsenal. Churchill's duplicity, vanity and senility in his last years are also brilliantly illustrated in this book. This is not the Churchill that many of us were taught by our history masters. Thanks to David Carlton, we now have a readable account of the whole man and not just the man as he would have us remember him. A must read.

The political analyst and historian Richard Lamb waited 50 years after events so that the British archives could be freely searched for first drafts of letters, memos, cables, and other communiques. We learn what the principals were actually thinking and feeling before they toned down their language in later drafts. Many hints of Winston Churchill's less than perfect diplomacy and military "genius" are scattered through histories and memoirs that he could not bowdlerize. Along with a generally positive assessment of Churchill's popularity as at tough pitbull, these imperfections are highlighted in Lamb's account. Here we find Churchill to have been doggedly and impetuously fallible, terrible in confrontation, mulish in his negotiations, and very shrewd in his sub-rosa efforts to bring the United States into the war. He fired good generals and kept on mediocre ones; he blundered so badly with the French that Americans paid blood on the beaches of North Africa. He pushed for boyishly-conceived sallies against military advice and got blood on his hands for which he dodged responsibility.

Without stating so explicitly, Lamb makes it clear that of the three European warlords, Churchill was the least capable; if it had not been for the codebreakers (Ultra), Hitler's strategies and tactics likely would have mangled every British, Canadian, and British-American venture. And the perfidy Churchill used to further his post-war aims for the British Empire was outclassed and outgunned by Stalin.

Lamb's prose is elegant as his research is uncannily good. Every WWII amateur should read this book. Pity that it went out of print.

Never Surrender is yet another volume in what already is the longest biography in the world. (At least according to the good people at the guiness book of world records. ) It is a collection of all the speeches and papers of Winston Churchill during the most critical phase of his Prime Ministry, and perhaps the most critical phase of World War Two. In this volume we get to witness Churchill's reaction to Dunkirk, the fall of France, and the Battle of Britain, and we also get to witness Churchill's heroic response to them. In this volume we see Churchill at his absolute best.

The offical biography is written by Martin Gilbert, a task he assumed after Randolf, Winston Churchill's son, died. The bigraphy consists of eight biographic volumes, and each volume has a few volumes of relevant documents to support it. Never Surrender is one of the document volumes which support the biographic volume "Finest Hour: 1939-1941" which is perhaps the finest volume of the entire biography. With all biogrphic volumes and the supporting books, The entire biography now stands at 23 volumes. Roughly 7-10 more are expected.

Never Surrender is probably the finest supporting volume of the entire set. It covers possibly the most important moment in British history, and it is a fine read in itself thanks to the usual outstanding work of Gilbert. The book is not for everyone, only those well versed in Churchill lore, and also keep in mind the book is not a narrative, but more like a collection of letters. But to anyone truly interested in Chuchill, or this era of English history, the book is nearly a must-have.