This book was one of those little nuggets of gold that you sometimes come
across while digging around in the dusty corners of the used bookstore. The
cover isn’t flashy, the font is very small and it was published in 1926. The
writing, however, is good and the points he makes about the conquest of
Britain first by the Celts, then the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings, etc., is
so interesting that I squinted my way thru it waiting for the next bit to
unfold. His point about feudalism as a necessary step between tribalism and
the nation-state which allowed the accumulation of wealth and the beginnings
of the division of labor into specialties and trades is particularly
interesting. It’s also written from a pre-World War perspective when England
still had an Empire of some sort and the British thought of themselves as a
“race” so added to the history that he is writing is another layer of
historical interest to the modern reader. Unfortunately, the book is out of
print. And the bookstore only had this one volume published in 1953 by
Anchor Doubleday. I managed to find the following 2 volumes on Amazon so I
can continue the story, if my eyes don’t give out.