Winston Churchill as historian

The British statesman Winston Churchill was a prolific writer throughout his life, and many of his works were historical. His better-known historical works include: Marlborough: His Life and Times, The World Crisis (a history of World War I), The Second World War, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Churchill was an exponent of the view that the British and American people had a unique greatness and destiny and that all British history should be seen as progress towards fulfilling that destiny. This belief inspired his political career as well as his historical writing.

Although Churchill was not a trained historian, the influences on his historical thought and prose style, were likely Clarendon's history of the English Civil War, Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Macaulay's History of England.

Churchill's historical works fall into three categories: family history, autobiography and narrative history.

The first category comprises his works of family history: the biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill in two volumes (1906), and of that of his great ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times in four volumes (1933–38).

The second category is Churchill's autobiographical works, including his early journalistic compilations The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War (1899), London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). These latter two were issued in a re-edited form as My Early Life (1930). All of these books contain information about Britain's imperial wars in India, Sudan and South Africa. The works on South Africa contain elements of self-promotion, since Churchill was a candidate for Parliament in 1900.

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