https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/26/this-happy-breed-of-men/
“There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to a young correspondent who contemplated with alarm British losses in the American War of Independence. As it happened, Britain absorbed the parturition of the United States with aplomb, growing ever stronger for more than a century. Where are we now? There’s lots of ruin about: no one disputes that. But how are we—we, the English-speaking peoples of the world?—
I am not sure who coined the term “Anglosphere,” but James Bennett gave it currency in his book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century. Bennett’s book was published in 2004. A paperback edition, with a new Afterword, appeared in 2007. The Anglosphere Challenge endeavored to make good on its optimistic subtitle. The 19th century had been the British century. The 20th century belonged to America. Today, the conventional wisdom predicts that the 21st century will belong to China. But, Bennett argued, “If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity, the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere century.”
“If.” A tiny word that prompts large questions. What were those opportunities that needed grasping? How sure was our grip? And who, by the way, were “we”? What was this Anglosphere that Bennett apostrophized? Winston Churchill’s opus on the English-speaking peoples, published in four volumes in the mid-1950s, principally included Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. He commenced his story in 55 B.C., when Julius Caesar first “turned his gaze” upon Britain, and concluded as Victoria’s long reign ended. By 2006, when Andrew Roberts extended Churchill’s work in his magisterial History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, the Anglosphere had expanded to include Commonwealth Caribbean countries and, more to the point, India with its 1.4 billion people and the burgeoning capitalist dynamo that is its economy.