Neither the idea that Britain ‘stood alone’ in 1940, nor that the British war was a ‘people’s war’, were at all common during the Second World War. If anything was thought to be ‘alone’, it was the empire, though the more common view was that the empire always had allies. ‘People’s war’ was a rare synonym for ‘total war’ and was sometimes used in an internationalist sense of a war of many peoples, and as the sort of war Britain should be, but was not, fighting. However, from 1945 a national ‘alone’ came into usage, for example by Churchill; but only from the 1960s was it a commonplace in history books. ‘People’s war’ became more widely used in histories written in the 1960s, which defined it in a national progressive sense, although the term did not become common until the 1990s. Both ideas were essentially the creations of historians, who nationalised the history of what was an imperial and internationalist war, often turning it into a radically different domestic story focused on a national Home Front (ignoring the many imperial home fronts), a story which marginalised the military, foreign and political history of the war, and indeed the social history of the military as well. Historians later assumed that ‘alone’ and ‘people’s war’ represented wartime nationalist ideologies, and wrote about them critically. Yet until recently they did not recognise that it was the very particular nature of the histories written in the 1960s which had generated these terms, and which embodied very particular analyses of British history and of the Second World War. The paper ends by arguing that much greater understanding is needed of the core assumptions which lie beneath the historiography of twentieth-century Britain.

中文翻译：

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英国历史的国有化：历史学家、民族主义和 1940 年的神话

英国在 1940 年“孤立无援”的想法，以及英国战争是“人民战争”的想法，在第二次世界大战期间都不是很普遍。如果有什么东西被认为是“孤独的”，那就是帝国，尽管更普遍的观点是帝国总是有盟友。“人民战争”是“全面战争”的罕见同义词，有时被用于国际主义意义上的多民族战争，作为英国应该但不是战斗的那种战争。然而，从 1945 年起，一个国家的“单独”开始使用，例如丘吉尔；但只有从 1960 年代开始，它才在历史书中司空见惯。“人民战争”在 1960 年代撰写的历史中得到了更广泛的使用，这在国家进步意义上对其进行了定义，尽管该术语直到 1990 年代才变得普遍。这两种想法本质上都是历史学家的创造，他们将一场帝国主义和国际主义战争的历史国有化，经常把它变成一个完全不同的国内故事，专注于一个国家的本土战线（忽略许多帝国本土战线），一个边缘化了美国的军事、外交和政治历史的故事战争，甚至军队的社会历史。历史学家后来认为“单独”和“人民战争”代表了战时的民族主义意识形态，并批判性地写下了它们。然而，直到最近，他们才认识到，正是 1960 年代所写历史的特殊性质产生了这些术语，并体现了对英国历史和第二次世界大战的非常特殊的分析。