The English and Their History. By Robert Tombs. Allen Lane; 1,012 pages; £35. To be published in America by Knopf in February. Buy from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com

WHAT does it mean to be English? There was a time when one of the perks of Englishness was that you did not have to think too hard about such a question. That time has long gone. The recent referendum on Scottish independence inevitably raised the question of English as well as Scottish identity (and, to a lesser degree, Welsh and Irish). The huge immigration of the past two decades raises the same question in all sorts of complicated ways: about one in nine Britons and one in three Londoners was born overseas. The UK Independence Party, which is really an English national party, will most likely set the tone of politics in the run-up to next year’s general election.

England is one of the few nations without a state: English people cheer forlornly for England in the World Cup but are citizens of the United Kingdom. The boundaries between “Britishness” and “Englishness” are vague: English people are by nature amphibious—you cannot be English without also being British. But the distinctions are nevertheless real. The English would never order a British breakfast or misremember “England expects” as “Britain expects”.

The Act of Union in 1707, which linked England with Scotland and created the United Kingdom, did not create a federal state with new political institutions separate from and above those of England. Rather it created, in Robert Tombs’s words, a pantomime horse, with England providing the front legs, setting the common direction in domestic, foreign and imperial matters, and the back legs following, sometimes reluctantly, along.

“The English and Their History” is the perfect starting-point for anyone who wants to grapple with the complexity of the English question. Mr Tombs has marinated himself in the secondary literature. And he writes beautifully; there isn’t a lazy sentence in this text. Mr Tombs’s achievement is made all the more remarkable by the fact that he is the leading professor of French history at Cambridge: the guy who is supposed to explain the country’s troublesome neighbour to England’s future rulers rather than decipher the English to themselves and the world.

Mr Tombs errs on occasion. He gallops through the Middle Ages and strolls through the Blair years, relying too much on recent historians at the expense of their often wiser predecessors. He is so relentlessly reasonable that you want him sometimes to bare his teeth. But these are minor quibbles compared with his achievement. He not only draws the broad outline of English history with panache, he illustrates it with a remarkable collection of facts. Who knew that, in the 1880s, the English each used more than 14 pounds of soap a year whereas a French person used only six? Or that King George IV had eight boxing champions as pages at his coronation? Or that Friedrich Engels’s “Condition of the English Working Class”, which was written in the 1840s, did not come out in English until 1892? He also provides fascinating discussions on what might be termed the art of memory: how the English have interpreted various historic moments—particularly the Norman conquest and the English civil war—and how they have used those moments to construct their national identity.

What is that identity? The basic answer is that to be English is to be heir to an extraordinary history. England is arguably the world’s oldest nation state—it existed as a nation before nationalism existed as a notion—and it boasts some of the oldest institutions. Parliament, the monarchy, trial by jury, the law courts: all can claim deep roots in the Middle Ages. Britain is a relative newcomer by comparison.

England’s history is as remarkable as it is old. England has not been subjugated since 1066. It has not been torn apart by civil war since the mid-17th century. Eleven people died in England’s notorious Peterloo massacre; 10,000 died in the Paris Commune. Yet this peaceable kingdom has been remarkably successful in projecting its power abroad. By the mid-19th century it ruled a quarter of the world’s population, using some brutality (its navy forced the Chinese to import opium) but mostly light-touch imperialism. In the late 19th century the Indian civil service employed no more than 2,000 people, fewer than the number who work today for Ofsted, the schools inspectorate.

England’s long history inevitably complicates the notion of Englishness. Whenever you think you have found the essence of the English it changes before your eyes. The Victorians thought it lay in Protestantism. England is now one of the most secular countries in the world. The post-war generation thought they found it in the stiff upper-lip. Princess Diana’s death saw grown men blubbing like schoolgirls. England has sometimes been one of the world’s most prudish countries, as in the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, and sometimes one of the most debauched, as in the mid-18th and today. For most of its history England was one of the most decentralised and voluntaristic countries in the world—with self-governing cities, powerful local governments, volunteers keeping the show on the road. Now, it is one of the most centralised and bureaucratic: the proportion of Britain’s public spending controlled by the centre is roughly twice that in France, Italy and Japan, and more than three times that in Germany.

But some things might surely be described as basic to the national character: a willingness to prick pomposity, distrust for grand theoretical schemes, an instinctive enthusiasm for globalisation, an ability to balance tradition with change or Establishment frippery with Nonconformist efficiency, a fondness for compromise but a willingness to avoid fudging when necessary. England’s position as part of an island surely explains a lot of this: the sea simultaneously provides what Shakespeare called “a moat defensive” against the continent and a highway to the rest of the world. So does England’s enthusiasm for creating self-governing corporations like Mr Tombs’s Cambridge College, St John’s. Where else would a professional historian of France have the freedom to write a huge history of England and the capacity to express that history in readable English? Mr Tombs describes his book as “a brick for our common house”. It is a splendid brick—and one that deserves a place on every educated Englander’s bedside table.