An “Anglosphere” that includes India would represent a change from the Churchillian construct. Yet it needs to be remembered that this champion of a union of English-speaking peoples himself took a dismissive view of those who made a fetish of precedent. Churchill, who had backed the White Russian forces in 1918–20 and remained a foe of Communism his whole life, became an ally of Stalin’s Soviet Union by 1941, just as he had earlier embraced as soulmates the very Boers against whom he had once taken up arms in South Africa. Churchill’s constant was neither fealty to a political party nor to any single policy, but to his concept of the welfare of the two nations that blended within his own bloodstream—the United States and the United Kingdom.

During Churchill’s youth and beyond, the concept of “blood ties” as a civilizational—indeed as a civilizing—link was commonplace. It was carried to an extreme by the National Socialist German Workers Party during 1933–45. This was an age when the “physical” predominated, even in the creation of wealth. Manufacturing and chemical production were central to the economy. But if the United Kingdom still holds a position of respect within the international economy today, it’s because of its creative output: the literature, cinema, art, drama, and other expressions of the imagination that flourish in the native soil of the English language.

Given that the intangible has overtaken the physical, there is a need to refine the concept of “Blood” to include