“Both sides of the Brexit debate have got things wrong about our history”

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book looks at Brexit, but from the perspective of a longer history of the relationship between Britain and Europe. What made you want to write this book?

Robert Tombs: Our ideas about Europe, our relationship with Europe and the difficulties of that relationship - the whole European project, in fact - are all essentially based on an understanding of the past (and hence of the present), and expectations about the future. You could write endless books about Brexit and the EU, analysing political structures, economic systems and so on. But I think there’s a whole dimension of the decision that can only be understood as a reflection on the past, so therefore we have to take a historical approach.

One of the central tenets of your book is that if you look at the past, then Brexit becomes ‘historically explicable’. How so?

Our past has meant that our relationship with Europe is very fluid. We could obviously have chosen to remain in the EU and we almost did, but the outcome of the 2016 referendum shouldn’t be a surprise either. I believe that Brexit is historically explicable, but not historically determined. It’s very common to believe that there is a pre-set direction that history is moving in. We tend to be prone to that kind of thinking - for example that history dictates we are a European country, or that history dictates that we are not a European country. That seems damaging to me, because I think we have to be clear that we make