Description - The Sea Traders by Archibald Hurd
An excerpt from the introductory:
THE RIDDLE OF THE ISLAND EMPIRE.
England under the Heel of Conquerors-The Coming of the Romans-The Saxon Ascendancy-The Heptarchy and the Invading Danes-Deliverance from Servitude-England
THAT the little island of Britain, harried by Saxon and Dane, and ground under the heel of conquerors for centuries, should have become at last the pivot of an empire embracing nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the earth, constitutes a riddle to which the historian offers no solution. The explanation is possibly to be found in the fact that the history of this great expansion has been written by landsmen. They have told us when king succeeded king; they have described innumerable battles on land; and they have explained the growth of our system of government; but being themselves without the sea-sense, they have not supplied us with the secret of the riddle which the British Empire presents when we glance at the map of the world and recall the record of earlier centuries.
Great events are often concealed in trite phrases which spring to the lip without thought of their significance. Every child reads in his history at school of the landing of the Romans. "The Roman Conquest" means little or nothing to him, and the grown-up man or woman goes through life without realizing that this country was subject to the Romans for about four hundred and fifty years. They found the inhabitants little better than barbarians, who knew next to nothing of the culture which had flourished in past centuries in Asia and Africa, and which afterwards bloomed in Greece. By the Roman conquerors the natives were regarded with contempt; they lived amongst them, but mixed little with them. England was to the Romans their most distant colony, to be held by force and ruled with all the authority which flowed from the Imperial city of Rome. And thus it seemed that this small island, tossed like an afterthought out of the side of Europe, was destined to remain the despised dependent of one of the great empires of the continent. For after Boadicea's vain attempt to drive out the Romans, the conquerors remained absolute masters of the country until at last Rome herself began to decay. The distant legions were then called home, and the natives left to muddle on as best they could without the masters under whose yoke they had existed for so long that the memory of no man or woman held the recollection of the day when England had been free....
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