Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley

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Protestants

When Britain first at heaven’s command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land. And guardian angels sung this strain: ‘Rule Britannia, rule the waves, Britons never will be slaves’.1

J

ames Thomson’s words have become so familiar since they were composed in 1740, have been roared out so often in concert halls, at football matches or church services, in a mood of jingoistic pride or, more recently, self-indulgent nostalgia, that we hardly bother anymore to think about what they mean or what they fail to say. We barely notice that opening all-important reference to Britain’s divine origins, even though for Thomson – a minister’s son from the Scottish Lowlands – it would have meant a great deal. And the chorus is so rousing that it scarcely seems to matter that it is Britain’s supremacy offshore that is being celebrated, not its internal unity. Or that the British are defined less by what they have in common, than negatively – whatever these people are, we are told, they are not slaves. Yet Thomson’s emphases, like his silences, are suggestive. It is almost as if God is being invoked and bombast is being deployed to deter more searching questions. For just who were the British? Did they even exist?

a less than united kingdom As a would-be nation, rather than a name, Great Britain was invented in 1707 when the Parliament of Westminster passed the Act of Union linking Scotland to England and Wales. From now on, this document proclaimed, these three countries would be ‘united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain’, with one Protestant ruler, one legislature and one system of free trade. Like the earlier ‘Act’ of Union between England and Wales

job Britons text P11 2009-6-27 pp26


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Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley by Yale University Press, London - Issuu