Protestantism, nationalism, and national identity, 1660-1832

Historical Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 249-276

  Clark, J G D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

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EID: 0039992911     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X99008997     Document Type: Article

References (282)

1. For surveys see Margot Finn, 'An elect nation? Nation, state and class in modern British history', Journal of British Studies 28 (1989), pp. 181-91;
2. Gerald Newman, 'Nationalism revisited', ibid., 35 (1996), pp. 118-27.
3. I am grateful to Jeremy Black, John Gillingham, Marjorie Morgan, and John Pocock for comments on drafts of this article. I owe a particular debt to Patrick Wormald, whose work first taught me to appreciate the significance of pre-Conquest history.
4. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford, 1984);
5. R. R. Davies, ed., The British Isles, 1100-1500: comparisons, contrasts and connections (Edinburgh, 1989);
6. idem, Domination and conquest: the experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100-1300 (Cambridge, 1990);
7. Robin Frame, The political development of the British Isles, 1100-1400 (Oxford, 1990);
8. Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modem Europe (London, 1991);
9. Richard Bonney, The European dynastic states, 1434-1660 (Oxford, 1991);
10. J. H. Elliott, 'A Europe of composite monarchies', Past and Present, 137 (1992), pp. 48-71.
11. Brian Levack, The formation of the British state: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford, 1987);
12. Jenny Wormald, 'The creation of Britain: multiple kingdoms or core and colonies?', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 2 (1992), pp. 175-94.
13. This argument is developed, with reference to state formation in the British Isles since 1536, in J. C. D. Clark, The language of liberty, 1660-1832: political discourse and social dynamics in the Anglo-American world (Cambridge, 1994). The nation state (a polity identical with what is generally accepted to be a single people) is not the only viable state form: the UK's survival since that time is evidence of the strength of an alternative model.
14. 'Nations, we now know... are not, as Bagehot thought, "as old as history". The modern sense of the word is no older than the eighteenth century': E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 3. Gellner saw a role for religion in promoting nationalism only via Weber's thesis that Protestantism was the midwife of capitalism: Ernest Gellner, Nations and nationalism (Oxford, 1983), p. 41.
15. Such works at best propose analytical distinctions within 'nationalism' posited as a single teleological phenomenon. For an important reaction against 'a materialist conception of social reality' in historical sociology in favour of the view that 'Identity is perception'
16. see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: five roads to modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 13, 496.
17. This work nevertheless continues to use a single term, 'nationalism', to cover a variety of phenomena, contending that nationalism has 'a conceptually evasive, Protean nature' (p. 7). Historians see a series of different phenomena rather than a mysteriously united and Protean one.
18. Gellner, Nations and nationalism, pp. 138-9
19. and Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism, pp. 87-9, did so in order to disparage patriotism. This was not the object of Maurizio Viroli, For love of country: an essay on patriotism and nationalism (Oxford, 1995).
20. This work rightly begins with an argument that patriotism and nationalism 'must be distinguished'; but although it seeks to historicize nationalism by finding for it a precise chronological genesis, it treats patriotism imprecisely as a language that 'has been used over the centuries' (p. 1).
21. The Oxford English dictionary gave the first usage of 'nation' in 1300, 'national' in 1597;
22. both were current long before its first example of 'nationalism', with a political meaning, in 1844.
23. The same work traced 'patriot' to 1596, but found a source for 'patriotism' only in 1726. The third edition of the OED may uncover earlier usages for 'patriotism' but it seems unlikely that general currency will be discovered before the 1720s.
24. 7Clark, Language of liberty, pp. 46-140.
25. Cf. Finn, 'An elect nation?', p. 181.
26. The recovery of this phenomenon began with Bonamy Dobrée, 'The theme of patriotism in the poetry of the early eighteenth century', Proceedings of the British Academy, 35 (1949), pp. 49-65;
27. Betty Kemp, 'Patriotism, pledges and the people', in Martin Gilbert, ed., A century of conflict (London, 1966), pp. 37-46;
28. Quentin Skinner, 'The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole', in Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical perspectives (London, 1974), pp. 93-128:
29. 'By the concept of patriotism both Bolingbroke and his opponents understood the ideal of acting in such a way as to defend and preserve the political liberties which their fellow-countrymen enjoyed under, and owed, to the constitution', p. 99.
30. This idea can be traced at least from Richard Price's A discourse on the love of our country (London, 1789);
31. cf. Johan Huizinga, 'Patriotism and nationalism in European history' (1940), in Huizinga, Men and ideas (London, 1960), pp. 97-155.
32. It is present in Michael Ignatiefi, Blood and belonging : journeys into the new nationalism (New York, 1993), as' civic nationalism', which' maintains that the nation should be composed of all those - regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, language or ethnicity - who subscribe to the nation's political creed'. Ignatieff contrasts this 'rational attachment' with an unacceptable 'ethnic nationalism' (pp. 5-9).
33. 'Patriotism' preceded Bolingbroke; the concept appears in the titles of polemical writings from 1731 at the latest. By contrast, the first title in the catalogue of the Bodleian Library to contain the word 'nationalism' is John Kingsley, Irish nationalism (London, 1887).
34. This assumption was subsequently dispelled by Geoffrey Elton, The English (Oxford, 1992), which stressed Anglo-Saxon state formation and the importance of a religious matrix. On this book, see the discussion by Patrick Wormald, John Gillingham, and Colin Richmond, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), pp. 317-36.
35. Still current with, for example, Ernest Barker, National character and the factors in its formation (London, 1928). Ch. 2, 'The genetic factor: race', continued the demolition of Victorian concepts of race even before the political events of the 1930s.
36. H. M. Drucker and Gordon Brown, The politics of nationalism and devolution (London, 1980). This phase of academic analysis was not marked by postmodern hostility to national identities; Drucker and Brown indeed accepted as a premise (pp. 2-3) the Kilbrandon Commission's insistence on the reality of national identities in Scotland and Wales.
37. Charles Tilly, ed., The formation of national states in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), was a sociological work which lacked the comparisons between many different historical track records that its title seemed to promise. Geoffrey Elton, in his review, lamented: 'Three topics in particular ruin the investigation by their absence: the law, the Church and the ideology of nationalism... The only reason why [law] was left out would seem to be the authors' decision to treat states simply as engines of exploitation; bewildered by their concentration on the "extraction of resources" (mobilization of men and money), they entirely overlooked the fact that among the formative influences were other purposes quite as important to the inhabitants as to the rulers... Leaving out the Church would come naturally to this group of social scientists and historians anxious to be at home in the social sciences, but it tends to make nonsense of the whole enquiry':
38. G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart politics and government, III (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 489-90.
39. Tilly had not learned these lessons in Coercion, capital and European states, AD 900-1900 (Oxford, 1990).
40. For a critique of Tilly's neglect of political culture, political theory, and religion, see Siep Stuurman, 'A millennium of European state formation', International Review of Social History, 40 (1995), pp. 425-41.
41. E.g. Anthony D. Smith, Theories of nationalism (London, 1971).
42. Anthony D. Smith, The ethnic revival (Cambridge, 1981);
43. idem, The ethnic origins of nations (Oxford, 1986). Smith argued (p. 1) against 'the new wave of social scientists and historians', naming Seton-Watson, Tilly, Breuilly, Nairn, Benedict Anderson, and Gellner, who 'pronounced the nation a wholly modern creation with few, if any, roots in earlier epochs'.
44. John A. Armstrong, Nations before nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982);
45. Theda Skocpol, ed., Bringing the state back in (Cambridge, 1985);
46. Michael Mann, The sources of social power (2 vols., Cambridge, 1986);
47. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The great arch: English state formation and cultural revolution (Oxford, 1986).
48. J. G. A. Pocock, 'British history: a plea for a new subject', New Zealand Historical Journal, 8 (1974), reprinted in Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), pp. 601-21
49. and 'The limits and divisions of British history: in search of the unknown subject', American Historical Review, 87 (1982), pp. 311-36.
50. Jeremy Black, Convergence or divergence? Britain and the continent (London, 1994);
51. cf. the Euroenthusiast Stephen Haseler, The English tribe: identity, nation and Europe (London, 1996). Haseler, a professor of government, there adopts the erroneous interpretation that 'A serious idea of Englishness...did not begin to cohere until the eighteenth century' (p. 11). The danger of uncritical borrowings by political science from flawed history is now urgent.
52. Wim Blockmans and Jean-Philippe Genet, general eds., Richard Bonney, ed., Economic systems and state finance (Oxford, 1995);
53. Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Power elites and state building (Thirteenth to Eighteenth centuries) (Oxford, 1996);
54. Janet Coleman, ed., The individual in political theory and practice (Oxford, 1996);
55. Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and justice: legal instruments of power (Oxford, 1997);
56. Peter Blickle, ed., Resistance, representation and community (Oxford, 1997);
57. Allan Ellenius, ed., Iconography, propaganda, and legitimation (forthcoming);
58. Philippe Contamine, ed., War and competition between states (forthcoming).
59. Patrick Wormald, 'Enga Land: the making of an allegiance', Journal of Historical Sociology, 7 (1994), pp. 1-24, at 19, questions whether Genet's structural priorities, finding the 'modern' state in the France of Philip the Fair (1285-1314), like another student of French history
60. J. R. Strayer, On the medieval origins of the modern state (Princeton, 1970), were not 'indulging the French historian's usual habit of confusing the history of France with that of Europe. Englishmen familiar with the vigour of English government on either side of the Norman conquest would be tempted to take their story at least three centuries further back.' The implications of this argument are explored below.
61. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The varieties of British political thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993);
62. Roger A. Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish political thought and the Union 0f 1603 (Cambridge, 1994);
63. and John Robertson, ed., A Union for empire: political thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995).
64. Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (2 vols., Cambridge, 1978);
65. idem, 'The state', in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political innovation and conceptual change (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 90-131.
66. Richard S. Tompson, The Atlantic archipelago: a political history of the British Isles (Lewiston, 1986);
67. Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: a history of four nations (Cambridge, 1989);
68. J. C. D. Clark, 'English history's forgotten context: Scotland, Ireland, Wales', Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 211-28.
69. Michael Hechter, Internal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, 1975).
70. Tom Nairn, The break-up of Britain: crisis and neo-nationalism (London, 1977).
71. For the astonishment of a Kenyan literary scholar studying in Scotland at this self-destructive historiography, used as he was to the more self-confident projection of metropolitan culture overseas, see Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: writing identity in the culture of colonialism (New York, 1996), p. ix.
72. Conrad Russell, The causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990);
73. idem, The fall of the British monarchies, 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1991), were mature statements of an analysis worked out by Russell earlier, e.g. 'The British problem and the English Civil War', History, 72 (1987), pp. 395-415.
74. It was given influential expression by the establishment at Cambridge in 1988 of a paper in the Historical Tripos on the 'British problem' from the Union with Wales in 1536 to the Union with Scotland in 1707, taught chiefly by a Civil War scholar, John Morrill, and an historian reasserting a 'nationalist' perspective in an Irish debate, Brendan Bradshaw. A record of the partly programmatic work inspired by this course is now published as Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British problem, c. 1534-1707: state formation in the Atlantic archipelago (London, 1996) : it stressed, for example, that for nine centuries before 1922, Ireland was 'semi-detached' (p. 3).
75. Addressing similar issues were Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485-1725 (London 1995)
76. and Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer, eds., Uniting the kingdom? The making of British history (London, 1995), the latter justifiably summed up by J. G. A. Pocock (p. 292) as bringing to fruition the new approach to the subject for which he had called in articles published in 1974-5 and 1982 (above).
77. 'English nationalism never existed, since there was no need for either a doctrine or an independence struggle':
78. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and states: an enquiry into the origins of nations and the politics of nationalism (London, 1977), p. 34;
79. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the state (Manchester, 1982;
80. nd edn., 1993), pp. 5, 75-88;
81. Michael Hurst, States, countries, provinces (Bourne End, 1986);
82. Hagen Schulze, ed., Nation-building in central Europe (Leamington Spa, 1987);
83. Peter Alter, Nationalisms, translated as Nationalism (London, 1989);
84. Bernhard Giesen, Nationale und kulturelle identität: studien zur entwicklung des kollektiven bezvussteins in der neuzeit (Frankfurt, 1991);
85. Mary Fulbrook, National histories and European history (London, 1993);
86. Mikulás Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The national question in Europe in historical context (Cambridge, 1993);
87. Hagen Schulze, States, nations and nationalisms: from the middle ages to the present (Oxford, 1996).
88. In England, the crucial works were Hugh Cunningham, 'The language of patriotism 1750-1914', History Workshop, 12 (1981), pp. 8-33
89. which adopted the insistence on patriotism as essentially constitutionalist and libertarian propounded by Skinner, 'The principles and practice of opposition' (1974);
90. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983);
91. and Raphael Samuel's edited collection of essays, Patriotism: the making and unmaking of British national identity (3 vols., London, 1989).
92. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the absolutist state (London, 1974; 2nd edn., 1979);
93. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, revised edn., 1991).
94. Notably, but not exclusively, in Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge, 1992) : 'The past thus seems to be up for grabs, a chest of props and togs ready-to-wear in almost any costume drama, available to fulfil all manner of fantasies' (p. 1).
95. Finn, 'An elect nation?', p. 182. This process evidently preceded the break-up of multinational polities, especially in the former communist bloc after 1989. This last was a development generally welcomed by the left as an extension of pluralism, and less often deplored as an effect of populist nationalism.
96. The papers of the nineteenth and twentieth meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society were published in Studies in Church History, 18, as Stuart Mews, ed., Religion and national identity (Oxford, 1982);
97. but despite highly relevant contributions, this research initially had little impact on some of the historians of the period 1660-1832.
98. For its earliest dating, to the England of Bede
99. see Wormald, 'Enga Lond'.
100. E.g. Orest Ranum, ed., National consciousness, history and political culture in early-modern Europe (Baltimore, 1975), especially John Pocock's discussion of the 'elect nation' in England and Michael Cherniavsky's of the role of the Orthodox church in Russia.
101. T. C. W. Blanning, 'The role of religion in European counter-revolution, 1789-1815', in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best, eds., History, society and the churches: essays in honour of Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 195-214.
102. For a reassertion of the role of religious issues in the revolution itself, see Dale Van Kley, The religious origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791 (New Haven, CT, 1996).
103. Samuel E. Finer, 'State-and nation-building in Europe: the role of the military', in Tilly, ed., Formation of national states in Western Europe;
104. Smith, The ethnic origins of nations, pp. 38-41, 73-6-To some degree, however, this may be a distorting effect on our perspective produced by the world wars of the twentieth century:
105. see Kenneth O. Morgan, 'England, Britain and the audit of war', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), pp. 131-53.
106. P. G. M. Dickson, The financial revolution in England: a study in the development of public credit, 1688-1756 (London, 1967);
107. Peter Mathias and Patrick O'Brien, 'Taxation in Great Britain and France, 1715-1810', Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), pp. 601-50;
108. Patrick O'Brien, 'The political economy of British taxation, 1660-1815', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41 (1988), pp. 1-32;
109. idem, 'Public finance in the wars with France, 1793-1815', in H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815 (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 165-87.
110. Robert W. Tucker and David G. Hendrickson, The fall of the first British empire: origins of the war of American independence (Baltimore, 1982), p. 109.
111. John Brewer, The sinews of power: war, money and the English stale, 1688-1783 (London, 1989).
112. For this theme now see, more comprehensively, Bonney, ed., Economic systems and state finance, a survey which spans the period from the middle ages to the end of the eighteenth century, covering the themes of taxation, fiscal institutions, the church, sovereignty, currency, economic theory, the financial relations of centre and periphery, rebellions against taxation, the financing of war, and national debts. For a consideration of this argument in a later time frame
113. see Philip Harling and Peter Mandler, 'From "fiscal-military" state to laissez-faire state, 1760-1850', Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), pp. 44-70.
114. Lawrence Stone, ed., An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), pp. 2, 4, 6. Hobsbawm's dismissal of the perceptions of ordinary men and women is characteristic of one school of thought. The legitimacy of this approach as history is open to doubt.
115. Ibid., pp. 2, 5, 20.
116. For a more developed functional analysis by an author represented in Stone's volume, see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997). Ertman places states in a typology determined by two polarities: absolutist v. constitutionalist, and patrimonial v. bureaucratic.
117. Stone, ed., Imperial state at war, p. 11.
118. 'Too little attention has been paid to the fact that Britain in the eighteenth century was little more than a somewhat precarious and recently formed federal political unit. A viable state is not necessarily coincidental with a nation, the latter being defined by a sense of community in a common culture and patriotic feeling shared by both rulers and ruled': ibid., p. 4. This assumption of the weakness of the eighteenth-century dynastic state depended on an implied comparison with an ideal type, the nineteenth-century ethnically grounded nation state. The inappropriateness of the latter as a general yardstick is one theme of the present article.
119. 47Ibid., p. 17.
120. Clark, Language of liberty.
121. Gerald Newman, The rise of English nationalism: a cultural history, 1740-1830 (London, 1987), pp. 53, 63, 67. Newman denied the applicability of' nationalism' to the England of the seventeenth century, but treated the mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon as continuous with nineteenthcentury 'nationalism'. He also argued for 'nationalism' as an essentially secular idea, an offshoot of the Enlightenment.
122. Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992).
123. Ibid., pp. 367-8.
124. For more sophisticated analyses of the impact of war in shaping societies, often distorting or reversing processes of social evolution or state formation deemed to be linear
125. see for example Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the outside in: World War II and the American state (Princeton, 1996);
126. Arnold D. Harvey, Collision of empires: Britain in three world wars, 1793-195 (London, 1992);
127. Clive Emsley, British society and the French wars, 1793-1815 (London, 1979).
128. Colley, Britons, pp. 5-6.
129. It seems likely that this concept was borrowed from another discipline and used without a clear sense of its limitations. This echoing of a concept was doubtless encouraged by the literary scholar Edward W. Said's Orientalism (New York, 1978), where the Orient was presented as providing Europe's 'deepest and most recurring images of the Other' (p. 1). Here as elsewhere, it took time for a fashionable term to percolate into the historiography.
130. Claude Nordmann, 'Choiseul and the last Jacobite attempt of 1759', in Eveline Cruickshanks, ed., Ideology and conspiracy: aspects of Jacobilism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 201-17.
131. Jack P. Greene, 'The Seven Years' War and the American Revolution: the causal relationship reconsidered', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8 (1980), pp. 85-105.
132. For this thesis see especially Clark, Language of liberty, pp. 296-381.
133. Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven CT, 1982);
134. idem, Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (New Haven, CT, 1989).
135. For the much more complex role of religion see, for example, Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650-c. 1850 (Cambridge, 1998).
136. 'It has recently been argued that empire was an instrument of national consolidation, unifying the British against the French, the nation's primary "other". Yet the discourses of imperialism produced as many contradictions as unities, championing libertarianism and chauvinism, celebrating the birthrights of white English men while denying those rights to Britons, and vindicating the libertarian reading of English constitutional development while also embedding hierarchies of difference in English political culture. The 'others' identified or subdued through the imperial project were internal as well as external, domestic as well as foreign, within as well as without': Kathleen Wilson, The sense of the people: politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 24-5.
137. For the divisions of identity created by the Hanoverian accession, see Wilson, Sense of the people, pp. 101-17.
138. Ibid., p. 368.
139. Even that most militantly anti-Catholic part of the British empire, the Thirteen Colonies, found it possible without substantial controversy to accept France as an ally in 1778.
140. Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism: ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge, 1996).
141. Colley, Britons, p. 18.
142. Ibid., pp. 1, 5, 369.
143. Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., Invention of tradition.
144. Colley, Britons, p. 36.
145. Ibid., p. 20.
146. Ibid., p. 55.
147. For ambiguities over 'Scots' and 'British' identities even into the nineteenth century, see Marjorie Morgan, 'The terminology of national identity in Victorian Britain', paper presented to a conference of the North American Conference on British Studies, 5-8 Oct. 1995.
148. Keith Robbins, Nineteenth-century Britain: integration and diversity (Oxford, 1988), pp. 1-28.
149. Morgan, 'Terminology of national identity', discusses other usages in addition to these.
150. For a new interpretation of this theme see J. C. D. Clark, 'Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth century Britain', in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds., English radicalism, 1550-1830 (forthcoming).
151. Ian F. W. Beckett, The amateur military tradition, 1558-1945 (Manchester, 1991);
152. J. R. Western, The English militia in the eighteenth century: the story of a political issue, 1660-1802 (London, 1965).
153. William Stafford, 'Religion and the doctrine of nationalism in England at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 381-95, at 381;
154. for the complex relationship of militia service to 'patriotism', see J. E. Cookson, 'The English volunteer movement of the French wars, 1793-1815: some contexts', Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 867-91.
155. For challenges to and defences of the asserted providentialism of church and nation in the 1830s
156. see Sheridan Gilley, 'Nationality and liberty, Protestant and Catholic: Robert Southey's Book of the Church', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 409-32.
157. Koppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a factor in the rise of German nationalism (New York, 1934).
158. The Conclusion quoted with approval a remark by the journalist Peter Scott: 'Britain is an invented nation, not so much older than the United States': Colley, Britons, pp. 1, 373.
159. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Paris, 1976; trans. Alan Sheridan, Cambridge, MA, 1988);
160. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870-1914 (London, 1977);
161. Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into battle: republican imagery and symbolism in France, 1789-1880 (Paris, 1979; trans. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge, 1981);
162. Lynn Hunt, Politics, culture and class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles, 1984).
163. Katherine R. Penovich, 'From "Revolution principles" to Union: Daniel Defoe's intervention in the Scottish debate', in Robertson, ed., A Union for empire, pp. 228-42, shows that Defoe, like Bede, sought to express the Union and British identity in terms of providential mission.
164. Colley, Britons, p. 6.
165. For this political programme adopted as an historical framework, see John Kendle, Federal Britain: a history (London, 1997).
166. Anderson, Imagined communities; Nairn and Anderson are acknowledged in Britons, pp. 386, 413. As with the work of Clifford Geertz, it may be that these belated borrowings from social anthropology have not been made with sufficient discretion.
167. Colley, Britons, pp. 9, 16.
168. Ibid., p. 9. Haseler states the same political agenda more candidly: "Englishness" was the identity of a small caste which ran the "tribe" and, more importantly, the state...the end of the UK, and the demise of this uniform identity, provides a chance to express finally the diversity of the peoples of the British Isles. This book is dedicated to a rediscovery of that diversity': The English tribe, p. viii. An equally historically flawed component of this analysis is its treatment of the UK as an attempted 'nation state' whose claim to identity with a nation is compromised by internal diversities (p. 7). The unhistorical programme to promote the demise of these things was most cogently expressed in Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism, esp. pp. 182-3.
169. Colley, Britons, esp. pp. 5, 8, 370-2
170. Clark, Language of liberty, pp. 46-51, 62-71.
171. James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons (Oxford, 1982);
172. idem, Essays in Anglo-Saxon history (London, 1986);
173. idem, 'The united kingdom of England: the Anglo-Saxon achievement', in Grant and Skinner, eds., Uniting the kingdom? (1995), pp. 31-47, at 35;
174. idem, 'The late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view', Proceedings of the British Academy, 87 (1994), pp. 39-65.
175. Patrick Wormald, 'Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum' in Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullogh, and Roger Collins, eds., Ideal and reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society: studies presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99-129;
176. idem, 'The Venerable Bede and the "Church of the English'", in Geoffrey Rowell, ed., The English religious tradition and the genius of Anglicanism (Wantage, 1992), pp. 13-32;
177. idem, 'Frederic William Maitland and the earliest English law', Law and History Review, 16 (1998), pp. 1-25;
178. idem, The making of English law: King Alfred to the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1999).
179. Elton, The English, pp. 1-2, citing Wormald, 'Bede, the Bretivaldas'.
180. Wormald, 'Enga Lond', p. 2, correcting Strayer, On the medieval origins of the modern state.
181. Wormald, 'Enga Land', p. 3.
182. Smith, The ethnic origins of nations, p. 4 and ch. 5 passim.
183. Wormald, 'Enga Lond', p. 3.
184. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
185. Sarah Foot, 'The making of Angelcynn: English identity before the Norman Conquest', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996), pp. 25-49.
186. John Gillingham, 'The beginnings of English imperialism', Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 (1992), pp. 392-409.
187. Wormald, 'Enga Land', pp. 10-11, 13.
188. Ibid., p. 14.
189. 99' Ibid., pp. 15, 17.
190. John Gillingham, 'The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain', Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), pp. 99-118, for an interpretation of that work as a contribution to 'the politics of cultural nationalism'.
191. The present paper does not concern itself directly with the forms of 'national' identity to be found in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland from the middle ages to the present. On this theme
192. see especially Frame, Political development of the British Isles, 1100-1400;
193. Davies, Domination and conquest;
194. Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and resisting Britain: cultural identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (London, 1997);
195. Alexander Murdoch, British history, 1660-1832: national identity and local culture (London, 1998);
196. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533-1707 (Cambridge, 1998);
197. Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic identities (Manchester, forthcoming). In general, such research has emphasized the degree to which England's neighbours did not subsume their identities in a new British identity after 1707.
198. John Gillingham, 'The beginnings of English imperialism', Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 (1992), pp. 392-409.
199. Robert Bartlett, The making of Europe: conquest, colonization and cultural change, 950-1350 (London, 1993).
200. Barnaby C. Keeney, 'Military service and the development of nationalism in England, 1272-1327', Speculum, 22 (1947), pp. 534-49. at 543.
201. John Gillingham emphasizes the importance in this respect of Henry II's partial conquest of Ireland in 1170-1: 'English invasion of Ireland', p. 24.
202. Davies, Domination and conquest, pp. 12, 14, 114-15 and passim. The theme is extended in Davies's Presidential Address, 'The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994), PP. 1-2055 (1995), pp. 1-21;
203. (1996), pp. 1-24:
204. (1997), pp. 1-24.
205. Georges Grosjean, he sentiment national dans la guerre de cent ans (Paris, 1927); Halvdan Koht, 'The dawn of nationalism in Europe', American Historical Review, 52 (1947), pp. 265-80;
206. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, 'Pro patria mori in medieval political thought', American Historical Review, 56 (1951), pp. 472-92;
207. John Barnie, War in medieval society: social values and the Hundred Tears War, 1337-1399 (London, 1974);
208. A. K. McHardy, 'Liturgy and propaganda in the diocese of Lincoln during the Hundred Years War', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 215-27;
209. John Gillingham, 'The English invasion of Ireland', in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 24-42;
210. idem, 'Conquering the barbarians: war and chivalry in twelfth-century Britain', Haskins Society Journal, 4 (1992), pp. 67-84;
211. idem, 'Foundations of a disunited kingdom', in Grant and Stringer, eds., Uniting the kingdom ?, pp. 48-64.
212. 'English national self-consciousness', in Elton, Studies, iv, p. 132.
213. For studies of national consciousness in the sixteenth century, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of nationhood: the Elizabethan writing of England (Chicago, 1992);
214. Claire McEachern, The poetics of English nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge, 1996);
215. John M. Richardson, 'The barbarians: humanism and nationalism in early Tudor England' (M. Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1993).
216. William S. Maltby, The black legend in England: the development of anti-Spanish sentiment, 1558-1660 (Durham, NC, 1971).
217. Peter Furtado, 'National pride in seventeenth-century England', in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, I, pp. 44-56, emphasizes the themes of 'national honour and national sin', p. 54.
218. Fletcher, 'The first century of English Protestantism', p. 316;
219. Fletcher, The outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), pp. 191-207.
220. John Wolffe, ed., Christianity and national consciousness (Leicester, 1987);
221. idem, God and greater Britain: religion and national life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1345 (London, 1994);
222. Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978);
223. idem, Dissent or conform: war, peace and the English churches, 1900-1345 (London, 1986);
224. W. J. Sheils, ed., The church and war (Oxford, 1983).
225. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds., Englishness: politics and culture, 1880-1320 (London, 1986), focused on similar pressures for redefinition within England.
226. Gaines Post, 'Two notes on nationalism in the middle ages', Traditio, 9 (1953), pp. 281-320, at 320.
227. Paul Brand, 'Ireland and the early literature of the common law', Irish Jurist (1981), reprinted in Brand, The making of the common law (London, 1992), pp. 445-63, at 446;
228. cf. Davies, Domination and conquest, pp. 114-15.
229. V. H. Galbraith, 'Nationality and language in medieval England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 23 (1941), pp. 113-28, acknowledged that 'There can of course be no doubt about the existence of some sort of a national consciousness in pre-Conquest England' (p. 118), but emphasized the ardent national consciousness of fifteenth-century chroniclers writing in English in the face of military challenge.
230. H. J. Chaytor, From script to print: an introduction to medieval literature (Cambridge, 1945), ch. 3, 'Language and nationality', traced the beginning of 'a national movement' to the mid-thirteenth century (p. 35);
231. V. J. Scattergood, Politics and pottiy in the fifteenth Century (London, 1971).
232. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the nation: language, literature and national identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford, 1996), pp. v-vi, 10. This was the case however much monarchs like Henry III, 'not reconciled to the loss piece by piece of the Angevin empire which had in the 1170s stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees, projected himself as a European monarch in a European court' (p. 5).
233. Rotuli parliamentorum (London, 1783), 1, p. 362
234. quoted in Barnie, War in medieval society, pp. 102-3.
235. Davies, Domination and conquest, pp. 4-5.
236. Wormald, 'Enga Lond', pp. 3, 18.
237. For Foxe's Book of martyrs as exemplifying the perspective of international Calvinism, only later absorbed into the national myth
238. see Clark, Language of liberty, pp. 47-8. For reassertions of prior national self-awareness in the context of the debate over Foxe, see Patrick Collinson, 'Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode', and Jesse Lander, "Foxe's" Books of martyrs: printing and popularizing the Acts and monuments', in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds., Religion and culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 15-45, 69-92.
239. Menna Prestwich, International Calvinism, 1541-1715 (Oxford, 1985).
240. David Loades, 'The origins of English Protestant nationalism', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 297-307, at 298, 302.
241. For tensions between the national and the international in early Protestantism, see for example Anthony Fletcher, 'The first century of English Protestantism and the growth of national 'identity', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 309-17;
242. John McKenna, 'How God became an Englishman', in DeLIoyd Guth and John McKenna, eds., Tudor rule and revolution: essays for G. R. Elton from his American friends (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 25-43;
243. Michael McGiffert, 'God's controversy with Jacobean England', American Historical Review, 88 (1983), pp. 1151-76;
244. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds., Protestantism and the national church in sixteenth century England (London, 1987).
245. It was a scholar well versed in both Reformation history and sixteenth-century state formation who emphasized the function in this respect of a key English institution: G. R. Elton, 'English national self-consciousness and the parliament in the sixteenth century', in Otto Dann, ed., Nationalismus in vorindustrieller zeit (Munich, 1986), pp. 73-81, reprinted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart politics and government, iv (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 131-43. Elton there rightly avoided the anachronistic terms 'patriotism' and 'nationalism'.
246. Hans Kohn, 'The genesis and character of English nationalism', Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), pp. 69-94;
247. David Loades, 'The origins of English Protestant nationalism', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 297-307 ('Such a situation had not been created overnight by the war with Spain');
248. Anthony Fletcher, 'The first century of English nationalism', ibid., pp. 309-17;
249. Greenfeld, Nationalism, ch. 1, 'God's firstborn: England'. Greenfeld's argument that a semantic shift in the use of the term 'nation' from the elite to the people in early sixteenth-century England 'signaled the emergence of the first nation in the world, in the sense in which the word is understood today, and launched the era of nationalism' (p. 6) cannot, however, be sustained in the light of the evidence for earlier centuries.
250. Wormald, 'Enga Lend', p. 18.
251. Ibid..
252. The Authorized Version employs 'nation' 454 times, where the Vulgate used' natio' on only 100 occasions, and with different meanings: Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 52-3;
253. Gillian Brennan, 'Patriotism, language and power: English translations of the Bible, 1520-1580', History Workshop Journal, 27 (1989), pp. 18-36.
254. For this argument, see Clark, Language of liberty, pp. 19-20, 46-62.
255. Ibid., pp. 1-45, 303-81.
256. Colley, Britons, p. 18.
257. From a large literature, see the articles collected in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 335, Michael O'Dea and Kevin Whelan, eds., Nations and nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the eighteenth-century context (Oxford, 1995), especially Thomas Bartlett, 'Protestant nationalism in eighteenth-century Ireland', pp. 79-88
258. and Kevin Whelan, 'United and disunited Irishmen: the discourse of sectarianism in the 1790s', pp. 231-47.
259. John Vincent, Pollbooks: how Victorians voted (Cambridge, 1967), revealed denominational patterns not explored for an earlier century until John A. Phillips, Electoral behavior in unreformed England (Princeton, 1982);
260. idem, The great Reform Bill in the boroughs: English electoral behaviour, 1818-1841 (Oxford, 1992);
261. Frank O'Gorman, Voters, patrons and parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Oxford, 1989).
262. P. M. H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969);
263. William H. Mackintosh, Disestablishment and liberation: the movement for the separation of the Anglican Church from state control (London, 1972).
264. Keith Robbins, 'Religion and identity in modern British history (presidential address) ', Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 465-87, at 465;
265. idem, 'An imperial and multinational polity: the scene from the centre, 1832-1922', in Grant and Stringer, eds., Uniting the kingdom?, pp. 244-54.
266. Robbins, Nineteenth century Britain, pp. 63-96.
267. For the variety of identities within the empire, rather than a simple polarity between Catholic and Protestant, see Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987);
268. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the realm: cultural margins of the first British empire (Chapel Hill, 1991).
269. It is relevant that the nationalism of 1848 was confined by no religious boundaries and was present in Roman Catholic states as well as in countries with different balances between Protestant denominations to England's.
270. Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603-1608 (Edinburgh, 1986).
271. Only an historiographical neglect of law and religion could divert attention away from the Union of 1603 and that seminal legal elucidation of it, Calvin's Case, towards the Union of 1707. Galloway's study made clear that James I intended to secure a measure of religious uniformity between his two kingdoms (p. 144) : the Union of 1603 had from the outset ecclesiological implications which the Union of 1707 lacked, a feature of 1603 which the failure of the policies of Charles I and Laud later obscured. For the vagueness of the idea of Britain in 1603 (as in 1707)
272. see Jenny Wormald, 'James VI, James I and the identity of Britain', in Bradshaw and Morrill, eds., The British problem, c. 1534-1707, PP. 148-71
273. Burke to Adrien Duport [post 29 Mar. 1790], in T. W. Copeland et al., eds., The correspondence of Edmund Burke (10 vols., Cambridge, 1958-78), VI, p. 106.
274. This paragraph draws on the research of Marjorie Morgan, 'The terminology of national identity in Victorian Britain'. This research will be embodied in Professor Morgan's book, National identities and travel in Victorian Britain (London, forthcoming).
275. For this argument see Newman, Rise of English nationalism. It is nowhere addressed in Britons.
276. James Meadowcroft, Conceptualising the state: innovation and dispute in British political thought, 1880-1914 (Oxford, 1995), p. 8.
277. For an overview of identities within the British Isles to the eighteenth century, expressed as a deliberate challenge to Hobsbawm's Nations and nationalism since 1780
278. see Adrian Hastings, The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1-95.
279. As was argued, for example, in Colls and Dodd, eds., Englishness.
280. In that sense, any 'Britishness' built around the Union of 1707 was very different from American identity built around the events of 1776 or 1787.
281. For a survey which gives due weight to these themes, see Keith Robbins, Great Britain: ideas, institutions and the idea of Britishness (London, 1998).
282. The term 'race' was still found in English discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but chiefly as synonymous with the older sense of historically conditioned identity. England was distinguished from twentieth-century Germany, Italy, France, and Spain by its lack of formal racialist doctrine or consciousness. In that sense, England enjoyed an important legacy of its ancien regime. How the idea of 'race' functioned within Irish and Scots nationalism is a question not examined here. Nor is the question whether postmodernists neglected to extend their analysis to such phenomena.