A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

A History of the English Speaking Peoples is a four-volume history of Britain and the other English speaking nations, written by Winston Churchill, covering the period from the Roman conquest of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914). It was published 1956–58.

Churchill was a great British patriot with a love of history and a firm belief in the trans-Atlantic alliance between Britain and the United States, so it was natural for him to turn his hand to a history of both nations. Though the focus is on the United States and England, brief histories of Canada, Australia, and South Africa are also included.

Churchill began the history during the 1930s, during his so-called "wilderness years" when he was not in government. Work was interrupted in 1939 when the Second World War broke out and then when Churchill was appointed Prime Minister. After the war finished in 1945, Churchill was busy, first writing his history of that conflict and then as Prime Minister again between 1951 and 1955, and so it was not until the late 1950s, when Churchill was in his early 80s, that he was able to finish the work.

The later volumes were completed when Churchill was over 80; notably, a full one third of the last volume was devoted to the military minutiae of the American Civil War. Social history, the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution hardly get a mention. Political opponent Clement Attlee suggested the work should have been titled "Things in history that interested me"http://politics.guardian.co.uk/bookshelf/story/0,,1426526,00.html.

Despite these criticisms, the books were bestsellers and reviewed favourably on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Daily Telegraph, J.H. Plumb wrote: "This history will endure; not only because Sir Winston has written it, but also because of its own inherent virtues - its narrative power, its fine judgment of war and politics, of soldiers and statesmen, and even more because it reflects a tradition of what Englishmen in the hey-day of their empire thought and felt about their country's past."

The four volumes are:

The Birth of Britain
The New World
The Age of Revolution
The Great Democracies

In the early 1970s, the BBC produced a series of twenty-six fifty-minute plays loosely based around Churchill's work and entitled Churchill's People. The quality of the productions was judged to be so poor that Head of Drama Shaun Sutton declared them untransmittable. However, so much publicity had already been put in place surrounding the broadcasts that they were forced to go ahead, with much critical mauling and low viewing figures (see BBC television drama).

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