british influences

Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? This book is an ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to author Daniel Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms--individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government--are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather, they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that the Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to common-law rights. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism.

To understand Canada's history of Britishness, Vance looks into the military past of both countries. The fabric of Canadian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owes a great deal to the presence of British military. And this, observes Vance, is a two-way relationship: he reminds us that during the two World Wars, close to a million Canadians travelled to the United Kingdom. In this form of reverse colonialism, Canadians established modest outposts in Britain, and parts of the country were Canadianized.