Belgium

Published in 1921, this single-volume survey set out to put the findings of modern Belgian historians, Henri Pirenne above all, in front of British readers. Cammaerts opens with the Roman conquest and the belt of forest known as the Silva Carbonaria, which he treats as the origin of the country’s Flemish and Walloon divide. He then moves through the cloth towns and their belfries, the Burgundian dukes and Philip the Good, the brothers Van Eyck and later Rubens, the long Spanish and Austrian centuries, the revolution of 1830, and the guaranteed neutrality broken in 1914. His running argument is that Belgium was no artificial creation of European diplomacy: the language line never matched the political borders, and the two peoples had been welded into one nation well before independence.