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HIS BOOK HAD ITS GENESIS IN THE 1980s when I was
teaching at Yale University and uncertain whether I would ever again live for any length of time in Britain, which is where I was born and grew up. It took me almost a decade to complete and my motives for writing expanded as I went along. Britons remains primarily, however, what it was initially projected as: a work of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history. It deals with multitudes of long-dead men and women, and with a set of small islands that came over this period to matter hugely. Like most books, Britons also reflects the particularities of its author’s own past. At one level, I was reacting as I wrote it against the tendency of many of the best and brightest historians of Britain active in the 1960s and ‘70s to focus overwhelmingly on episodes of riot, radicalism, rebellion and revolution – repression on the one hand and resistance on the other. This appetite for charting division and contest in the British past was in part healthy and legitimate, but it made me as a (then) young historian on the make curious about the other side of the picture. This book was never intended as a comprehensive vision of early modern Britain. I did not set out to make a case in its pages for an unvarying consensus in this society, which would have been absurd, or to deny the manifold fissures and failures within it. But I was concerned to investigate what I saw – and still see – as a profoundly significant shift over time. After 1707, the ‘one united kingdom by the name of Great Britain’ proclaimed by the Treaty of Union remained divided in all kinds of ways. Nonetheless, over the next 130 years, it acquired sufficient cohesiveness for a series of domestic insurrections to fail (as they had not invariably failed before 1707), for successive dangerous invasion attempts from abroad to falter and be resisted, and for a string of evermore demanding and geographically ambitious wars to be embarked upon and – with one exception – won. Moreover, there developed in this period both a language of Britishness and a widespread though never uncontested or exclusive belief that the unit called Britain constituted, as one late eighteenth-century Scot put it, an umbrella, a shelter under which various groupings and identities could
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plausibly and advantageously congregate. Great Britain became a workmanlike nation of sorts, albeit one that encompassed other, smaller nations. I wanted to explore how and why this came to be so. This curiosity derived in the main from what I read in books and archives and from discussions with other historians, but it was also prompted by my own upbringing. Like many others born in Britain I am a mongrel (part Welsh, part Irish and part English), and my education crossed borders. Consequently I have never found resolutely single-stranded histories of my birthplace all that convincing or resonant with my own experience. As a sixth-former in Cardiff I remember feeling perplexed and irritated that lessons in Welsh history were pressed upon me on some days, and lessons in English history on others, with little attempt being made to link these histories or suggest how they might both be part of something bigger. The fact that English, Welsh and Scottish history have more often than not been taught and interpreted separately is of course politically and culturally significant. But it is equally significant that quarantining these societies from each other, and concentrating only on what is distinctive about their respective pasts, quickly results in distorted and shrunken history. There are important separate stories that need prising open, to be sure, but there are also shared, interlinked and over-arching stories. Without ignoring the former, Britons focuses on the latter. Its format and content reflect my beliefs about how history should be pursued and presented in other respects. Over the years, there have been many distinguished books on nation-making by theorists of nationalism and historians of political thought, and I have learnt much from them. But purely abstract analyses and a concentration on the ideas of intellectual elites can lead to the rich, messy and discordant – but scarcely unimportant – views of the vast majority of human beings in the past being glossed over or tidied into excessive uniformity and rationality. In this book, as in its companion volume Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (2002), I tried very hard to elicit the opinions and expectations of women as well as men, and to excavate testimonies on the part of the poor and the unsophisticated, not just the prosperous, educated and powerful. I also made extensive use of visual images, prints, paintings, murals, sculptures and more, employing them as an integral part of, and added dimension to my text. Britishness (like Britain’s empire) was imagined, communicated, debated and memorialised in stone and on canvas, in maps, sketch-books, and embroidery, as well as through the spoken, written and printed word. Britishness was also fashioned in reaction to external and not simply internal stimuli. Britons, like
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Captives, situates Britain in a wider European, Transatlantic and global context. Without such a broad-angled vision, British history cannot be adequately understood. Nor can the very recent British past and the present, which also have a bearing on this work. Books that take a long time to write are at the mercy of change and serendipity: and this was the (largely) happy fate of Britons. In some respects, the transformations that occurred as I was writing it were personal ones. What had been projected purely as a history book became inflected at a minor level by my own consciousness of identity under pressure while working as a resident alien in the United States. Far more importantly, however, the book’s conclusions were sharpened by events in Britain and elsewhere during the course of its completion. By the time Britons was first published in 1992, the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher’s long tenure of power, the increased grip and contentiousness of what is now the European Union, growing support for devolution in Wales and Scotland, fierce debates about the future of Northern Ireland and immigration, and a besetting and excessively selfflagellatory obsession with British decline, had all served to make questions of identity and patriotism, the cements and corrosives of nationhood, current and controversial to a degree that had not obtained when I first embarked upon the project. Partly as a result of this, Britons secured a level of review attention, media comment, political notice – and sales – not normally available to scholarly analyses of the Georgian past. This is manifestly not a complaint. Historians are bound by their profession to unpack and interpret the past. They are privileged indeed if their writings penetrate beyond the academy and influence and inspire contemporary debate. If there was a downside to the attention lavished on Britons, it was that a degree of political and even prophetic purpose was occasionally attributed to it quite beyond its author’s intention or capacity. On one occasion, a celebrated periodical published two different critiques of this book adjacent to each other. One of them, by a Scottish nationalist, claimed that I was covertly seeking to perpetuate the Union; the other, by an evident Tory, accused me of plotting the break-up of Britain. As this exchange underlines, there is in fact no single, monolithic conclusion to be drawn from this book about Great Britain’s future survival (or not) as a political unit and comparatively recent and hybrid nation. As a citizen, I naturally have my own opinions and preferences.1 And I still adhere to this book’s conclusion: ‘that a substantial rethinking of what it means to be British can no longer be evaded’, and to the view that the events and developments set out in these pages help to explain why that is the case. But Britons is a history book, not prophecy or polemic. It aspires to help interested readers understand aspects of the British present as well as a vital portion of the British past. Britain’s future, however, like the future
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of its component countries, can only be determined by the varied peoples involved, by politicians, and by chance. This said, a better, and more nuanced understanding of the past could contribute a useful measure of clarity and depth to current debates on these issues. An otherwise stimulating book by Richard Weight has recently suggested that Great Britain and subsequently the United Kingdom were disreputable and violent creations from the start: ‘founded on greed, religious and racial bigotry, fear and contempt’, and ‘. . . primarily established to further the quest for Empire’.2 This strikes me not so much as untrue as beside the point. As Britons makes abundantly clear, the post1707 invention that was Great Britain was indeed a markedly aggressive and predatory state, though no more bigoted in religious terms than most Western and non-Western polities at that point. As happened with other made-up, composite nations, fifteenth-century Spain for instance, or the republic forged out of the thirteen American colonies after 1776, a political union embracing different peoples and cultures was followed and fostered in Britain’s case by recurrent war against external enemies and persistent prejudice as well against internal ‘others’. The Roman Catholic was often feared and despised in Britain (and of course in Ireland) in this period and after; just as the Native American was harassed in the early American Republic, and Muslims were hated and enslaved in Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain. In each case, attacking an internal minority that was perceived as alien, dangerous, and inferior helped foster a sense of nationhood and common purpose. As this suggests, however, the aggression that accompanied Britain’s forging was scarcely unique, though for a while it was uniquely worldwide. To label Great Britain, and later the United Kingdom, as somehow peculiarly nasty entities from their inception is to lend credence to the idea that there are other nations that are inherently natural and benign. In historical fact, all nations that have ever existed have been man-made constructions, and as such impure, imperfect, intolerant at times of various minorities, and prone to violence. Great Britain may or may not implode in the near or distant future. But if it does, this will not be because it is uniquely malign and synthetic, but rather because it can no longer function adequately as a unit or command sufficient support and belief from its varied peoples. Britons’s sub-title was carefully chosen and designed to be understood at various levels. ‘Forging the Nation’ was intended to convey both a process of making and that element of counterfeit and invention that has characterised all nations at some point, but was striking and recent in Britain’s own case. I was also thinking of an epigram by the American poet Chester Kallman:
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To forge a style. Does that mean fraudulently ape Or work out a garment you never can escape? It well could mean instead A way to get ahead.3 Post-1707 Britain cohered and grew powerful in part by way of varieties of internal and external violence. But it also worked and prospered because for a long while it was able to convince many (never remotely all) within its boundaries that it offered ways for them to get ahead, whether in terms of commercial opportunity, or enhanced religious security and constitutional freedoms, or greater domestic stability and safety from invasion, or access to improved job opportunities at home and abroad, or less tangible forms of betterment. By the same token, if Great Britain fissures in the future into autonomous Welsh, Scottish and English nations – and it may – this will in part be because its different peoples have decided that they can get ahead better without it. There is another respect in which thinking more carefully and more coolly about the past might contribute to the current debate about Britain’s future. In recent years, much of this debate has been couched in terms of real and imaginary cultural traditions and essences. Writings and speeches of varying quality on ‘Scottishness’, ‘Englishness’, ‘Welshness’ and ‘Britishness’ now abound, so much so that the impression is sometimes conveyed that these are purely domestic phenomena nurtured by and dependent upon internal circumstances only. Yet national identity and identities within the island of Great Britain have always been influenced by events and forces beyond it, and this continues to be the case today. It is a major argument of Britons that, in all kinds of ways, Britishness was constructed and contested after 1707 in response to overseas developments. On the one hand, the existence from the 1600s of flourishing colonies in North America and the Caribbean meant that there came into being what David Hancock calls a ‘British Atlantic community’.4 As a result, and as Chapter 4 of Britons describes, the loss after 1776 of the most populous sector of this Transatlantic community, the Thirteen Colonies, provoked both trauma at home and an unavoidable reappraisal of how Britain could be renovated and its rulers re-legitimise themselves. Overseas empire impacted in other ways too. The commercial, investment and employment opportunities it afforded helped reconcile previously refractory individuals, lobbies and regions to British union, most conspicuously, and as Chapter 3 sets out, in Scotland. The imperatives of empire also compelled the rulers of Britain themselves to adapt and compromise. The decision to break the official link
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between Britishness and Protestantism and pass the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, a theme of Chapter 8, was scarcely unconnected to the fact that – by that stage – Catholic Irishmen made up over a half of the empire’s white soldiery in India.5 This was only one respect in which expanding empire had the effect of making Great Britain an even more hybrid entity than it was to begin with. Imperial aggression and slave trading may have served at one level to make some white Britons more racially self-conscious and arrogant. But empire and slavery also served to expand the number of black Britons. And it was some of these men and women, as well as white abolitionists, who led the campaign against the slave trade: a crucial component – as the final chapter of this book describes – of the Victorian conception of what Britain was all about. It needs stressing however that, in this period as in others, Continental connections were always as influential and as multifarious as Transatlantic ties and other imperial networks. One of the recurrent argument of Britons is that the overwhelming Catholicism of large parts of Continental Europe, and especially France and Spain, provided a newly-invented Britain with a formidable ‘other’ against which it could usefully define itself. The real and imaginary threat represented by French and, to a lesser extent after 1707, Spanish forms of government, religion, and military power allowed the different Protestant traditions of Scotland, Wales, and England to come together in a common union of self-preservation, anxiety, and defiance. This did not mean however – as some have suggested – that Continental Europe as a whole always functioned or was regarded as Britain’s antithesis, Militant but nervous Protestantism also provided in the period covered by this book for important and persistent British alliances with co-religionists in various German states. From 1714, until the end of the timespan covered by this volume, 1837, Britain was regnally joined with the Protestant German electorate of Hanover. It was ruled by successive Hanoverian monarchs; individual Hanoverians filled various of its state offices; and it regularly went to war on the Continent whenever Hanoverian interests were threatened. Hanoverian soldiers, as well as troops from other Protestant German states, also provided invaluable additional cannon fodder for British military purposes. At least a third of all ‘British’ troops employed in the American Revolutionary War were in fact German Protestant warriors. More positively, it was the aid and armies of Protestant Prussia that allowed Britain to emerge so victorious in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), and to win the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the very foundation – as outlined in Chapter 8 of this book – of its nineteenthcentury European and global hegemony. Right up to 1914, and even
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after in some quarters, Britain’s ‘natural ally’ was not generally viewed as being the United States of America, but rather Germany. Why is all this historical detail significant now? Because it helps to explain why current debates about Britain’s identity and future can appear so tortured and intractable. This is not simply due to domestic fissures and frictions. From its very invention as a unitary state and would-be nation in 1707, Great Britain has pushed and been pulled in many and different overseas directions. It was part of a Transatlantic community. Imperial greed gave it interests and investments in every other ocean and continent as well. And it was an integral part of Europe quite as much as it fought in Europe. What has changed over the last half century and more, is that Britain’s freedom to balance and choose between these different alignments and attachments has radically diminished. At its eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century peak, being at once Transatlantic, global and European was a function and an emblem of British power. Now these self-same multiple alignments can seem only to contribute to British division and disarray. On the one hand, American global hegemony determines, and arguably sometimes distorts, Britain’s foreign policy, defence procurement, culture and economy. On the other, Brussels and the European Union interfere progressively with Britain’s laws and internal government. More perhaps than by any other issue, Britain’s political classes – and especially the English – are riven between the claims of its partners in Continental Europe and the claims and power of the United States, neither of which in truth can be plausibly resisted by a small offshore island. In addition, Britain’s own growing non-white population, in large part the legacy of its past imperial ventures, functions as a vivid source of domestic change, and – in the eyes of some – as an encroaching challenge. Britain, that one-time presumptuous and promiscuous global player, has become – or so it can appear – a plaything of others. But there are other ways of looking at things. ‘The importance of the idea of identity can scarcely be doubted’, Amartya Sen has recently written, yet neglecting ‘our plural identities in favour of one “principal” identity can greatly impoverish our lives and our practical reason.’6 Given the unprecedented level of change we are all now living through (and this is emphatically not just a challenge felt by the British), it is understandable that many people hunger for some kind of renewed anchorage, and often for a narrower, more traditional, and seemingly more secure sense of who they are. As far as these small islands are concerned, the current interest in learning Cornish and arguing for Cornish autonomy, or in exploring some of the more uncompromising versions of Islam, are both examples of a far more widespread yearning for roots and a kind of imagined ancestral purity
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and integrity. It is important that such yearnings, however sincere and deeply-felt they may be, do not lead to an embracing of a single, exclusive identity. It is important, too, that the natural human desire for a sense of belonging should not be accompanied, in Britain or anywhere else, by a recoiling from overseas influences which offer myriad opportunities as well as (sometimes) shocks and dangers. Under pressure from without as well as within, Britain’s capacity to function as an efficient umbrealla over different peoples and cultures may – or may not – continue long into this new millennium. But whether it does continue or no, we should not panic; and we should not allow obsessive navel-gazing to distract us from evolving a broadangled view of the world and a better and more generous sense of citizenship. Sen’s vision of a ‘unitary but freedom-centred conception of Britain as a society of persons, with various backgrounds, who are free to choose their own identities and priorities’, and who are also at ease with an ever-more inter-connected world in which they are no longer paramount, but must collaborate with others, will never command universal support.7 But neither should it too easily be given up. L.J.C. Princeton, 2004
Notes 1. Christopher Harvie, ‘Uncool Britannia: Linda Colley’s Britons reconsidered’, and Michael Gove, ‘The Flight from History’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 January 1999. For my thoughts about identities and nationhood as a British citizen rather than as a historian, see my Millennium Lecture, ‘Britishness in the 21st Century’, 10 Downing Street website. 2. Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London, 2002), pp. 1 and 727. 3. Chester Kallman, Absent and Present (Middletown, CT., 1963), p. 70. The emphases are the poet’s own. I am grateful to David Underdown for drawing my attention to this verse. 4. See David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995). 5. For more on this, see Chapters 10 and 11 of my Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London, 2002). 6. Amartya Sen, ‘Beyond Identity. Other People’, The New Republic, 18 December 2000, pp. 23 and 25. 7. ibid., p. 29.