NB page 6 intro

Much of our history (as opposed to “pre-history”) makes a depressing story. The bloody skirmishes of the Dark Ages; the civil wars (with Thomas Hobbes observing that life can easily degenerate into something “nasty, brutish and short”); the rise of empire and slavery, fuelling William Blake's “dark satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution; mass dislocation of people from their homes and the landscape; the World Wars of the 20^th century; any sane person would conclude that both the land and its people would end up exhausted.

2000 years ago, the Romans tried to impose Empire on our islands for perhaps the first time. The brighter news is that, not for the first nor the last time “cultural absorption” took the edge off a foreign elite.