Book Review: Ben Wellings and Andrew Mycock, The Anglosphere: Continuity, Dissonance and Location
| Author | Jack Holland |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920971191 |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP19 –NP20
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
971191PSW0010.1177/1478929920971191Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
research-article2020
Commissioned Book Review
The Anglosphere: Continuity, Dissonance
and Location by Ben Wellings and
Andrew Mycock. Oxford: British Academy;
Oxford University Press, 2019 248 pp., £55,
ISBN 9780197266618.
This insightful collection interrogates the ties
that bind the core Anglosphere countries
together, enabling them to repeatedly unite on
the battlefield, willingly share intelligence and
cooperate in a plethora of (perhaps unexpected)
policy areas, beyond security and defence. It
brings together an impressive array of scholars,
developing interdisciplinary insights into the
Anglosphere’s history, geography and future. In
its assessment of the ontology, possibility and
normativity of the Anglosphere, this book pre-
sents an important account of the ‘state of the
art’, located at the forefront of a rejuvenated
‘Anglosphere studies’. This bolstered research
agenda emerges out of the turbulent Anglosphere
politics of the twenty-first century, characterised
by the mutual sycophancy of Bush and Blair
after 9/11, the apparent lunacy of Brexit on the
back of misguided colonial nostalgia, and the
surprises of Trump’s unabashed transactional
realism. Of these, it is Brexit that predominates
in setting the book’s context.
In its first section, the book wrestles with
the questions of ontology and history: what is
the Anglosphere, when and where did it
emerge, and what sustains it? The answer is
necessarily multifaceted: the Anglosphere is
an idea, a set of interlocking discourses and a
series of policy networks. As an idea, the roots
of the Anglosphere are traced, variably, to the
Scottish Enlightenment, Victorian England
and even a specific speech by Winston
Churchill in 1917. As a series of discourses,
the Anglosphere finds its origins in talk of
Greater Britain and Anglo-Saxondom, which
helped to enable a remarkable feat of interna-
tional relations: relatively peaceful hegemonic
transition at the turn of the twentieth century,
as London learned to play Greece to
Washington’s Rome. As a set of networks, the
Anglosphere exists at multiple crucial sites of
everyday interaction, with significant policy
outcomes. This infrastructural architecture has
occasionally been explored historically but
rarely unpacked in the contemporary era, per-
haps given how secretive so many of these net-
works are. This, then – the unveiling of murky
channels of governance – is an important dem-
ocratic function, helping the Anglosphere to be
held to account.
In its second and third sections, the book
explores the tensions, limitations and exclusions
of the Anglosphere. These are particularly
important as its proponents talk up the promise
of Global Britain, following Brexit. Needless to
say, overoptimism on trade is rigorously damp-
ened and troubling racial imaginaries are
unpacked, as the contemporary politics of histo-
ry’s narration is made apparent and persuasively
deconstructed. The reader learns of the contin-
ued importance of war’s memory and a geopo-
litical imagination that excludes on the basis of
race as much as language, culture or regime
type. The result is that, while ‘Geography trumps
history’ for trade, it remains the other way
around for alliance preferences. Contemporary
world order comprises regional supply chains
but global security governance. That, of course,
is why there was such a powerful, rational argu-
ment for Britain’s continued membership of the
European Union, based on the trade benefits.
The emotional impulse to look further afield,
though, remains strong, as war memory under-
girds an Anglo-American worldview that con-
tinues to spearhead global capitalism and sustain
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