I CH 1 - Krishan Kumar - The Idea of Englishness

The Idea of Englishness
To the memory of Ray Pahl (1935–2011), Frank Parkin (1931–2011),

and John Hartley Williams (1942–2014), friends and
fellow travellers in this region
The Idea of Englishness
English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought
Krishan Kumar
University of Virginia, USA
© Krishan Kumar 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Krishan Kumar has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Kumar, Krishan, 1942- author.
The idea of Englishness : English culture, national identity and social thought / by
Krishan Kumar.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-6195-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4724-6196-4 (ebook) –
ISBN 978-1-4724-6197-1 (epub) 1. National characteristics, English--History.
2. Nationalism – England – History. 3. England – Civilization. 4. Imperialism--History.
I. Title.
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2015021234
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at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
Prefacevii
Acknowledgementsix
1 Englishness and English National Identity 1
2 Empire and English Nationalism 31
3 English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts 47
4 Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow 69
5 Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness and the

Future of the United Kingdom 89
6 When Was the English Nation? 111
7 Empire, Nation and National Identities 133
8 Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory 165
9 1066 and All That: Myths of the English 199
10 William Morris and Englishness 219
Index233
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Preface
This book comprises a series of essays, most of which have been previously
published. I see them as complementing and extending the discussion in my book,
The Making of English National Identity (2003). The essays, most of which were
written after the book appeared, have been lightly revised; but much of the new
material has been reserved for the first chapter, written especially to introduce this
volume. Chapter 10 is also new.
Englishness has clearly moved up the cultural and political agenda in recent
years. These essays are meant to contribute to current debates. But they do so not
so much by commenting on current events as in seeking to uncover the deeper
historical and cultural roots of current preoccupations. A central theme is the
recentness of concerns specifically with English national identity and English
national culture. Englishness has long been buried in other enterprises, many
of them global in scope – England as the first industrial nation, England as the
centre of the world’s largest empire. Even closer to home, the construction and
management of the United Kingdom has distracted attention away from more
purely English matters. When, for reasons discussed in these essays, the English
are at last forced to look at themselves, they find themselves curiously lacking – by
comparisons with other nations – the tools needed to do the job.
National identities are notoriously hard to pin down, especially as many people
deny that they even have them. One way of getting some sort of purchase on this
is by comparison. Hence the essays, where relevant, bring in comparisons with
other countries, to show the distinctiveness of the English case (see especially
Chapters 3, 4, and 8). There is also the equally notorious conflation – in English
eyes at least – of England and Britain, Englishness and Britishness. The essays (see
especially Chapters 1 and 5) attempt to show the longstanding effect of this fusion
on conceptions of English identity. The English are said at last to be separating
themselves – conceptually at least – from other British; these chapters argue that
the heritage of the past is not so easily shrugged off. Chapter 9, on English myths,
shows in part how important the interweaving of English and British traditions has
been to English understandings of themselves.
The English, in the past, were pioneers of modern social thought, in the
writings of Hobbes, Locke, Malthus, Ricardo, Bentham, Mill and other “social
scientists”. By incorporating and assimilating Scottish and Irish thinkers – Burke,
Smith, Hume, Ferguson – they added to the lustre and influence of “English”
social thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But certain varieties of
social thought – that especially of sociology – seemed antipathetic to the English.
Chapters 1, 8 and 10 reflect on this, and argue that while sociology as such might
not have established itself in England, other disciplines – notably history and
viii The Idea of Englishness
literature – may well have supplied a lively and creative “implicit” or “informal”
sociology to fill the gap.
Chapters 2, 6 and 7, finally, deal with two themes that were central to the
argument of my book, The Making of English National Identity. One is to refute
the claims of several prominent scholars that the English were “nationalistic” from
a very early date, and that they may even be said to have invented nationalism. I
argue on the contrary (Chapter 6) that it is only in the last hundred years or so that
we have seen a concern with English nationhood and English national identity
– and that until very recently that concern has been mainly cultural rather than
political. Second is the theme of empire, and my argument that empire has been
bound up with English identity for a long time, going back to the English imperial
conquest of the British Isles in the Middle Ages. Chapters 2 and 7 rehearse and
defend this position, showing in addition how important empire has been not just
for English but also for Welsh, Scottish and Irish identities.
***
I should like to thank Neil Jordan, my editor at Ashgate, for his ready acceptance
of the idea of this book – collections of essays are not much favoured by publishers
these days – and for his encouragement and support throughout the process of
production. No-one could have hoped for a more sympathetic or helpful editor.
Thanks are also due, at Ashgate, to Pam Bertram and Lianne Sherlock, for their
invaluable help. I also want to offer a warm collective thank you to ASEN, the
Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, based at LSE. Several of
the essays in this volume were first given either as talks there or as publications in
the ASEN journal, Nations and Nationalism. The ASEN meetings are enjoyable
as much for their sociability as their intellectual stimulation. They bring together a
remarkably diverse group of scholars, young and old, working in many disciplines.
I particularly want to express my appreciation and admiration for Anthony Smith,
John Breuilly, and John Hutchinson, as well as the many bright young scholars –
Atsuko Ichijo, Stephen Mock, Gordana Uzelac, among a host of them – who have
been central to the organization of ASEN from the start. To my mind they have
done more for the study of nationalism than any other body anywhere.
My indebtedness to the many scholars working on Englishness is evident,
I hope, in the notes and references, as well as the in the acknowledgments to
specific chapters. Among them I particularly want to mention the late Bernard
Crick, one of my teachers at the LSE and a lifelong friend thereafter. His many
contributions to the study of Englishness and English national identity more
than adequately compensate for the full-scale treatment that he planned but
did not live to carry out. I also want to salute Arthur Aughey, Chris Bryant,
David McCrone, Mike Kenny, Andrew Mycock, and Ben Wellings: not just for
the richness of their own writing, but for the many enjoyable and stimulating
conversations that we have shared at conferences and other such gatherings.
Their company has made the intellectual journey into Englishness a source of
pleasure as well as of much profit.
Acknowledgements
Chapters 1 and 10 of this book are new. The remaining chapters were previously
published. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint,
as follows:
Chapter 2: “Empire and English Nationalism”. First published in Nations and

Nationalism 12(1), 2006: 1–13. Permission to reprint granted by Wiley-Blackwell.
Chapter 3: “English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts”.

First published in Nations and Nationalism 12(3), 2006: 413–32. Permission to
reprint granted by Wiley-Blackwell.
Chapter 4: “Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow”. First published

in European Journal of Social Theory 6(1), 2003: 5–23. Permission to reprint
granted by Sage Publications.
Chapter 5: “Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness, and the Future

of the United Kingdom”. First published in Nations and Nationalism 16(3), 2010:
469–87. Permission to reprint granted by Wiley-Blackwell.
Chapter 6: “When was the English Nation?” First published in Atsuko Ichijo and
Gordana Uzelac (eds), When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories
of Nationalism, 2005, pp. 137–56. Permission to reprint granted by Routledge.
Chapter 7: “Empire, Nation, and National Identities”. First published in Andrew

Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, 2012,
pp. 298–329. Permission to reprint granted by Oxford University Press.
Chapter 8: “Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory”. First

published in Sociological Theory 19(1), 2001: 41–64. Permission to reprint
granted by American Sociological Association and Sage Publications.
Chapter 9: “1066 and All That: Myths of the English”. First published in Gerard
Boucher (ed.), National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents, 2013,
pp. 94–109. Permission to reprint granted by Routledge.
Chapter 1
Englishness and English National Identity
The English Question has recently moved from the margins of British political life
to centre-stage. Fuelled by concerns about the perceived inequities of devolution
and a growing sense that England and the English are losing out in this unbalanced
Union, concerns about the future of England are provoking widespread public
debate.
Institute for Public Policy Research 2008.
The Discovery of England and Englishness
If the systematic study of Englishness was a relatively undeveloped field until as

late as the 1990s, scholars have been busily, even frantically, making up for the
lack ever since. The obvious driving force of this new interest has been the threats
to the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom. The Labour government’s
devolution measures of 1998 raised, perhaps for the first time since the secession
of Ireland in 1921, a serious question mark over the future of the United Kingdom.
The Scots now once again had their own parliament; Wales and Northern Ireland
had their national Assemblies. Where did the English stand in all this? Should they
have their own parliament too? As the wealthiest and most populous part of the
United Kingdom were they not the carriers of the rest – and should they continue
to be so? Were the English, the original creators of the United Kingdom, also in
some sense, and in some measure, its victims? Would they be better off alone –
especially as the other groups in the kingdom seemed intent on establishing their
own identities and perhaps even demanding outright independence? The Scots, the
Welsh, the Irish, seemed to know who they were; but the English – who were they?
On 18 September 2014, at the request of the Scottish parliament, there was
a referendum on Scottish independence. Oddly, it took place in Scotland only,
the British government apparently deeming irrelevant the wishes of the rest of
the United Kingdom. But not surprisingly it inspired an outpouring of public
comment on the future of the United Kingdom, and of the relations of the various
parts that compose it. For the English, faced with the possible secession of the
second most important national group in the kingdom – union with whom has
always been thought to be the lynch-pin of the multinational United Kingdom – it
was inevitable that questions would be raised about their own identity, and their
own future role in the kingdom.
The Scottish referendum – the Scots rejected independence – clearly marks an
important, perhaps a defining, moment, in the evolution of the United Kingdom.
It tells us, as we shall see, a good deal about its future, about the forces holding
it together as well as those threatening to pull it apart. But what concerns us
2 The Idea of Englishness
particularly here is its effect on England and the English. Where and in what ways
does it fit into the debates about England and Englishness that had come to be so
marked a feature of English intellectual and public culture in the two preceding
decades? To what extent did it crystallize those debates? Before assessing the
impact of the Scottish referendum we will need to consider the character of the
scholarly and popular contributions to the public discussions of these years.
When we say that systematic study of Englishness only emerged in the 1990s,
we do not mean to discount the volume, variety and value of the many contributions
and commentaries that had appeared for many years before. The point is however
that most of the running up to then had been made by literary scholars and cultural
critics, often in the midst of other pursuits in which Englishness featured only
incidentally. Thus there might be references to Chaucer and Englishness, or to
Shakespeare’s view of England in his history plays, or the evocations of England in
Blake. Wordsworth’s Cumbria and Hardy’s Wessex might also stimulate thoughts
about regional Englishness, and about England as a patchwork of regions. But
there were few attempts to relate English literature, in any systematic way, to the
character of the English nation or to English national identity – except possibly to
discern a vein of nostalgia for a lost England in more recent writing, or to examine
how literature fuelled patriotic emotion during the world wars (see, for example,
Lucas 1990; Gervais 1993; Easthope 1999; Fussell 1977).
There had also been a thriving tradition of commentary drawing on the genre
of travel literature, in which authors journeyed at home, in their own country, to
offer their thoughts on the national culture. Outstanding and celebrated examples
of this kind were H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927), Joseph Priestley’s
English Journey (1934), and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Orwell was also the supreme practitioner of another type of commentary, that
pioneered by Thomas Carlyle in his essays of the 1830s and 1840s (“Signs of the
Times”, “Chartism”, etc.). This took the form of reflecting on “the condition of
England” through an engagement with contemporary social and political issues.
Edward Bulwer Lytton’s England and the English (1833) was an earlier example
of the form but lacked Carlyle’s passion and incisiveness. In Orwell’s case, the best
known essays are “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1941) and “The English People”
(1947), but thoughts on the condition of England are to be found throughout his
writings, including his novels. Anthony Hartley A State of England (1963), and
Anthony Sampson’s highly-regarded Anatomy of Britain series (1962, 1965, 1982,
1992, 2004), might well be seen as a lively continuation of this tradition.
A third kind of writing that taught the English a good deal about themselves
was that contributed by foreigners. That too had a distinguished tradition, going
back at least to Voltaire’s Letters on England (1733). Later examples include Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856), Hippolyte Taine’s Notes on England
(1860–70), Henry James’s English Hours (1905), and Bill Bryson’s Notes from a
Small Island (1995). Frequently, especially more recently, these reflections have
been expressed in a humorous or satirical mode, though usually affectionately.
Examples include G.J. Renier’s The English, Are They Human? (1931), George
Englishness and English National Identity 3
Mikes’s How to be an Alien (1946), and Ranjee Shahini’s The Amazing English
(1948). In commenting on English perceptions, none of these however matched a
merciless and wickedly hilarious native product, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s
1066 and All That (1930) – for generations of sixth-formers, as Raphael Samuel
remarks, “scholarship’s equivalent of a dirty book” (1998: 209; and see further
Chapter 9, below).
What was lacking in these often engaging and illuminating accounts was close
examination of the idea of Englishness, and of the development of English national
identity. There was little to match the many studies of this kind to be found in the
literature on French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Russian national identity – to
go no further afield (for some examples see Kumar 2000: 594–5n3). There had
been, it seems, no reason, no call, to study English national identity, still less
that strange-sounding thing, English nationalism (see further on this Chapter 5,
below). If, as is evident, much useful and fascinating material existed with which
to attempt to grapple with these questions, it was generally as an off-shoot of other
inquires, in which nationhood and national identity were not central concerns.
It is this situation that began to change in the 1990s. It might even be possible
to date the change rather precisely, with the appearance in 1986 of the collective
volume, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls
and Philip Dodd. Published on cheap paper by a new and relatively small press,
it was nevertheless immediately hailed as a ground-breaking contribution, and
widely praised by reviewers for its originality as well as its timeliness. It quickly
established itself as a key text for thinking about the subject of English identity, the
more so as it showed the importance of the period it examined as a critical time –
what I have called “the moment of Englishness” – for originating certain themes
which became central to most attempts to understand Englishness (Kumar 2003:
175–225; see also Chapter 6, below).
Colls went on to write a full-scale account of English identity, as well as to
produce a biography of George Orwell which saw him as an “English rebel”, one
expressing a peculiarly English style of opposition while remaining a passionate
English patriot (Colls 2002, 2013). Another sign of the times was the publication
in 1989 of an ambitious three-volume collection, Patriotism, edited by Raphael
Samuel. The subtitle of these volumes was “The Making and Unmaking of British
National Identity”, but as with all studies of this kind the contributors moved
rather uneasily and unsteadily between “England” and “Britain”. Patriotism
was a product of the enterprising and active History Workshop group – almost
a movement – devoted to “people’s history”. Samuel, one of its founders, also
continued his own individual and highly original form of investigation into
Englishness in a series of later publications, sadly cut short by his untimely death
in 1996 (Samuel 1989, 1994, 1999a).
In 1992 there appeared what is by general consent the most important single
contribution to the new or renewed concern with Englishness, Linda Colley’s
Britons. What might appear paradoxical, given the book’s title and its subject
– the making of British identity – is easily explained by the fact that it was
and is impossible to discuss Englishness without discussing Britishness (see

further Chapter 5, below). England and Britain are two sides of the same coin,
which is what principally creates the difficulty of defining a purely English
identity (quite apart from the usual problem of talking about “pure” identities).
What Colley showed was that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an
overriding British identity was formed (mainly in opposition to the “old enemy”,
France) that subsumed the other identities – English, Scottish, Welsh – of
Great Britain (Ireland she treated as a separate matter). The subsequent story
of these other identities was a complicated interweaving with and occasional
resistance to Britishness. But the great value of Colley’s study, and the reason
why it achieved such prominence in the debates of the 1990s and after, was its
unusual attention to the question of national identity as a subject for sustained
historical investigation. This was relatively new at least for British historians
(Colley herself is of Welsh origin). Theoretically sophisticated, stylishly written,
and profusely illustrated, Britons supplied a rich deposit of historical material
and a provocative set of ideas for thinking not just about Britishness but also
Englishness and other forms of national identity in the United Kingdom.
The enthusiastic reception of Colley’s book made it clear that she had struck a
chord. It also makes it clear that the new concern with Englishness and Britishness
preceded, by at least a decade or so, the actual devolution measures introduced by
the Labour government in 1998. Of course those measures themselves had emerged
out of previous decades of grappling with the problem of devolved rule, going
back to the 1970s and the Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution of 1973.
So it would be perfectly fair to regard devolution as the issue that re-charged the
debates on English national identity, the more so as the impact of the Thatcherism
of the 1980s had re-fuelled Scottish resentments and led to increased support for
the Scottish National Party. For many of the long-standing nationalists, such as
Tom Nairn, Thatcher was a godsend, revitalizing a Scottish nationalist movement
that had faltered after the failure of the referendum on Scottish devolution in 1979
(Nairn 2003: xv–xvi; see also, Bogdanor 2001: 193–4).
There were, it is true, other causes of the rise of interest in Englishness at
this time. Margaret Thatcher had, in her administrations of the 1980s, put a great
stress on national unity and British patriotism (“putting the Great back in Great
Britain”). Like many others before and since – including her successor John
Major – “Britain” was often a stand-in for “England”. Nationalism was part
of Thatcher’s strategy in her victorious war with the trade unions, portrayed
as putting class before nation. Her other war, the Falklands War of 1982, was
even more successful, generating a frenzy of old-style jingoism (Barnett 1982).
Both stances secured her a resounding victory in the 1983 General Election.
Thatcher’s espousal of nationalism, reminiscent of Churchill and unusual in any
British leader since the Second World War, stirred up, as did most elements of
Thatcherism, fierce divisions in British society; but it undoubtedly put questions
of national identity on the public agenda (it was indeed the surge of British
nationalism at the time of the Falklands War that led to the soul-searching on the
Left and the series of History Workshop conferences that resulted in the volumes
of Patriotism).
More significantly, there was “Europe”. After much heart-searching, and
amidst bitter divisions that joined sections of the left with those of the right,
Britain had joined the European Economic Community (later the European
Union) in 1973. But she remained an uncertain and in many ways not whole-
heartedly committed member – choosing, for instance, not to adopt the euro as
her currency when all other members did so. Margaret Thatcher and her successor
as Prime Minister, John Major, were both notable “Eurosceptics”, ensuring that
a traditional attitude of difference from – and superiority to – “the Continent”
would remain strong at the highest levels.1 Lingering attachment to the empire
and the Commonwealth meant that European integration was seen as a threat
to long-standing ties (as it certainly seemed to people in the Commonwealth).
There was also the stress – evinced eventually in Labour’s Tony Blair as much as
in Thatcher and Major – on the “special relationship” with the United States, and
the importance of the Atlantic Community. Such an attitude led Blair to commit
Britain firmly behind the United States when it invaded Iraq in 2003 – to the
consternation of most of Britain’s fellow-members of the EU.2
As, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–9, problems mounted within
the European Union, there was a corresponding growth of Euroscepticism within
Britain, and especially England. A marked sign of this was the growing popularity
of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), one of whose leading demands was
1 Thatcher’s Euroscepticism was powerfully, and provocatively, expressed in her

“Bruges Speech” given at the College of Europe on 20 September 1988. Commenting on
it later in her memoirs, she records that what prompted it was her feeling of frustration
and anger at recent developments in the EEC, especially under Commission President
Jacques Delors. “Were British democracy, parliamentary sovereignty, the common law,
our traditional sense of fairness, our ability to run our own affairs in our own way to
be subordinated to the demands of a remote European bureaucracy, resting on very
different traditions?” (Thatcher 1993: 743). Other, less fortunate European nations
might, she mischievously suggested, be willing to put up with this. “If I were an Italian
I might prefer rule from Brussels too” (1993: 742). The Scots, by this time thoroughly
disillusioned with rule from Westminster, might well have felt like the Italians. They
had no trouble in decoding this speech as a paean to English rather than to British
traditions. Many of Britain’s non-English inhabitants were beginning to feel towards
London rather as Thatcher felt in relation to Brussels. The Scottish revolt against the
Community Charge (or Poll Tax), initiated in Scotland in 1989, a year before the rest of
the United Kingdom, was only the most spectacular – and successful – expression of this
discontent with an English-dominated Parliament. For Thatcher’s own pained account of
this episode (“a little local difficulty”) see 1993: 642–67. For Scottish attitudes to Europe,
as a counter-weight to England (“Independence in Europe”), see Ichijo 2004.
2 On the crisis in Europe provoked by this division over Iraq, and the finger-pointing
at Britain by some prominent European intellectuals, see Kumar 2008a.
withdrawal from the EU.3 Responding to this threat to their power, the Conservative
government of David Cameron promised a referendum on the European Union in
2017, if the Conservatives were returned to office in the 2015 election. Attitudes
towards “Europe”, from which England had long sought to distance herself, were
bound to colour conceptions of national identity (see Chapter 4, below; also Smith
2010). Growing Euroscepticism was therefore, both before and after devolution,
one of the forces driving the revival of interest in and concern for English national
identity (see Gifford 2008; Wellings 2010, 2012; Vines 2014).4
At an even higher level of generality, there was the impact of globalization.
Some time ago, Eric Hobsbawm (1977) had pointed out that globalization had
had a peculiar and paradoxical effect on nationalism. At one level it seemed to
nullify nationalism, by reducing the importance of the nation-state and thereby
making its prospective achievement by those nations still lacking a state – the
Scots, the Catalans, the Quebecois – a somewhat empty aspiration. But precisely
because of this, argued Hobsbawm, precisely because it did not matter, the
international system was now more hospitable towards nationalism, especially
the nationalism of small nations. Since nation-states, with the exception of a
few super-states, were not really independent any more, why not let as many
as wanted to flourish? They would still, as a matter of necessity, be locked into
the global system dominated by a few large powers. Hobsbawm also discerned
a more cynical, and sinister, intent, guiding the thinking of the multinational
corporations and the large states controlling the global system. Why not
encourage nationalism, especially the nationalism of small nations, as a means
of breaking up larger and potentially more awkward and refractory states? Is
not Moldova easier to manage than the Soviet Union, Kosovo than Serbia (and
Serbia than Yugoslavia), Scotland than the United Kingdom?
3 Although the party’s name invokes the UK, rather than simply England, many
commentators have noted that it concentrates its efforts on England, which is also the most
Eurosceptical part of the UK and where UKIP has secured most of its victories in recent
elections to the European Parliament (see Wellings 2010: 502).
4 Ben Wellings argues that the “central element in English nationalism is the defence
of sovereignty” – the UK’s sovereignty – and that “by defending the UK’s sovereignty
against the encroaching powers of the European Union, English nationalists often obscure
English nationalism by defending Britain.” He further argues that “opposition to European
integration has informed and illuminated nationalism in England for over forty years,
providing the ideological content for the most organized expression of contemporary
English nationalism”. Thus “Euroscepticism is in all but name English nationalism, but
it is an English nationalism that still characteristically speaks the language of Britishness”
(2010: 488–9, 503). While the point is a fair one – and one also made by me (see Chapter 4,
below) – pointing to the European factor as a relatively longstanding one in creating forms
of English national identity, it unnecessarily downplays the significance of devolution as a
cause of the most recent resurgence of interest in Englishness, and even perhaps of English
nationalism (see also Kenny 2014: 29–30).
Hobsbawm may have underestimated the resilience of the nation-state, but

the break-up of large entities such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the
increase in the number of new nation-states in recent years, does lend a good
deal of plausibility to the analysis. So too does the persistence of nationalism
as a force, in an era when it may seem – as it does to many – anachronistic.
The United Kingdom presumably is no exception to these global tendencies.
The persistence and even strengthening of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalism
is one testimony to this. The rise of English nationalism may be another. The
much-commented on “revival” of ethnicity and nationalism in recent times, and
especially since the 1990s, may not be so much a replay of the nineteenth– or
even twentieth-century story, as a new development, a “neo-nationalism” for our
times that nestles more or less comfortably within the larger embrace of global
or regional structures.
Studying Englishness
Whatever the principal reason – devolution, Thatcherism, Europeanization,

globalization – there is no doubting the unprecedented increase in interest in
Englishness in the last two decades. It has expressed itself at both the scholarly and
the popular levels. Following on Colley’s Britons, which broke through scholarly
circles to get wider media attention, there was the even greater popular success of
the BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1999). Reprinted many times,
it is still a popular item in High Street bookshops (where they can still be found)
and airport stores. Almost equally successful was Kate Fox’s Watching the English
(2005), which skilfully and entertainingly put anthropological techniques of
participant-observation to work on her own tribe. And though dealing with Britain
as a whole, Simon Schama’s turn of the millennium BBC2 television series, A
History of Britain, and the best-selling 3-volume publication that accompanied
it, was seen by its author as especially timely “at a moment when the whole issue
of national allegiance and identity is once again a serious question rather than
an easy assumption” (2000–2: I, 8). Dealing with Britain was in fact one well-
tried method of dealing with England, and its asymmetrical place in the United
Kingdom, as shown by Norman Davies’s masterly history, The Isles (1999). This
was also evident in Andrew Marr’s BBC2 television series – complementing that
of Simon Schama’s – A History of Modern Britain (2008).
Then there was the stream of personal reflections, often with a humorous
slant, on various aspects of Englishness. Such were A.A. Gill’s The Angry Island
(2005), Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot (2006), Paul Kingsnorth’s Real
England (2008), Roy Strong’s Visions of England (2012), Henry Hitchings’
Sorry! The English and Their Manners (2013), and Harry Mount’s How England
Made the English (2013) (see also Chapter 5 for earlier contributions in this
vein). Also personal, but on an epic scale, was Peter Ackroyd’s Albion (2004),
a lengthy exploration of “the English imagination” through its cultural history.
Julian Baggini’s Welcome to Everytown (2007) reprised the travel literature genre
through “a journey into the English mind”.
This was a form of writing that had a long history, often expressed at times
of great national crisis, as during and after the World Wars of the twentieth
century. Whether or not they took satirical or comical form, they tended to reveal
a certain worry about the state of the national health, a felt need to diagnose
and perhaps reassure themselves and others that though things might appear
uncertain and stressful at present the underlying condition was robust. The nation
had the resources to come through well in the end. The very lightheartedness of
many of these contributions suggested the underlying anxiety. In good times, for
nations as for individuals, there is rarely a need to be self-reflective, even in a
self-mocking way.
The mills of scholarly activity had by no means been idle either in these years.
What was particularly important was that now literary and cultural critics were
joined by historians and social scientists in wide-ranging inquiries into Englishness
and English national identity. If Colls and Dodd and Colley had blazed the path,
others were quick to follow. Historian Peter Mandler (2002) explored the relation
of English history-writing to the “national life”, and followed it soon after with a
full-scale treatment of the idea of “the English national character” (2006). David
Powell (2002) bravely tackled the difficult question of the relation between state
and nation in Britain since 1800. Another ambitious treatment by a historian
was Richard Weight’s massive Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000
(2003). In an elegant and concise account, Paul Ward traced Britishness Since
1870 (2004). Historians were also the main contributors in the extensive review
edited by Helen Brocklehust and Robert Phillips, History, Nationhood and the
Question of Britain (2004).
The Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Richard Evans
(2009), thought this was the right moment to remind Europeans and others of
how truly “cosmopolitan” the supposedly “insular” British historians had been, by
comparison with their continental European counterparts. Such cosmopolitanism,
he argued with some complacency, was reason for national self-congratulation. No
doubt he was pleased that his Cambridge colleague Robert Tombs, a historian of
France, should turn his lens on his native land, in his The English and their History
(2014) – an attempt to put current debates in very long term historical perspective
indeed, stretching back to early medieval times. Historians continued to play a key
part in the debate on national identities; fittingly Linda Colley, who had addressed
the Cabinet on this matter at 10 Downing Street, was invited, in advance of the
forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence, to give a series of talks on
BBC Radio 4, published as Acts of Union and Disunion (2014).
Sociologists and other social scientists, traditionally indifferent to questions
of nationalism and national identity, now joined enthusiastically in the inquiry.
Sociologist Michael Hechter thought it an opportune moment to bring out a new
edition of his insightful study of the United Kingdom, Internal Colonialism
(1999). Krishan Kumar published The Making of English National Identity
(2003). Christopher Bryant, in The Nations of Britain (2006), produced an

important and informative synthesis of recent work. Sociologists continued the
work of exploration in such lively accounts as Chris Rojek’s Brit-myth: Who
Do the British Think they Are? (2007) and Vron Ware’s report for the British
Council, Who Cares About Britishness? (2007). In the vein of Michael Billig’s
“banal nationalism”, Michael Skey explored “everyday nationalism” in England
in his National Belonging and Everyday Life (2011). Social scientists were also
prominent in a number of edited collections, such as Robert Hazell’s The English
Question (2006a), Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright’s Britishness (2009), and
Mark Perryman’s Imagined Nation (2008) and Breaking Up Britain (2009). These
last two, published by the famous left-wing publisher Lawrence and Wishart, were
also significant for showing that the left had fully entered the fray, not content
to let the issues of English national identity and English nationalism remain the
preserve, as traditionally, of the right. A similar determination was shown in the
contributions of the editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, both in the
columns of the magazine and in such works as Progressive Nationalism (2006)
and The British Dream (2013).
Bur probably the most important contribution of the social scientists lay in
the series of wide-ranging national surveys carried out under their direction from
the 1990s onwards. The most important of these were the British Social Attitudes
Surveys, led in later years by John Curtice and Anthony Heath. Actually begun
in 1983, from the 1990s these began to include questions on national identities,
enabling the researchers to track changes on a year by year basis (e.g. Park
et al. 2010). From their base in the Institute of Governance at the University of
Edinburgh, sociologists David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer had also, since
1999, been conducting surveys on national identities and changing attitudes
towards the United Kingdom (see, e.g. Bechhofer and McCrone 2009). Later
came the “Future of England” surveys, carried out in 2011 and 2012 by a team
of social scientists at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) (Jones et al.
2012, 2013). The results of these surveys have provided a wealth of material for
reflection and commentary on whether, and to what extent, national identities in
the United Kingdom have been changing over the past two decades. Most accounts
have drawn on them, notably in such works of synthesis as Bryant (2006) and
Kenny (2014).
The relatively new interest in Englishness on the part of historians and social
scientists has not discouraged literary and cultural scholars from continuing
their own exploration of an area in which they have already contributed much.
In Nation and Novel (2008), Patrick Parrinder offered a monumental account of
the novel’s engagement with ideas of England and Englishness from the fifteenth
century to his own time. Stefan Collini followed up his English Pasts (1999) with
Absent Minds (2006), a study of British intellectuals, mostly literary. Both works,
drawing on English literature as well as English social thought, had many acute
things to say about Englishness and English national identity. The literary scholar
Robert Young (2008) also went beyond literature to give a sparkling account of
“English ethnicity”. Simon Featherstone’s Englishness (2009) was a wide-ranging

and imaginative study of twentieth century English popular culture and its relation
to national identity. Arthur Aughey and Christine Berberich produced the edited
collection, These Englands (2011), in which a group of literary scholars and social
scientists engaged fruitfully in “a conversation on national identity”. Arguing
against the general (English) tendency to fuse English and British, a group of
literary scholars attempted to show, by examining a number of past and present
representatives, what a genuinely English literature might look like (Westall and
Gardiner 2013). This is probably also the place to recall two powerful earlier
studies of literary Englishness by Simon Gikandi (1996) and Ian Baucom (1999),
in both cases linked specifically to the English experience of empire.
One further area needs to be mentioned in this brief survey of recent
contributions to thinking about Englishness. The end of the British empire in the
1960s brought many immigrants from the former British territories to Britain.
Most of them settled in England. Their position in English society, the extent to
which they should assimilate or integrate into the host society, inevitably raised
questions about what kind of society that was, what would it mean to assimilate
to it. Was England becoming a fully multicultural society, with a wide range of
values, customs, and cultures? Or was there an “English core” that set limits to
the variability of English society? What did it meant to talk about “hybrid” or
“multiple identities”, English being perhaps just one among several and allowing
for many ways of living in English society? These questions had generated
a lively public debate ever since the 1960s. In the last two decades they have
become particularly acute, largely because of perceived problems with Muslim
communities not just in England but throughout Europe (Kumar 2008b; Bryant
2011; Mann 2011; Goodhart 2013).
Debates about multiculturalism raise important issues not just about national
identity but about the nature of contemporary societies as such. Here we are
concerned simply with those discussions that bear on Britishness and Englishness.
An important, though controversial, statement was the so-called Parekh Report,
The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), prepared by the political scientist
Bhikhu Parekh for the Runnymede Trust. Equally stimulating have been the
reflections of sociologist Tariq Modood (2005, 2007, 2010). As Modood
recognizes, concepts of citizenship are central to ideas of nationality and national
belonging (see also McGlynn et al. 2011). This is a subject that for obvious reasons
also concerns governments, and among the contributions from official circles
on national identities was the report, written by Lord Goldsmith, “Citizenship:
Our Common Bond” (2008), commissioned by the then Labour Prime Minister,
Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown himself, both in and out of office, has felt driven
to enter directly into the debates about national identity. In particular he has been
concerned to defend the idea of Britishness against the claims of both Englishness
and Scottishness, seen as narrow and exclusive (see for example, Alexander and
Brown 2007; Brown 2014; and see also Hassan 2009; Lee 2011). In the months
preceding the Scottish referendum of September 2014, his energetic campaign
against Scottish independence has been held by many to have been critical to its
rejection by the Scots.
Politicians in general were reluctant to enter the debates about national identity,
fearing to raise passions or to offend particular constituencies (Kenny and Lodge
2010). The activities of the British National Party and, initially at least, the United
Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), led many moderate politicians of all parties
to avoid the question of nationalism altogether, as seeming to provoke extremist
responses. But gradually, as Euroscepticism grew and nationalist parties made
more insistent demands, some politicians at least felt that silence was dangerous,
and they began to make public pronouncements on the national question. On the
Labour side, Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary David Blunkett were the most
forward, feeling in particular the need to defend Britishness and the Union against
nationalist attacks. Conservatives, historically the party of the Union, made an
about-face as they watched their support in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
ebb away. For some Conservatives, at least, it was time for the Conservative party
to become the English party, and to seize the torch of English nationalism (Ingle
2011).5 Faced with the Scottish referendum, politicians of all parties felt it was time
to make clear their position on future arrangements within the United Kingdom.
By the end of the first decade of the new century, the volume of contributions
on “the English question” had become so great that a new genre emerged, of
“commentaries on the commentaries”. This took the form of critical reflections on
the main contributors to the debates, together usually with an argued position of
the author’s own. Among the best of these were works by two political scientists,
Arthur Aughey (2007, 2011) and Michael Kenny (2014).6
A number of things need to be said about the contributions mentioned in this
short survey. One, they represent a very partial and highly selective list, focusing
especially on books. In a fuller account one would need to look at the vast amount
of recent writing on questions of English and British identity in the newspapers
and journals.7 One would need also to consider radio and television, which have
5 “One of the paradoxes of modern Conservatism is that the party is perceived of as

both an essentially English party and the party of the Union” (Ingle 2011: 134).
6 One should also mention here the significance of certain recent national events that
have given rise to intense discussions of Englishness and Britishness, and of the general
character of the national culture. These include the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on 31
August 1997 (see e.g. Merck 1998, Thomas 2002), Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee on
2–4 June 2002 (see e.g. The Times 2002), and the London Olympics of 2012 (see e.g. Bryant
2015). Sport in general has thrown up much commentary on the national character, whether
in response to the repeated failures of the English football team in the European and World
Cups, or in celebrating the successes of the English cricket team and the triumphs of the
Scottish tennis player, Andrew Murray, and the Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy (see for
example, Markovits 2013). It was of course at sporting contests that the English flag, the
Cross of St George, first began to appear in the 1990s.
7 See especially the journals The Political Quarterly, Ethnicities, and Nations and
Nationalism, all of which have published a number of special issues on Englishness and
produced notable series delivered by the likes of Simon Schama, Linda Colley,
and Andrew Marr. In a variety of media, England and Englishness have been
debated with a vigour and passion never seen before.
The other point is the obvious overlapping of treatments of Englishness and
Britishness. This is a time-honoured tradition (cf. Heathorn 1996). Works about
Britain inevitably raise the question of England’s pre-eminent role within the
United Kingdom, when indeed they don’t deal almost exclusively with England
itself. Works which focus on the English question equally have to consider English
attitudes towards the other nations comprising the United Kingdom. The fact that
works on Britain and on England are mixed together in this survey is thus an
accurate reflection of the impossibility of separating the two – especially but not
only for the English.
“The Dog That Finally Barked”: The Rise of English Nationalism?

The Death of Britishness?
In The Making of English National Identity (2003) I argued that the question of
English identity had only really emerged with the end of empire in the 1960s.
Up to that time empire had, for the English at least, been a kind of substitute
for national identity. Running the empire, managing peoples of many races and
nationalities, had tended to suppress both the need and desire for an identity that
celebrated simply the English nation. English nationalism was the dog that did
not bark.
This had changed from the 1960s onwards. The disappearance of the “protective
layer” of the empire had left the English exposed, seeking a new kind of identity,
the more so when faced by nationalist challenges from the Scots, Welsh, and Irish
within the United Kingdom, and by “Europe” from without (see further Chapter 2,
below; and for discussion of the argument, see Hutchinson et al. 2007).
In a later look (see Chapter 5, below), I asked in what ways, and to what extent,
had the English come to develop – perhaps for the first time ever – a sense of
themselves as a distinctive nation, different from the other nations of the United
Kingdom? How in particular had the devolution measures of the 1990s affected
the English? Did it lead to a sense of victimhood? Did it stimulate the rise of
English nationalism? What was the fate of Britishness?
Britishness. Certain bodies, such as the Fabian Society and the Institute for Public Policy
Research, have also been active in promoting discussion on “the English Question”.
Another active body was the Foreign Policy Centre set up by Tony Blair and Robin Cook,
one of whose projects was the “Global Britons Programme” which produced a number
of publications on Britishness (e.g. Griffith and Leonard 2002). The journalist Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown, a Senior Researcher at the Centre, and author of the well-received Who
Do We Think We Are? (2001), comments frequently on questions of national identity in her
regular columns in the Independent and the Guardian.
Opinion polls, and other ways of judging public sentiment, did show, in the
first years of the twenty-first century, a rise in English consciousness. But they
also showed a fairly robust attachment to Britishness (or, as commonly in the past,
an unwillingness or inability to distinguish between Englishness and Britishness).
There was little demand for a separate English parliament, and little feeling that the
English felt unfairly treated within the Union. Despite the growth of a considerable
literature on Englishness, and several expressions in film, television, and music,
there was nothing that could fairly be called English nationalism, certainly not of
the political kind. The resources might be there, but they showed no sign of being
welded into a politically self-conscious force.
Have things changed now, since that assessment of 2009/10? Are there clearer
signs of expressions of English consciousness? Can we now speak of English
nationalism? Has the English dog finally barked?
That has been the principal claim of a number of influential analyses of the
past few years. The most important source of this view has been the “Future of
England” surveys of 2011 and 2012 (Jones et al. 2012, 2013). What they purported
to show was that there had been a dramatic increase in expressions of English
identity, at the expense of Britishness. Moreover while there was still no great
support for a separate English parliament, there was now considerable support
for “English Votes for English Laws” at Westminster – the view that non-English
MPs (especially Scottish) should not be allowed to have a vote in the British
parliament on matters that applied only to England (the “West Lothian question”).
In addition there was now – to a much greater degree than before – increasing
resentment among the English at the disproportionate amount of public spending
going to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish as compared with the English (the
“Barnett Formula”). The 2013 McKay Commission “Report on the Consequences
of Devolution for the United Kingdom” drew heavily on the “Future of England”
surveys for its observation that there is now “a significant level of grievance”
among the English, sparked especially by concern over the West Lothian question
and the Barnett Formula (in Kenny 2014: 229–30).
The “Future of England” surveys also provide the main – though by no means
the only – evidence for the conclusions of Michael Kenny’s recent The Politics
of English Nationhood (2014), the most comprehensive treatment of its subject
so far. Though suitably aware of the ambiguities and contradictions in the polling
data, he nevertheless feels that, taken with much evidence from recent cultural
expressions of Englishness, he can confidently state:
I conclude that there is a considerable body of evidence to support the conclusion

that an avowed sense of English national identity has become more salient and
meaningful for many people, and that this has developed at a greater distance
from an established sense of allegiance to Britain. This emerging pattern of
national identity may well turn out to constitute one of the most important phases
in the history of national consciousness of the English since the eighteenth
century. (Kenny 2014: 20–21; see also 242)
So the English dog, according to Kenny and others, has finally confronted
the British lion. The distinction between two kinds of loyalties and allegiances
– English and British – previously for the English thoroughly confused, has – as
already for the Scots, Welsh and Irish – finally come to be recognized. The Scottish
referendum, though it failed to break-up the Union, has for many only confirmed
this trend. It clearly led many in England to think hard about their own position,
and their own identity, within the Union. The feelings revealed by the Future of
England surveys, and endorsed by Kenny (though his book was published before
the referendum), are in the opinions of many only likely to be hardened by the
debates surrounding the referendum. At any rate the referendum in Scotland was
bound also to throw the spotlight on England. “Now”, said David Runciman after
the results of the referendum had been announced, “the discussion turns to what
England wants, which was bound to happen, whether the result had been ‘Yes’ or
‘No’” (London Review of Books 2014b: 21).
The question is, has the English dog really barked or merely wagged its tail –
and what might that mean? If there has indeed been a “resurgent Englishness”, how
best to characterize it? Kenny speaks of a rising sense of “English nationhood”,
but also says that “properly nationalist sentiments are held only by a minority of
English citizens” (2014: 238).
This seems to beg a number of questions. What are “properly nationalist
sentiments”? Are they to be identified only with “political nationalism”, and
what then might be the demands of an English political nationalism (an English
parliament does not seem to figure among them)? Is the standard of comparison
the kinds of nationalism shown by the Scots, Welsh and Irish, or something else
– perhaps the forms of continental nationalism? From the available literature it
appears that it might be helpful to distinguish between “Englishness”, “English
national identity”, “English nationhood”, and “English nationalism”. There would
be considerable overlap, of course; but the semantic field of English national
identity seems unusually wide and varied, and it would be a worthwhile exercise
to explore it further.8
The same set of questions might be applied to Britishness. Britishness, like
Englishness, comes in a variety of forms. “England is a nation, Britain is a
convenience”, says Paul Kingsnorth (2008: 17). This attitude reflects a longstanding
tradition of regarding Britain and Britishness as “artificial” or “official”, as cold
and “external” entities imposed on a more “natural”, spontaneous, and warm
Englishness, Scottishness, etc. “We have to be British and we want to be English”,
wrote the novelist John Fowles in a similar vein (in Kenny 2014: 235). Oddly
enough – since her book is about the making of Britons and Britishness – this
approach underlies the position in Linda Colley’s influential Britons, which treats
8 This point was also made by Ben Wellings, at a panel to discuss Kenny’s book at the
Social Science History Association’s meeting in Toronto, 8 November 2014. My discussion
here draws upon that panel. The contributions by Ben Wellings, Arthur Aughey, and myself
will be published in a forthcoming symposium on Kenny’s book in the journal Politics.
the construction of British identity as largely a state-directed, top-down affair

designed to bind the peoples of Great Britain together against various external
enemies, principally France, and to give them a common cause in the enterprise of
the British Empire. For Colley therefore, as for many others, Britishness is a rather
thin “official” carapace than can fairly readily be discarded when these external
props fall away. In her most recent contribution, Acts of Union and Disunion, she
has re-affirmed her view that “although Britain is still sometimes viewed as an old
and peculiarly stable country … historically speaking Great Britain, and still more
the United Kingdom, are comparatively recent and synthetic concepts” (2014: 4).
In this view, English is something organic, British something mechanical. The
mechanical can be fairly easily changed or re-adjusted, or got rid of altogether;
to tinker with the organic is to risk taking life. Englishness is primordial if not
perennial; Britishness is a lately-assumed garb that can be cast aside when not
wanted or needed. In many contemporary accounts, that is what is happening
today. Kenny again sums up this position when he says that Britishness can no
supply “the shared identity space” that is needed for “a meaningful and shared
sense of nationhood” (2014: 242). How far is this true?
We should note first that, as Kenny himself indicates, the polling evidence
is ambiguous on the matter of the decline of Britishness among the English
today. There does seem clear evidence of a decline, across all national groups
– English, Scottish and Welsh at least, though not among the Northern Irish –
of an identification with Britishness as a primary referent. But the rise in levels
of identification with Englishness has not taken place at the expense of being
loyal to Britain. Nor, significantly, has there been any decline among the English
of the habit – deplored by other Britons – of treating England and Britain as
interchangeable. The “Future of England” survey of 2011 still shows 50 per cent
of the English sample declaring themselves “Equally English and British”, “More
British than English”, or “British not English”. Only 40 per cent say “English not
British” or “More English than British” (Kenny 2014: 90).
What should we stress – the increase in Englishness or the still quite resilient
attachment to Britishness? Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Much depends on
one’s point of view, it seems, or perhaps on what one hopes or wishes for. We might
also note the unevenness, geographically, of the changes revealed by the surveys.
For instance the strongest expressions of Britishness were shown in London, home
to more than one-fifth of the entire population of the United Kingdom (Kenny
2014: 90). That hardly sounds like an identity on its last legs (cf. Curtice 2011).
What in any case might Britishness mean in this context? Is it the same as
Unionism, a commitment to the United Kingdom as a political entity, with all
its apparent conveniences, at the expense of an assertive nationalism – what we
might call “instrumental Britishness”? Is that the meaning of the outcome of the
recent Scottish referendum? Most commentators during the campaign discerned
a relatively high tide of Scottish nationalism running through the population. Yet
when it came to it, a clear majority decided to stick with the Union. There might
not have been much sentiment in this, more a calculation of where the advantage
might lie. But that is surely not an unimportant thing in politics. It could give
Britishness, of the instrumental kind, a considerable new lease of life.9
But there is also a deeper level of Britishness, not easily captured by polls and
surveys. There is what we might call “institutional Britishness”, the result of living
under or with institutions that have long been defined by their Britishness. This
includes the British Monarchy, the British Parliament, the British Armed Forces,
the British Civil Service, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and many parts
of the British Welfare state, especially the National Health Service. The labour
movement, whether in the form of trade unionism or the Labour Party, has nearly
always, from the time of the Chartists onwards, been stalwartly British. Two World
Wars did much to cement feelings of common Britishness. Sport, we know, can
divide the nations of the United Kingdom; but it was as “Team GB” that the home
team participated so successfully in the 2012 London Olympics.
It is not easy to measure the subjective effects of institutions of this kind.
The monarchy, for instance, goes up and down in popularity, depending often
on the day-to-day behaviour of this or that member of the royal family. But most
commentators stress the overall commitment, even affection, for the monarchy as
an institution.10 There is less support for a republic now than there was at various
points in the later nineteenth century.
Institutional Britishness has deep roots – deeper for the English, who mostly
created it in the first place, than for the other nations of the United Kingdom. Hence
the continuing inability, or disinclination, on the part of the English to separate
England and Britain. This could certainly change in the future. Institutional
9 There was also another interesting current running through the debates about
the Scottish referendum and what it might promise. Just before the Scottish referendum,
the London Review of Books invited the opinions of a group of distinguished British
intellectuals, most of them of the radical variety (2014a). Most hoped that the Scots would
say yes to independence. But the reasons had, in many cases, little do with what this might
mean for the Scots themselves, or the future of Scotland outside the Union. Rather the
contributors hoped for the secession of the Scots on the grounds that this might dissolve the
Union altogether, and give the whole country a much-needed shake-up. They particularly
looked for its effects on England, and the dislodgement there of the political elites that
had run the country for so long. In the event they were disappointed, though hopeful that
the experience had revealed serious fault-lines and fissures in the make-up of the United
Kingdom. In any case, most felt that the Scottish referendum had concentrated English
minds wonderfully (London Review of Books 2014b).
10 For their part the royal family, following the example of Victoria and Albert, are
assiduous in stressing that they are monarchs of the whole of Britain, not just England.
One of the first things that Prince Charles did following his marriage to Camilla Parker-
Bowles in 2005 was to make a visit to the family home in Balmoral, Scotland, and publicly
introduce his bride to the Scottish people. The couple are known as the Duke and Duchess
of Rothesay in Scotland. At a ceremony to open a school playground in the Scottish town
of Ballater, the prince wore a kilt and his bride wore a crimson coat with a tartan trim (New
York Times, 15 April 2005).
Britishness cannot be taken for granted, and there may be signs of a weakening
of this or that institution. But the contemporary meanings of Englishness, and
the sense of a recent rise in English national consciousness, have to be measured
against the persistence of these deeper forms of Britishness.
There is a further consideration. Many of England’s major cities contain people
who came here as immigrants or were born to immigrants, most of them from
the former British empire. Although there are some indications that a number of
them are willing to identify themselves as English, or Scottish or Welsh, the vast
majority still prefer to see themselves as British first.11 For them it is a securer, more
capacious, identity. There still seems something exclusive about Englishness, if
less so Scottishness or Welshness. Being British meant, at one time, being virtually
a citizen of the world, a member of the world-wide British empire. Something
of that cosmopolitanism lingers in the label – especially as there still people in
what used to be called “the British Commonwealth of Nations” who think of
themselves as British. Nor should we forget the people of Northern Ireland, for
the majority of whom being British is virtually a condition of existence. All in all,
Britishness seems assured of a reasonably secure future. If it resolved nothing else,
the referendum on Scottish independence is testimony to that.
One final point, this time picking up the theme of empire. As many others, I
earlier argued (2003) that with the end of empire, there was likely to be a return
to more local traditions of nationhood, though whether this would take political
or merely cultural forms was (and is) unclear. With Britain’s global role radically
diminished, with an England apparently beleaguered in the United Kingdom under
the assaults of “Celtic” nationalism, it seemed natural to expect a kind of retreat to
older forms of Englishness.
I am beginning to think that that was to write empire out of the picture too
quickly. I have been influenced in this by reconsidering Ian Baucom’s very
accomplished account (1999) of the relationship between Englishness and
empire. Baucom sees a tension between Englishness as something intensely local,
intimately bound up with particular English places and scenes, and Englishness as
something tied up with empire and England’s worldwide presence. He suggests a
certain succession, with imperial Englishness increasingly taking over from local
11 The Parekh Report on a Multicultural Britain stirred up controversy by suggesting

that even Britishness was a white, racial, identity, therefore forbidding to many non-white
black and Asian immigrants or children of immigrants. That seemed a mistaken view, which
the authors of the report later sought to qualify. The evidence suggests that Britishness is
the most inclusive of all the designations available to citizens of the United Kingdom,
and that most of them see it that way and are not at all unwilling to be included in it.
Englishness is often identified – by both the ethnic English themselves and other British
ethnic groups – with “the white majority” and monoculture; Britishness with all groups and
multiculturalism (see e.g. Mann 2011). That does not rule out the possibility of an “English
multiculturalism” but for the moment at least Britishness seems the most promising identity
to promote in the interests of social cohesion.
Englishness in the course of the nineteenth century. This seems an attractive way
of considering what often seem contradictory forms of Englishness, no doubt
expressing a certain overlap of the two traditions. It can also of course illuminate
the English–British enigma, and the tendency either to fuse them or to privilege
Englishness over Britishness.
What however if there is not so much a succession as an alternation, even
a “dialectical” relationship, between the two forms of Englishness, between
globality (empire) and locality (the earlier, place-based, kind of Englishness)?
What if one is not completely displaced by the other, but rather the two circle
each other and sometimes overlap? In the late nineteenth century, at the very
height of empire and thus, of global Englishness, there was what I have called
a “moment of Englishness”, a recovery (or invention) of elements of an older
English culture, brought about partly by the “imitation effect” of continental
nationalism and partly also by anxieties about the whole enterprise of empire
and what it seemed to lead to. In the twentieth century there was on the contrary
a strong assertion of Britishness (or “global Englishness”), helped especially by
the World Wars but also by the evolution of the British Empire into the British
Commonwealth of Nations. One saw especially in the white Dominions in the
first half of the twentieth century a strongly cultivated Britishness that diffused
back to the homeland (Bellich 2009). “Greater Britain” did not die in the late
nineteenth century; it had a powerful after-life, under different names, well into
the second half of the twentieth century.
Now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, we are led to believe that
there has been another swing of the pendulum and that a local Englishness has
returned (not necessarily only in a conservative guise, as we have seen; there is
“radical Englishness” as well). But has imperial Englishness (English as British)
been completely effaced? Is the 400-year imperial experience so easily and so
quickly forgotten? Not only are the millions of immigrants and their descendants –
now something like 10 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom and most
of them concentrated in English cities – living reminders of the empire. There is
now a thriving “literature of empire”, written by British writers – V.S. Naipaul,
Salman Rushdie, J.R. Farrell, Paul Scott, Jane Gardam – which constantly reminds
the British public of the imperial experience, and its continuing legacy. An empire
that lives on in the mind is not the least potent of empires.
Even the attempts to ignore or deny the empire betray its continuing presence.
Enoch Powell is a famous case in point. Powell served in India in the late 1940s
and retained an abiding affection for the country. His early political career was
marked by a defence of empire. Later, disturbed by the extent of Commonwealth
immigration, with its implicit claim of right of residence by virtue of membership
of the empire, Powell turned against the empire. He even attempted to expunge
it from the historical record, claiming that the British Empire was an artificial
excrescence grafted onto a native Englishness (Schofield 2009). But the very denial
of empire, against the manifest record and Powell’s own experience of it, indicates
a clear case of “the return of the repressed”. The act of denial itself affirms its
presence, and its potency. Empire continues to haunt all efforts to suppress it – as
one would expect of so long-lived an experience.
One might indeed ask: can a nation as imperial as the English have been
for centuries – going back to the English imperialism of the Middle Ages –
comfortably retreat to a local, Little Englander, position? English is now the
global language, and English culture and institutions – a legacy of the empire
– are diffused throughout the world (aided, of course, by the variety of Anglo-
Saxon culture known as Americanism).12 Is this now the time – in the face of
continuing and intensifying globalization – to retreat into “Deep England”? One
has to hope not. Fortunately the evidence suggests that the English are not yet
prepared to turn completely in on themselves. London’s cosmopolitanism, and
its position as a magnet for so many young Europeans, might be a better pointer
to England’s future.
Sociology and English Social Thought
A note, finally, might be in order concerning the subject of Chapter 8, “Sociology

and the Englishness of English Social Thought”. There it is argued that, as indeed
generally held, sociology was a stunted growth in England. Attempts to make it
flourish in the period after the Second World War has had limited success. Compared
to the United States and continental Europe, sociology, and social thought in
general, have not in the recent period been conspicuous English successes. This
has been tied principally to two things: the close embrace of social science in its
formative years by government concerns of social policy or the social missions of
philanthropists, thus not allowing for the growth of an autonomous social science,
especially in the universities; and the persistence of a dominant “gentlemanly”
culture that privileged the humanistic disciplines – the classics, literature, and
history – and looked askance at the social sciences (with the possible exception
of economics).
Is there any need to change that basic account?13 The most spirited challenge to
it has come in a recent work by the sociologist Mike Savage, in his Identities and
Social Change in Britain since 1940 (2010). Savage argues that, contrary to most
received accounts of the history of sociology in Britain, something like a “social-
12 Bryan Turner interestingly suggests, within the context of a discussion of “British

sociology”, that we should recognize that British sociologists are dispersed across the
globe, and that they and other overseas British intellectuals “became in many ways the first
global intellectual movement of the modern period.” It is wrong therefore to be speaking
of “British sociology” or “British intellectuals” with reference only to the United Kingdom
itself (Turner 2006a: 173). This intriguing argument could do with further exploration.
13 For a powerful re-statement of the generally received account see Turner 2006a.
This generated a considerable critical debate (British Journal of Sociology 2006), to which
Turner responded (2006b).
scientific revolution” took place in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. This
overthrew the “gentlemanly social science” that, deriving from the humanistic
culture of the old elites, dominated British social science in the first half of the
twentieth century. In particular there was “a moment of sociology” in these decades,
putting sociology at the heart of this social-scientific revolution. The practitioners
of this new sociology, employing in particular the tools of the intensive interview
and the sample survey, and conducting sophisticated ethnographic studies of local
communities all over the country, made themselves into something like a new
scientific and technical intelligentsia, opposing the cultural authority of the old
humanistic intelligentsia and to good extent supplanting it. Moreover, like all good
revolutionaries they announced the coming of a new society, the “rational nation”,
constructed and defined not, as in the well-known account of Benedict Anderson,
by novels and other literary devices, but by social science methods and measures
(2010: 162, 189).
We see here the crystallization of a managerial identity through the mobilization

of social science and, more particularly, a nascent sociology … A key emphasis
here was on how the social sciences were themselves implicated in the formation
of a new mission of national ‘greatness’, one which no longer rested on imperial
power and economic supremacy, but on individual self-realization. Sociologists
were not just commentators on social change. They were themselves markers of
a new rational modernity. (Savage 2010: 117; see also 215–36)14
Unlike many revolutions this one did not fail or be blown of course. Social
science and sociology, according to Savage, continued their triumphant march in
the academies and in the society at large after 1970. Moreover, though Savage
generally writes of Britain, this is a largely an English story, told through the
activities of mostly English social scientists and English institutions. A particularly
important role is allotted to the new English “plateglass” universities of the 1960s
– Sussex, Essex, Kent, York, Lancaster, Warwick – which all featured the social
sciences prominently in their teaching and research. Together with some of the
provincial universities – Manchester, Leicester, Liverpool, Keele – they are said
to have led the assault on the old heartlands of the old humanist intelligentsia,
Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Journals such as the Sociological Review,
14 It is remarkable how closely this account mirrors that of the American sociologist
Daniel Bell, in his celebrated work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Bell too
saw a new professionalized scientific elite (in his case both natural and social-scientific)
coming to power in the new knowledge-based “post-industrial society”. Savage does not
mention Bell or his work, which is a pity since there were so many critical discussions of
it. For one such, see Kumar 1978.
long based at Keele, published much of the new research, as against the more
traditionally-leaning LSE-based journal, the British Journal of Sociology.15
By 2003–4, says Savage, about 25 per cent of all academics in English
universities worked in the social sciences, compared to less than 5 per cent in
1946. The greatest losers were in the arts and humanities, which contributed no
more than 12 per cent of all academics in 2003–4 (in 1946 they made up 42 per
cent). Moreover, while the natural and technological sciences held their own in
terms of numbers, their reputation had suffered, Savage alleges, through widely-
disseminated critiques of their methods, their claims to absolute truth, and their
impact on the environment. Hence, “by the end of the twentieth century it is
possible to talk of the cultural dominance of the social science establishment”,
within which “sociology emerged as a specialist academic subject of considerable
size and significance” (2010: 132–3; see also 120).
This was a change of epochal significance, suggesting a new politics and a
new set of priorities for society. The new social science, as opposed to the old
“synthetic”, humanistic kind, privileged the contemporary over the past, and in
doing so committed itself to social change as its prime concern and the main object
of its inquiries. “The rise of the social sciences, as they contest the power of the
established disciplines, involves forging a vital relationship to claims about the
new, and in this process we can see the collapse of an older form of gentlemanly
social science, and the formation – halting, uncertain, yet ultimately triumphant
– of new discourses of the social as an immanent site of change … . We are still
living in this moment” (2010: 133–4; see also 163–4).
This is not the place to attempt a full-scale assessment of this ambitious
though not always coherent or consistent account.16 What we have to note here is
its fundamental implausibility. It is as if C.P. Snow’s dream, as expressed in his
famous Rede lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” (1959), was
actually being realized at the time it was delivered, when Snow himself regretfully
commented on the power and predominance of the old humanistic culture and the
continuing subordination of scientists and the scientific perspective. Snow argued
eloquently for a redressing of the balance, but did not hold out much hope in the
conditions of England of his time.17 Savage wishes to show that Snow need not
have despaired. Even if the natural scientists did not lead the revolution, their
allies the social scientists did, and science and rationality triumphed in their name.
It is reasonable to argue that there was indeed a “moment of sociology” in the
1960s and 1970s. This was when the new universities, with their strong social
15 For an appreciation of the role of the Sociological Review, see the special issue,
Sociological Review 2008.
16 See the sharply critical review by Ray Pahl (2011) – one of the pioneers, in
Savage’s account, of the new sociology – and Savage’s response (2011). A more measured
review is Ortolano 2012.
17 For an excellent discussion of Snow’s position, and the controversy generated by
his lecture, see Ortolano 2009.
science departments, were attracting bright young scholars from all over the
country (Oxbridge and LSE products prominent among them). This was when
the weekly periodical New Society, founded in 1962 to diffuse social science
knowledge, achieved its greatest influence and popularity. It was when social
scientists got their own national funding body, the Social Science Research
Council, disbursing large research grants. It was when publishers rushed to sign
up sociologists and other social scientists – Penguin, as so often in the past, taking
the lead in this enterprise with its strong Pelican Sociology list. Sociologists such
as Michael Young, Laurie Taylor and Stuart Hall became prominent figures on
radio and television. Sociology featured so strongly in the national culture at the
time that Malcolm Bradbury could write a popular satirical campus novel, The
History Man (1975) – later televised – in which the protagonist was an amoral
sociologist in the familiar confines of one of the new plateglass universities. Love
them or hate them, sociologists seem to have arrived. If there was a golden age of
sociology in England, this was it.
But if so, it faded very soon thereafter. Symbolic of this failure was the
decreasing popularity of New Society in the later 1970s and its eventual closure
in 1988.18 Pelican Sociology stopped commissioning new titles and later quietly
closed down the series. New publishers, such as Croom Helm, which had risen
on the basis of the new interest in sociology, closed down in the later 1980s. Few
sociologists were called upon to offer their thoughts, in the public sphere, on the
great events of the time.19 And even if there were a reasonable number of social
scientists in the universities in the early 2000s, the vast majority were in “Business
Studies” and “Education” – that is, applied or professional disciplines – rather than
in sociology.20
18 Technically it merged with the New Statesman (which had earlier absorbed The
Nation), which now became the New Statesman and Society.
19 It is telling that the sociologists who were most respected in the profession – David
Lockwood, John Goldthorpe, Tom Bottomore, David Martin – were virtually unknown
outside it. Those who did become known did so for their non-sociological work, as for
instance Frank Parkin with his satirical novel Krippendorf’s Tribe (1985). Laurie Taylor,
finding the academy constricting, gave it up altogether for a career in broadcasting and
journalism. The Nuffield Mobility Study headed by Goldthorpe has been very influential
within the profession but has had virtually no impact on public debates at home. Very
different were government-sponsored inquiries such as the Robbins Report on Higher
Education (1962).
20 The figures for 2003–4 show 1,400 sociologists to 6,049 in Business Studies
and 5,094 in Education. Psychology – mostly by now an experimental, natural-science,
subject – had 2,871 (Savage 2010: 131). It is also worth noting that sociology has lost its
popularity among students since the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s – a more attractive area
for them has been “cultural studies”, an off-shoot of English literature departments (Turner
2006a: 182). For some, the impact of cultural studies – seen especially as a legacy of the
Birmingham School – on British sociology has been unfortunate, further weakening it (see,
e.g., Rojek and Turner 2000).
One can of course attribute much of this decline to the coming of Margaret
Thatcher’s regime in 1979 and the variety of “neo-liberalism” that she represented.
Thatcher notoriously disliked sociology and social science generally: “there is
no such thing as society”, she firmly declared (“only individuals and families”).
Her Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph felt likewise, transforming the Social
Science Research Council into the Economic and Social Research Council
(the “social” apparently being retained only reluctantly and under pressure).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the social sciences – with the exception of
certain varieties of economics – were increasingly under pressure. Associated with
the “social-democratic consensus” of the post-war period, if not thought out-and-
out socialistic – they were the natural targets for a newly revitalized and ascendant
conservatism. They were widely if unfairly blamed for promoting a hedonistic and
irresponsible culture, especially among the young. Sociology and the “Swinging
Sixties” seemed natural bed-fellows.
It is important to remember that even in sociology’s golden age, sociologists
were not necessarily very prominent in the culture at large, as “public intellectuals”.
Here historians and literary scholars continued to make the running, as before.
No work by any sociologist achieved the popularity and influence of Raymond
William’s Culture and Society (1958) or Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy
(1957): both written by literary critics. The same can be said of the great work of
the historian E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), as
well as writings by historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Asa Briggs. Even on the
left, where one might have expected sociologists to have a greater presence, the
intellectuals with the greatest influence – Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Tom
Nairn – were nearly all educated in the traditional humanistic disciplines, history,
literature, philosophy (quite apart from the fact that for a long time they avoided
institutional affiliation of any kind).
The nearest thing in sociology to a popular success of these kinds was Peter
Willmott and Michael Young’s Family and Kinship in East London (1957), a
work deliberately aimed at a general readership and somewhat frowned upon
by professional sociologists.21 Michael Young also achieved a success with
his satirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) – a work, again, that
deliberately eschewed the conventional social science presentation. Otherwise
sociologists mostly operated as loners. Anthony Giddens certainly achieved
considerable public recognition, but more after he became Director of the
London School of Economics and a Labour Life Peer.22 Ernest Gellner too,
especially with his work on nationalism, had an influence beyond academic
21 Their later, more professional, joint study, The Symmetrical Family (1973), had
nothing of the same impact – showing also perhaps that the tide had already begun to turn
against sociology.
22 See Turner 2006a: 177 for a brief assessment of Giddens’s influence on British
intellectual life. He notes that “Giddens has not produced any major macro-sociological
analysis of British society”, and that indeed “the real failure of British sociology … is the
circles, but he was never a conventional sociologist (he hardly ever published
in sociology journals, for instance), and his last appointment was as a Professor
of Anthropology at Cambridge (Hall 2010). Then there is W.G. Runciman, who
has produced an impressive body of work of both a theoretical and substantive
kind, but who has never developed a following in Britain, let alone in the wider
sociology community as a whole. Perhaps the best-known British sociologist
currently is Michael Mann, but it is significant that he has chosen to spend most
of his academic life outside Britain, in the United States. Bryan Turner would
be another good example of this, having spent most of his working life outside
Britain, in Australia and the United States.23
Runciman (Viscount Runciman), Old Etonian, Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, past President of the British Academy, is hardly a typical British
sociologist. But perhaps he indicates well the situation of sociologists in England,
in that his standing has come mainly from his non-sociological roles, in the
British Academy (traditionally a bastion of humanistic culture) and in public
service (he was Chairman of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, 1991–3).
This suggests, as indeed has often been claimed (e.g. Annan 1991, Halsey 1992,
Ortolano 2009: 219–54), that the traditional humanistic elites never really lost
their hold on English culture, that there was no displacement by a new elite of
scientifically and technically trained professionals (as claimed by Savage). The
old guard continued to rule the roost.24
Or perhaps there is no reigning cultural elite at all now. The social scientists
may never have taken over, but the traditional humanistic elites may also now have
disappeared. It has been remarked that there are very few public intellectuals today
– from any of the major scholarly disciplines – that command attention in the way
their counterparts did in previous periods, up to an including the 1960s and 1970s.
This has been put down partly to specialization and the retreat from the desire,
common to earlier intellectuals, to reach beyond immediate professional circles
(Collini 2007: 464–71). A few scholars – a Simon Schama, a Niall Ferguson –
failure to produce any significant macro-sociological analysis of British society and its
decline” (2006a: 184).
23 Revealingly Bryan Turner (2006a: 176) himself singles out Alasdair McIntyre as
“the most influential social philosopher of the postwar period” in England, and his style
as representing “British sociology at its most stylish, philosophical and provocative”. But
McIntyre is a most peculiar choice to represent British sociology. Though he was for a short
period a professor of sociology at Essex, he has mostly worked as a moral philosopher –
certainly one with an unusually wide range that includes sociological concerns – first at
Leeds, then at Oxford, and latterly in the United States, at Boston University and Notre
Dame. He is in fact another example, along with Gellner and Runciman, of the oddity
of English sociology, an affair of loners and mavericks. Turner might well also fit this
description (Michael Young would be another good example).
24 In a recent publication W.G. Runciman (2015) has argued for a startling continuity
– in culture and ideology as well as social structure – in English society since the early
eighteenth century.
venture into the world of the mass media and gain a reasonably wide audience. But
otherwise the public realm is mostly dominated by professional politicians and
journalists. Even here it can be said to be highly fragmented, with the social media
increasingly playing their enigmatic role.
What this will mean for English sociology, and English social thought more
generally, is hard to predict. But there is currently little sign that sociology and
sociologists are having much impact on public debates or the public culture.
Mostly they are fighting increasingly desperately to hold on to some space in the
academy. They have few friends in high places. The Labour governments of Blair
and Brown turned out – after an initial honeymoon – to be almost as unsympathetic
to the social sciences as the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and
her successors. Only those disciplines that can prove their practical usefulness,
in the most hard-headed of economic terms, now get government support, and
sociology will always find it difficult to justify itself in those terms. If the English
question is now being raised, it does not seem very likely that many will be turning
to sociology for the answer. It is not through social science that England will find
its identity, or its soul.
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Chapter 2
Empire and English Nationalism
Empire and Nation: Foes or Friends?
It is more than as a pious tribute to the great scholar whom we commemorate

today that makes me begin with Ernest Gellner.1 For Gellner’s influential thinking
on nationalism, and specifically of its modernity, is central to the question I wish
to consider, the relation between nation and empire, and between imperial and
national identity.
For Gellner, as for many other commentators, nation and empire were and are
antithetical. The great empires of the past belonged to the species of the “agro-
literate” society, whose central fact is that “almost everything in it militates against
the definition of political units in terms of cultural boundaries” (Gellner 1983: 11;
see also Gellner 1998a: 14–24). Power and culture go their separate ways. The
political form of empire encloses a vastly differentiated and internally hierarchical
society in which the cosmopolitan culture of the rulers differs sharply from the
myriad local cultures of the subordinate strata. Modern empires, such as the Soviet
empire, continue this pattern of disjuncture between the dominant culture of the
elites and the national or ethnic cultures of the constituent parts.
Nationalism, argues Gellner, closes the gap. It insists that the only legitimate
political unit is one in which rulers and ruled share the same culture. Its ideal is
one state, one culture. Or, to put it another way, its ideal is the national or the
“nation-state”, since it conceives of the nation essentially in terms of a shared
culture linking all members. Thus “if the rulers of the political unit belong to a
nation other than that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes
a quite outstandingly intolerable breach of political propriety” (Gellner 1983: 1).
What, therefore, for nationalists could be more outrageous than an empire such
as the British where a handful of British men and women ruled over millions of
Indians, Africans and others, all of whom contained within themselves the seeds
of genuine nationhood?2
1 This chapter was originally given as the Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture of
the journal Nations and Nationalism, delivered at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, 19 April 2005.
2 For those, such as Dominique Schnapper, who emphasize democratic citizenship
rather than common culture as the central principle of nationality, the opposition between
inherently undemocratic imperial structures and “the community of citizens” that defines
nations is equally absolute: see Schnapper 2002: 3.
In pitting nation against empire, nationalism against imperialism, Gellner

implicitly linked himself to an intellectual tradition running back to the
Enlightenment and, especially, the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder. It was
Herder who, of all the Enlightenment thinkers, launched the most passionate
indictment of European imperialism, and he did so largely in the name of the
nation, that “natural plant” that Herder considered the essential building-block of
humanity.3 “Nothing … appears so directly opposite to the end of government as
the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixture of various kinds of humans
and nations under one scepter” (quoted Muthu 2003: 248). Empires are monstrous
growths, inimical alike to freedom and to the specific differences that are the
defining principle as well as the glory of nations. This became a commonplace
of liberal thought as it increasingly allied itself with the national principle in
the nineteenth century. Even those liberals, such as John Stuart Mill and Lord
Macaulay, who defended imperialism felt the need to justify empire against the
more “natural” principle of nationality. Empire was acceptable so long as it saw its
mission as the guidance and education of less developed peoples towards the goal
of national self-government (see Mehta 1999).
The history of the relations between nations and empires in the last two centuries
seems to bear out this perception of difference and divergence. For what has that
history been but a revolt against empire in the name of nationality? For much
of the last half-century of their existence, the Austrian and the Russian empires
struggled with the question of how to nullify or mollify the nationalists aspirations
of their diverse realms, until both empires came crashing down in the cauldron
of the First World War. Much the same happened with the Ottoman empire. In all
cases what seemed to have triumphed was the principle of nationality, officially
endorsed by the victors in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918
(see, e.g., Kappeler 2001: 213).
Later came the spectacular series of “wars of national liberation”, in which the
colonies of the surviving European empires – British, French, Dutch, Belgian –
asserted their independence on the basis of the nationalist doctrine that had become
the norm of international relations and that was, again, officially acknowledged in
the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (“everyone
has the right to a nationality”). Later still, in 1989–91, the “informal colonies” of
the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe declared their independence, followed swiftly
afterwards by like actions among the various national republics or “colonies” of
3 “For Herder the concept of a people, a Volk, and the concept of empire, were simply
incompatible. Sooner or later all the world’s empires were destined to collapse back into
their constituent parts”, seen as natural units of peoples or nations (Pagden 2003: 131; and
see generally Muthu 2003: 210–58). Of course there was nothing natural about nations for
Gellner, nor did he share Herder’s anti-imperialism. What he did accept though was the
categorical difference between nations and empires. For Gellner’s last thoughts on this
subject, where he showed a distinct sympathy for empires, especially the Habsburg empire,
see Gellner’s posthumously published volumes, 1998a and 1998b. See also Kumar 2015.
Empire and English Nationalism 33
the Soviet Union itself (though, as Gellner rightly asserted, it was not nationalism
itself that brought down the Soviet Union).4 The collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 seemed to set the seal on the long-drawn-out encounter between nationalism
and imperialism, and to most observers there seemed no doubt whatsoever which
had proved the victor.
But we should be aware that there is another way of telling the story. In this
account, empire and nation are not set against each other but appear as twin
expressions of the same phenomenon of power. It is perhaps difficult to make
this case for the early-modern empires, because the concept of the nation and the
ideology of nationalism were both poorly developed before the late eighteenth
century. But it is certainly possible to see the connection in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, when nationalism rose to prominence, if not dominance, in the
political life of Western nations. Nineteenth-century imperialism can then appear as
an extension, perhaps a hypertrophy, of nationalism; by the same token the nation
can come to conceive itself in the image of empire, the supreme expression of
great power status. “Imperialism and nationalism’, says Christopher Bayly, “were
part of the same phenomenon … The rise of exclusive nationalisms, grasping and
using the powers of the new and more interventionist state, was the critical force
propelling both the new imperialism and the hardening of the boundaries between
majority and assumed ‘ethnic’ populations across the world … Imperialism and
nationalism reacted on each other to redivide the world and its people” (Bayly
2004: 230, 242–3; see also Mommsen 1990).5
4 The important thing however, as he noted, was the perception that nationalism had a
prescriptive right to succeed, when compared with the reactionary imperialism of the Soviet
Union. “Nationalism had not contributed much to [the collapse of the Soviet system] …
but benefited from it, and decisively contributed to the break-up of empire after economic
defeat … had been conceded” (Gellner 1998a: 57).
5 For J.A. Hobson, the great critic of imperialism, imperialism was “a debasement
of … genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near
or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable peoples” ([1902] 1965: 11). Mommsen
(1990: 212) also refers to imperialism as a “deformation” of nationalism, although only if
one takes the liberal nation-state as the norm. For Hobson, as for other liberal nationalists,
nationality still appeared the natural and desirable principle, with imperialism being a
corrupted version of it. But later thinkers were less sure about this, preferring in many
cases to see imperialism as the direct outgrowth of the virulent principle of nationalism.
For them, the climax of this process was seen in the 1930s, in the imperialistic designs
of Italian, German, Japanese and to some extent Russian nationalism. Here nationalism
and imperialism revealed their affinity. See on this especially Kohn 1932: 49–76 and
Arendt 1958: 123–302; see also Lichtheim 1974: 81; Baumgart 1982: 47–90; Hobsbawm
1987: 158–61; Pagden 2003: 132–8; Zimmer 2003: 35–8. This was also generally Joseph
Schumpeter’s view of modern imperialism, which “does not coincide with nationalism
and militarism, though it fuses with them by supporting them as it is supported by them”
(Schumpeter [1919] 1974: 97). The Marxist view, which sees imperialism as the last or
It is one thing however to see a connection between nationalism and imperialism,

another to conflate nation and empire. Are empires no more than nation states writ
large? In one obvious sense clearly not, as empires have existed for millennia
and nation states for not much more than two centuries. More importantly, with
some exceptions it is hard to think of empires as other than multi-ethnic or multi-
national entities.6 They thereby breach the cardinal principle of nationalism that
state and nation, polity and culture, should coincide. To that extent Gellner and in
general the Herderian tradition are right to insist on the fundamental difference of
nation and empire.
But matters are not so simple. In the early-modern period, as David Armitage
and others have stressed, the concept of empire was often closely related to the
original meaning of imperium as sovereignty, rather than to its somewhat later –
and generally modern – meaning of rule over a multiplicity of lands and peoples.
This allowed many absolutist monarchies to declare themselves empires, as in
the famous declaration of Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 that
“this realm of England is an empire”. Since, moreover, many of the early-modern
states were what have been called “composite states” where, as in Spain or Britain,
one monarch might rule over several territories, this in itself suggests a closer
connection than we are accustomed to think between empire and what later evolved
into the nation-state. Thus while it may be anachronistic to speak of nations as
empires in this period, it is certainly possible to speak of states as empires, with
the emphasis on state sovereignty rather than rule over diverse peoples. It is indeed
this sense of empire that predominates in the writings of Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius
and Spinoza (Koebner 1961: 52; see also Armitage 2000: 14–23; Pagden 1995).
But there is a further and perhaps more compelling consideration. Most nation-
states, or what became nation-states, like most empires, are the result of conquest
and colonization. England was united by the Norman conquest, and then went
on in its turn – largely at first under Norman auspices – to unite the peoples of
Wales, Ireland and, eventually, Scotland into another state, the United Kingdom,
and another nation, the British nation. Both France and Spain too, starting in the
Middle Ages, eventually achieved nationhood by a process of conquest launched
in the French case by the Capetian kings and in the Spanish case by the crowns
of Aragon and Castile. “France” and “Spain” were the product of the more or less
forcible integration by these monarchs of neighbouring lands and peoples, many
of them differing considerably from the institutions and culture of the dominant
groups. In the nineteenth century Prussian conquest of the other German states
made “Germany”, and Piedmontese conquest of the other Italian states made
“highest” stage of capitalism – initially carried by the nation-state – generally goes along
with this view of the affinity of nationalism and imperialism.
6 A feature they have had since Roman times, as evident in the evolution of the
meaning of the word imperium from “sovereign rule” to “rule over a plurality of peoples”.
See Koebner 1961: 1–18.
“Italy” (hence the famous remark of Massimo d’Azeglio’s, “we have made Italy,
now we must make Italians”).
Many “nation-states”, in other words, are mini-empires – some not so mini.
What was called by contemporaries in the eighteenth century “the empire of Great
Britain” or “the British empire in Europe”’, referred not to Britain’s overseas
empire but to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and – later – Ireland (Kumar
2003: 180).7 Admittedly this was meant mainly to point to the fact of central
sovereign rule over all parts of the kingdom. But from our perspective it can just
as well refer to the imperial conquest by the English of the other peoples of the
British Isles – the “first English empire”, as Rees Davies (2000) refers to it in his
account of the earlier part of this process in the Middle Ages. To this extent the
usage covers both the main meanings of empire: sovereign rule and rule over a
multiplicity of peoples and territories (cf. Lichtheim 1974: 38).
We will return to this “inner empire” of Great Britain. But one last general
point has to be made. Anthony Smith (1986) has made a powerful case for
the view that all nations are constituted by “core” ethnies, around which may
cohere other ethnic groups. Such core ethnies lend their distinctive character
to the nation. Might we not extend that observation to empires as well? Most
empires are constructed by a particular people – the English, the French, the
Russians, the Turks – who oversee the development of the empire. Whatever
their numbers, it is they who tend to define the character of the empire, and to
provide it with its sense of meaning and purpose. They are, we may say, the
“state-bearing” peoples of the empire. It is from the empire that they get their
sense of themselves, their identity. Were it not in many cases anachronistic as
well as, in the end, probably misleading, we might be tempted call this a national
identity. But we can at least speak of a collective identity that comes from their
role as carriers of the imperial mission.
Once more therefore the gap between nation and empire appears narrower than
normally conceived. Imperial peoples may develop a consciousness that has many
parallels with national consciousness. There are limits to this parallel, as we shall
see; but it does suggest an approach to the question, or the puzzle, of English
national identity (see further Kumar 2010).
An Imperial People
When the question of English national identity became a matter of public debate
in the 1990s, it was often remarked how little there was to go on. While there was
a certain tradition of discussing Englishness and the idiosyncrasies of the English
character, there was nothing like the resources that the French or the Germans
7 There is a parallel here in the later attempt, notably by Charles Dilke and J.R. Seeley,
to see “Greater Britain” – mainly the white colonies and dominions – as an extension of
England. See especially Bell 2007; see also Wellings 2002: 106.
or the Italians were able to draw upon in reflecting on their national identity and
the character of their nationalism.8 Works such as Linda Colley’s Britons ([1992]
1994) provided some much-needed guidance, but in general the scholarly literature
on the subject was remarkably thin, as were more general reflections by public
figures.
There can be many reasons for this absence. One has to do with the notorious
confusion of “English” with “British”, so that both English and other British are
often uncertain whose identity is in question, England’s or Britain’s. This is in
fact partly a consequence of what is the more important problem, the absence
of a tradition of reflection on the English state itself, and of its character in
comparison with other states.9 One result of that is that “state” and “nation” are
often used interchangeably, with no attention to the possible – and indeed frequent
– divergence between them. This is especially important in a multinational state
such as the British.
What I wish to suggest is that we consider the English state as primarily an
imperial state, and the English people as an imperial people. This is not so unusual,
in the context of discussions of the British empire as that is conventionally
understood. It is less usual in relation to England’s position in the United Kingdom,
and to its role more generally in the British Isles. But this role is no less imperial
than in the former, more familiar, case. With the dissolution of Britain’s overseas
empire, it may indeed turn out to be more consequential for English nationalism
and the development of English national identity.
The English were, as Sir John Seeley noted in his influential The Expansion
of England (1883), imperial in a double sense. They first created a land empire,
Great Britain or the United Kingdom, formed by the expansion of England from
its southern position at the base of a group of islands off the north-western coast
of Europe (the “East Atlantic archipelago”). They then constructed an overseas
empire, not just once but twice: first in the western hemisphere, in North America
and the Caribbean, and later in the east, in India and South-East Asia. Adding the
large African and Pacific possessions, this empire comprised at its height after the
First World War nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface and a quarter of the world’s
population – the largest empire the world has ever known (Ferguson 2004: 240).
8 See, for the French, Germans, Italians and others, the references in Kumar 2000:
594–5. See also, for the absence of a tradition of reflection on English national identity,
Kumar 2003: 18–21, 39–41. A roundtable discussion in Prospect magazine (Ascherson
et al. 2005), involving Neal Ascherson, George Brown, Linda Colley, Tariq Modood, and
others, brought this out particularly clearly. See also, for contrasting views on this question,
Mandler 2006, Kenny 2014.
9 A brave attempt to fill the gap is Corrigan and Sayer (1985). The weakest part
of that work is, however, precisely the question that is of the greatest significance in our
context, the relation between the English state and the English nation. A work that is more
attentive to that distinction is Powell 2002.
It is true that while the first empire, the “inner empire” of Great Britain, was
largely an English creation, in the case of the second “outer”or overseas empire
Scots, Welsh and Irish all played a prominent and even disproportionate part
(Colley 1994: 126–32; Kumar 2003: 170–72). But whatever the question of
numbers, there was never any doubt in the minds of either rulers or ruled that it
was predominantly the English who were in command, as much in the overseas
empire as in the “home” empire. It was the English Common Law, the English
parliament, the English monarchy (even when occupied by Scots or Germans)
that supplied the key institutions to the two empires.10 Crucially of course it was
the English language that became the common possession of both empires. It is
hardly surprising that the English – and many others, both Britons and foreigners
– say “English” when they mean “British”. It is a clear if largely unconscious
recognition of the brute facts of the matter.
If the English are to be thought of as an imperial people, then it may be that
it is wrong to compare – as say Gerald Newman does in The Rise of English
Nationalism (1987) – English nationalism and English national identity with the
more conventional forms of nation-state nationalism that we associate with the
new nations of Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century, or the many new or
recovered nations of the twentieth century, such as Ireland or Poland. The more
helpful comparisons would be with other imperial peoples – the Russians, the
Austrians, the Turks, perhaps the French.11 It is their identities, and the peculiar
qualities associated with it, that may offer some clue to the puzzle of English
national identity.
I have argued elsewhere (Kumar 2000; 2003: 30–35; 2010: 128–33) that
imperial peoples can be said to have, or to develop, a “missionary consciousness”
in relation to their empire, and that it might therefore be possible to talk of an
imperial or missionary “nationalism”. The kind of consciousness I have in mind
is that of a group or people who feel they have a special destiny or mission in the
world, a special task that requires that they suppress the ordinary manifestations of
nationalism. Nevertheless, since nationalist ideology often also endows the nation
with the sense of its own uniqueness and goodness, its special role in history, and
10 It is true of course that the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) left the Scots in
charge of their own religion, their own education, their own law, and certain aspects of
local government. But as I have argued elsewhere (Kumar 2003: 151–4), with the possible
exception of religion Scottish institutions developed largely under the tutelage of English
ones. For the contrary view, see, e.g., Paterson 1994. There is a judicious assessment in
Kidd 2008.
11 See Chapter 3, “French and English Nationalism: Comparisons and Contrasts”, for
the argument that the French, though clearly an imperial people, differ in some important
ways from other imperial peoples, especially the English.
its superiority to other nations, it may be fitting to speak of imperial or missionary

nationalism.12
But whether or not it is acceptable to speak of “missionary nationalism”, it is
very different from nationalism as we have come to understand that phenomenon
from its nineteenth-century forms. The difference is this: the imperial nation might
– and usually does – insist on the superiority and special nature of its empire, but
it cannot equally insist on its own superiority or special nature, its superior quality
as a people. So Romans, Turks, Austrians, Russians and English might feel pride
in their imperial creations, but that pride has to be reserved for the creations rather
than the creators.
The reason is fairly obvious. Empires are typically made up of many peoples,
of many different ethnicities. To govern the empire you need to make as many of
these peoples as possible feel that they belong, that the empire is as much theirs
as it is that of those who originally created it (which might have been a very long
time ago). Now in practice there is usually a people who are the creators or “state-
bearing” people of the empire – Romans, Russians, English, etc. The temptation
might be for them to beat the drum, to go on about their greatness in creating such
mighty structures.
That temptation has to be resisted. It can cause envy and resentment. The
right attitude has to be modesty and perhaps even self-depreciation. The dominant
people in the empire get their sense of themselves – their collective consciousness
– from their creation, the empire, and the cause or purpose – the “mission” – to
which the empire is officially committed. In the Russian case, the missions have
variously been Orthodoxy and Communism; in the case of the Ottomans, Islam,
of the Habsburg Empire, Catholicism (and perhaps “Europe”), of the French, la
mission civilisatrice. The imperial peoples see themselves as the carriers of the
mission. But the obverse of that consciousness is a necessary playing down of
themselves as a “mere nation”, with the mundane purposes – self-aggrandizement,
self-importance – and inward-looking nature of much nationalism. Imperial
nations cannot afford to be “just another nation”. Theirs is a nationalism, if we
wish to call it such, with more to celebrate than merely themselves.
English Nationalism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?
It is this perhaps that is the cause of much of the perplexity surrounding the
question of English nationalism. We have been looking in the wrong place.
12 It is of course problematic to speak of missionary nationalism in the case of those

empires – e.g. the Spanish and the Portuguese, not to mention the Roman – that existed well
before the birth of nationalist ideology in the nineteenth century. One could probably find
more precise or more acceptable terms. I use the term nationalism merely to point to some
interesting correspondences between imperial and national identities. For another treatment
of ‘missionary peoples’, see Smith 2003: 95–130.
English nationalism is not like German or Italian nationalism, not like Greek or
Polish nationalism, not like Czech or Romanian nationalism. It is not even like
French nationalism (see note 10, above). It is closer to Russian nationalism, and to
that of other imperial peoples whose collective consciousness has not been ethnic.13
For our models of English national identity we need to look at the ideologies and
identities of other historic empires – not excluding such exemplars as Rome (see,
e.g. Pagden 2003: 19–37).
What were the causes or missions with which the English identified
themselves? In the first place, there was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
Protestantism. This was not, it should be noted, a “national” cause in the narrow
sense of that term. Protestantism was an international movement, as international
as the Catholicism it opposed in every quarter. But, especially after the defeat of the
Spanish Armada of 1588, the English had a surge of confidence that made them see
themselves as leading the Protestant crusade on behalf of Protestants everywhere.
England became a refuge for persecuted Protestants from the Continent – not for
the last time in its history, making it a home for many skilled craftsmen and a
haven for many distinguished scholars, scientists and artists.
The Protestant cause was also immensely valuable in the second main mission
with which the English identified: the making of Britishness, especially after
the union with Scotland in 1707. Wales had of course long been conquered and
incorporated; Ireland was much more of a problem, and it was not until Cromwell
that its conquest was assured. The Scots had never been conquered; and, though
they shared a king with England from 1603, it was not until the early eighteenth
century that they could they be pressurized into a parliamentary union with England.
Once that had been accomplished, however, the English set about constructing a
British identity that, while not necessarily substituting for other identities, provided
a capacious umbrella under which all groups could find shelter (Kumar 2003: 130–
74). In this task Protestantism, especially when pitted against the national enemy,
France, played a major role (Colley 1994; see also Colley 1992: 314–23). Of course
that left out much of Ireland (though binding the northern part – Protestant Ulster
– more firmly into Britain than perhaps any other part of the kingdom). For the
Irish, however, there was the common enterprise of the overseas British empire, in
which Catholic Irish shared along with their Protestant counterparts in the rest of the
kingdom (see e.g. Jeffrey 1996; Kenny 2006).
It was a marked feature of Britishness that, of all the nations of the British
Isles, it was the English who most subordinated their identity to it, to the point
where over time the difference between English and British became elided.14 This
13 It is frequently, but wrongly, claimed that Russian nationalism is ethnic in character.
See, e.g., Greenfeld 1992: 189–274. For a criticism of this view, see Kumar 2000: 584–8. I
have elaborated on this criticism in my forthcoming book, Ruling Peoples, to be published
by Princeton University Press in 2016.
14 To many of course, especially today, this is a cause for lament rather than, as it
might have appeared in the past, for celebration. Cf. this cri de coeur of Billy Bragg, in the
of course reflected the fact that it was the English who had the highest stake in
the venture. To have celebrated their own English identity, as the creators and
directors of Great Britain, would have been impolitic in the extreme. Most English
statesmen recognized that. So too, perhaps even more, did the monarchy, which
especially in the person of Victoria made a conscious effort to tie together the
various peoples of her kingdom by cultivating their ways and finding opportunities
to dwell among them.
It was under the sign of Britishness, too, that the English gained their sense
of identity from the other great projects that they launched upon the world. In the
nineteenth century, with the decline of all-out religious conflicts, Protestantism
gradually ceased to be the main concern. But now there was the Industrial
Revolution, a truly great cause with which the English, along with other British
ethnic groups, could identify. With the industrial revolution the English–British
inaugurated a new type of civilization which, for good or ill, transformed the
world forever. Britain was the world’s first industrial nation. But it became rapidly
clear that industrialism was not and never could be merely a national thing. Like
the capitalism of which it was a part it was from the start a global phenomenon.
Industrialism might, as Gellner argued, give rise to nationalism; but as an economy,
a culture and a way of life it always transcends it. In inventing and committing
themselves to industrialism, as earlier to Protestantism, the English found both a
national purpose and a cause that took them beyond nationalism.15
This was probably even truer of the other great project of nineteenth-century
Britain: the British overseas empire. One aspect of this makes this especially clear.
The British empire was always “informal” as much as it was formal. Long ago
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson (1953) propounded the idea of “the empire
of free trade”, pointing out that the British were just as happy to achieve their ends
without formal annexations of territory as they were – when forced – to do so by
extending the formal bounds of empire. In championing free trade, the English
not only furthered their own interests but could do so on the basis of what could
be put forward as a universal idea, a universal formula for the betterment of all
peoples and nations. The “empire of free trade” had the same libertarian ring as
“the empire of the seas”. Just as, under international law, no-one could control
the seas, so no-one controlled or directed free trade. It was a happy circumstance
that allowed the English, as the core nation of British society, to link themselves
Prospect discussion: “We are invisible. England doesn’t have its own parliament or national
anthem. I watch the rugby, and I see the Welsh singing “Land of our Fathers”, and the Scots
have “Flower of Scotland”, while we are singing a song that doesn’t even mention our
country. These are small things but millions of people are starting to notice that England is
the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about” (Ascherson et al. 2005: 22).
15 There was of course always a strand in English culture which resisted industrialism.
See Wiener 1981. But this can be exaggerated, and certainly misrepresents the picture for
the nineteenth century, the period in which English/British industrial supremacy was the
source of much national pride. See on this especially, Rubinstein 1994.
to a cause that both expressed their national interest and at the same time loudly
proclaimed its non-national or anti-national character.16
But, if compelled to extend their empire by taking formal possession of
territories, the English had no difficulty in finding causes with which to identify.
Here we find the familiar tropes of “the civilizing mission”, the “white man’s
burden”, the carriers of civilization to “lesser breeds without the law” (see e.g.
Mehta 1999; Pitts 2005; Schwarz 2013). It is not difficult to see hypocrisy in all
this, the disguising of self-advantage under the cover of a benevolent mission. It
is less easy to accept that it might be sincerely meant, and that it might for many,
from missionaries to soldiers and administrators, express a genuine conviction that
empire represented progress in the lives of its subjects (see, e.g. Schreuder 1976;
Etherington 2007; Brown 2008).
For the English this was especially clear when the comparison was made with
other European empires. While European rule might be the fate of the larger part
of the world, it was better for that world that the English take charge in as large
a section as possible. In his Heart of Darkness (1902), Joseph Conrad pointedly
contrasted the horrors of the Belgian Congo with the more constructive British
empire, where “one knows that some real work is being done” (Conrad 1995: 25).
In his laconic way Conrad summed up the conviction of many Englishmen that their
institutions had not only led them to world power but could be put at the service of
all mankind. Parliamentary government, the rule of law, the glories of the English
language and English literature, all were “Anglo-Saxon” achievements that had
long outgrown their parent society and were available for adoption the world over
(Young 2008). When the statesman William Huskisson spoke of planting “in every
quarter of the globe … the seeds of freedom, civilization and Christianity”, he
equated that undertaking with bringing to the lands of the empire “English laws
and English institutions” (in Noonkester 1997: 283).
The Rise of English Nationalism?
The argument so far is that the English did not need, or at least did not develop,
nationalism in the usual understanding of that term. “English nationalism”
sounds strange, both to the English and to others. The English were, for much
of their modern history, implicated in a range of enterprises which suppressed
the common manifestations of nationalism. There was and is English patriotism,
and certainly English xenophobia. There was and is racial Anglo-Saxonism. There
is even the “Whig interpretation” of English history, which celebrates English
achievements and England’s fortunate separation from the European Continent,
with its disastrous history of authoritarianism and civil conflict. But there is
16 See the quotation from Richard Cobden in Ferguson 2004: xix, which nicely points
up both the universalism of free trade and the way in which this could be deployed against
the acquisition of (formal) empire.
no English Herder or Fichte; no English Mazzini or Garibaldi; no Michelet or

Mickiewicz, or any equivalent of the nineteenth century literary quest to discover
“the Russian soul”. There is nothing in England like the Scottish Declaration of
Arbroath (1320), nothing like the idea of “national war” as “holy war” invoked
in the Greek Proclamation of Independence (1822) (Kohn 1965: 116; see also, for
some similarly impassioned declarations, Kedourie 1971).
Is there an English nationalism today? The transnational causes that gave
the English a sense of identity – Protestantism, industrialism, imperialism – are
either weak or absent. The European Union, to many English people, is as much
a threat as a promise. The presence of a large minority of non-European, non-
white, citizens continues to be a source of anxiety to a considerable section of the
white majority in the country. Scots, and to a lesser extent Welsh and Irish, show a
disposition to pull out of the United Kingdom and to make their own arrangements
with Brussels. Looking at the matter in one way, we might be tempted to say
that the protective layers that allowed the English to ignore questions of national
identity have now all fallen away. The questions are back with a vengeance. There
are several small groups around which think they have the answers, though they
are yet to convince most people. Of greater significance is a Conservative party
which, swept out of the Celtic regions, may be the English nationalist party in
waiting (see further Chapters 1 and 5).
But perhaps it is wrong to see English nationalism as “the dog that did not
bark”, as if there is something unnatural about the English in not having embraced
nationalism. There is nothing natural about nationalism, as Gellner above all has
taught us. The English developed their own forms of identity consistent with their
character as an imperial people. With empire gone, together with the other historic
causes to which the English attached themselves, there is certainly a felt need to find a
new role in the world. But should that role be seen in the banal terms of nationalism?
Is English nationalism the right response in a world, and at a time, when nationalism
seems increasingly quaint, if not downright reactionary and backward-looking?
There is certainly a lot of nationalism about, and the temptation might be simply to
join the club. But this would be a disappointing fate for a people which has played
so active and significant a part in the great movements of the world. As the example
of Sweden shows, one can be a relatively small country and yet still be outward
looking, still committed to the great causes of humanity. The European Union is but
one theatre in which the nations can suppress their rivalries and antagonisms for the
greater good of all. There is a wider world out there, with wider opportunities. It is
time for the English to reach out, not to turn inwards.
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Chapter 3
English and French National Identity:
Comparisons and Contrasts* 1
It is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in

other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.
Sigmund Freud ([1930] 1963: 51)
History and Identity
The French and the English, it is generally agreed, have very different attitudes to
their history and how it affects them. For the English, despite all the cultivation
of “heritage” and the celebration of “Olde England”, the past is past; it has done
its work. That does not mean that the English turn their back on the past, in the
American manner (“history is bunk”). Rather it is an assumption of a continuity so
seamless that the past dissolves insensibly into the present, making the distinction
between past and present both difficult and pointless. Continuity knits the past
to the present; it creates an organic whole which confronts the future with the
resources of a thoroughly mastered and assimilated history.
Such a perception of continuity has significant implications for the concept
of national identity. “Because we in England”, said Herbert Butterfield in an
influential expression of this view, “have maintained the threads between past
and present we do not, like some younger states, have to go hunting for our
own personalities. We do not have to set about the deliberate manufacture of a
national consciousness, or to strain ourselves, like the Irish, in order to create a
‘nationalism’ out of the broken fragments of tradition, out of the ruins of a tragic
past” (Butterfield 1945: 114).
Butterfield, as numerous references in his book make clear, did not simply have
the Irish and other “younger states” in mind. The “tragic past” that was their burden
was also the affliction of a near neighbour, one that was not only very old but had
for some centuries rivalled England for world supremacy. The French suffered from
precisely those violent ruptures and abrupt discontinuities that it had been England’s
*This is a revised version of a paper first presented at the 14th Biennial Conference of
Europeanists, Chicago, 11–13 March 2004. My thanks to the discussants and participants
at my panel, especially Miguel Glatzer and Robert Ventresca. I should also like to thank
the members of Gérard Noiriel’s seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris, where I spoke on 22 May 2003; their lively responses – especially those
of Emmanuelle Saada – helped me shape the idea of this paper. Thanks also for helpful
comments to three anonymous reviewers for Nations and Nationalism.
good fortune to avoid. Thus after “the great gash” caused by the seventeenth-century
Civil War, the English “recovered continuity for our institutional life, so that healing
could take place and normal growth could begin again”. The French by contrast,
“after the cataclysm of 1789, did not heal the wounds or tie up the threads again”.
The result was a permanent war between “Tradition” and “Reason” in French
politics and society, a constant struggle between an embattled conservatism and “the
romantic hypostasization of Revolution as such” (Butterfield 1945: 75, 104).
This complacent view of English history, and of its contrast with that of the
French, is of course eminently contestable, and has indeed frequently been contested
in the work of radical historians such as Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson.
But whether or not seen as the self-serving view of the comfortable classes in
English society, there remains an element of truth – at least as perceived by many
of the English – in the contrast. Moreover so far as France is concerned, students
of that country have largely concurred with this view of French history and its role
in French political life. The turbulence of recent French history means that the past
remains urgently alive, permanently present, a constant source of both warnings
and inspiration. “The British [sic]”, says Anne Sa’adah, “achieved closure on most
of their disputes. The French did not, and so for them the past, dense with colliding
ideas, individuals, and groups, remains present. It shapes how people understand
themselves, articulate their aspirations, and assess the possibilities of political life.
It provides the key to the codes in which current conflicts are framed and fought”
(Sa’adah 2003: 1–2; cf. Gildea 1994: 340–44; Nora 2001: xxi).2
The important question, as Butterfield suggests, is the effect of such differences
of history, and of the relation to history, on national consciousness and national
identity. Nations are formed of national memories, of the stories of great men
and great deeds. This, as Ernest Renan says, is “the social capital on which the
national idea is based.” But it not just triumphs and glory but also, and perhaps
more so, defeats and trials that make the nation. “One loves in proportion to the
sacrifices to which one has consented, and in proportion to the ills that one has
suffered … [I]ndeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Mourning
is more important for national memory than triumph, for it imposes obligations, it
demands a collective effort” (Renan [1882] 1990: 19).3
2 It may not be irrelevant to note that the study of “collective memory”, and of its role
in the life of the nation, is a largely French invention, beginning with Maurice Halbwachs
([1950] 1980), a pupil of Durkheim’s, and continuing in the monumental project of Pierre
Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984–92, 1996–98). “History”, as Nora says, “especially the
history of France’s development as a nation, has been our most powerful collective tradition,
our milieu de mémoire par excellence” (1996–8, I: 3). For some stimulating reflections
on that tradition, see Englund 1992; and for the very different English historiographical
tradition, at least in the last century or so, see Mandler 2002; Bentley 2005.
3 Ian Ousby’s (2003) study of the Battle of Verdun, and what it means for French
national memory, illustrates this with outstanding clarity. See also generally Schivelbusch
2004.
English and French National Identity 49
Renan, writing shortly after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, and the
loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, had every reason to feel the point keenly.
It was necessary to wrest some sort of victory – if only a moral victory – from a
crushing defeat. The French, he argued, could take strength from the experience
of suffering and defeat. France would emerge fortified as a nation, more certain of
its identity, clearer as to its values. So had Rome emerged reinvigorated and more
firmly united after its ordeal at the hands of the Carthaginian general Hannibal; so
too would France after the trials of 1870–71.
It is the argument of this paper that it is the experience of defeat, taken with
a particularly disturbed internal history, that has coloured French perceptions of
national identity and shaped the character of its nationalism. This becomes clearer
in a comparison with England and the English. The French and the English share
many features. From the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the break with
Rome under Henry VIII in 1534, the French and the English had a common
history (Clanchy 1998; Davies 1999: 303–401; Carpenter 2004). For much of
the medieval period the French supplied England with a succession of monarchs,
Norman and Plantagenet; French was the language of courtly society and courtly
culture in England; French masons and French quarries supplied the skills and
materials for the building of the great English cathedrals such as Canterbury, York
and Winchester. Even the bitter conflicts between French and English, such as the
Hundred Years’ War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had the appearance
of family quarrels, in which rival kings fought for the joint supremacy of France
and England.
The Protestant Reformation and the loss of English power in France drew clearer
lines between French and English developments. But their histories remained
inextricably interlocked. Now however, it was no longer struggles over a common
Anglo-French patrimony that united them but, as great powers, competition and
conflict for world domination. With the removal of the Dutch challenge at the end
of the seventeenth century, the stage was set for an epic confrontation between the
established power of France and the rising power of England.
The consequences of this conflict for the making of English (and British)
identity have often been noted, most persuasively by Linda Colley (1994). One
clear way, building on earlier traditions, was the drawing of the line between
English – and British – Protestantism and French Catholicism. Another was the
celebration of the English as “the island race”, with the development of the free,
manly, qualities generally held to go with maritime nations as contrasted with
the despotic, militaristic, traditions of the land-based continental nations (see e.g.
Wilson 2003). The two could be fused – as later in Arthur Bryant’s Protestant
Island (1967) and several of Winston Churchill’s writings – in the idea of England
as a Protestant bastion of liberty standing against the reactionary and benighted
forces of international Catholicism on the Continent. Here the English could draw
on a popular tradition, going back to the sixteenth century, of the contrast between
free, maritime, commercial, and Protestant nations, such as the English and the
Dutch, and the despotic, continental, Catholic powers, hostile to trade, such as the
Spanish and the French (Armitage 2000: 125–45). There were, in other words, a
plethora of contrasts, ancient and more recent, that could supply ready stereotypes
in the emerging competition between France and England. In focusing on the
experience of empire, and the contrasting political histories, at least as perceived,
of the two countries, we should be clear that we are dealing with only two of
the many possible factors that need to be considered in the way Anglo-French
interaction shaped national self-perceptions.4
Scholars of late have been keenly aware of the imperial factor, and of imperial
rivalry, in the making of English national identity (e.g. Wilson 1998; Baucom
1999; Kumar 2003). Less often remarked is the way this conflict also shaped
French self-understanding. Already in the eighteenth century, as David Bell has
shown, rivalry with the English – always the preferred French term, even after
the making of Britain in 1707 – had begun to make its mark on French self-
conceptions. This could lead to a sense not simply of basic national but even, at
times, of racial difference, “as the French struggled to differentiate themselves
from the people with whom they often felt the greatest affinity and similarity, yet
who had also emerged as the greatest apparent threat to their own honor, prosperity,
and understanding of the world: the English” (Bell 2003: 104; see also Acomb
1950). Ressentiment, as Liah Greenfeld above all has emphasized, is a great factor
in the growth of European nationalism; and nowhere was it more keenly felt than
in eighteenth-century France in face of the rising power of England (Greenfeld
1992: 177–84).
French national consciousness was no doubt fed by conflicts with a variety
of other neighbours, first Spain and later Germany. It has in fact been common
to stress the rivalry with Germany as a central fact in the making of French
nationalism. As the joint legatees of the Carolingian empire, France and Germany
can be seen to have been engaged in a more or less continuous struggle over their
inheritance for more than a thousand years. Did not the great French historian
Ernest Lavisse reduce the Franco-Prussian war and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to
a single episode in the epic struggle between Germany and France for the central
strip of Lotharingia – a struggle that had been going on since the division of the
Carolingian empire in 843? (Gildea 1994: 122; see also Ousby 2003: 2). Even if
one does not take so long-term a view, there is material enough in the shorter term
to lend much plausibility to this position. When one considers the crippling defeat
of France in 1871, the sense of wounded pride and the frequent calls for revenge
against Germany up to the First World War, and the even greater humiliation of
1940, it is hard not to agree that Franco-German rivalry is one of the keys to the
formation of French national identity.5
4 For a comprehensive and sparkling account of the interactions between the English
and French since the time of Louis XIV, see Tombs and Tombs 2007.
5 “Anti-German sentiment is so profoundly rooted in French history since 1870 that
it is almost tempting to regard it as a constitutive feature of French national character”
(Hazareesingh 1994: 133; see also Ousby 2003: 152–87; Schivelbusch 2004: 103–87).
But the rivalry with England is equally important – arguably more important
in modern times (Weber 1986: 105). Not only does it have the peculiar intensity
that comes with intimacy, the product of a centuries-old joint history. More
importantly, following the decline and dissolution of the Spanish and Portuguese
empires, it was France and England – not France and Germany – who stood forth
most clearly as the candidates for world empire in the modern period. The making
of French national identity, just as the making of English national identity, has
to be seen at least in part as a product of imperial ambitions and imperial rule.
This experience the French and the English shared, with something of the same
consequences. What separated them, what produced the contrasting character of
their sense of nationhood, were the striking differences in outcome.
Like Butterfield in the passage quoted earlier, I have in this section variously
spoken of “national identity”, “national consciousness”, “nationhood” and
“nationalism”. Elsewhere I use other terms – “national sentiment”, “nationality”
– in the lexicon of what Steven Englund (1992: 310) felicitously calls “nation-
discourse”. Clearly it would be helpful to have precise definitions of these terms,
and to employ them accordingly. Equally clearly no such precision is to be found,
for the good reason that the phenomena in question do not lend themselves to
it, as nearly the whole literature on nations and nationalism testifies. When does
“national sentiment” become “national consciousness”, when does “national
consciousness” solidify into “national identity”? When and in what ways does
the sense of “nationhood” or “nationality” become “nationalism”, a more explicit
and conscious declaration – perhaps – of membership, usually accompanied by a
celebration of the nation?
There are differences of meaning, of course, as even the above briefly suggests.
But those differences cannot be specified in advance, as it were, in the form of
neat definitions acceptable to all students of the subject. The best one can do is
to indicate by the context why the particular term might be the most appropriate,
always aware that it can be contested and that alternative terms are nearly always
available – even if “family resemblances” between them can usually be discerned
(see on this Calhoun 1997: 4–8; also generally Englund 1992).
Perhaps the term that comes closest to the concerns of this paper is “national
identity”. I am interested, that is, in the different ways in which the English and
French came to conceive themselves as a nation, and the part played in this by
their differing experiences as rival nations. That this would affect the character of
English and French nationalism – as an ideology or a movement – seems obvious;
but my purpose here is not to explore this further ramification in any detail.
Imperial Nations
For much of the time between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, the
English and the French shared the struggle for the mastery of Europe and the
world. In the earlier period, the powerful and wealthy state created under the “Sun
King” Louis XIV appeared likely to emerge as the eventual winner. Militarily
powerful, economically prosperous, culturally dominant, the French seemed to
carry all before them. Bourbons sat on the throne not just in France but in Spain
and several of the Italian states. French power was strong in North America, the
Caribbean, and India. French was the language of the educated classes all over
Europe, French culture the culture to admire and imitate.6
By the middle of the nineteenth century a dramatic change had come about.
As a result of the Seven Years War (1756–63), one of the most decisive wars of
modern times, the French were largely driven out of North America, the Caribbean
and India. Britain set itself on the road to world power (Bowen 1998; Duffy
2002; Ferguson 2004: 32). The French got their revenge by aiding the American
colonists against British rule, and later Napoleon spectacularly renewed French
imperial ambitions. Once more however French hopes were thwarted by defeats
in the battles of the Nile (1798), Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815), allowing
further territorial gains by Britain. Other rivals – Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch
– had already succumbed to Napoleon, who thereby aided Britain’s rise to be “the
first modern superpower” (Duffy 2002: 242).
In the early 1840s the French saw the opportunity to gain influence in the
crumbling Ottoman Empire by supporting the rebellious Egyptian pasha Mehemet
Ali. British concern to prop up the Ottomans again put paid to French designs.
But, unlike the cases of India and North America, the French were not eliminated
from North Africa. From their base in Algiers, seized in 1830, the French
expanded along the Mediterranean littoral. Algeria was formally incorporated in
1870; Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912) followed. French North Africa was the
spearhead for the incursions into sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the formation of
French West Africa (1895) and French Equatorial Africa (1910).
Even more impressive were the gains in far-away south-east Asia. French
intervention in Vietnam in 1858 on the side of Catholic missionaries led to
increasing French involvement and imperial ambitions in the region. Between
1863 and 1893 Cambodia, Laos, and the Vietnamese territories – Annam, Tonkin,
and Cochin China – came under French rule, forming French Indo-China.
These were substantial gains, and France was undoubtedly the second imperial
power in the nineteenth century (Fieldhouse 1982: 303–4; Aldrich 1996). But
there, for the French, was the rub. Second is not good enough. Once more it was
their old enemy, the English/British, who took the lead, expanding into every
corner of the world, dominating the sea-lanes, and thwarting the French wherever
and whenever it suited them. The British had no special interest in Indo-China –
there was no British equivalent of Lyons silk manufacturers in pursuit of raw silk
6 For the dominant position of France, politically, economically and culturally, for
much of the eighteenth century, see especially Jones (2002); see also Newman (1987:
1–18). Niall Ferguson remarks that, despite British successes in the War of the Spanish
Succession (1702–13), “the danger that France would win a struggle for global mastery
against Britain was a real one, and remained real for the better part of a century” (2004: 30).
– and were content to let the French take over the region while the British took
over Borneo, Burma, Malaya and the rest of India, ‘the jewel in the crown’. For
good measure they also gobbled up Hong Kong (1842) and parts of New Guinea.
But it was in Africa where the French received their severest and most
humiliating check. The French dreamed of a vast African empire, linked by a
Trans-Saharan Railway running from Algiers to the Sudan, with branches to the
key port city of Dakar on the West African coast. The French writer Pierre Vuillot
exhorted his fellow-countrymen to conquer the Sahara and pursue the goal of “a
French Africa from Chad to the Atlantic, from Algeria to the Soudan” (Fleming
2003: 22).The French, routed by the Prussians in 1871 and with no hope of
avenging the defeat in Europe itself, sought to compensate themselves by gaining
glory in the great spaces of Africa and elsewhere. “It was in the sands of Tunisia
and in the jungles of Indo-China that the officer-corps recovered its pride after the
humiliation of 1871” (Sedgwick 1968: 84; see also Fieldhouse 1982: 305; Doyle
1986: 315; Hazareesingh 1994: 132; Gildea 1994: 121).
The Trans-Saharan Railway was never built, and British diplomacy and
military power ensured that the French remained shut up in the northwestern
corner of Africa (the one exception being the island of Madagascar off the east
coast). A particularly cruel blow was the effective loss of the Suez Canal, built by
French enterprise and French engineering skills, to Britain. Disraeli’s purchase of
half the shares in the Suez Canal Company in 1875 – and thereby a preponderant
interest – laid the basis of a growing British interest in Egypt which ended in
outright control after 1882, displacing the French who had historic ties there going
back to Napoleon. A further humiliation attended renewed French attempts in the
region in the so-called “Fashoda incident”of 1898. British troops moving up from
Egypt and the Sudan forced the withdrawal of the French garrison at Fashoda, on
the head-waters of the Nile. The retreat from Fashoda caused an uproar in French
domestic politics. Here was a reversal that, if not quite as spectacular as the one
inflicted by Nelson on Napoleon at the battle of the Nile, had repercussions almost
as momentous. It ended French hopes in Egypt and the Sudan, and put paid to
French ambitions of an equatorial African empire stretching from the west coast
to the east (Robinson and Gallagher 1962: 602, 629; Andrew and Kanya-Forstner
1971: 113; Betts 1978: 31–3; Baumgart 1982: 63–8, 181–2).
The contrast with Britain could scarcely be greater, or more apparent to
contemporaries (Doyle 1986: 307; Brunschwig 1966: 20–30). Britain consolidated
its rule in India and in south Asia. It had ousted France in the Caribbean, leaving it
with Martinique and a few other islands. It became the dominant power in Africa,
directly ruling nearly half the continent. Together with the dominions of Australia,
New Zealand, Canada and South Africa the British Empire at the height of its
power – just after the First World War – occupied nearly a quarter of the world’s
land surface and included a quarter of the world’s population. This made it “the
most extensive empire in world history” – physically three times the size of the
French empire and six times in terms of population (Ferguson 2004: 240–41).
More so than that, was the worldwide dominance of Britain’s “informal

empire”, in manufactures, trade and finance. In the mid-nineteenth century
Britain accounted for more than half the world’s trade in manufactured goods,
and even more in services. British ships carried goods equal to those of all of the
rest of the world put together. London was the world’s financial centre, “banker
to the world”. British influence through investment and banking was powerful
even in those areas, such as China and South America, where Britain had no
formal imperial presence (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Bayly 1989: 72–3,
143; Ferguson 2004: 241–7).
How could all of this not be galling to Gallic pride, in the light of France’s own
great past as the leader of Europe and light to the world? Repeatedly frustrated
by Britain in the competition for world power, the French were led again and
again to reflect on the reasons for their failure. Frequently this involved looking
for scapegoats at home, as at the time of the Fashoda incident, when an unholy
coalition of Protestants and Jews, supporters of the “traitor”, Captain Dreyfus,
were blamed by French nationalists for French humiliation at the hands of the
British (Gildea 1994: 252, 308). Imperial failure led to bouts of anguished national
soul-searching. What was it about France that had brought it to this pass? Why was
modern France incapable of repeating the triumphs of the past?7
The contrast with the English/British in the rivalry for empire in the nineteenth
century was repeated in the dissolution of empire in the twentieth century. The
British got out of their empire not gracefully, nor even opportunely, from the
point of view of the subject peoples at least. They departed India in unseemly
haste, leaving behind the bloodshed and tragedy of partition into two states, India
and Pakistan. In some of the African states, such as South Africa and Southern
Rhodesia, the British legacy was entrenched white minorities who were given
a free hand to oppress and exploit the native black population; in others, such
as Uganda and Nigeria, they left a legacy of tribal rivalry that was to divide
the countries in bitter civil wars after independence. Nor should we forget the
violence and brutality of the independence struggles in some of the colonies, such
as Malaya and Kenya.
7 As Jules Ferry, the principal advocate for French imperialism during the Third
Republic, observed, France cannot be content with ordinary success as a nation: “One cannot
propose to France a political ideal analogous to the ideal that animates nations like the free
land of Belgium or republican Switzerland. France has other needs. She cannot simply be
a free country. She must also be a great country, exercising over the destinies of Europe all
the influence that is hers” (quoted Sa’adah 2003: 263). As Sa’adah notes, “the affirmation
of French greatness was central to all definitions of French identity” (2003: 33). See also,
for the expressions of hurt nationalist pride in this period, and the determination to reverse
French fortunes, the essays in Tombs (1991). Earlier, the spectacularly bungled attempt
by Napoleon III to re-start a French empire in South America by installing Maximilian
as emperor of Mexico had added one more sorry episode to nineteenth-century French
imperialism. See on this Cunningham (2001).
So the British retreat from empire can in no way be considered an unqualified

success story. Nevertheless, when compared with decolonization in other
major European empires – the Dutch and Portuguese, for instance – the British
withdrawal was remarkably peaceful (Holland 1985: 191–265; Kahler 1984;
Spruyt 2005). With the virtually unanimous agreement of all the political parties,
British governments from 1945 to the 1970s wound up the British Empire – the
largest the world has ever known – with a speed and an orderliness that still seems
astonishing. If, as Sir John Seeley famously said, the British had “conquered and
peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind” (Seeley 1971: 12), they now
very consciously and calculatedly, even cynically, disembarrassed themselves of
their imperial robes.
And the French? The French gave up their sub-Saharan African colonies
reasonably gracefully – despite the rhetoric about the Sahara, the French were never
as intensely involved there as elsewhere (Betts 1991: 116; Holland 1985: 154). But
over their principal imperial possessions, in North Africa and Indo-China, they
fought bitter and long-drawn-out rearguard actions for which at times they seemed
to be prepared to sacrifice France itself. There was nothing in the British case to
equal the eight-year war in Indo-China that ended with the humiliating defeat by
the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954; nor the equally vicious and brutal war
between French troops and insurgents that, following almost immediately on the
loss of Indo-China, convulsed Algeria between 1955 and 1962 (Holland 1985:
163–75, Betts 1991: 79–93; Thomas et al. 2008: 182–251).
Historians have noted the irony that “modern French colonial history begins
and ends in Algeria”, with military encounters there; they have also noted that “the
irony is sharpened by the realisation that the geographical antipodes of French
colonial empire – Algeria and Indochina – were similar extremes, the locations of
the two most serious wars of decolonization” (Betts 1991: 113). What needs to be
added to this is the internal impact of these struggles on French domestic society.
The trauma of the Indochinese and especially Algerian imbroglios bitterly divided
French society, leading to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the real prospect
of civil war (Sa’adah 2003: 79–95; Shepard 2006). De Gaulle offered himself as
saviour, now as during the dark days of the Second World War. But once more,
as after the Franco-Prussian War, as after the constant rebuffs and reversals in
the struggle for empire and global influence, the French were driven back upon
themselves, forced to reflect on the causes of their misfortunes and to consider
what it was in the national psyche that – compared to the more successful English
– led to such disasters.
Imperial Legacies
There is one more thing to consider in this comparison of France and England
as imperial nations. This has to do with imperial legacies, and in particular the
pattern of race relations that has resulted in the respective countries as a result of
their policies towards the subject peoples of their empires. This too brings out the
contrasting attitude to nationhood and national identity in the two countries.
The French, as is widely recognized (e.g. Fieldhouse 1982: 308; Doyle 1986:
307; Bell 2003: 209), were broadly assimilationist in their attitudes to their
non-European subjects. The policies adopted during the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic wars, of exporting French ideas, French culture, and French
administration to the peoples of Europe, were later continued in the French
colonies. Arabs in North Africa, Africans in black Africa and the Caribbean,
Vietnamese and other orientals in Indo-China, were to become Frenchmen and
Frenchwomen.8 The aim, as Jules Ferry, the great imperialist spokesman of the
Third Republic put it, was to spread France’s “language, her culture, her arms,
and her genius” (Doyle 1986: 315; see also Murphy 1968: 139–75; Aldrich 1996:
97–100; Conklin, 1997: 1–23). The French had as missionary a purpose as the
English, indeed perhaps more so. Was the mission civlisatrice not an expression –
if not a new idea – that the French gave to the world?
About what exactly this civilizing mission consisted in there was some
dispute, reflecting the splits in French society. Conservatives stressed Catholicism
and the need to convert the heathen to (the right kind of) Christianity. Liberals
and radicals – those that were not hostile to empire in the first place – played up
Reason, Science and Progress – the hallmarks of the secular French Enlightenment
(Hazareesingh 1994: 132). But there was no great disagreement over the goal of
producing essentially French citizens, as alike the citizens of metropolitan France
as it was possible to be. The civic republicanism of the French Revolution, made
into something like an official ideology during the Third Republic, served as the
basic template for moulding the model French citizen, at home and in the colonies.9
This conception was to have significant consequences for debates about
citizenship and nationhood in the post-imperial period, with the arrival of millions
of non-European former subjects into the home country as immigrants. French
governments of virtually all political persuasions insisted that immigrants should
8 One of the often-remarked consequences of this was that Arab, African and
Vietnamese children in French colonial schools were taught from school history books that
often started with the statement, “nos ancêtres, les gaulois …” Assimilation was, of course,
an ideal, a goal, and was in any case never uncontested. Both in law and in day-to-day
practice the distinction between indigines, who were mostly subjects, and Europeans, who
were mostly French citizens, governed much of the life of the colonies in the nineteenth
century. But from the late nineteenth century on the concept of assimilation became
increasingly influential in French thought and policy, and had an increasingly strong effect
on the colonies (Aldrich 1996: 110–11). On colonial administration, French policies of
nationality and citizenship, etc., over time, see Fieldhouse 1982: 308–24; Aldrich 1996:
212–30; Weil 2008. On the complexities and contested nature of assimilation, see Saada
2002, 2012; Wilder 2003, 2005; Bleich 2005: 173–8.
9 See on this Brubaker (1992: 85–113); Hargreaves (1995: 149–76); Noiriel (1996:
xix–xxi, and passim); Birnbaum (2001: 243–50); Favell (2001: 40–93); Sa’adah (2003:
91–3, 199–243).
conform to the basic model of secular republican citizenship; religious symbols

and practices, especially non-Christian ones, were to be kept as private matters,
away from the public realm, including the realm of public education. Extreme
right-wing groups, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, fanned the flames
of French nationalism, darkly predicting the loss of French national identity under
the waves of immigrants and their alien ways. Immigrant groups, particularly
many among the five million or so Muslims, with some support from liberals and
radicals, vigorously resisted this centralizing and secularizing drive. In the face
of a rigid and intolerant conception of French republican identity they drew upon
French traditions of equality and individual freedom which proclaimed respect for
the equal rights of all – including the right freely to practice one’s religion.
Once more France is engaged in an intense and passionate debate about
its national identity (Hargreaves 1995: 149–76; Noiriel 1996; Kastoryano
2002: 99–116; Sa’adah 2003: 199–260; Bleich 2005).10 Once more it has had
to summon up events, ideas and personalities from its past, as buttresses and
ballast for conflicting positions. What is the French nation, and what does it
mean to belong to it? Is the republican inheritance of the French Revolution
a clear and sufficient guide to French identity, or has it, as some claim, by its
“hegemonic” position stifled awareness of alternatives from within its own
past (e.g. Englund 1992: 316)? Is French identity truly civic, as has usually
been held (e.g. Brubaker 1992)? Or, as Jews were perhaps the first to suspect,
following their “emancipation” in the course of the French Revolution, did
being “civic” in France amount to taking on an “ethnic” identity, as secular,
rational, and republican beings (Kates 1989)? French policies in the empire,
and the consequences of this when former subjects refused to live up to French
expectations, were bound to stimulate such questions.
Such debates about national identity have undoubtedly also been stimulated
in Britain, and especially in England, by the onset of mass immigration from
former colonies in the period after 1945. But these debates have been based on
different understandings, and have drawn on different resources, as compared
with the French (see Favell 2001; Bleich 2003). For one thing, unlike the French,
the English have little tradition of reflection on nationalism and national identity.
Their debates have therefore had to start from scratch, so to speak (Kumar 2003:
10 The killing by two radical Muslims, on 7 January 2015, of a group of French

cartoonists based around the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has re-ignited in the most
spectacular fashion imaginable agonized debates about French national identity, and
especially the place of civic republicanism within it. This debate about national identity
is by no means confined to France – following similar attacks, Dutch and Danes have also
been engaged in intense bouts of self-examination – but the targeting of Charlie Hebdo has
given it a renewed and heightened relevance there. Especially at issue is how far France
should – like the USA, Canada, Australia, and a number of other countries – recognize
itself as a multicultural society, something it has hitherto resisted. For a brief account of the
reactions to the shootings in France, see Erlanger 2015.
249–69).11 For another, the place of non-white or non-European immigrants in

the English nation, and their relation to English national identity, have to be seen
against a background of their very different treatment as subjects in the former
colonies of the British Empire.
As compared with the French, whose goal was assimilation and whose methods
therefore involved direct rule and integration of the colonies in a uniform system
of administration centred on Paris, British imperial rule was generally indirect
and marked by considerable local variation. The position was classically stated
by Lord Lugard, Governor-General of Nigeria in the 1900s, who set the technique
of indirect rule within the perspective of eventual independence for the colonies.
“Liberty and self-government’, he claimed, “can best be secured to the native
population by leaving them free to manage their own affairs through their own
rulers” (Bayly 1989: 125; see also Cell 1999: 240). Enlightened paternalism was
here satisfyingly harnessed to cheap government: the British throughout their
imperial history had far fewer soldiers and administrators per head of the subject
population than the French (Doyle 1986: 307; Cell 1999: 232; Ferguson 2004:
163, 247).
The policy of indirect rule through native rulers was never mechanically
adopted throughout the British Empire – in India, especially, it was significantly
11 This is of course a matter of relative emphasis, rather than the assertion of a

complete absence of a tradition in England of reflection on national identity, or at least on
“Englishness”. Gerald Newman (1987), for instance, has made the case for the development
of what he calls English “cultural nationalism” in the second half of the eighteenth century;
Katie Trumpener (1997) also sees the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as
giving rise to genres of literary nationalism which both asserted the separate character of
the Celtic nations in Britain and at the same time – through a shared experience of empire
– aspired to fuse them in a common Britishness. There is also the persistent concern with
“Anglo-Saxonism”, again strongly marked in the literary sphere, as an important strand
of English national identity (Horsman 1981: 9–77; MacDougall 1982; Simmons 1990;
Young 2008). One might also trace a more distinctly political tradition of reflection on the
English (or British) national character through the thought of Burke, Bentham, Carlyle,
Macaulay, Bagehot, Seeley, Barker and others (see e.g. Greenleaf 1988; Mandler 2006;
for an interesting variant on this, emphasizing the more radical tradition, see Mendilow
1986). I do not wish to deny these developments, nor the possibility that they can be put
into the framework of a distinctively national (English or British) tradition, though I do
not think that they always add up to the expressions of nationalism claimed for them. My
point is simply that, as compared with the French and several other Continental nations,
these various currents in English life have not produced a continuous, self-reflective
tradition of thinking about the nation, national identity, and national destiny (one important
reason being the very confusion of “English” and “British” to be found in most of the
accounts above, creating difficulties in particular for the English and their sense of their
own distinctive national identity – hence the common denial that there is such a thing
as “English nationalism”). The reasons for this are partly the subject of this paper; for
additional discussion see Kumar (2003: passim, esp. 18–21, 175–87; see also Kumar 2006,
and Chapter 5, below).
breached in the distinction between “British India”, subject to direct rule, and
the India of the princely states (Cell 1999: 236–7). But it is a good indication of
the general tendency of British imperial rule. One consequence was a willingness
to accept a greater variety of customs and cultures than was true in the French
case. Such an attitude of pluralism made it easier for British statesmen to espouse
a policy of “multiculturalism” when, in the post-war period, the question arose
of how best to integrate immigrants into British society (Favell 2001: 94–110;
Joppke 1999: 223–6). Taken with the absence, among English people themselves,
of any clear sense of what English national identity might mean, this policy bid
fair to be the best answer to the challenge posed by mass immigration.
For various reasons, it has not really turned out that way. Threats of the “break-
up of Britain”, coupled with the pull of the European Union and at the same time
a fundamental uncertainty as to where England stood in relation to the United
States, have precipitated an urgent debate about English national identity that
makes the earlier period of pluralism seem innocent and somewhat remote (Kumar
2003: 239–73). English politicians have come to stress a tougher policy towards
immigrants, and to define a stronger sense of Englishness (or Britishness) to which
immigrants must conform. A policy of creeping assimilation seems in the making,
shown strikingly by the recent decision to make all new naturalized British citizens
take a new “citizenship oath”: a declaration of their commitment to the nation
which is clearly designed to indicate a stricter conformity to cultural norms (The
New and the Old 2003; see also Paul 2001; Ward 2004: 113–40; Kumar 2008).
But still there is nothing yet proposed in Britain as radical as the banning of
headscarves among Muslim girls in French public schools, and the attendant attack
on other symbols that offend against the secular republicanism that is the official
definition of French national identity (Terray 2004; Joppke 2009). Here as before,
a strong sense of national identity in France, as compared with a weak one in
England, have produced characteristically different outcomes. The French, many
of them at least, think they know who they are; the English are still searching. The
French think they have a model of citizenship and belonging to which all must
conform; the English are alarmed at the pluralism that they have so far encouraged
but find it difficult to define the model of English or British identity to which they
might expect people – they themselves included – to conform.
Threats to Nationhood: France and England
I have stressed so far the differences in imperial experience and attitudes between
the French and the English. This is because this is an aspect of the formation of
national identity in the two countries that has not received much attention. But we
should of course include some discussion of a phenomenon that has been widely
acknowledged, though not necessarily in relation to questions of national identity.
This is, as compared with the English, the succession of crises and catastrophes
that have punctuated modern French history at regular intervals (see the first
section of this paper). There is, in other words, an internal, domestic component
that must be taken into account in comparing the attitudes of the two nations to
their sense of nationhood and national identity. This distinction is admittedly
somewhat artificial. French imperialism, as much as English/British imperialism,
has to be related to its domestic history, and vice versa (cf. Burton 2003). But it
is helpful to consider domestic events separately, as an additional factor in the
explanation of differing styles of nationalism.
Here too the story parallels the imperial experience, and the contrasts between
relative English success and French failure, at least as perceived by their respective
peoples. The English can congratulate themselves on an orderly evolution, at least
since the seventeenth century. Their revolution, and its attendant disorders, are
far enough back in time to be decently buried. The “whig interpretation” of their
history, which became the national myth, stresses progress through continuity and
gradual change, rather than abrupt shifts and revolutionary convulsions (see further
Chapter 9, below). Despite the disruptions of the industrial revolution, despite the
wholesale replacement of a rural way of life by an urban one, despite the rise to
global dominance and its subsequent demise, there was a sufficient approximation
to reality in the Whig interpretation of English developments to make the English
look complacently on themselves and their history, especially as compared with
their French neighbours. Such complacency, such an impression of orderliness in
their affairs, did not encourage English introspection (as Durkheim once rather
acidly observed)12 – least of all in relation to national identity.
France, once more, sees it differently. The French Revolution of 1789
created fissures that, if they have healed even now, bitterly divided French
society throughout the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries. The
legacies of that revolution were themselves the causes of a succession of other
revolutions – in 1830, in 1848, in 1871. Each of these revolutions in turn threw
up fresh antagonists, with new grievances which they stubbornly nursed over the
course of many generations. Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, republicans,
liberals, Opportunists, Catholics, socialists, anarchists: all fought each other with
a fierceness and intransigeance that were indeed matched in other continental
societies but were conspicuously lacking in Britain. “France is gifted”, Marc Ferro
remarks, “not so much for battle as for civil war” (quoted Braudel 1993: 120).
The Third Republic is as good a place as any to indicate the nature and
magnitude of the conflicts, though a similar story could be told of virtually any
period in French history from 1789 to the 1960s. Born of the disaster of the Franco-
Prussian war, and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the Third Republic started its career
over the 20,000 dead bodies of the Communards, victims of the crushing of the
Paris Commune of 1871 by the new government headed by Thiers. No succeeding
working class movement was ever to forget this ruthless act of the government
against its own people. In the 1880s the Republic survived an attempted coup
12 “Among a people who consider their institutions everything they ought to be,
nothing can incite thought to apply itself to social matters” (Durkheim 1960: 383).
d’état by the populist demagogue General Boulanger, with his rallying call of a
revanchist war against Germany. The feeling in the army and in other conservative
institutions in French society showed itself again in the Dreyfus affair that
convulsed French society in the 1890s. Once again, the affair ended in a mood
of bitterness and mutual recrimination. No reconciliation between the competing
parties was offered; none seemed possible. The separation of Church and State in
1905, thus fulfilling long-standing radical republican demands, was simply the
victory of the strong over those who, for the moment, had been weakened and
discredited by their part in the Dreyfus affair.
The Third Republic survived these crises and the enormous strains of the First
World War. Perhaps, if we recall Renan’s remark about the unifying effects of
suffering, it was the very horror of that war, and the example of the thousands of men
who sacrificed their lives for the nation, that helped to reconcile the various parties
and gave the Third Republic a new lease of life. But traditional divisions revived
in the 1930s, with violent clashes between communist and fascist parties, and open
expressions of virulent anti-semitism in the press, the Church, and elsewhere. The
victory of Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936, widely seen as marking a turn
towards socialism in France, further fuelled these divisions between left and right.
The Popular Front government, incapable like all previous governments of healing
the rifts, fell in its turn. But it was the old enemy, Germany, that delivered the coup
de grâce. The defeat and occupation of France in 1940 marked its lowest point
since the earlier defeat by Prussia in 1870. It was a bitter irony that the country
whose actions had brought the Third Republic into being was there, at the end, to
dig its grave.
Such episodes in the life of a nation have their inevitable consequences.
As with Germany after 1945, they forced upon the political class in France an
insistent questioning and soul-searching, a constant process of reflection on the
national character and purpose. This process can be said to have begun with the
1789 Revolution, in the urgent debates surrounding it at the time and in the later
reflections by scholars, statesmen, and intellectuals. These would include works
by such thinkers as Francois Guizot, Jules Michelet, and Alexis de Tocqueville.13
Later works express the same spirit of interrogation and inquiry. There is Ernest
Renan’s famous lecture at the Sorbonne, ‘What is the Nation?’ (1882), stamped
with his anguish at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The writings of Fernand Braudel
and Pierre Chaunu on the “sensibility” and the “identity” of France, and of Pierre
Nora on French “collective memory”, are in much the same vein of painful
reflection, not to say nostalgia (Englund 1992). And one could add here the
growing literature on Vichy France, and what that dark episode has to say about
France and its character (e.g. Jackson 2001). Marx once wrote that “France is the
only country of the ‘idea’; that is to say, the idea it has of itself” (quoted in Rubel
13 For an illuminating examination of this tradition of historiography and national

commentary, seen retrospectively from the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989, see
Kaplan (1995).
1960: 139). How perfectly is that exemplified in the famous opening section of
Charles de Gaulle’s war memoirs, whose first line runs: “Toute ma vie, je me suis
fait une certaine idée de la France”(“All my life, I have harboured a certain idea
of France”) (de Gaulle 1954: 1). The continuing stream of works on “the idea”
or the “destiny” of France is powerful testimony to the continuing vitality of that
tradition (e.g. Birnbaum 2001).
I have argued elsewhere (Kumar 2000, 2003) that imperial nations often have
problems coming to terms not just with the nationalism of their subject nations but
also with their own nationalism. That has been the case with Russians, Austrians,
and the Ottoman Turks. It has also been strikingly the case with the English.
The creators first of an “inner empire”, the United Kingdom of England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, and later of a second “outer empire”, their vast overseas
empire, the English developed a sense of “missionary nationalism” that gave
them an identity and a role in the world, as the carriers of particular “missions”:
Protestantism, parliamentary liberties, free trade, the rule of law. Such an identity
carried with it the suppression or, better, the ignorance of or indifference to
nationalism, as that ideology came to be conventionally expressed in its nineteenth
century forms (see further Chapter 2, above). The result is a conspicuous absence
in the English case of any sustained tradition of reflection on English nationalism
and English national identity.
France too is an imperial nation. Like the English, they too built up an “inner
empire”, starting with the conquest of the independent territories of the old
Frankish lands by the Capetian kings. Like the English, indeed as their principal
rivals, they too built up a second “outer empire”, a large overseas empire, in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And like the English, they saw themselves as
the carriers of a special mission, the mission civilisatrice, the mission to carry the
torch of the Enlightenment and of the arts of civilized living throughout the world.
But, unlike the English, the French developed a strong sense of nationalism
and national identity. Indeed, pace Greenfeld (1992), they can even be said to
have invented modern nationalism, in the course of the French Revolution (see,
e.g. Brubaker 1992: Chapter 1; Bell 2003; Kumar 2015). The difference has to do
with the difference of the histories that we have briefly surveyed. The English and
the French differed as imperial nations – the French failing not in any absolute
sense, perhaps, but in relation to the rivals against whom they most measured
themselves, and with whom they were in the fiercest competition (the “narcissism
of small differences”, as Freud termed it). Similarly, compared with the internal
development of the English, modern French history was punctuated by conflicts
and crises that repeatedly put whole classes and communities at war with each
other. The result of both these experiences was to create a long and fertile tradition
of national self-reflection in France – something absent in the English case. Which
experience best equips the two nations in facing the challenges of the present
– immigration, Europeanization, globalization – is something that remains to be
seen.
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Publishing.
Chapter 4
Britain, England and Europe: Cultures
in Contraflow*
National and European Identities
It is clearly mistaken to counterpose, as is often done, nationalism or national

identity squarely against “Europe” or European identity. Different nations have
responded to the European challenge – or invitation – in different ways. For
Greece, Spain and Portugal, membership of the European Union has been a
source of national pride. It is an indication that they have overcome a history of
backwardness and authoritarianism. They have become truly modern, like other
great European nations such as France, Britain or Germany. Becoming European
in these cases does not contradict or undermine national identity; on the contrary
it enhances it. It means that they have arrived. It is a recognition of an achieved
status as a modern nation state.1
Italy and Germany too, for somewhat different reasons, have on the whole
welcomed membership of the European Union.2 For them too joining the Union
*Acknowledgements: This is a revised version of a paper first given at the 13th

International Conference of Europeanists, ‘Europe in the New Millennium’, Chicago, 14–16
March 2002. For valuable comments I should like to thank the presenters and participants in
my panel, especially Gerard Delanty, Juan Díez Medrano and Gianfranco Poggi.
1 As Pablo Jáuregui has shown for Spain, the idea of Europe as the source of national
regeneration was already popular at the turn of the twentieth century, following Spain’s
disastrous defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Its best known exponent was José
Ortega y Gasset, who declared in a public lecture of 1910: “To feel the ills of Spain is to desire
to be European … Regeneration is inseparable from Europeanization … Regeneration is
the desire; Europeanization is the means to satisfy it. It was clearly seen from the beginning
that Spain was the problem and Europe the solution” (in Jáuregui 2002: 20).
2 I speak throughout this paper of “Germany”, “Italy”, “England”, etc., as if they
are unified entities, speaking with one voice. Clearly that is not the case. The populations
of most European societies, at both the elite and mass levels, are very divided in their
attitudes to Europe, reflecting generally very different interests. Nevertheless, for the kind
of argument I am making I think this caution – essential in other kinds of analyses – is less
important. The argument works at a level of generality sufficiently high to encompass a
considerable variety of view-points. What we may be considering in most cases are official
ideologies, national self-conceptions developed through the medium of public institutions,
such as schools and the mass media, over sometimes long periods of time; but by that
has brought solid gains in national self-estimation. In their cases the problem to be
overcome is not backwardness but a troublesome and disfiguring past. Membership
of the European Union helps them bury a recent past of fascism, totalitarianism
and catastrophic defeat in war. It enables them to see themselves as reborn nations.
Giving up a certain amount of sovereignty in return is not necessarily only a loss.
On the contrary it can be seen positively, as a mode of penance, a recognition of
past guilt, and an act of healing and reconciliation (Borri 1994: 10; Knischewski
1996: 134; Fulbrook 1999: 201).
In all these cases we see instances of what Alan Milward (2000) has called
“the European rescue of the nation-state”. Europe has not so much threatened
national identities as offered them the chance to reinvent themselves, in
circumstances in which some kind of refashioning was urgently called for.3
Europe has been seen not primarily as the destroyer of national sovereignty but
as the agency of national regeneration.
For Britain, and especially for England, things look very different.
Membership of the European Union is perceived against a historical background
of industrial supremacy, world empire, and victory in the Second World War.
Entry into Europe therefore carries the character of a loss, if not outright
humiliation, an admission that Britain is an ordinary nation, just like other
nations. The implied surrender of national sovereignty is especially threatening
to the English, for whom the principle of sovereignty has been a cardinal item
of their national identity.
Moreover, for over two centuries Europe in various guises has functioned as
“the Other” of “this island race”. It has been a negative reference point for the
construction of British identities, collectively and separately (Colley 1994). What
happens when that reference point disappears? How do the different nations that
make up the British Isles come to view Europe? What does “Europe” mean to
them in the construction or reconstruction of their various national identities?
How does it affect their relations to each other? These questions have taken on a
new significance in the light of a radical transformation of Britain itself.
very token they have become the forms of understanding of quite large sections of the
population, at all levels of society. The problem of interests and differential perception of
course applies not just to attitudes to Europe but in all questions of “national identity” and
what that is presumed to mean. Nevertheless that does not, nor should it, stop us using the
concept of national identity so long as we “de-construct” it when necessary.
3 We can see something similar in the position of the new Eastern European applicants
– Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and others – for membership of the European
Union. They too have pasts – the past not just of communist rule but in many cases of
authoritarian political traditions stretching further back – that they wish to annul. For them
too accession to the EU would symbolize a fresh start. It would announce their arrival as
equals to Western European nations, in a community of nations dedicated to the ideals of
democracy, modernity and prosperity.
Britain, England and Europe 71
The Break-Up of Britain?
In 1997–98 Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government, fulfilling an election promise,

introduced a series of radical measures of devolution within Britain. With them,
an entirely new relation has emerged between Britain and Europe. “Britain” is, in
effect, no more. In Scotland there is, for the first time since 1707, a Parliament with
significant powers; Wales has a National Assembly; Ulster has had its Assembly
restored, now on a more secure power-sharing basis. Most far-reaching of all,
the Belfast Agreement of 1998 envisaged a “Council of the Isles” (the “British–
Irish Council”) in which all parts or “nations” of Britain and Ireland might find
representation, not excluding the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man (Bogdanor
2001: 105–9, 201–86; O’Leary 1999).4 Dreams of a federal Britain, which had
waxed and waned since the 1880s, began to seem capable of fulfilment (Kendle
1997). At the very least, it was clear that the entity that had been known as the united
kingdom of Great Britain since 1707, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland since 1801 – already, since 1922, abridged to the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland – was not what it had been. Books, newspaper articles,
and television documentaries streamed out, proclaiming in one form or another “the
death of Britain” – most likely, according to many accounts, to be heralded by a
declaration of Scottish independence (see, e.g. Marr 2000; Nairn 2000).5 The United
Kingdom, in these accounts, was dissolving into ethnic nationalisms, on the one
hand, and disappearing into Europe on the other (Aughey 2001: 171–82).
This turn of events in Britain6 is only the latest in a story of instability and
change. As Hugh Trevor-Roper (1982: 100) has said, “the people of these islands
[the British Isles] have seldom been united, politically or culturally. Efforts were
made to unite them from the twelfth century onwards, but they only came under
4 O’Leary (1999) points out that the Belfast Agreement – uniquely in United
Kingdom constitutional experience – combines both “internal consociation” (proportional
power-sharing within Northern Ireland) and “external confederalism” (as shown in joint
British–Irish bodies such as the North–South Ministerial Council, accountable to their
respective national legislatures). This makes the nature of the “Union of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland” very different from that of the “Union of Great Britain”. “The Agreement
is the penultimate blow to unitary unionism in the UK, already dented by the 1997–98
referendums and legislative acts … The formation of an English Parliament would be the
last blow” (1999: 84).
5 Nairn has good reason to feel that his prescient earlier account, The Break-
Up of Britain (1977/1981) has been vindicated; though for a caution against premature
announcements of the “death of Britain”, see Chapter 5, below. The results of the Scottish
referendum on independence in September 2015 showed that for the Scots at least Britain
was still the preferred unit to which they wanted to belong. See further Chapter 1, above.
6 I use, as is common, “Britain” as a shorthand for the “United Kingdom of Britain
and Northern Ireland”, though aware of the offence this can give, especially in Ireland.
Where necessary I choose my terms more carefully.
the same monarch in 1603, and the complete political union, which was at last
achieved in 1801, endured only till 1922. Since then the process has been reversed”.
Writing in 1982, Trevor-Roper could note the rise of Welsh and Scottish
nationalism, but nothing in their endeavours came close to the achievements of
1997–98. As Vernon Bogdanor (2001: 1) has put it, “devolution is the most radical
constitutional change this country has seen since the Great Reform Act of 1832”.
It is indeed more radical than the reforms of 1832, since what it portends strikes at
the heart of the central constitutional doctrine of the British state, the sovereignty
or supremacy of Parliament.
It is indeed remarkable to contemplate how short and chequered the British
story is. There was a “Britannia” in Roman times, but it excluded most of
Scotland as well, of course, as all of Ireland. There followed a period of extreme
fragmentation – the Anglo-Saxon “heptarchy”, invasions by Danes and Vikings
– before the Anglo-Norman state, building on the unification accomplished by
Alfred the Great in the ninth century, began its expansive career in the British
Isles. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wales and a part of Ireland were
conquered, but Scotland held out and was never conquered by the English. Wales
was formally integrated into the English state in the sixteenth century, and Ireland
was ruthlessly subdued and colonized by the English in the seventeenth century.
But, though sharing a monarch with England, and ruled by a Protestant minority,
Ireland retained its own Parliament until 1801, and during the 1780s and 1790s
came near to achieving something like Home Rule.
In the meantime a Scottish king, James VI, became, as James I (1603–25),
king of England-with-Wales, Scotland and Ireland. But Scotland remained fully
independent, with its own church and parliament, and James’s hopes of creating
a “Great Britain” came to naught. Only in 1707, under great pressure and with
the greatest of reluctance, did the Scottish Parliament agree to make “a Treaty
of Union” with England. This brought into being the united kingdom of Great
Britain, some 500 years after Edward I’s efforts at constructing “the first English
empire”. As Peter Scott has put it (1990: 168), “Britain is an invented nation, not
much older than the United States” (cf. Mitchell 1999: 157).
Even that achievement was precarious. Scotland lost her Parliament, but
she kept her own church, her own legal system, her educational system and her
system of local government. There was a distinctive Scottish civil society, and
an autonomy to Scottish development that could make many Scots feel that the
union with England was provisional and conditional.7 Ireland – the Ireland of the
majority Catholic population – was an even more unruly and unwilling partner.
Forced into a parliamentary union with Britain in 1801, she showed increasing
discontent throughout the nineteenth, culminating in a war of independence during
and after the First World War. Britain had begun to break up as long ago as 1922,
a mere two centuries after its creation.
7 See Paterson 1994. On the curiously incomplete character of the British state
created by the Union of 1707, see Levack 1987.
Only Wales, comprehensively conquered by the thirteenth century, showed

little disposition to question the Union. But that was partly because, thanks to the
early translation of the Bible into Welsh (unlike the case in Scotland and Ireland),
the Welsh, alone of all the Celtic peoples in the British Isles, had been able to
preserve their language and the culture that went with it. Nestled comfortably into
the side of England, significant sections of the Welsh population did well out of
the English connection (not forgetting the Welsh Tudor dynasty that ruled England
from 1485–1603). The Welsh, the original British, were also the model modern
Britons.
But, spurred on by the example of the Irish and Scottish nationalists, the Welsh
too from the early twentieth century began to demand greater autonomy if not
outright independence. With the creation of the new Welsh Assembly in 1998,
the Welsh have found a political voice that, in the opinion of many observers,
could take them well beyond the limited self-government currently accorded them
(see, e.g. Osmond 2001). This is certainly the case with the Scottish Parliament:
few expect the Scots to stop at the euphoric point they have now reached in their
striving for independence (McCrone 2001: 106–7; Nairn 2000: 153–4). As for the
beleaguered Protestants of Northern Ireland, their fate seems to be either to find a
place in a united Ireland or to negotiate a position in the newly proposed Council
of the Isles. In either case, their status as a constituent part of the United Kingdom
seems likely to end in the new future. Northern Ireland has now been placed firmly
in an all-Ireland context, even if it might re-emerge in a federal or confederal
Britain (Kearney 1997: 92–5; O’Leary 1999: 90; Nairn 2001).
Whether or not there is actually a “break-up of Britain”, the possibility and
prospect throw into relief the special problem of England. It is England that has
the most problems about its identity, and its place in the world. Core of the “inner
empire” of Great Britain, and then of the grander overseas empire of what Sir
Charles Dilke called “Greater Britain”, the English for long felt neither the need nor
the desire to define a national identity. A certain notion of “Englishness”, thought
of largely in cultural terms, sufficed. For the rest there was the imperial mission,
variously conceived at different times – now “civilization”, now Protestantism,
now law and parliamentarism. Such a self-conception left no room for nationalism,
in the ordinary sense. Nationalism, and the investigation and cultivation of national
identity that went with it, were for other peoples. The English, so they thought, had
bigger things on their plate (Kumar 2000, 2003, 2006).
This creates a special problem for England in its relation to Europe. It is
England, not “Britain”, that has the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with
Europe, and the greater European integration currently under way. The Irish,
the Scots, even the Welsh have always had a different view of Europe from the
English. It is far easier for them to contemplate a new relation with Europe than
it is for the English. The potential break-up of Britain is doubly threatening to
England. Not only does it lose its raison d’être, as the core nation of Britain. It is
also brought face to face with the legacy of its past attitudes to Europe.
The Faces of Europe
It is not only Britain that is a variable entity, different things at different times. So
too is Europe. Victoria de Grazia has recently restated the well-established view
that “there is no eternal Europe … Europe, like other civilizations, is discursively
as well as institutionally formed in relationship to others” (2001: 3).8 At a higher
level of generality, Björn Wittrock has also stressed that the institutional complexes
that make up modernity, specifically European modernity, are not fixed for all time
but rather establish the framework for a “continuous process of innovation” (2000:
47; see also Therborn 1995).
What are these Europes that have existed, and what might be their legacies?
There is of course the Europe of the Roman Empire, especially the Western Roman
empire. This left a body of laws and a system of communication that provided the
bedrock of later state formations, especially in continental Europe. It also provided
a tradition of imperial rule and bureaucratic administration that was fundamental
to the development of many European states (Ertman 1998). It gave Europe a
language, Latin, that became the lingua franca of educated Europe, and formed
the basis of many European vernacular languages. Latin was also the language
that transmitted the literary culture of the ancient world, thus supplying, as “the
classics”, the body of learning that became the staple of the educated classes of
Europe down to the eighteenth century and beyond.
Medieval Europe – another Europe – both extended the Roman inheritance and
at the same time lost significant sections of the old Roman world. The Carolingian
empire and its successors took romanitas to areas which had escaped Roman rule,
eastwards beyond the Rhine and the Danube. At the same time the Arab advance
deprived Europe of the North African littoral and much of Spain. Likewise the
Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions overwhelmed much of the Roman civilization
of the old Roman province of Britannia, bringing in new ways and institutions.
The “North”, the Scandinavian world, made its fateful appearance upon the
European scene. Meanwhile, to the East, the conversion of Muscovy to Orthodoxy
mean the incorporation of another strand of the Roman tradition, that expressed
in the civilization of the Eastern Roman empire based on Byzantium. Europe now
had a significant and long-lasting fault line dividing “West” from “East”, western
Catholicism from eastern Orthodoxy.
Arabs and northern invaders did not of course just abstract from Europe, they
added in immeasurable ways. The Moorish occupation of Spain brought Islam
to Europe and made it an enduring part of European civilization. The northern
invaders, German and Scandinavian, introduced beliefs and practices that became
the basis of parliamentary institutions in many parts of Europe. They also brought
a distinctive type of law, most clearly expressed in English Common Law. It is
possible, too, that they are the source of the distinctive family form of north-
8 On the variously constructed Europes, past and present, see especially Delanty
1995, 2013. See also Wilson and van der Dussen 1995; Pagden 2002.
western Europe, the “nuclear family”, seedbed of many of the developments that
later made northwestern Europe the most dynamic part of Europe.
So Europe was reconfigured in many ways during the Middle Ages. Crucially,
of course, its sense of itself was shaped by another Roman legacy, the religion
of Christianity. But that divided Europe as much as it united it. It took another
Islamic threat, that of the Ottoman Turks, to impose some kind of unity on Europe
in its defence of its Christian heritage. Europe could now be seen “in the Turkish
mirror”(Yapp 1992; Neumann and Welsh 1991). But what that mirror showed,
at least to those perspicuous enough to see it and honest enough to admit it,
was a Europe marked by innumerable signs of Islamic culture – from the Arab
philosophers of the Middle Ages, through Moorish architecture and urban design,
down to a Balkan civilization that was a synthesis of Orthodox and Ottoman
culture.
The Reformation introduced another fault line in Europe, that between the
Protestant north and a Catholic centre and south. There was now Western Europe
and Eastern Europe, Northern Europe and Southern Europe. The Habsburg
attempt to hold all the parts together failed, just as did a later attempt at European
integration, that of Napoleon. With the rise of nationalism and the collapse of
the far-flung multinational empires, the idea of any kind of unified Europe might
have seemed hard to sustain. The historian and statesman François Guizot, in his
celebrated History of Civilization in Europe, tried to put a brave face on the fact of
European diversity and disunity.
Modern Europe presents us with examples of all systems, of all experiments of

social organization; pure or mixed monarchies, theocracies, republics, more or
less aristocratic, have thus thrived simultaneously, one beside the other; and,
notwithstanding their diversity, they have all a certain resemblance, a certain
family likeness, which it is impossible to mistake. ([1828] 1997: 30)
To some this “family likeness” is suspicious, a forced striving after an identity

that is not there. Europe is a sham, a patchwork of overlapping and conflicting
elements parading itself as a single civilization in the interests of certain dominant
groups (Nederveen Pieterse 1994; Shore and Black 1994; Shore 2000). But when
Edmund Burke said that “no European can be a complete exile in any part of
Europe” (in Davies 1996: 8), he – of all people – was not praising uniformity.
There can be an idea of Europe that accepts difference, even profound divisions
(see, e.g. Gowan 1997; Eder and Giesen 2000).
Nevertheless, even this brief sketch of European development indicates the
many faces of Europe, even the possibility that there are many Europes. The
twentieth century made its own contribution in the Cold War division of East and
West, and the erasure of the culture of another distinctive component, “Central
Europe” (Kundera 1984). With the fall of communism, some part of the East–West
division has abated. But the European Union has raised new walls. Entry into it
has become a prized attainment for many, leading to definitions of Europeanness
that in many cases have no historical warrants. There are some states, formerly
bitterly fought over in the name of “Europe”, that now seem thrown into some
sort of limbo.
If there are many Europes, there are many possible relationships with Europe.
The context of Victoria de Grazia’s remarks about there being no “eternal Europe”
was a discussion of possible changing relationships between Europe and America.
Could “Americanization” simply be the latest stage of European modernization,
rather than some eternal “other” to be constantly fought against (as the French,
or at least some of them, seem to regard it)? Or is the latest wave of resistance to
Americanization an indication that Europe, “having now matured its own brand
of modernity”, is now in a powerful position to contest the American variety? (de
Grazia 2001: 3).
One might ask similar questions about the relation of Britain to Europe. The
British state is one entity that has, since the eighteenth century, developed a
set of positions in relation to continental Europe. Those positions, though they
have varied in relation to the changing configurations of Europe, show some
consistency. It is unclear whether there is a British nation or a British people to
which these positions can be attributed, though the gap between state and nation
can be exaggerated (see, e.g. McCrone 2000; but cf. Colley 1994).
There are also the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and the wider
grouping of the British Isles. England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland had widely
differing relations with the European mainland before the construction of the
British state. They continued to do so, though to a radically diminished extent,
after the creation of the British state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In
the late twentieth century, the British state appeared to be unravelling. What might
be the new or revived relations between the nations of Britain and the Continent?
How might these be affected by the legacies of past relationships?
Cultures in Contraflow
For Scotland, Ireland, and Wales the prospect of a “return to Europe” is welcome
on a number of counts. Like the countries of Central and Eastern Europe seeking to
escape the embrace of the Russian bear, “Europe” for the so-called Celtic nations
of the British Isles represents a way of escaping the longstanding clutches of the
imperial power in the Isles, England. For Scotland, it was the “auld alliance” with
France that from 1295 to 1560 helped it to hold on to the independence that it had
so nearly lost under Edward I, and to resist all the pressures for union with England.
Even after the Scottish Reformation of 1560 and the union of the crowns of 1603,
Scotland looked to France and generally to continental Europe for assistance in
holding off its powerful southern neighbour. And when, reluctantly but as if bowing
to the inevitable, Scotland did join with England in 1707, it marked the onset
of a period of cultural efflorescence in which Scotland’s prior relations with the
Continent proved invaluable in its intellectual and professional life. The Scottish
Enlightenment was the central feature of the British Enlightenment; but even more
clearly it was an aspect of the European Enlightenment. David Hume, Adam Smith
and Adam Ferguson were known and revered all over Europe; Scottish doctors,
architects and engineers were in demand everywhere on the Continent; Glasgow
and Edinburgh – more than London – vied with Paris to be the capital of the
European Enlightenment.
With the growth of the British Empire, Scottish energies were diverted
elsewhere, as happened with most of the peoples of the British Isles. But despite
British–French rivalry, the memory of the “auld alliance” always remained
a presence in Scottish culture, and ties with the Continent remained strong –
cemented by strong European interest in the Gaelic poetry of “Ossian”, the novels
of Sir Walter Scott, and the culture and landscape of the Highlands.9 The Scottish
nationalist movement which emerged in the early years of the twentieth century
was fully conscious of the utility of emphasizing Scotland’s European, as opposed
to Anglo-Saxon, connections. The discovery of oil in the North Sea off the coast
of Scotland in the 1970s gave an enormous boost to Scottish self-confidence. Scots
now felt they had the economic wherewithal to go it alone. But it was always
envisaged that separation from England would be accompanied by Scottish entry
into the European Union as an independent entity. The granting of a separate
Parliament to Scotland in 1998 has made that aspiration come nearer to fulfilment
than at any time before.
The Scots already have before them the example of the republic of Ireland.
Since Ireland’s accession to the European Union of 1973, she has thrived mightily.
Ireland in the space of three or four decades has blown away a century of stagnation
and backwardness.10 Like Spain or Portugal, she is one of those nations for whom
Europe has been the salvation. Europe has answered the call of all those old Gaelic
poets who longed for rescue – by France, by Spain – from the old enemy, England.
Ironically, one of the casualties of Ireland’s rapid progress has been the Catholic
Church, whose influence was predominant in the era following the establishment
of the Irish Free State in 1922. It is ironic, because it was Catholicism that was
9 See Weinbrot 1993. The Ossian influence on the Continent is vividly illustrated
in Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), where Ossian – at the time still
thought genuine – is liberally quoted. We should remember too that for some Scots, those
who followed the Jacobite cause in the eighteenth century, the “auld alliance” remained
vital for nearly a century after the Union with England. In effect it remained part of the
cultural repertoire that could be drawn upon when time and circumstance made it expedient
to do so.
10 For the transformation of Irish society since the 1960s – not all of which therefore
can be attributed to EC/EU membership – see O’Mahony and Delanty 2001: 167–75. As
they say, “undoubtedly, for many, to opt for Europe was to consciously oppose continued
poverty and failure” (2001: 175). Both they and Allen (2001) emphasize the contradictory
and problematic nature of Irish “progress” in recent decades. It should be noted that the
recession of 2007–11 hit Ireland particularly badly; but Ireland would have fared worse
without the EU.
the principal tie binding Ireland to the Continent in the centuries following the
Protestant Reformation. Irish scholars and theologians occupied important
positions in the colleges and seminaries of Catholic Europe, and were prominent
in the Vatican itself. Irish poets and writers always felt greater affinities with
continental writers and thinkers than they did English ones – Joyce and Beckett
being perhaps the best expressions of that (Kearney 1997: 115–17). In joining
the European Union, Ireland is merely formalizing a long-standing tradition. The
chancellories of Brussels have replaced those of Rome; it is secular rather than
Catholic Europe that is now the driving force; but Ireland has come back to its
European home.
Britain has felt the threat that came from Ireland’s European sympathies at
several points in the past. During the Napoleonic wars, and again during the First
World War, anti-British – mainly anti-English – sentiment in Ireland came close
to allowing Britain’s enemies a base within the kingdom itself. The Union of 1801
was intended to forestall this for the future, but the force of anti-British feeling in
Ireland throughout the nineteenth century mean that this remained a hope rather
than an achievement. The Irish were the first of the “British” peoples to break up
the union. They – at least the Catholic majority – had never been happy within it,
unlike the Scots and the Welsh; so perhaps their case cannot be taken as typical.
But it was exemplary in one important sense. It showed how Europe could be used
as a counter to the overwhelming power of England in the British Isles.11
If the Welsh learn this lesson, it will be more difficult for them to put it into
effect. They have been more integrated into Britain, and especially its English core,
than any of the other Celtic peoples. Certainly in the Middle Ages their European
credentials were as strong as anyone’s. They were subjected to Norman influence
almost as much as the English themselves, and French and Latin were as common
among their educated classes as elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the astonishingly
long-lasting fame and Europe-wide influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-
century History of the Kings of Britain ensured that the Welsh – the original
11 Europe, it has been suggested, can also be one of the answers to the Northern
Ireland predicament. Northern Ireland can fit into a “Europe of the Regions”, on the model
of proposals for such regions as the Basque Country, Catalonia, Wallonia, Flanders, South
Tyrol, etc. This, it is hoped, would loosen the hold of outmoded nationalist postures on the
part of both unionists and Northern Ireland Catholics. “A European identity for Northern
Ireland could help kickstart it out of its position … as a continental backwater into the
mainstream of European debate” (Kearney 1997: 86). Such a European solution is further
seen within the context of a “Council of the Islands of Britain and Ireland, eventually
evolving towards a federal British–Irish archipelago” (Kearney 1997: 11, 91–5). The
“British–Irish Council” envisaged in the Belfast Agreement of 1998 can be seen as a step
in that direction. It is also significant that the Belfast Agreement originally suggested that
Northern Ireland – together with the Irish Republic – could join the European Monetary
Union even if the rest of Britain remained outside: a possibility that seems to have been
closed by the UK Northern Ireland Act which declared currency to be a “reserved matter”
(O’Leary 1999: 83, n. 19).
Britons – would be marked out for as central a role in Europe’s future as in her
past (Williams 1991: 62–73).
Given England’s own European orientation in the Middle Ages, the thirteenth-
century English conquest of Wales did not by itself thwart this possibility of a
renewed European future. What made it more difficult was the almost total
triumph of the Reformation in Wales and, perhaps even more, the spectacular
success of Methodism there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was
Methodism, more than simply Protestantism, that gave to Welsh culture that
distinct provincialism that can still be seen, especially in the rural parts. It was a
provincialism that kept Wales aloof from many of the main developments on the
Continent that were eagerly absorbed by Scots and Irish. If the Welsh sought a
larger theatre for their energies it was not so much to the Continent as to England
itself, and the New World in the West, that they looked.12
That epoch now seems to be coming to a close. The Welsh, with their new
Assembly, are now flexing their political muscles. They are as aware as the Scots
and the Irish of the new “opportunity structure” that is held out by the European
Union. A painful lesson was taught them by the Thatcher years of privatization.
This forced many Welsh to turn away from their traditional attachment to a
socialist economy, and look to inward investment from abroad. They now
increasingly see their future as a region within Europe, and have been developing
close ties with regions, such as Baden-Württemberg and Lombardy, which have
similar economic cultures (Osmond 2001: 116). This new European orientation
also explains why the Welsh, who rejected devolution in 1979, were receptive to
it in 1997. Decentralization was a decisive first step towards separate integration
into Europe. The re-education process seems to be continuing. A poll of January
2002 showed Wales to be the first United Kingdom nation to support the single
European currency, the euro (The Guardian, 15 January 2002).
So far the Welsh seem content to remain within the United Kingdom; and
it is true that they have nothing like Scottish oil with which to bargain. But the
secret is now out. Europe is a counter to Britain. A strategy of “opting-out and
joining-in” is available to any determined political elite that can drum up enough
popular support. At the very least the existence of the European Union allows
the constituent parts of the United Kingdom to consider renegotiating the terms
of the union.13
12 Although it is interesting to note that when Welsh nationalism – as expressed

by Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist Party), launched in 1925 – developed it was strongly
influenced by European thought and culture, notably through Plaid Cymru’s founding
president, Saunders Lewis. Lewis, a Catholic convert, “saw Wales as a nation of Europe,
and of a Europe defined in terms of Latin Christendom and the lost values of the Middle
Ages” (Williams 1991: 279).
13 There is a parallel here with Eric Hobsbawm’s well-known account of how
globalization encourages the growth of national and ethnic demands, often from very small
groups. The point seems to be that very few of the independent political entities that might
English Exceptionalism
It is England, the architect and lynchpin of the British system, that is most
threatened by this development. Moreover, it is England, in comparison with its
British neighbours, which can least rely on the compensating recourse of Europe.
The reasons for this are complex, and to some extent paradoxical. “England” –
the territory that became England – has been an integral part of Europe since the
invasions of the Celts in the fifth century BC, and remained so until at least the
end of the fifteenth century. The Roman conquest continued the pattern of pan-
European settlement and institutions begun by the Celts, as did, though with a
more restricted focus, the Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian invasions. With
the Norman conquest and the subsequent Norman and Angevin dynasties, England
– now so-called – was placed formally within the web of European possessions
and ambitions that stretched from Ireland and Scotland to Italy, Sicily and the
Holy Lands beyond. England was thoroughly Europeanized, on a wider scale than
ever before. “English” culture was Anglo-Norman; French was the language of the
court and the upper classes, just as Latin was the language of the English church and
of state administration; Italians such as Lanfranc and Anselm became Archbishops
of Canterbury; Norman architecture covered the land; English philosophers and
poets from Duns Scotus to William Chaucer were part of European culture, and
had European connections and reputations (Clanchy 1998; Black 1994: Chapters
1–3; Davies 1999: Chapters 4–6).
It was the Reformation that, by most accounts, began England’s withdrawal
from the European mainland (though the loss of practically all of England’s French
possessions in the fifteenth century might be said to have contributed to this move).
England found itself confronted by two Catholic powers, first Spain, then France,
that embodied different principles of culture and politics. We should remember
though that Protestantism was as international as Catholicism, so that the mere fact
of England’s turning Protestant is not sufficient to explain a growing abandonment
of continental ambitions and adventures.14 But the experience of encountering the
formidable powers of Spain and France, taken with the opportunities that had
emerge can or will be truly independent, but that they do not need to be because they will be
firmly plugged into the structures of international capitalism and more generally the global
economy and global civil society. These will, willy-nilly, “carry” them (Hobsbawm 1977).
A very similar relationship can be said to exist between the smaller nations of Europe and
the European Union.
14 It is the idea of England as the “elect nation”, found in English Protestant theology
of the sixteenth century, that has led some scholars to see the Protestant Reformation as
launching England’s insular and anti-European self-conception (see, e.g. Haller 1963;
Jones 2000). But the doctrine of the “elect nation” was by no means peculiar to Protestant
England, having been anticipated in fact more than a century earlier by Catholic France.
See Strayer 1971. It is a misunderstanding of this point that partly makes Liah Greenfeld
(1992: 29–87) mistakenly see England as the inventor of European nationalism in the
sixteenth century.
opened up westward with the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World,
seem to have convinced English elites that the English future lay not in Europe
but overseas.
It is from the mid-seventeenth century that we begin to get the drawing
of those invidious distinctions between England and “the Continent” that
for centuries became the staple of politicians’ rhetoric, political and legal
commentary, historiography, children’s classics and popular culture. England
stood for peace, Protestantism and freedom, continental Europe (with some
honourable exceptions) for militarism, Catholicism and despotism (Armitage
2000: 144–5). The freedom gained by the English people, deriving from a peculiar
history that predated the Norman conquest, had unleashed a wave of cultural
and commercial energy that was taking England to the summit of world power.
English prosperity was widely and democratically spread; the majority of the
French and Spanish were sunk in apathy and poverty, while their rulers revelled
in luxury. English Common Law was contrasted with continental Roman Law,
to the detriment of the latter, English individualism with continental corporatism
and bureaucratic control. Continental monarchs held their people in thrall by
maintaining large standing armies; England after the seventeenth-century Civil
War dispensed with standing armies and relied instead on the strength of her
navy to defend her shores, her prosperity and her freedom.
These contrasts, some of them breathtaking in their one-sidedness, came to
be embodied in a number of enduring myths and interpretations that, taught at an
early age in families, churches and schools, provide the English with an account
of themselves as exceptional in a number of ways, but especially as compared
with continental Europe. One of these was the myth of “the Norman Yoke” that,
as Christopher Hill (1986) has shown, served for centuries to provide ordinary
English people with a sense of their superiority as descended from freedom-
loving Anglo-Saxons (now conveniently counterposed to “Latin” Europe).
Another, more scholarly but with plenty of popularizers, was what came to be
known as “the Whig interpretation of history” (Butterfield 1931, 1945; Burrow
1983; Haseler 1996; Condren 1999).15 Applied to England, it produced a history
of uninterrupted parliamentary government, culminating in the rise of the House
of Commons and the sealing of parliamentary supremacy in the revolutions of
1642 and 1688. This fortunate history was contrasted with the suppression of
parliaments on the Continent and the growth of centralized bureaucracies subject
only to the will of the monarch. Continental societies, such as that of the French,
might try to break out of this pattern and seize freedom through revolution. But
the fate of the French Revolution, its culmination in the Terror and military
dictatorship, only showed how imprisoned continental societies were by their
heritage of centralized despotism. English observers of the nineteenth century
15 For a particularly good study of one of the most popular and influential of these
“Whig” historians, G.M. Trevelyan, see Cannadine 1997: esp. 95–140. On the “Whig
interpretation” and other English myths, see further Chapter 9, below.
watched with concern but also some complacency the failure of parliamentary
institutions to take firm root in countries such as France, Italy and Germany –
not to mention the countries further east.
Britain’s acquisition of a world empire, and worldwide responsibilities and
interests – greater by far than that of any other European country – was bound to
intensify further the sense of a difference from Europe. The English, as the creators
and guiding spirits of an empire in which Scots, Welsh and Irish also shared, saw
themselves increasingly in the perspective of Rome, the Rome that had overseen
the spread of order and civilization to the far corners of the ancient world (Brunt
1965; Kumar 2012). Their rivals were those, such as the Russians, who also had
non-European interests and who also saw themselves as the carriers of an imperial
mission. Moreover, there was the growing world power of the United States, with
which Britain had many ties and which many regarded as a member of a far-flung
English-speaking family. This too offered a pole of attraction as an alternative to
Europe (Schwarz 2001: 160). When, after the devastation of the Second World
War, Sir Winston Churchill proposed the construction of a “United States of
Europe”, he was clear that Britain would not be part of it. We are, he said, “with
Europe, not of it. We are linked, but not comprised” (in Black 1994: 236). World
order would be maintained by the great powers – the United States, the Soviet
Union, a united Europe, and an independent British Empire and Commonwealth
(Sherman 1999: 93).
Britain’s empire has gone, and with it Britain’s world role. This confronted
Britain with one challenge, as Dean Acheson memorably noted, and the English,
as the imperial people, felt it more acutely than the other British peoples.
But now the English face what is in some ways a more serious challenge, the
prospect of the loss of that “inner empire”, Great Britain, which had sustained
them and given them a sense of purpose for nearly three centuries. Europe offers
itself as an alternative, but for the English absorption in a united Europe is a far
more difficult thing to contemplate than it is for Scots, Welsh and Irish. England
remains pivoted uneasily between Europe and America, as British policies
from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair clearly show. Nor is the ambivalence
about Europe restricted to “Eurosceptics” on the Right of the political spectrum
(Krieger 1999: 136; Marr 2000: 173, 190). Within the English Left there is a strong
tradition of “Little Englandism” that sees the European Union as a capitalist club
or cartel, and fears that English membership will it make it far more difficult
to bring about the radical social changes that the Left has historically stood for
(Nairn 1973; Sherman 1999: 98; Aughey 2001: 173). Ironically, and for very
different reasons, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn join hands in defence of “the
sovereignty of Parliament” (Mitchell 1999: 159) – a sovereignty now threatened
both by the existence of competing assemblies in Britain and by the increasing
importance of European law made by the institutions of the European Union.
England’s isolationism from Europe has returned to haunt it.16 For Macaulay,
this insularity, this idea of England as an “island race”, was something to be
celebrated, as pointing to the source of England’s superiority over the Continent.
“Our fathers became emphatically islanders, islanders not merely in geographical
position, but in their politics, their feelings, and their manners” (in Weale 1995:
220). From Shakespeare to the present, English writers have persisted in calling
England an island, despite the evident geographical inaccuracy and to the annoyance
of the other inhabitants of the island of Britain. But the slippage is revealing. The
English, at least in modern times, did develop an insular mentality, though we
have to remember that this was accompanied by a sense of a wider global purpose.
But in relation to Europe at least, that insularity was highly consequential. It meant
that the English sought to avoid all “entanglements” in Europe. All that mattered
was that no power should be allowed to dominate Europe, as that would threaten
England’s security. For more than a century the principle of “the balance of power”
governed Britain’s European policy – the obverse of a policy of non-involvement.
Reluctantly England was drawn into European affairs, most fatefully in the First
and Second World Wars. But the instinct was always to turn its back on Europe.
History is not all-determining, otherwise we would never have escaped the
Stone Age. The English – at least the ordinary English – have shown in recent
years a willingness to embrace continental culture in many forms, from films to
food and sex. Continental travel has become standard for all classes. London is
now the European capital, the mecca for the young and ambitious of all European
nations. English society is now more “multicultural” than ever it was before. And
even if it is largely due to American influence, the fact that English has become so
widely spoken on the Continent should certainly be an aid to English integration
in Europe (Seidentop 2001: 133).
And yet we need to remember that many of the elements that make up English
multiculturalism – the black and Asian communities that now account for about 7
per cent of the English population – do not have European roots and are in many
respects deeply concerned about England’s turn to Europe. Not only do they feel
that they do not, and cannot, possess a “European” identity; they fear that they
may lose many of the gains made in English race relations legislation in the last
few decades, since the race relations legislation of the European Union is based
on a different model.17 England’s imperial heritage here introduces a discordant
element – one of the many examples of the empire striking back.
16 This isolationism is of course, relative. England, like the rest of Britain, has never
been cut off entirely from European developments, even after the Reformation and the
cultivation of an English ideology of uniqueness. For the continuing involvement with
continental culture and politics, see Reeve 1999; Scott 2000.
17 See Favell 2001: 210. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the other hand argues that Europe
can be an opportunity for the ethnic minorities, of all backgrounds, as Europe is itself
made up of minorities. “No single ethnic group in the European Union is big enough to
be a majority … . We need to promote the idea and image of Europe not as some white
History strikes back in another way, one even more difficult for the English to
deal with. Parliamentary sovereignty is so enshrined within English constitutional
practice that many English commentators cannot imagine an English nation or an
English national identity without it. Here the difference with the Scots and other
British nations is telling. As T.C. Smout points out, the Scots do not fear giving up
their sovereignty to Europe because they have learned that there can be national
identity without state sovereignty. “Union does not mean that national identity
disappears.” England, however, “has been riven with fears that if Britain surrenders
any of her sovereignty to a federal Europe, her identity will go as well; her history
has given her no experience of the loss of sovereignty, or of the possibility of
survival of identity” (Smout 1994: 112; see also Marquand 1993; Schwarz 2001:
163–4; Aughey 2001: 174; Wellings 2010). For the English, Europe equals no
national sovereignty, hence no national identity.
Will England overcome its long-standing Euroscepticism? If polls are anything
to go by, the English are almost evenly divided, with the majority accepting,
without any great enthusiasm, further integration into Europe (see, e.g. Davies
1999: 1035–6; New York Times, 9 December 2001).18 No doubt the debate over
Britain’s adoption of the euro will crystallize opinion further. But we should not
be surprised to find several echoes, if not the actual use, of the argument of “this
island race”.
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Chapter 5
Negotiating English Identity: Englishness,
Britishness and the Future of the
United Kingdom
Etherized Englishness
In his engaging recent study, The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Robert
Young traces a movement in the nineteenth century from a concentration on the
“Saxon” character of English ethnicity to one which was more open and inclusive,
incorporating not just the poetic but feckless “Celts” but other ethnicities as well.
Particularly as the Empire expanded, Englishness came to be a quality that could
be applied to distant groups scattered across the globe: Canadians and Australians,
South Americans and South Africans, New Zealanders and New Englanders. Nor,
he suggests, was this identity necessarily restricted to white groups only. Others
– Indians and Afro-Caribbeans – found it available for their purposes, and were
able to insert themselves into it. Indeed, Young suggests, so many outsiders and
“foreigners” have been involved in the elaboration of it that Englishness is best
considered as something made from afar, from outside England. “Englishness
paradoxically became most itself when it was far off … [It] was … transformed
into a mode of masquerade that was best performed far from home, a global
identity into which others could always translate themselves” (2008: 3). Rupert
Brooke’s “corner of a foreign field/That is forever England” well captures this
displaced, deterritorialized, character of English ethnicity.
It is this quality, Young argues, that explains the “curious emptiness of
Englishness”, its lack of a “cultural essence” and the difficulty people have in
filling it with any substantive content. “It was never really here, it was always there,
de-localized, somewhere else: by the end of the nineteenth century, England had
been etherized, so that England and the English were spread across the boundless
space of the globe …” (2008: 236).1 As a result Englishness never evolved into
1 This would not be to deny the existence of an alternative tradition of “Little

Englandism”, in which Englishness was stubbornly seen as constituted by home-grown
qualities, intrinsically linked to the English landscape, English music and poetry, English
domesticity, and John Bullish attitudes to foreigners and foreign ways. For some thoughts
on this see Gott (1989). But what is interesting is that Little Englandism was not always
or only inward-looking; it could be linked to a sense of England’s distinctive mission in
the world, as in some very influential thinkers – such as Richard Cobden and J.A. Hobson
a true nationalism, if by that we mean a well-defined sense of national identity

similar to that of its continental neighbours.
Though a few improbable forms of English nationalism (morris dancing,

pageants) were invented at home by folk enthusiasts, by the end of the nineteenth
century Englishness was defined less as a set of internal cultural characteristics
attached to a particular place, than as a transportable set of values which could
be transplanted, translated and recreated anywhere on the globe, embodying
the institutions and social values of Anglo-Saxon culture: language, literature,
law, liberty, justice, order, morality and Protestant Anglican religion … . As it
was assumed and adopted into the discourse of imperialism, Englishness was
transformed into an ethnicity unlike any other; because it was no single ethnicity
but an amalgamation of many, it became a cosmopolitan ethnicity that comprised
the transcendence of individual ethnicity or nation, just as ‘English’ was used
as a general category that designated more than the particularity of the people
and culture of the territory of England. This imperial (in the sense of universal)
identity led not only to an increasing emphasis on the idea of ‘Greater Britain’
of English-speaking Anglo-Saxons, but eventually also to the imperial (in the
political sense) idea that the Englishman was in some sense above any narrow
ethnicity or race of the kind observable in other countries – he was, as The Times
had argued in 1852, a ‘born cosmopolite’, free of the ‘follies of nationality’.
(2008: 232–3)2
There is hyperbole in this, no doubt, together with a certain air of self-congratulation.

But the basic insight remains true. “English nationalism” is an odd thing, hard
to say with a straight face. The recent attempt (Mandler 2006) to delineate an
“English national character”, and to argue that there is a tradition of reflection on
it, throws some interesting light on English thought in the past two centuries but
does not really reveal a concern with national character as that term is normally
understood.3 More convincing is the view that the discourse on national character
– who combined Little Englandism with a vibrant internationalism. The two are not
necessarily contradictory. See on this, Kumar 2003: 202–23; see also Baucom 1999 on how
Englishness could alternate between being with the empire (as “Britishness”), and against
it (Englishness versus Britishness).
2 For the idea of “Greater Britain”, as popularized by Charles Dilke and John Seeley,
see Bell (2007). One could argue of course, contra Young, that the whole idea of a national
“cultural essence” is problematic. The point remains that Englishness is a curiously and
unusually elastic entity.
3 The existence of a tradition of reflection on English national character, and the
expression of something we might call English nationalism, are hotly debated topics. For
scepticism regarding both, see Kumar 2005, 2006b. Mandler’s book is ostensibly something
of a retort to this position, but it is quite clear from its contents that what it is fundamentally
about are traditions of thought relating to England as a civilization, rather than as a nation
with a “national character”. What Mandler calls “the civilizational perspective”, in which
Negotiating English Identity 91
in England – and perhaps elsewhere – was a vehicle for expressing political

concerns of a more general kind, more particularly the propensity for liberty and
the type of “public spirit” developed by different political traditions (Romani
2002; see also Collini 1993). There were periods of concern with the health or
otherwise of English culture, and, especially in the two world wars and their
aftermath, at times a more searching look at English strengths and weaknesses
(Kumar 2003: 175–225; Mandler 2006: 143–95). But compared with the writings
and reflections on national identity commonly found in continental Europe there
is a remarkable absence of material in the English case (see. e.g. Kumar 2006b).
English nationalism is the dog that did not bark.
In his account of “etherized” Englishness Young draws freely on the
observations of two Americans, Ralph Waldo Emerson in his English Traits (1856)
and Henry James in his English Hours (1905). Discounting race, Emerson pointed
to the “English composite character”, and observed that “every thing English is a
fusion of distant and antagonistic elements.”
The language is mixed; the names of men are of different nations, – three languages,
three or four nations; – the current of thoughts are counter: contemplation and
practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; worldwide enterprise and
devoted use and wont; aggressive freedom and hospitable law with bitter class
legislation; a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole
earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes … nothing can be praised in
it without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial
praise. (Emerson 1966: 32)
Emerson thought that the English character had developed by “well-managed

contrarieties”, fusing often disparate and contradictory qualities drawn from a
wide variety of races – Celts, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Normans – and forming “an
anthology of temperaments out of them all.” Quoting Defoe, that “the Englishman
was the mud of all races”, Emerson argued that “the English derive their pedigree
from such a range of nationalities that there needs sea-room and land-room to
unfold the varieties of talent and character” (1966: 33). Such an explanation – and
perhaps justification – of English colonialism and imperialism found an echo in
the restlessness and “perpetual motion” that Henry James discerned in the English
people. Asking himself why he is so fascinated by the comings and goings at the
great London railway stations, “even when I wish neither to depart nor to arrive”,
James wonders whether it is because
England is seen as having a special “civilizing mission” in the world, has persisted in
English thought for a remarkably long time, right up to the mid-twentieth century. See
Mandler 2006: passim, esp. 32, 85–6, 144–6. But not only does this not amount to English
nationalism, in critical respects it actually works against such an idea.
They remind me of all our reciprocities and activities, our energies and
curiosities, and our being all distinguished together from other people by our
great common stamp of perpetual motion, our passion for seas and deserts and
the other side of the globe, the secret of the impression of strength … that we
produce in any collection of Anglo-Saxon types. (1981: 22)
Though identifying with “Anglo-Saxon types”, James and Emerson are both
outsiders, the one an American expatriate, the other an American visitor. They
remind us – as does Young himself – how important outsiders have been in the
elaboration of our notions of Englishness. Can anyone imagine trying to analyze
the meaning of Englishness in the last century or so without recourse to writers
such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot? Can one consider the substance
of English culture, the distinctively English approach to the arts and ideas, without
drawing on settled émigrés such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bronislaw Malinowski,
Lewis Namier, Karl Popper, Ernst Gombrich, Ernest Gellner, Nicolaus Pevsner,
Nicholas Kaldor, George Steiner, Geoffrey Elton – to select from a much longer
list? In recent years too there has been another wave of writers and intellectuals,
especially from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, who have found their homes
in England and have added their observations on the natives to those of their
illustrious predecessors – V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro,
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Stuart Hall, Bhikhu Parekh, Tariq Modood, George Alagiah,
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and many others.4
What bearing does all this have on current discussions of Englishness, and in
particular the emergence of “the English question” in the context of parliamentary
devolution and reassertions of Scottish and Welsh nationalism? What resources
does it provide – if any – for dealing with questions of English identity? Is there
a need for such a definition, as many argue? Should Englishness be regarded,
along with Scottishness, Welshness, and Irishness, as just as one of the four main
components of a British or UK identity? Is England just one of the “four nations” of
the United Kingdom? I want to argue that this is a profoundly mistaken conception,
and that any attempt to treat Englishness on a par with the other nationalisms of
the British Isles – or indeed to treat it as a nationalism at all, in the usual meaning
of that term – will land us in intellectual and political confusion. England and the
English have played too distinctive and peculiar a role in the United Kingdom
for easy analogies with other nationalisms, politically pleasing as they might be,
to be able to help us in analyzing the current predicament of the English. The
observations of “outsiders and émigrés” help, as in other contexts, to see more
4 The classic statement of the role of continental émigrés in twentieth-century English

thought and culture is Anderson (1992; first published 1968). For the contributions of
European observers, which have also played an important part in English self-conceptions,
see Langford 2000 and Buruma 2000. For “black British” and British Asian conceptions of
Englishness and Britishness, see Parekh 1974, Stein 2004, Alibhai-Brown 2001, Alagiah
2006.
clearly what is not always obvious to the natives themselves (Kumar 1982). They
enable us to see, in a somewhat different way from Edward Thompson’s (1978)
famous account, “the peculiarities of the English”.
Situating Englishness
Defining Englishness is, according to many commentators, a fairly hopeless

and in any case perhaps unnecessary task. Drawing on Michael Oakeshott’s
thought, Arthur Aughey has remarked that “coming to define Englishness is not
so much a preface as a postscript”, and that we should think of an engagement
with Englishness “as participation in a conversation”, rather than as delineating a
fixed or stable entity (2007: 7). This is no doubt true of most questions of national
identity, as perhaps of most other social phenomena as well: definition, Max
Weber wisely observed, “can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the
study” (1963: 1). But in the case of the English it has seemed peculiarly hard to
trace the tradition of thought within which any definition of Englishness could
be situated, whether at the beginning or the end of the investigation. This has not
so much to do with “English exceptionalism” – every nation, to a degree, thinks
itself exceptional; it is, as David Goodhart has put it, “the relative absence of an
institutionalized Englishness” (2006: 22) that is the problem.
There is no doubting though the current sense that some account of Englishness
is an urgent need. A spate of recent books, television and radio programmes, and
special exhibitions testifies eloquently to this. The very titles or sub-titles of the
books and articles proclaim the main concern: Imagined Nation: England after
Britain (Perryman 2008a); A New England: An English Identity within Britain
(Blunkett 2005); The English Question (Chen and Wright 2000; Hazell 2006a);
Identity of England (Colls 2002); The Progressive Patriot (Bragg 2006); The
Politics of Englishness (Aughey 2007); “England Arise” (Goodhart 2008). Unlike
earlier discussions, in the wake of devolution, about the future of Britain, the
current concern in England at least is very much about England and the future of
England within the United Kingdom.5 For the moment at least, whatever their past
misdemeanours, the English are very clear about the distinction between England
and Britain, Englishness and Britishness.
Eric Hobsbawm, at the end of his Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, remarks
that “the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress
in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggest that, as so often,
the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said
Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and
5 For some of the earlier literature on the possible “break-up of Britain”, and the
consequences for England, see Kumar 2003: 239–73. See also Bryant 2006: 157–207.
A valuable survey of the more recent discussions, focusing especially on England and
Englishness, is Aughey 2007; see also Weight 2003: 706–26.
nationalism” (1992: 192). Whatever we might feel about that sardonic judgement
on nationalism, might not the observation be a fitting one to apply to the stream
of studies of Englishness now appearing? Might they not portend “the end of
England” – England at least as she has been known and understood hitherto?
The “death of Britain” was announced by several commentators some years ago,
reflecting on the impact of devolution (e.g. Nairn 2000, 2001; Marr 2000; Weight
2003: 665–735; see also Aughey 2001). Might not the “death of England” also be
implicated in that wider demise – so that England, as much as Scotland and Wales,
has to be re-invented, and the contours of Englishness re-defined? Neither in the
case of the “death of Britain” nor that of England, of course, are commentators
speaking in any sense literally, or in any but a few cases expecting the imminent
break-up of Britain or the United Kingdom. What they do seem to be pointing to is
the need for a comprehensive re-thinking, and perhaps re-ordering, of the structure
and organization of the United Kingdom, as well as the elements comprising it.
If however, to quote Hegel again, this re-thinking “paints its grey in grey”, if the
dominant hue is melancholic or elegiac, then indeed we might feel some concern
for the continued health of the entity, whether England or Britain (see e.g., for
England, Scruton 2001).
But if, for heuristic purposes, we look at England from the point of view of
its putative end, what is its beginning? This becomes not simply a question of
history but one involving the whole character of England and Englishness. Did
England, even English nationalism, begin in the eight and ninth centuries, with
Bede’s imperialist announcement of a special destiny for the English people and
Alfred’s espousal of English as the state language? (Wormald 1994; Hastings
1997: 35–65). Is it to Shakespeare’s England that we should rather look?
(Greenfeld 1992; Gorski 2006). Or perhaps later, in the eighteenth century, to a
Protestant England embattled against Catholic France, and the virulent expression
of a Hogarthian English chauvinism? (Colley 1994; Newman 1987). If this also
seems unsatisfactory or too early, what about late nineteenth-century England and
the elaboration of a distinct cultural Englishness? (Colls and Dodd 1986; Kumar
2003: 202–25). There are even some who would wish to displace the “moment
of Englishness” even further forward, and see its main lineaments featured in the
convulsive reaction to the First World War, and a passionate engagement with
Englishness as a kind of solace for the trauma of that war (see, e.g. Light 1991, and
the discussion in Mandler 2006: 143–95; Marsden 2000: 26–7).
The question of origins is a vexing one (see further Kumar 2005 – Chapter
6 in this book). It is not likely to be resolved, given the range of features held to
characterize Englishness and English national identity. Is it language, or literature,
or religion? Is it England’s “peculiar” political and constitutional development,
as embodied in the well-known Whig interpretation of English history? Is it
England’s taste and disposition for empire – the English imperial habitus, as one
might say? Is it a particular cultural configuration, seen for instance in an alleged
English anti-urbanism and deep-seated attachment to the countryside (see e.g.
Wiener 2004)? Whatever we choose, even in combination, is likely to land us in
wildly differing periods of English history, with a concomitant stress on different

and perhaps even contradictory features of English identity.6
This is one more reason – in addition to the general difficulties of defining
national identities – for considering Englishness from a different perspective.
Young’s approach outlined above is one such. I attempted something similar when
arguing that we should see Englishness and English identity within the context of
England’s role in the world, and especially its career as one of the most successful
imperial powers ever (Kumar 2003, 2006a). This would take the discussion away
from the particular content of English identity to a more structural focus on
England’s relation to its near neighbours – Welsh, Scottish and Irish – as well as
its more distant subjects across the seas. Not that this would not yield interesting
material on the various causes, concerns, and self-conceptions with which the
English have identified themselves over the centuries. But it would in the first
place draw attention to the shifting nature of those concerns – from religion,
say, and the Protestant cause in earlier centuries, to the promotion of the English
language, law, and parliamentary institutions in more recent times, often as part
of the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon” mission in the world. These changes were
themselves the reflection of England’s changing position in the world, in particular
her growth to world power.
Such an approach – from the outside in, rather than through an inspection of
purely internal and largely domestic features – would also allow us to consider
English identity in ways different from the current and perhaps excessive emphasis
on subjective consciousness. It would take us away from the sort of study that
argues that because, for instance, many English people showed ignorance of and
even indifference towards their Empire, this indicates that the Empire cannot have
had any great impact on English culture (see, e.g., Porter 2004). Such a positivist
approach certainly throws up interesting questions, but it does not and should not
conclude the debate on national identity. Identity has structural as well as subjective
or psychological qualities (cf. Brubaker 1992: 5; 2004: 28–63). It points to the
range of opportunities and alternatives available to groups and individuals situated
in certain ways, in relation to other groups and individuals. Whether these show up
weakly or strongly in individual consciousness is a variable matter, dependent on
particular situations – war for instance is very likely to thrust national awareness to
the forefront of people’s minds. But that does not mean that national identity only
has meaning in wartime, nor that we cannot look for other expressions of identity
than the consciously-held and professed views of individuals.7
This has particular relevance when considering the evidence for the rise – or
otherwise – of a new English nationalism, and of a new search for English identity.
6 Consider for instance the contrast between Alan Macfarlane’s (1978) emphasis on
the long tradition of English individualism and those who stress the equally long communal
and collectivist strain in English life, such as A.L. Morton 1969 and E.P. Thompson 1993.
7 For an attempt to show this in the case of the impact of the British Empire on British
identities, see Kumar 2012 (Chapter 7 in this book).
A distinct shift in consciousness is alleged, with potentially serious consequences

for the organization of the United Kingdom, and perhaps of its very future as
an entity. Traditionally it has been Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism that has
threatened the Union; now, it appears to many, the English have added their voice.
Given England’s past role as creator and custodian of the Union, a dissent from
that quarter has to be treated very seriously indeed.
“England, Arise!”
“What is Britishness?”, rhetorically asked the Welsh leader, Gwynfor Evans of

Plaid Cymru, in 1981. “The first thing to realize is that it is another word for
Englishness … Britishness is Englishness” (in Pittock 1999: 104). This expresses
a longstanding view, reflecting the real fact of the domination of the British
Isles by the English language, English law, English culture and English political
institutions.8 It also points to a longstanding problem for the English, in so far as
they wish to assert an identity peculiar to themselves and different from those of
other inhabitants of the British Isles. For much of the time the English–British
confusion has of course been highly advantageous to the English. It has concealed
the fact of English primacy behind the more benevolent and all-embracing cloak if
Britishness. It is, in fact, an aspect of the more general pattern whereby the English
saw themselves from without, as formed by their relations with and control over
others. It becomes problematic however, for the English themselves as much as it
has been for those others, when the need apparently arises for a clearer definition
of the English nation and the English way. How to separate Englishness from
Britishness?
That there is now some urgency in doing this has seemed apparent from recent
survey evidence.9 This seems to show, firstly, a marked decline in Britishness.
James Tilly and Anthony Heath (2007) have charted a “decline in British national
pride” among all groups and in all areas of Britain in the last two decades: “the
average person in 2003 is clearly less proud of their Britishness than the average
person in 1980.” Moreover this decline is particularly evident among younger
groups, leading the authors to comment: “As older generations with stronger
British national identities die out, the ‘glue’ holding the different parts of the UK
together is likely to become weaker still and there will be greater potential for
independence movements to make headway” (Tilly and Heath 2007: 674–5). This
8 The continuing distinctiveness and independence of Scottish ecclesiastical,

educational and legal institutions after the Union of 1707 are frequently asserted (e.g.
Paterson 1994), but have also frequently been shown to be less significant than claimed. See
Kumar (2003: 145–57). For a good discussion of the whole relation of England to “outer
Britain” or “the Celtic fringe”, see Pittock (1999); Ward (2004: 141–69).
9 For a discussion of more recent survey evidence since the writing of this chapter,
see Chapter 1, above.
is despite the fact that there has not been any significant decline in the proportion
of the UK population – over 60 per cent – who still identify themselves as “British”
(in addition to other national identities). What is significant, as Heath and his
colleagues say in another study, is that the proportion who say that British is the
“best or only” way of describing how they think of themselves has fallen from
just over a half (52 per cent) to well below a half (44 per cent) in the period from
1996 to 2005 (Heath, Martin, Elgenius 2007: 10). One may still think of oneself
as British, therefore, but with a decreasing sense of its salience in one’s life and
a diminishing commitment to the political entity of Britain. It is almost as if, for
significant sections of the population, Britishness is becoming a residual legacy of
the glory days of British power and prestige.
Heath and his colleagues discern another, and in some ways more striking,
trend, parallelling the decline of Britishness. It has long been known that – at least
since the 1970s, and to an increasing extent thereafter – both the Scots and the
Welsh have privileged their Scottish and Welsh identities over their British ones.
The English on the other hand have historically not shown such a preference,
being rather reluctant to identity themselves as “English only” or English as “most
important”. They have been perfectly content to see themselves as equally English
and British (this presumably reflects the old English–British elision) (Bryant
2006: 6; Bond 2006: 618; Bechhofer and McCrone 2008: 83, 91).
This, it is alleged, has undergone a dramatic change in the last decade or so.
Two things stand out. One, the decline in adherence to Britishness has been more
marked in England than in Scotland or Wales. While there has been no consistent
drop in Scotland and Wales since 1997 – the year devolution was announced – in
England the proportion who give British as their primary identity fell from 59 per
cent in 1997 to 48 per cent in 2005 (in 1992, 63 per cent of the English chose British
as their primary identity).10 Second, the decline in Britishness among the English
over the past decade has not been accompanied by an increasing identification with
Europe or with any sort of cosmopolitan identity. Rather it has led to a significant
increase in the numbers who now chose English as their primary identity: from 31
per cent in 1992 to 40 per cent in 2005 and 47 per cent in 2006. “Already weak in
Scotland and Wales, Britishness appears now to have lost some ground in England
to a sense of feeling English instead” (Heath, Martin, Elgenius 2007: 11–12; see
also Curtice 2006: 131; Condor et al. 2006: 135; Bechhofer and McCrone 2008:
94; but see also the reservations in Fenton 2007).
One has to issue the usual caveats about such survey findings: that much
depends on the precise wording of questions, that the figures differ somewhat
among different scholars, that findings can be “artificially” inflated by particular
short-term factors (e.g. the Bechhofer and McCrone survey, as the authors
10 The extent of English “Britishness” is still considerably higher than the Britishness
of the Scots and Welsh. Between 1992 and 2005, the proportion of Scots who chose British
as their primary identity fell from 25 per cent to 14 per cent; for the Welsh the fall was
slighter, from 26 per cent to 27 per cent (Heath, Martin, Elgenius 2007: 11).
themselves note, took place during the 2006 World Cup, with heightened English
national awareness as being the only British nation that qualified), that scholars
can read different meanings into the same or similar findings. More serious are
all the well-known objections to survey research itself, with its reliance on data
from questionnaires and its abstraction from the many different situations in which
individuals find themselves. This is an especially important matter in the case of
identity, national and other, where situational differences can lead to a variety of
outcomes. Thus the way you vote, the football team you support, and the country
you are willing to die for may depend on a number of quite different identities, not
all necessarily subsumable under each other.11 Equally important is that situations
can change remarkably rapidly over time, rendering earlier opinions and attitudes
as found in surveys highly misleading at later dates (think of changing British
attitudes to the Soviet Union in 1939, 1941, 1945 …).
It is striking nevertheless that, despite these frequently-aired reservations, there
is a general acceptance that the survey evidence points to something real, that the
English are at last waking up to the need to give some account of themselves as a
nation.12 They are acutely aware that while many of their neighbours – both in the
United Kingdom and on the Continent – seem fairly secure in their sense of their
national identity, they, the English, are not. This comes out with some poignancy
in the statement of one of the English interviewees in the 2007 British Social
Attitudes Report:
The Scottish, the Welsh, and the Irish to an extent, seem to cling on to their
identities much better than the English do. Well, I suppose some people would
say that that’s because the English were always seen as a little bit arrogant and
not needing to have that identity, but I think the result of all that is, that the
English have sort of lost … a little bit of that, and I think we need to get a bit
back. We have the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, we don’t have
anything for England per se, so I think, I think there is a void. (Heath, Martin,
Elgenius 2007: 12; cf. Fenton 2007: 330, 336)
The idea that there is a “void” that needs to be filled is one of the commonest
tropes of the contemporary literature of Englishness (Aughey 2007: 19; Bryant
2008: 677), though there is much disagreement as to why it exists and how it
should be filled. One powerful response to the situation expresses not just the
11 This point was forcefully made by Chris Pickvance at a talk I gave at the University
of Kent in May 2008. For some other cautionary observations about the use and misuse of
survey evidence, specifically those relating to questions of English and British national
identity, see Miller 1997: 18; Condor et al. 2006; Kenny 2014: 78–9, 92, 105. For the
problematic nature of the concept of national identity as an all-inclusive commitment, and
for its “situational” or “circumstantial” character, see Fenton 2007: 322–7.
12 This is also the conclusion of the most recent full-scale account, Kenny 2014. See
further on this and other more recent discussions, Chapter 1, above.
feeling of a lack but also a certain bitterness, a certain sense of victimhood that
is quite common among former imperial powers (see e.g. for Russia, Hosking
2006). The devolution settlement of 1997 was particularly galling to the English.
England, the wealthiest and most populous part of the United Kingdom, found
itself in a position where it alone lacked the institutions to manage its own affairs.
The Scots had their parliament restored; the Welsh and Northern Irish had their
Assemblies; but there was no English parliament or English National Assembly.
As Stein Ringen puts it, “eight in ten Britons [the English people] have seen no
devolution coming their way, are ruled more centrally from London than ever
before, and may well get fed up with the Scots who want both autonomy for
themselves and participation in English affairs in Parliament” (Ringen 2008: 10;
see also Weight 2003: 711; Field 2008). The call for an English parliament, or at
the very least “English votes on English matters”, has followed naturally from this
sense of indignation.13
“The paradox of Britain”, says David Goodhart, “is that although it was
substantially made by the English, they did not – unlike the other British nations
– define their own role in it. England dissolved itself into Britain, and to this day
has only minimal political/institutional identity … The danger for the English is
that they will be left holding on to the symbols and institutions of Britain long
after it has been cleared out of any emotional and political meaning” (Goodhart
2008: 3). This seems right. The devolution measures and the decline of Britishness,
notably among the English, raise “the English question” in an acute form. The
problem is how to respond to that predicament with the resources, or lack of them,
to hand. The movement for an English parliament, though no longer simply a
right-wing cause, has yet to generate much enthusiasm either among the English
population at large or the political elites (Curtice 2006: 132; Hazell 2006b: 5–6,
221–4; Bryant 2008: 667).14 Given the chance in 2004 to vote for a North East
13 The Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP) is the most important group here
– for its aims and activities, see its website, www.thecep.org.uk. There is a brief description
of the CEP and other groups supporting an English parliament in Bryant (2008: 670–72).
Among commentators there is general agreement with Hazell’s verdict that “the CEP has
remained stuck on the political fringe”, attracting neither elite nor mass support (2006b:
224). But one should always be aware of the radicalizing and mobilizing potential of
particular events, especially if exploited by one of the major parties. There is, for instance,
a wing of the Conservative Party that would like to seize the torch of English nationalism,
exploiting both anti-European sentiment and English resentment at favourable treatment
of the Scots in such devices as the “Barnett formula” (see English et al. 2009). New data
collected by John Curtice for the British Social Attitudes survey show the growth of a
significant number of English political, not just cultural, nationalists, and support for an
English national party. If Scotland were to opt for full independence, things might suddenly
look very different in England. A referendum on this very matter was held in Scotland on
18 September 2014; on the result and its significance, see Chapter 1, above.
14 What does seem to get a reasonable amount of support is the demand for ‘English
votes on English matters’ (or EVoEM) – a response to the notorious “West Lothian question”
Regional Assembly – a stepping-stone perhaps to the creation of an “England of

the regions” – the English overwhelmingly rejected it. The mass appearance of
the St. George’s Cross at football matches and other sporting events is certainly
a significant phenomenon – but is “ninety-minute nationalism” the real thing?
(Weight 2003: 712; Perryman 2008b; Abell et al. 2007).
Moreover, what is the goal of the English nationalists – the break-up of Britain?
Full English independence – which almost none of the English people seem to
want? (Hazell 2006b: 7–8, 227–8). English autonomy on a par with the Scots, the
Welsh and the Northern Irish within a federated Britain? This has seemed more
attractive, with its appearance of symmetry and equality between the four British
nations. But it comes up against some very real hard facts of actual and longstanding
asymmetries within the United Kingdom (Lee 2006: 371–3). Ever since the
federal movement in Britain began, from the debates on Irish Home rule in the
1880s to the devolution debates of the 1970s and beyond to the 1990s, the federal
solution has foundered on the “insuperable problem” of “the preponderating size,
power and prosperity of England” within the United Kingdom (Kendle 1997: 8;
cf. Hazell 2006b: 221–4). A federal UK would inevitably be dominated by its
strongest power, the English.15 “England for the English” (Body 2001) may sound
appealing to many English ears – but if England does not wish to go it alone,
if there is little call for full English independence, what kind of constitutional
settlement can there be? How to square England’s historic role as the founder and
presiding power of the United Kingdom with the aspirations of the other British
nations?
It is here that the past returns with a vengeance. English nationalism, if such
a thing exists, cannot be conceived in the same terms as Scottish, Welsh, or Irish
first posed in the 1977 devolution debates by Tom Dalyell, M.P. for West Lothian. When
given the choice between an English parliament and EVoEM, polls show a strong preference
for the latter, with over 50 per cent support, and only a relatively small minority (around
20 per cent) favouring the former (Bryant 2008: 667–8; see also, but more sceptically,
Curtice 2006: 132; 2008: 12; Hazell 2006b: 224–6). But the fluctuations in support for
EVoEM are almost as great as in those for an English parliament, and are highly dependent
on the exact framing of the question as well as, one imagines, short-term political factors.
So for instance in response to the Scottish referendum of September 2014 there has been a
substantial increase in support for EVoEM (see further Chapter 1, above).
15 A conclusion resoundingly endorsed by the Kilbrandon Report on the Constitution
of 1973: “A federation consisting of four units – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland – would be so unbalanced as to be unworkable. It would be dominated by the
overwhelming political importance and wealth of England. The English Parliament
would rival the United Kingdom federal Parliament; and in the federal Parliament itself
the representation of England could hardly be scaled down in such a way as to enable it
to be outvoted by Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, together representing less than
one-fifth of the population. A United Kingdom federation of the four countries, with a
federal Parliament and provincial Parliaments in the four national capitals, is therefore not
a realistic proposition” (quoted in Kendle 1997: 165).
nationalism. Those were – like many of the nationalisms of Central and Eastern
Europe – to a good extent reactive nationalisms. They were formed in opposition
to the imperial power, in this case England. Nothing works so well to give
nationalism its force as the call to resist oppression, real or imagined.
For imperial nations, such as England, there is no such mobilizing agency.
Their whole history has been one of the suppression of national identity in the
interests of preserving the empire, and their own role within it. With empire gone,
the English have indeed had to reconsider their future as a nation. But not for them
are the options of national independence, or the embracing of any but the most
trivial symbols of traditional nationalism. A nation that has played so global a part
in world history cannot simply turn its back on its past.
That might have been possible if, like Denmark, Portugal or even France, there
existed a relatively compact national territory to which they could retreat. But
England is inextricably interwoven with the United Kingdom. Its whole history
since the Middle Ages has been one of expansion into the British Isles. England is
an archipelagic nation. It is a synecdoche for Britain (if we allow for convenience
the common equation of Britain with the United Kingdom). If the other nations of
Britain choose to withdraw from the Union England will of course have to face up
to the consequences. But it is not an option available to the English themselves.
The repeated finding that, despite devolution and occasional bursts of English
nationalism – more an expression of exasperation with the Scots or Northern
Irish – the English remain on the whole satisfied with current constitutional
arrangements (including a substantial measure of devolution for the Scots, Welsh
and Northern Irish),16 is eloquent testimony to this fact. The English do not wish
to destroy the Union. “English nationalism” remains what it has always been, an
anomaly. The attempt to define a cultural Englishness, in the manner of Anthony
Easthope (1999), Roger Scruton (2001), David Blunkett (2005: 8–9), and others
(English et al. 2009), is one thing, and a worthwhile and revealing exercise. But
it does not amount to a statement of English nationalism, if by that we mean the
classic doctrine of an assertion of separateness and the search for an independent
political roof. England has to look elsewhere for its bearings.
Englishness and Britishness
The difficulty the English have in separating themselves from the British is
frustrating for some, especially those wishing to promote a more robust English
nationalism (not to mention those elsewhere in Britain who see it as a continuing
expression of English imperialism). But for others it can seem a positive
advantage, indicating the way that a less essentialized identity can be offered
16 See Chen and Wright 2000; Hazell 2006a; Curtice 2008: 10–12; Bryant 2008.
Further evidence and discussion is in Kenny 2014: 84–7, which generally endorses this
finding.
to various groups that do not or cannot identify with an ethnicized or racialized

Englishness. Thus Mary Hickman argues that (pace Linda Colley) the English
did not just exclude the Irish as Catholic aliens too difficult to fit into the English
paradigm. On the contrary, following their lordly and imperialist bent they
incorporated the Irish into an inclusive concept of an “Anglophone archipelago”,
which allowed for difference within an essentially English-dominated Britain.
“The English constructed themselves as the backbone of a more inclusive sense of
British nationhood that was able to assimilate all differences within an overriding
principle of identity” (Hickman 2000: 102). Hickman considers that, properly
reconstituted, “the English genius for multiculturalism” might open the way to a
non-racist, “non-reactionary English nationalism” that is inclusive not just of the
Irish but of other, non-white, British groups (2000: 108). This would involve the
renegotiation of both Englishness and Britishness, recognizing the historic link
between them but seeking to purge Englishness of its assumption of superiority.
The combative Bernie Grant, the black council leader and MP for Tottenham
in the 1980s, once declared that he called himself “British” because “it includes
other oppressed peoples, like the Welsh or the Scots. It would stick in my throat
to call myself English” (in Paxman 1999: 74). It has generally been assumed that
blacks and Asians in England (where 97 per cent of Britain’s non-white ethnic
minorities live, making up about 7 per cent of England’s population) are prepared
to think of themselves as British but not English because of the racial connotations
of the latter (though, notoriously, the Parekh Report of 2000 thought that even
“British” was racially tinged).17 While that may have been true in the past this
seems to be changing now (Condor et al. 2006: 133–5; Weight 2003: 713; 2008:
100–103).18 The black journalist Gary Younge reports how, having once thought
it impossible to describe himself as English, despite having been born in England
– “if pushed … I would admit to Britishness” – he now thinks it is possible to
“find an accommodation between blackness and Englishness”. Moreover, he says,
this is easier in England now than in any other part of Britain. Unlike the case
in Scotland and Wales, “the apparently seamless link between Englishness and
whiteness has long since been broken … From pop to politics, cuisine to music,
17 For the traditional unwillingness of ethnic minorities to identify with Englishness,

and even in some cases with Britishness, see Modood et al. 1997: 328–38; Condor et al.
2006: 131. On the “racialization” of Britishness, as suggested in the Parekh Report, see
Bond 2006: 612. This too seems to be changing, if it was ever very strong. A MORI poll of
2002 for the Commission for Racial Equality found that 86 per cent of British people did
not think you have to be white to be British (Goodhart 2006: 29).
18 Though Condor et al. show, interestingly, that, despite an increasing propensity to
think of themselves as English, people from the non-white ethnic minorities are as prone to
confuse English and British as their white English compeers – as many of them say, either
the distinction doesn’t occur to them or “to me they are both the same” (Condor et al. 2006:
138–9). In the light of the argument of this paper – against a narrowly defined English
identity – this seems a very promising finding!
fashion to business, the black experience is now intimately interwoven into the
fabric of English daily life” (Younge 2006: 112–13).19
George Alagiah, born in Sri Lanka and now a senior BBC correspondent,
records a similar movement from alienation to identification with his adopted
home country, and though he tends to speak of “Britain” rather than England, he
too says that he and his siblings “now call England home because this is the place
where we grew up … and where we are now most comfortable” (2006: 261). The
suggestion here is of an Englishness still, as of old, fused with Britishness but
capable of widening and adapting itself to the changes of the past half century, to
accommodate both new groups and the aspirations of England’s old neighbours
in Britain.20 A new version of “Anglo-Britishness” may be in the making (Davey
1999). But we must be careful not to downplay England and Englishness in the
interests of some kind of supra-English, cosmopolitan, identity, as championed by
Kevin Davey and other cultural radicals. David Goodhart, observing that many
people from the ethnic minorities are now embracing Englishness as well as
Britishness, rightly warns: “A stronger sense of Anglo-British citizenship does not
need to be, indeed cannot be, built against Englishness. Britain is a multinational
democratic state inevitably dominated by the English, in the way that the Swiss–
Germans dominate the Swiss federation or the Anglo-Canadians the Canadian
federation” (2006: 30). What is at issue is not the submergence of Englishness
in some fuzzy Britishness but the rethinking and reformulation of Englishness
itself, building on that capaciousness noted by Robert Young, Mary Hickman, and
others.
That does not of course mean a disavowal of Britain or Britishness. We have
seen that that would be inconsistent with England’s whole history and sense
of itself. For the English at least, whatever it might be for the other nations of
Britain, the English–British relationship is symbiotic, constitutive. Moreover,
though as we have seen there is survey evidence of some decline in Britishness
among the English, and a correspondingly stronger emphasis on English identity,
it still remains the fact that nearly two-thirds of English respondents in a variety
of surveys still think of themselves as mainly British or British as well as English,
and that more or less equal numbers identify themselves as primarily British (c. 48
per cent) as say they are English first (c. 47 per cent) (Condor et al. 2006: 133;
Hazell 2006b: 229; Bechhofer and McCrone 2008: 95). Noting these findings,
19 As Younge notes, this integration relates mainly to urban England, where 90
per cent of the black and Asian population live. In the rural areas things remain much as
they were before (Garland and Chakraborti 2006). On the difficulties faced by non-white
minorities in identifying themselves, and being accepted, as Scottish, see Bond 2006.
20 There is a parallel here with the idea of “Greater Britain” in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Originally applied mainly to the white Dominions – Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa – it came, under prodding from certain figures
such as Charles Dilke and George Curzon, to include India and other non-white colonies
in the British empire.
commentators such as Robert Hazell (2006b), Frank Bechhofer and David

McCrone (2007), and Bernard Crick (2008, 2009) have all denied that we are
witnessing the “death of Britain” or the rise of a strong English nationalism. While
there has been a concern with cultural identities, there is little evidence of the
growth of strong political identities that would undermine the Union. For these
commentators Britishness continues to be robust, and the debate about its alleged
precariousness – promoted among others by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown –
often conceals other concerns (see, e.g. Kim 2005; Lee 2006; Kenny et al. 2008).
Events have a way of pushing even the most deep-seated trends awry, and we
should not feel that the current sentiments about the United Kingdom could not
change quite abruptly. There are certainly powerful historical reasons for thinking
that the United Kingdom is much more vulnerable today than it was in the past.
The things that made it in the first place, the things that kept it together over the
past two or three centuries, have mostly lost their force. Empire has gone, so too
has world power. In their place have come Europeanization and globalization,
putting pressure on the United Kingdom while simultaneously encouraging the
aspirations of its constituent units for more autonomy or even independence.
England’s attachment to the Union cannot by itself save it. That will depend
largely on the Scots, and to a lesser extent the Welsh and Northern Irish. It is here
that there is evidence of the greatest volatility, and the potential for events to mark
out a new course.21 Much will depend, no doubt, on the willingness and ability of
political elites to exploit a highly fluid situation.
But for England, whatever the case may be with the other British nations, the
option of a strong political nationalism is neither a realistic nor a sensible one. It
goes against the grain of its whole history – its whole temperament, we may say.
There are scraps of cultural Englishness – a love of the countryside, an aversion
to cities, a distrust of intellectuals – but much of this is nostalgic and backward-
looking, heavily slanted towards the middle and upper-middle class outlook that
has been so dominant in modern England. It excludes too many groups to make it
very serviceable for a national identity, and as the basis of an English nationalism
it is almost bound to be reactionary (cf. Wright 2005; Blunkett 2005: 7). For the
English a larger sense of their place in the world has to be the starting point of their
re-thinking about themselves. That has to include Britain, which England can no
more do without than Britain can without England. Englishness and Britishness
are joined to each other as the limbs to the body. One might protest, as a young
Englishman did to Steve Fenton, that “the English are British, and that to me is
21 In addition to the Scottish referendum, and the threat of Scottish independence,
one should note among the newer pressures the crisis in the European Union caused by
the economic weakness of several of its southern members, and a corresponding growth
of anti-European sentiment among the English in particular. A new concern about home-
grown Muslim extremists, and anxieties about immigrants from the poorer parts of the
European Union, are also affecting concepts of Britishness and Englishness. All of this is
discussed in Chapter 1, above.
wrong” (Fenton 2007: 330), but what is English Englishness? Scotland, Wales, and
Northern Ireland without the United Kingdom are conceivable, as the Republic
of Ireland showed nearly a century ago; an England without Britain is virtually
unthinkable. Were Britain to dissolve – by no means impossible – the English
would be faced with a crisis of identity far greater than anything confronting
them at present. It is not clear what resources are available for handling such an
eventuality. But “England for the English” seems the least helpful response.
“English nationalism” has always seemed an exotic, almost an alien,
phenomenon. At a time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when
nationalism was sweeping over much of Europe, the English retained a respectful
distance. There were other, more urgent and demanding, things to do: coming to
terms with industrialization and urbanization, in the most sweeping transformation
in world history since the Neolithic Revolution; managing the United Kingdom,
a multinational enterprise that might be taken for granted for much of the time
but that, as towards the end of the nineteenth century, could also reveal glaring
fault lines; ruling the largest empire ever known to humankind. All of these things
militated against the cultivation of nationalism, as that sentiment is normally
understood. There might be racial pride, as in the sense of the “Anglo-Saxon”
achievement. But that pointed towards something much wider than the English
nation, towards something called “Greater Britain”, an entity that included not
just the white colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa but
also the United States and, in the opinion Sir Charles Dilke, the popularizer of the
concept, even India (Bell 2007). It could never be reduced to mere nationalism.
Nationalism, to most English thinkers, always seemed to have something
of the provincial about it, something more reminiscent of tribalism than of the
outward looking ideologies that seemed more necessary in the contemporary
world. The English admired and encouraged the nationalist struggles of others,
such as the Italians, Poles, and Hungarians, in their efforts to throw off oppressive
rule. Famous nationalists such as Mazzini and Kossuth found a warm welcome
and a safe refuge in England. Nationalism in their countries seemed a helpful
accompaniment to the achievement of liberty (Kumar 2015). But for the English
themselves it seemed an unnecessary and, arguably, a disabling force. If there was
an element of condescension in this, it befitted a people who saw themselves, as
the Romans of old, in global terms, the remakers of the world in their own image.
There are many today who would wish England to accept its reduced role in
the world, to settle for a cosy and comfortable Englishnesss, akin perhaps to the
way the Dutch or the Belgians have come to terms with the loss of their empires.
Even were that possible – and we have seen the difficulties of so doing – it would
seem a regrettable move. The English language, English institutions, and English
culture are diffused on a world-wide basis, starting with the United Kingdom
itself. America, an English creation, has in recent years been the main agent and
beneficiary of this worldwide diffusion. That role seems unlikely to diminish in
the near future. But England surely still has a part to play in this great saga. The
globalization and increasing interconnectedness of all human activities call for
an outward stance, not one that looks inward. The English, by their history and
traditions, are well positioned to exploit that situation. It would be a pity if they
were to lose the opportunity in pursuit of a narrow and defensive nationalism.
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Chapter 6
When Was the English Nation?
Forever England?
Remember, sir, my liege,

The kings, your ancestors, together with
The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
At Neptune’s park, ribbed and paled in
With banks unscalable, and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats,
But suck them up to th’ topmast. A kind of conquest
Caesar made here, but made not here his brag
Of ‘came and saw and overcame.’ With shame –
The first that ever touched him – he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping,
Poor ignorant baubles, on our terrible seas
Like eggshells moved upon their surges, cracked
As easily ’gainst our rocks; for joy whereof
The famed Cassibelan, who was once at point –
O giglot fortune! – to master Caesar’s sword,
Made Lud’s town with rejoicing fires bright,
And Britons strut with courage.
Shakespeare, Cymbeline, King of Britain, Act 3, Scene 1
Everyone knows the famous paean to England delivered by John of Gaunt in

Shakespeare’s Richard II (“this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty”, etc – as good
an example of the English/British confusion as we can find.). Far fewer know the
equally majestic tribute paid to Britain by Shakespeare in his less well-known and
infrequently performed play Cymbeline. Not just the tone but the coincidence of
theme and imagery is striking. Here Britain – unlike England – is truly an island,
proud and independent, defying the mighty Caesar and coming within an inch of
seeing him off (the play depicts another failed act of defiance of the Romans).
“Britain’s a world/By itself”, says another character in the play, “and we will
nothing pay/For wearing our own noses” (Act 3, Scene 1). If there is nationalism
here, it is British, not English, nationalism.
There have been several scholars who have championed the idea that it was
in Shakespeare’s time – in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – that
England truly came into its own. It was then, with the Protestant Reformation,
the declaration of royal supremacy, an increasingly assertive and heavily Puritan
parliament, and spectacular successes against Catholic Spain, the dominant power
of the time, that England broke away from its centuries-old Continental mooring
and struck off on its own. Writers and poets celebrated England as the “elect
nation”, God’s chosen, like the Israelites of old.1 The English, it is said, became
nationalistic – indeed, they invented nationalism (see especially Greenfeld 1992:
29–87; and cf. Greenfield 2002: 80; Gorski 2006). Shakespeare’s history plays
have always been included in the recital of items indicating this rise of nationalist
consciousness: they are, says Derek Hirst, “central to the writing of England and
its destiny” (2002: 257), and Adrian Hastings refers to “the nationalist message
of Shakespeare’s histories from Richard II to Henry V” (1997: 56).2 What indeed
could be more nationalistic than “On, on, you noblest English”, Henry V’s speech
before the walls of Harfleur, which concludes with the ringing cry, “God for Harry,
England, and Saint George”; or the rousing speech – “we few, we happy few, we
band of brothers” – before the battle of Agincourt (Henry V, Act III, Scene 1; Act
IV, Scene 3)?
Shakespeare is a treacherous guide in most areas, except perhaps the human
heart. What he gives with one hand he takes away with the other – this is the
famous “negative capability” that Keats admired in him. We do not know – at
least from his plays, and there is not much else – whether he was Protestant or
Catholic, royalist or populist, nationalist or cosmopolitan. He seems capable of
taking all positions, and none. Nationalism indeed seems one of the most unlikely
to attribute to him, from all that we know from his plays. Even in what appears
his most nationalistic of plays, Henry V, we find a chilling assessment of the cost
to the common people, in blood and money, of Henry’s ambitions in France (Act
IV, Scene 1); while the prominent presence of Welsh, Scottish and Irish figures,
and what amounts to a running debate on ethnicity between them, further reveals
Shakespeare’s clear awareness of a British dimension to the English question. And
there are many other indications of ambivalence and detachment in what are often
taken to be Shakespeare’s firmly held attitudes, whether towards royalty, religion,
the family, or the nation. Shakespeare is too often read solely through the lens of
a particular period or age. In our case, and with special reference to nationalism,
1 It is probably worth noting that practically every nation with a Judaeo-Christian
background – starting of course with the Jews themselves – has seen itself at one time or
another as an “elect nation” or a “chosen people”, covenanted with God to fulfil his purpose
in the world. See Gorski 2000, Smith 2003; Longley 2003. There is nothing special about
the English in this regard, which does not of course mean that they themselves might not
feel that there is. But it does throw into question the idea – as advanced e.g. by Greenfeld
1992 – that this belief is what most qualifies the English to be seen as the inventors of
nationalism. See further Kumar 2003: 108–14.
2 Cf. A.R. Humphreys: “In a general sense, England is the hero of all the histories;
Shakespeare writes of his country’s fate. This is especially so in Henry V” (“Introduction”
to Henry V, in Shakespeare 1994: 672). But, as Humphreys himself indicates, the royal
and dynastic character of the struggles chronicled makes the histories more – or less – than
nationalist epics.
When Was the English Nation? 113
there has been a tendency to see him as one of the earliest, and in some ways the
greatest, prophet of English nationalism. We can see this especially in the popular
film versions of Henry V (1945) and Richard III (1955), suitably embellished by
Laurence Olivier’s athletic acting and William Walton’s stirring music.3
At any rate, the existence of a “British” theme in Shakespeare’s plays, even if
there were no other reasons, is sufficient warning that we would be wrong to see
the uncomplicated celebration of England and Englishness as the leitmotiv either
of his work or of Elizabethan and Stuart culture in general. It is well-known that
James I, when he linked the thrones of Scotland and England in 1603, attempted
to promote Britishness throughout his new realm. His failure, on the whole, to do
so, and the deferment of the formation of Great Britain to the union with Scotland
in 1707, has led many people to write off this early attempt to create a British
identity (see, e.g. Levack 1987: 32–41; J. Wormald 1992). But not only is the
“British idea” itself much older than this Stuart effort, with a genealogy stretching
back into medieval times (Hay 1955–6; Williamson 1983). As a policy it was
energetically prosecuted by the Tudors, and received a considerable boost with
the victory of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland in 1560. Moreover James’s
vision of a union, not just of crowns, but of hearts and minds among all the peoples
of Britain was shared by several prominent thinkers and artists of the time, among
them the philosopher Francis Bacon and the poet Michael Drayton. England and
Englishness, it is clear, did not occupy the field uncontested in the early seventeenth
century; they were powerfully challenged by several alternative ideas, one of them
being Britain and Britishness (Kumar 2003: 132–4).
It has been a notable feature of recent English historiography to find the
English nation alive and well at some very remote periods indeed. The time of the
Venerable Bede, in the eight century, is one such, or at least the late Saxon period
before the Norman Conquest (Campbell 1995; Hastings 1997: 35–43; P. Wormald
1994). Others have seen a distinct English nationalism developing in alliance with
the conquest of the Celtic nations and the creation of “the first English empire”
from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries (R.R. Davies 2000; Gillingham 2000).
3 Baker and Maley remark on the “iconic texts – ‘Shakespeare’ – that were and
are implicated in a hegemonic ‘Englishness’” (2002b: 7). For some recent commentaries
on Shakespeare, challenging especially the conventionally attributed attitudes towards
nationalism, ethnicity, patriotism, monarchy, etc., see Baker and Maley 2002a; Dollimore
and Sinfield 1985, 1986; Floyd-Wilson 2002; Greenfield 2002; Holderness 1991; Jordan
1997; Joughin 1997; Kastan 1982, 1999; Marcus 1988; McEachern 1996; Mikalachki 1995;
Neill 1994; Parker 1998, 2002; Rackin 1990. On the film versions of Henry V, showing the
radically different possibilities of interpretation, see Lewis 1995. On changing visions of
Shakespeare across the centuries, see Taylor 1991. The celebrations of the tercentenary of
Shakespeare’s birth in 1916, occurring as it did in the midst of a World War which involved
much of the British Empire, revealed much about the ambiguities and ambivalences
surrounding “the poet of Englishness” who was at the same time supposed to speak to all
peoples, of all times and nations. The standard resolution seemed to be to link Shakespeare
to (the British) empire and so to the world at large. See Kahn 2001.
More familiarly there is the fourteenth century, the time of Chaucer, as the period
in which “the Englishing of the nation” truly took place (Elton 1992: 52).4 These
earlier periods now take their place alongside the claim – actually quite a venerable
one – that it was the early-modern period, the time of the Tudors, that saw the birth
of English nationalism (Pollard 1907: 26–78; Greenfeld 1992; Gorski 2006; see
also Kumar 2003: 93–7). If we add to these claims for the seventeenth (Kohn 1940)
and eighteenth centuries (Newman 1987; Lucas 1990), we can see that the student
of English nationalism is spoilt for choice. This still leaves out the most obvious
period, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the ideology of nationalism,
by the more or less unanimous agreement of scholars, became widespread, first in
Europe then in the rest of the world (see, e.g. Hobsbawm 1992; Zimmer 2003).
The English nation, in other words, like the bourgeoisie, is it seems always rising,
if not always there (Black 1994: 91).
What are we to make of all these claims? How do we adjudicate them? What
are their bases, and how do they relate to any general criteria we might lay down
for the recognition of nationhood? It is not possible here to examine these claims
in detail.5 But some general observations might help us to assess them, and point
us towards a plausible resolution.
Understanding the Nation in Time
The question, “when was the English nation?”, evidently falls under the more
general rubric of nations and nationalism. At what time can we speak, with any
degree of confidence, of “the English nation”, and what might we mean by that?
When did the idea of the nation emerge, and to what extent does England conform
to the general pattern? Can there be “nations before nationalism”, that is, the
existence of a developed sense of nationhood before the creation, in the nineteenth
century, of systematic ideologies of nationalism? Is England an instance of that?
Walter Bagehot, the great Victorian journalist and author of The English
Constitution (1867), thought that nations are “as old as history” (in Billig 1995:
26). This perhaps reflects the conviction and confidence of the age of nationalism.
For many nineteenth-century people, nations were indeed natural, the primary and
persisting units of political and social organization that had existed time out of
mind. These days we might call them “primordialists” or “perennialists”. They
are opposed by the “modernists”, who think that nations are recent inventions,
4 Claims for the medieval origins of English national consciousness – as of Scottish,

French, German and even Italian national consciousness – were indeed common among a
much earlier generation of historians, such as Marc Bloch, Johan Huizinga, and George
Coulton, as Walker Connor (1994: 211–12) reminds us. A particularly favourite example was
the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath (1320), as an early example of Scottish nationalism.
5 I have attempted this in Kumar 2003. See also, for the earlier periods, Breuilly
2005. For a different view, see Smith 2002: 12–14. And see also Hutchinson et al. 2007.
linked to the great modern developments symbolized by the French and Industrial
Revolutions. One implication of the modernist view is that both the invention of
nations and the ideology of nationalism occur in the same period and are, indeed,
inextricably connected, since “it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not
the other way round” (Gellner 1983: 55). On this view nations have no meaning, and
perhaps no existence, outside their construction within an ideology of nationalism.
There cannot be therefore, strictly speaking, nations before nationalism.6
Anthony Smith proposes an “ethno-symbolic” approach which avoids the
ahistoricism of the perennialist approach – nations have always been and always
will be – and the almost equally a-historical view of the modernists that nations
spring more or less full-blown from the processes of modernization, in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as Gellner [1998: 90–101] engagingly put
it, most nations neither have nor need navels). Against these Smith argues for
a historical understanding of the development of nationhood in time and over
time. Nations, he claims, emerge at different times and places, building upon
the “symbols, memories, myths and values” of long-existing ethnies or ethnic
communities (Smith 2009; see also Leoussi and Grosby 2007). Not only, then,
can we separate ethnies from nations – unlike the perennialists, who conflate
them, and the modernists, who regard ethnicity as more or less irrelevant to
nationhood. We can also investigate the times and conditions in which ethnies take
on the full trappings of nationhood, adding to their symbolic core such features
as “territorialization” (the occupation by the majority of a historic homeland), the
dissemination of a public culture, and the standardization of laws and customs
among members of the community.
This is an attractive proposal, which has the advantage not just of making sense
of the various sightings of nations in the pre-modern period but also of separating
the appearance of nations from the rise of nationalism as an ideology. There can
be and have been, in other words, nations before nationalism, though Smith is
suitably cautious about seeing this to any great extent before the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries (see also Smith 2003: 118–119). This more flexible approach
puts Smith close to the equally persuasive view of Philip Gorski that nationalism
itself is a more varied phenomena than we like to admit, and that this means that
the search for some unitary cause or origin, in the manner of the modernists, is
likely to be fruitless. “Nationalism does not have an origin or a single history; it
has a genealogy, a ruptured and fragmented history whose only unity lies in the
national category itself. Nationalism is not something that happened at a particular
time and place; it is something that happens in many places and times, and in many
different ways” (Gorski 2000: 1462; cf. Connor 1994: 219; Smith 2002: 12–14).
Disputes about nationalism, its origins and meaning, turn in most cases on
differences in the understanding of that vexatious concept, the nation. Where one
6 For “primordialism”, “perennialism”, and “modernism”, see the chapters by

Breuilly, Grosby and Smith in Ichijo and Uzelac 2005. See also Smith 1998; Breuilly 1996;
Zimmer 2003: 4–26; Scales and Zimmer 2005; Breuilly 2013.
person sees a nation, another sees at best an ethnie or perhaps no more than a
political community with a loosely-defined ethnic component. There is probably
broad general agreement, though, that a minimum definition of nation would
include some sense of shared membership, some idea of a common culture linking
all members more or less equally such that all felt they were participant in the
community. This does not mean that democracy in any formal sense is a condition
of nationhood – that would make nations and nationalism very late developments
indeed, later than most modernists accept. But it might mean that we must accept
that some kind of populism is to be found at the heart of the national idea, some
sense that rulers and ruled partake of the same “national soul”.7
This, admittedly, is to be influenced by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
concepts of the nation. But can we – perennialists, modernists, ethno-symbolists alike
– avoid that? Was it not only in that period that the idea of the nation first came under
scrutiny and achieved its most searching examination? Even those most convinced
that there are nations before nationalism have to work with some definition of the
nation, and it would be strange if that definition varied greatly from the classical
definitions achieved in the nineteenth century. There is an inescapable irony here,
that the prophets of nations before nationalism have to work with a concept of the
nation elaborated most fully in nineteenth-century nationalism.8
7 See Nairn 2003: 89–90, and cf. Connor 1994: 223: “National consciousness is a
mass, not an elite phenomenon”. Smith argues that “nationalism may be described as a mass
phenomenon … but there is no reason why the object of its endeavours, the nation, must
also be constituted as a mass phenomenon” (2002: 10; emphasis in the original). This brings
us back to the possibility of “nations before nationalism”. No one would deny that the
language of nationhood pre-dates nationalism; the difficulty in almost all cases is knowing
what to make of the notion of nation that is thereby invoked, especially as that varies so
much as between, say, the “nations” of medieval universities and the nation appealed to by
ancien regime French kings or – differently again – the French parlements (see on this Bell
2003). While one cannot legislate on these matters, and there are indeed, as Ernest Gellner
often conceded, ambiguous cases, it seems preferable to regard the modern idea of the nation
as deriving from, if not entirely tied to, the discourse of nationalism that developed around
the time of the French Revolution (see Brubaker 1992: ch. 1). This gives us a historical
benchmark, a terminus post quem, which allows us to examine any particular earlier usage
in the light of, and according to the understanding of, the full definition of nationhood as
achieved in the language of nineteenth-century nationalism. With the relevant changes, the
same could apply to the concept of “national consciousness” – in principle a mass concept,
if not always so in practice. If one wants to use it in relation to phenomena earlier than the
advent of nationalism – say, of the English people at the time of the Spanish Armada, or of
the Dutch at the time of the revolt against Spain – one would have to specify in what ways
and to what extent it matched up to the later and more clearly recognizable expression of
national consciousness. The logic of this would be the familiar one of “from the known to
the less known”.
8 Pierre Nora speaks of the “invincible tautology: one explains the nation by the
nation … without ever breaking out of the circle and grasping the thing from without” (in
Englund 1992: 316).
But one consequence of accepting this situation is that it does put some very
great obstacles in the way of those who want to see nations in the medieval or
early-modern period. If some kind of horizontal, populist solidarity is, in principle
at least, a condition of nationhood, how likely are we to find it in societies in which
monarchy, aristocracy, and church hold sway? Democratic ideas did gain some
kind of currency at various times – during the seventeenth-century English Civil
War, for instance. But in England as well as elsewhere they went underground for
a century or more before resurfacing in the American and French Revolutions. At
most other times before the eighteenth century, the general principle of European
society was hierarchy and difference – a principle to be found not just in society
but, as a God-given and God-sanctioned fact, in nature as well, as symbolized in
the idea of “the Great Chain of Being”. Royalty and even aristocracy could on
occasions attempt to annex the national idea, as David Bell (2003) shows in the
case of king and parlements in eighteenth-century France. But in principle there
was an irreducible opposition between the hierarchical principle of monarchy and
aristocracy – supported in most instances by the church – and the fundamentally
egalitarian aspiration of the nation. If we take seriously the idea that nations and
nationalism are mass, not elite phenomena, it is really difficult to argue for their
rise in any significant way before the nineteenth century – perhaps even the late
nineteenth century (see Hobsbawm 1984, 1992: 101–30; Connor 1994: 224;
Zimmer 2003).
The Imperial Nation
Such general considerations must obviously affect our understanding of the

particular case of the English nation, not to mention that curious and elusive,
almost un-English thing, English nationalism. Historians, like everyone else,
respond to the Zeitgeist. British historians have not been immune to the great
burgeoning of interest in nations and nationalism that has been such a marked
feature of the intellectual scene over the past two decades. This has not been so
surprising in the case, say, of Scottish or Irish historians, reflecting a long period
of concern by Scots and Irish of English domination of the British Isles. But it
has been sufficiently unusual among English historians to be the cause for public
notice and comment.9 Works such as Linda Colley’s Britons (1992) and Norman
Davies’s The Isles (1999) have attracted attention and debate well beyond the
scholarly community.
Not only has there been a renewed interest in nationalism among English
historians and historically-minded sociologists. Even more remarkable has been the
rise of what we can only call a school of English nationalist historiography. It is they
– scholars such as Patrick Wormald and Geoffrey Elton – who have made the claims
9 See, for instance, the correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement in March/
April, 2004.
for the early development of the English nation that we noted earlier. What makes
their contributions noteworthy is the fact that English scholars have a long-standing
indifference to questions of English nationalism, based on the conviction that there
really is no such thing. “English nationalism”, says Hugh Seton-Watson, “ never
existed, since there was no need for either a doctrine or an independence struggle”
(1977: 34); and John Breuilly remarks on “the absence of any distinctive English
nationalist ideology” (1993: 87; see also Kumar 2003: 18–21). Presumably the rise
of an English nationalist historiography, matching that of almost all of England’s
continental neighbours, reflects the sense that there is now a need for a clear
statement of English national identity. In a period in which the United Kingdom has
come under intense pressure from nationalist movements in the “Celtic” lands, and
in which substantial devolution has been granted to Wales, Scotland, and Northern
Ireland, it has occurred to many of the English that they too need a national story to
tell, and an English nation to define. Combined with concern about the integration
of a significant immigrant population, the attempts to create a European identity to
match and perhaps surpass national ones, and a general sense of a loss of power and
influence in the world, it is hardly surprising that English nationalism, perhaps for
the first time ever, now shows a distinct presence in English political life. Put another
way, we might say that England is at last becoming a normal nation, a nation like
others, at least in the West.10
If so, it has been a long haul. “At what point in its development”, asks Walker
Connor (1994: 223), “does a nation come into being?” In the English case, not only
might we be tempted to say, “not yet”, but we are faced with a series of complexities
and perplexities that makes the dating of English national consciousness unusually
if not uniquely difficult. A familiar problem, though not for that any easier to
resolve, is the English–British elision and conflation (Langlands 1999). How
to separate English and British developments, when for the English at least the
confusion is so total, and so disarmingly admitted, as to render the distinction of
identities virtually impossible (Condor 1996)? The Scots, Welsh and Irish do not
have the same problem, certainly not to the same degree. This is because they have
seen themselves, at various times and in various ways, as the victims of English
aggression and imperial ambition. Their sense of themselves as Scottish or Irish
has been formed to a considerable extent by their opposition to the English.
The problem for the English is the opposite. Insofar as they have a sense of
themselves, it is as an imperial nation – in relation to their Celtic neighbours as
much as to non-Europeans (Kumar 2003). The English were the creators of two
different kinds of empires, each with its characteristic effect on English self-
conceptions. They first built up an “inner empire”, what contemporaries as late as
the eighteenth century called “the empire of Great Britain”. This was a land empire,
10 See on these developments, Kumar 2003: 239–73. From what is now a relatively
large literature attempting to state the character of the English nation past and present, two
good examples are Paxman 1999 and Scruton 2001. Further examples are discussed in
Chapter 1, above.
one created, as in the case of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, by the expansion
of the imperial power into adjacent lands. Starting with the Norman Conquest, and
continuing particularly under Henry II and Edward I, the English conquered Wales
and Ireland and came within an ace of conquering Scotland. While Wales was
comprehensively “Englished”, the Irish conquest remained patchy and incomplete
until the more brutal conquest and colonization of the seventeenth century; while
it took a parliamentary union with the Scots in 1707 to pressure them into a
united kingdom. Nevertheless, with the formal incorporation of Ireland in 1801,
the “British Empire in Europe” – another contemporary term – was complete.
Although this does not in several respects fit the “internal colonialism” model
proposed by Michael Hechter (1999) – partly because the Celtic regions shared
in the spoils of the second, overseas, empire – there is no doubt of England’s
hegemonic position in that empire.
Imperial nations, especially in the case of land empires, have to be particularly
careful about nationalism – their own, that is. As the dominant nation, they have to
be sensitive to the susceptibilities of the subject peoples. They must not beat their
own drum too loudly, or they are likely to find a threatening echo in the nationalist
drums of their various subjects. Their rule is likely to be more efficient, and to last
longer, if they play down their own nationalism, their own sense of themselves
as the imperial power. So the Ottomans were quite content to take in Christians,
in large numbers, into the imperial bureaucracy, to the point where the Anatolian
Turks – putatively the dominant people – could feel themselves discriminated
against. So too Russians, in both the Tsarist and the Soviet empires, could feel some
resentment as their rulers, in pursuit of the goals of Orthodoxy or Communism,
neglected or downplayed purely Russian interests while stimulating the cultures of
non-Russian peoples and giving them a considerable role in imperial governance.
The point at which Turks and Russians, in the late nineteenth century, began to flex
their nationalist muscles, was the point at which their respective empires revealed
their weakness; it proved indeed to be the prelude to imperial extinction, though
the Russians found a new imperial cause and inaugurated a new empire.11
The English were only following this politic pattern in their studied disavowal
of official displays of English nationalism: allowing themselves, for instance, since
medieval times to be ruled by Welsh and Scottish, not to mention German, kings
and queens; lacking their own distinctively named national cultural institutions,
while allowing the Scots and Welsh to flaunt their own national museums and
national galleries; even, in recent years, granting the Scots, the Welsh and the
Northern Irish their own parliaments and national assemblies while resisting calls
for a comparable English one. The English even, until very recently, lacked their
own patron saint and flag. The Scots had St Andrews, the Irish St Patrick, the
Welsh St David, with flags to match which were proudly displayed on festive
and ceremonial occasions. The English made do with the Union Jack, in most
11 For the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the comparison with the British
Empire, see Kumar 2000. See also Kumar 2016, forthcoming.
cases unaware that this was not an English flag at all but an invention of James I
in pursuit of his British dream. Only in recent years, with the growth of English
nationalism, has there been the rediscovery of St George and the St George’s Cross
as English emblems, now seen in their thousands on the terraces at international
football matches.
English indifference and even antagonism towards nationalism, at least on the
part of rulers and elites, could be said in the early-modern period to be shared by
most of Europe’s ruling dynasties, especially those who conceived of themselves
in imperial terms. For what could be more contradictory than the principles of
nation and empire? But there is a sense in which we can say that, though not fitting
the standard models of nationalism very well, and perhaps in the end not even
deserving of the name, imperial peoples do develop a form of self-consciousness
and self-identity that we might call “imperial nationalism”. Since this is generally
tied to the putative “mission” of the empire, I have elsewhere proposed the
alternative designation “missionary nationalism” (Kumar 2000; 2003: 30–35;
2010; see also Smith 2003: 95–130). This suffers from a number of drawbacks,
one major one being that it applies to empires that existed for centuries before the
coming of nationalist ideologies proper in the nineteenth century. It can indeed be
applied to what we might think of as the ur-instance of missionary nationalism,
that of Rome from the first to the fourth centuries AD. It was Rome, both in its
pagan and its Christian form, that gave to Europe the model of “the civilizing
mission”; it was Rome that pioneered the policies of extending equal citizenship
to all its subject peoples, and of suppressing its own identity, and that of Italians
in general, as it converted itself into a “world empire” with a world mission (see
Pagden 1995: 11–28; Kumar 2016: Chapter 3).
Nevertheless, suitably understood, the concept of missionary nationalism
does seem to be a reasonably satisfying way of describing the self-conceptions of
imperial peoples such as English and Russians. It has the advantage above all of
highlighting the most characteristic feature of such a collective identity, which is
the displacement of attention from the people – the “nation” – to the mission or
cause, be it Islam, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantinism or simply la mission
civilisatrice, the form it took in the nineteenth century when religious goals lost
their former importance. Missionary nationalism is the nationalism of people who
have more to celebrate than merely themselves. It gives to such people a goal or
purpose from which they derive their place in the world. This is far from conducive
to modesty. But it does generally entail a disposition, born of a statesmanlike
prudence, not to insist too stridently on the character and virtues of the people who
know themselves to be the principal “carriers” of the imperial mission.
The English recognized this in the case of their “inner” land empire, perhaps
more in later centuries than in the earlier ones, when the tendency to stereotype
and belittle their Celtic neighbours achieved something like a racist dimension
(Gillingham 2000; Jones 1971). But they had an additional cause to do so as the
builders of a second, world-wide, “outer” empire, the more familiar overseas
empire of Great Britain. Here truly was a missionary enterprise, no less than to
spread what were seen as the benefits and blessings of English civilization to
every corner of the globe. At the height of its power, the British Empire occupied
nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass and controlled a quarter of the world’s
population – the largest empire the world has ever seen (Barraclough 1978:
245).12
But this was indeed the British empire, to a far greater extent than the “empire of
Great Britain in Europe”. All parts of the United Kingdom participated in imperial
rule, Scots, Welsh and Irish as much as English. Indeed it has often been claimed
that the Celtic nations, especially the Scots, did disproportionately well out of
the overseas empire (Colley 1992, Chapters 3–4; Kumar 2003: 165–72). There
was thus even less reason to stress English management of the empire, despite
England’s undoubted historic role in laying its foundations. With the obvious
exception of the Irish Catholics – who showed their feeling by leaving the United
Kingdom in 1921 – a common Protestantism linked all the peoples of Britain,
giving them a common cause to promote at home and abroad. Later there was the
British Industrial Revolution, and Britain’s rise to worldwide industrial supremacy.
Again this was a joint enterprise, in which merchants, industrialists, entrepreneurs
and engineers from all parts of the isles played their part. English money may
have oiled the works, but some of the most famous names – James Watt, Thomas
Telford, John McAdam, Thomas Lipton – were Scottish. In the imperial army
and police, the Irish – including Irish Catholics – and Scots were prominent in all
ranks. Scottish missionaries and educators, such as David Livingstone and Mary
Slessor, spread over the entire empire.
All these developments militated against a stress on Englishness and English
national identity. The monarchy under Queen Victoria was encouraged to
establish Scottish roots, a task to which Victoria and Albert took enthusiastically;
statesmen such as Gladstone stressed their Scottish and Welsh connections; the
Irish Wellesley brothers, above all the great Duke of Wellington, became national
heroes – but of a decidedly British, not English, stamp. The empire in particular
did much to establish an overarching British identity which, without suppressing
consciousness of the differences between English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, did
much to mitigate them. This applied particularly to the role of the English. As
Linda Colley says, “if Britain’s primary identity was to be an imperial one, then
the English were put firmly and forever in their place, reduced to a component part
of a much greater whole … and no longer the people who ran virtually the whole
show” (1992: 130).
The relation between the English and the non-European components of the
empire were naturally somewhat different. There was no question of admitting
Indians, Africans, Burmese, Chinese and others on an equal footing with the
British. But even here the missionary character of empire – with the due degree
of hypocrisy – could lead to a playing down of ethnic or national superiority.
12 The Mongol Empire of Gengis Khan was larger, but at its greatest extent very
loosely integrated and in any case very short-lived.
This was especially aided by the fact that the British, unlike say the French, made
little attempt to integrate the empire into the fabric of national politics. British
imperial rule was to a good extent indirect, relying on the authority and leadership
of native rulers. The official policy always remained that of preparing the colonies
for eventual independence and self-rule. The role of the imperial ruler was tutelary
(Mehta 1999). The civilizing mission consisted in the spread of education, science,
law, and parliamentary government. Inevitably these would have an English or
British inflection (Gikandi 1996; Viswanathan 1990). But, with some exceptions –
Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Education of 1835 being one13 – the English drew
back from the idea that they were imposing Englishness on the native populations
and undermining native cultures. British missionaries, scholars and administrators
in fact took the lead in the unearthing – sometimes literally – and the preservation
of native cultures (see Swenson and Mandler 2013). There was indeed pride in
the empire; but the pride resembled more that of craftsmen and architects in their
creations than any kind of self-regarding ethnic or national pride.
With the end of empire in the 1950s and 1960s, going with the end of British
industrial supremacy and generally of Britain’s position as a world power, the
whole British synthesis unravelled (McCrone 1997). The causes for which the two
empires, inner and outer, stood – Protestantism, industrialism, Western civilization
– no longer made sense, or were taken up by others, notably the Americans. The
British were thrown back upon themselves, one response being the revival of
Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism. The protective layers that had cocooned
the English, allowing them to regard nationalism as an alien force, inimical to the
English way, fell away. The English were now forced to confront the question of
their own national identity – and they did so without the benefit of any tradition of
reflection on the matter.
Reluctant Nationalists
English antipathy to nationalism is a well-known and much commented on

characteristic, from David Hume to George Orwell (Kumar 2003: 18–21). It may
even be, as Hume was the first to suggest, that this antipathy in itself constitutes a
central element of the English national character.14 What is clear at any rate is that
13 Even here, as Gauri Viswanathan (1990: 144–5) shows, Macaulay’s purpose in

advocating the English language and English education in India had a purely functional and
utilitarian end; it was not meant to promote any idea of English moral or ethnic superiority.
In that sense it could be held to be in line with the general British policy of advancement
and “modernization” in the empire, rather than the promotion of “Englishness” as a moral
or cultural ideal.
14 “The English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character;
unless this very singularity may pass for such” (Hume 1987: 207). Hume attributed this to
the “mixed” character of the English government, composed of monarchy, aristocracy, and
it reflects a central fact of English history. At the very time when nationalism was
becoming one of the most powerful of European ideologies, the English found
themselves governing the largest empire the world had ever seen. This, together
with their experience as the superintendents of the British Isles, left them with an
attitude of indifference towards nationalism. Nationalism was for other (lesser),
peoples. If they considered it at all, it was as a threat to the imperial system,
whether in the United Kingdom or overseas. Engaged on what they considered
more important and more pressing enterprises, the English had neither the time nor
the interest to reflect on themselves a nation.
It is this that gives such an air of implausibilty to recent – and not so recent –
claims to have found a strong English national consciousness, and even a vibrant
English nationalism, at various points from the eight to the eighteenth centuries. On
general grounds alone, as suggested earlier, we would have reason to be suspicious
of these claims for an early English nationalism. There may be, to use Anthony
Smith’s distinction, a case for speaking of an English ethnie in these years but not
an English nation. When we add to these general considerations England’s own
distinctive history as an imperial power since the Middle Ages, we have even more
reason to be sceptical. Neither Bede’s, nor Chaucer’s, nor Shakespeare’s England
show either the need or the existence of a strong English nationalist consciousness
(Kumar 2003, passim). No more does Johnson’s England, the England of the
eighteenth century, when ideas of nationhood were certainly being discussed in
European societies. But this was also the time when England was consolidating its
hold over the British Isles, and re-commencing its imperial ventures overseas after
the loss of the North American colonies. From the English point of view, the time
could scarcely have been less propitious for raising the flag of English nationalism
(British nationalism, another somewhat quirky phenomenon, might be a different
matter, as Linda Colley (1992) shows).
It is, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (Kumar 2003: Chapter 7), not before
the late nineteenth century that we first begin to discern the rise of anything that we
can properly call an English national consciousness. Again, the causes can be seen
as both general and particular. Generally, this is the period at which nationalism
began to penetrate deeply into the consciousness of European societies. Every
people, it was felt, had a “national soul”, the protection, strengthening and
cultivation of which was a moral duty. Throughout the European continent, from
West to East, intellectuals and statesmen set about discovering and, if necessary,
inventing, such a national identity for their people. Moreover, unlike the more
political or civic concept of nationhood that generally held sway in the first half
of the nineteenth century, the popular nationalism of the second half was more
distinctly ethnic and cultural. The soul of a nation was seen to lie essentially in
its language, its religion, its musical and artistic culture, its folkways and folklore
(Hobsbawm 1992: 101–30).
democracy, which brought about “a wonderful mixture of manners and character”, with no
one type dominating.
The British Isles were not immune from these currents, as is evident from the
rise of Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism at this time. So too the English, in part
spurred by the nationalism in other parts of Britain, began to reflect on themselves
as a distinct people. But there was an additional, more particular, reason for this
new-found self-consciousness on the part of the English. The late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries can be regarded, in one guise, as the high-point of the
British Empire, certainly if we consider the scale of territorial expansion and the
zealous promotion of official symbols and ceremonials, such as the great imperial
jubilees and coronations of 1887, 1897, and 1901, and George V’s Delhi Durbar of
1911. But, in another guise, it was also an age which saw the beginnings of a great
anxiety about empire, a sense that, like Rome of old, the signs were showing of
weakness and decadence. Certainly this was the mood of Rudyard Kipling’s great
poem “Recessional”(1897), with its theme of the passing of glory and greatness
(Cannadine 1984: 125; 2001: 106–12).
This too added to the new mood of sobriety and self-reflection. It seemed to
require a searching of the national conscience, and of the national past, in the
effort to discover and define what constituted England’s true essence, what were
the springs of national greatness – and perhaps too, national failings. I have called
this movement a “moment of Englishness”, to distinguish it from the more full-
blooded nationalism that was developing elsewhere (Kumar 2003: 175). For if this
was nationalism, it was of a severely limited kind. The imperial and the British
identities remained powerful and perhaps still ascendant. There was no talk of an
independent English nation, distinct from the Scots, Welsh and Irish. There was no
movement for “English Home Rule”.15 What there was however, was an attempt
to define a certain cultural Englishness; and if this was tinged, as it sometimes
was, with racial Anglo-Saxonism, this was not so much an expression of English
nationalism – Anglo-Saxonism after all encompassed the whole English-speaking
world, including America – as an attempt to express what were thought to be
characteristically English attitudes and values.
English thinkers and artists in these years discovered “the Whig interpretation”
of English history, the view that the English had had a peculiarly blessed history,
allowing them to avoid the frequent civil upheavals of the French, for instance,
and to progress by peaceful and orderly means towards parliamentary liberty.
Complementing this was what Stefan Collini (1993) has aptly called “the
Whig interpretation of English literature”. English literary critics and historians
canonized their men of letters, arguing for a great and glorious tradition of
writing from Chaucer to the Romantics and beyond which expressed certain
distinctively English values of sincerity, individuality, diversity and concreteness.
Similar features, with the stress on empiricism and pragmatism, were also seen
15 There was though a movement for Imperial Federation which, had it ever been
realized, might have made England simply one of many units, with an Imperial Parliament
– not necessarily in London or even in Britain – representing all the peoples of the British
Empire. See Kendle 1997.
to characterize English philosophy (thus enthroning utilitarianism as the national

philosophy, to the detriment of the great early English metaphysical tradition)
(Easthope 1999: 61–114). The English language itself was cleaned up and
standardized, as expressed in that “great national project”, the Oxford English
Dictionary on Historical Principles, in the terms conceived by its founder James
Murray (a Scot). In a series of influential books and reports, the teaching of
English, in the schools and universities, was urged as the most efficacious way
of instilling a sense of national consciousness in the young. “Our language and
literature”, said the Newbolt Report of 1921, “are as great a source of pride and
may be made as great a bond of national unity to us as those of France are, and
have long been, to the French” (in Collini 1993: 366).
Poets, novelists, folklorists, musicians, architects and town-planners made
their equally important contributions to this moment of Englishness. A distinctive
English musical tradition, drawing especially on the Elizabethan legacy, was
elaborated by composers such as Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst and Elgar. Tudor
was also largely the inspiration for the new “vernacular” domestic architecture of
E.F. Voysey and Edwin Lutyens. Cecil Sharp and others embarked on the great
enterprise to collect and record English folk music. Folklorists and musicians
as well as town planners, with their new “Garden Cities”, frequently evoked
the English countryside; and it was the countryside – particularly in its southern
aspect – that was perhaps the central symbol of the new Englishness that was
being discovered and defined in these years. “England has become a garden”, says
Old Hammond in William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890); and
Morris’s utopian vision of the southern English countryside was projected by a
score of English writers and publicists of the period – even when, as in the novels
of Thomas Hardy, a much darker vision was intimated by the authors themselves.
Stanley Baldwin’s passionate credo of 1924, “to me, England is the country,
and the country is England” (Baldwin 1926: 6), drew deeply on this wellspring
of feeling for the English countryside that was so intensively cultivated in the
previous decades.16
The vision of England created in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s has
indeed been astonishingly long-lasting. It was powerfully evoked in the interwar
period, when its nostalgic, backward-looking aspect seems to have particularly
appealed to a generation traumatized by the horrors of the First World War
(Light 1991). H.V. Morton called upon it in his popular travel book, In Search
of England (1927), as did Joseph Priestley in his anti-industrial English Journey
(1934). It continued to serve in another World War with much the same therapeutic
effect, as George Orwell noted while himself making use of it in his famous
16 I have discussed the cultural developments of this period in Kumar 2003: 202–25.
On the arts in particular, see Strong 2000: 561–601. John Lucas (1990: 9) makes the relevant
point about the anti-industrial, anti-urban, character of many of these contributions: “By the
end of the nineteenth century most English people lived in cities. To be English was not to
be English”. See also Wiener 1981.
evocation of England, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). As late as the 1990s a
Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, could still turn to it for his statement
of the “unamendable essentials” of Britain (sic) as “a country of long shadows on
county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers
and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the
morning mist’” (The Guardian 23 April 1993).17
The longevity and continuity of this image of England is a tribute to the
creativity of the artists and writers of the decades on either side of the First World
War. It is also of course deeply problematic, insofar as it does not seem to equip
the English particularly well in dealing with the demands of Europeanization,
globalization, and the possible break-up of the United Kingdom. It seems to
ignore the experiences and concerns of large sections of the English population –
women, especially working women, the urban working class, the new immigrant
populations, the cosmopolitan young. While it may still appeal to those groups,
vocal but relatively small in numbers, who wish to turn their backs on Europe and
the wider world, it is unlikely to provide much of a guide for those in search of an
England for the twenty-first century.
The trouble for the English is that this image is practically all they have. There
have been very few attempts to create anything new, and where efforts have been
made – as in New Labour’s “Cool Britannia” campaign – the results have usually
been embarrassing. At the moment an English nationalism, if it does develop to
any great extent, is likely to fall back on a very narrow base made up of selective
components drawn from an often remote past and detached from the memories
and experiences of the majority of the population. It is an England that is rural or
small-town, white, male, middle or upper-middle class, and fearful of change and
the challenges of a global, multicultural world. A work such as Roger Scruton’s
England: An Elegy (2001) reflects this vision with eloquence and intelligence,
even as the author shows his awareness of its passing and the near-impossibility
of reviving it.
The crisis of English national identity in the present fairly represents the history
of English nationalism. The claims for its “precocity”, at any time from the eight
to the eighteenth centuries, are unbelievable both on comparative grounds – there
seem no other instances of such early expressions of nationalism – and on the basis
of England’s own history as an imperial power, with every reason to discourage
English nationalism. In earlier centuries – up to the fifteenth and beyond –
English rulers engaged in the common European practice of creating empires and
extending dynastic power within the whole continent (Bartlett 1994). Norman and
Plantagenet kings swept beyond England into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. They
17 The propensity, as here and in many of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, to say

Britain when they were really referring to England, has been noted by many commentators
– see, e.g. Billig 1995: 102; Cannadine 1995: 13. This expression of “political correctness”
is an ironic reversal of the more common practice among the English of saying “English”
when they mean “British”.
competed for power with the kings of France, rightly seeing themselves as having
equal claims to many French territories and indeed to the French crown itself. Only
in the sixteenth century, with the loss of Calais, did English monarchs finally give
up effective claims to France, though they continued to bear the French title right
up to 1801. The early Hanoverians, like the Stuarts and “Dutch William” before
them, continued the Continental interest and involvement; only with George III do
we find anyone approaching the character of an “English” king – by which time
the monarchy was British and heavily implicated in a world that stretched well
beyond England.
This was the second theatre in which English ambitions displayed themselves
and which acted as a further restraint on nationalist consciousness of a purely
English kind. England became the centre, the metropole, of a worldwide empire
with responsibilities and concerns going far beyond the merely national. English
nationalism, in such a complex, would have been petty and destructive. English
elites were perfectly aware of that and so did almost nothing to stimulate English
nationalist feeling. On the contrary they went the other way and cultivated British
and imperial identities. These did not necessarily override ethnic identities and
differences. The English were aware of themselves as a people with their own
history and traditions and if they ever lost sight of that, the Scots, Welsh and Irish
were there to remind them of it. In the latter part of the nineteenth century they
went a considerable way towards systematic reflection on Englishness. But not
only was this compatible with Britishness and a wider imperial consciousness; it
never emerged as a movement of English nationalism on the scale and with the
character of nationalist movements elsewhere.
The English have been reluctant nationalists. If they now see a need for
nationalism, they are severely handicapped by the lack of a tradition of reflecting
on it. Moreover, they are attempting it in a global context that is vastly different
from the period in which nationalism found its fullest expression and achieved
its greatest victories. If one were in a position to advise, one might suggest that
England would face its future better if it were to remember its historic global
outlook.
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Chapter 7
Empire, Nation and National Identities
Banal Nationalism, Banal Imperialism
Surveying the treatment of empire – specifically the British Empire – in films and
on television in Britain since the 1960s, Jeffrey Richards notes that it was almost
wholly critical and hostile. This was against a background of more or less general
ignorance, among the British population at large, of what the British Empire was
or had been. At the same time the 1997 poll revealing that ignorance recorded a
surprising degree of pride – more than 70 per cent of respondents – in the fact that
Britain had had an empire. Sixty per cent also regretted the loss of empire, and
almost an equally large percentage – 58 per cent – believed that the Empire had
done “more good than harm” in her colonies. “How is it”, asks Richards, “that
after thirty years of exposure to largely hostile depictions of the Empire and in the
light of demonstrated and colossal factual ignorance about it, the public are still
proud of their vanished Empire?” He attributes this to a largely English “crisis
of national identity” – the Scots, Welsh and Irish are, he thinks, more sure of
themselves – and comments that “the English retreat into a nostalgia for an empire
which they barely remember and of which they know almost nothing”.1
It is interesting that some famous polls conducted by the Colonial Office in
1947 and 1948, when the British Empire was still more or less intact, revealed an
almost equal degree of popular ignorance of the Empire – for instance, few people
could name a single colony (one man suggested Lincolnshire), and some people
thought that the United States was still part of the Empire. Again though this
was combined with a general sense of the importance of empire and the special
responsibilities it placed upon Britain.2 Evidently consciously-held knowledge
of empire, as tapped by opinion polls and the like, may be only one way of
understanding the influence of empire on the general population of a society. It
may even be the least important way.
1 Richards 2001: 143. The poll Richards refers to was conducted by Gallup for the
Daily Telegraph; see the Daily Telegraph, 26 August 1997.
2 See MacKenzie 2001: 28. For a critical discussion of this poll and other surveys of
the time, see Thompson 2005: 207–9. As Thompson remarks, “people did not need to know
a lot about [the Empire] in order to have an opinion on it.” The complaint about popular
ignorance of and indifference to the Empire has, as many have remarked, a long history,
stretching well back into the nineteenth century: see, e.g. Bell 2007: 31–2, quoting J.S. Mill
and J.A. Froude.
All this indicates the difficulty and complexity of assessing the impact of
empire – especially, in this case, the impact on the home society. On the one
hand there are those – largely but not only of the “postcolonial” school – who are
inclined to see empire everywhere, suffusing the consciousness of the population
in a multitude of significant ways.3 On the other hand – partly in reaction to what
they see as unexamined and largely ideological assertions on the part of the post-
colonialists – are the sceptics who think that the impact of empire has been vastly
exaggerated, and that its long-term influence has been slight.4
It is unlikely that the differences between these two schools of thought will
ever be resolved. For they approach the same question – what has been the impact
of empire on the home population of the colonizing society? – with very different
methodologies. The one reads deep meaning in the culture of the imperial society,
scouring it for the almost Freudian slips and symptoms of deep-seated and largely
unconsciously held attitudes and assumptions. It is these, the postcolonialists, who
are most likely to stress the pervasive influence of empire, manifested in such
attitudes as racism.5 The other, more empirically-minded, school examines the
more readily available evidence of school textbooks, novels, the popular culture
of film and television, and the utterances of public figures. It is on the basis of
this latter approach that some – by no means all – have concluded that the British
Empire has left surprisingly few marks on British society, at least among the
general population.
Theorists and scholars of nationalism and ethnicity have recently begun to look
more closely at the actual way in which national and other collective identities
play out in the everyday lives of individuals. There is talk of “banal nationalism”,
the way in which, on a daily basis, “the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives
of its citizenry” (Billig 1995: 6). On stamps and coins, in the national flags flown
3 See, e.g., MacKenzie 1984; Hall 2002; Burton 2003; Wilson 2004; Gilroy 2004; Hall
and Rose 2006. Bernard Porter (2004: ix) – following MacKenzie – provocatively calls this
group the “Saidists”, as followers of the postcolonial theorist Edward Said, particularly his
influential Culture and Imperialism (1993). For postcolonialism generally, see Young 2001.
John MacKenzie however is no Saidist; nor is A.G. Hopkins, who nevertheless believes
that “images of empire and the imperial ideal … entered the British soul and influenced its
character” in a lasting way (Hopkins 1999: 214).
4 See especially Porter 2004, and – though more cautiously – Nasson 2004; Price
2006. A cautious note was also earlier struck by Marshall 1995: 380, 392–3 – though
Marshall stressed more the lack of overt discussions of the empire in public life, and the
relative ease with which Britain wound up its Empire, than the absence of an impact on
British society, which indeed he regarded as profound; see also Marshall 1993. For a
judicious survey of the whole debate on the influence of empire on British society, see
Potter 2007; see also Bell 2006: 292–4; Drayton 2005: 191–2. A fair-minded and plausible
account, indicating the many connections between empire and British society, is Thompson
2005: see also Thompson 2000: 1–8.
5 For the allegation of racism and allied forms of English exclusiveness as a legacy of
empire, see the essays in Macphee and Poddar 2007; see also Rich 1990.
Empire, Nation and National Identities 135
on private homes and in filling stations, in the statues and monuments that, barely
noticed, are scattered throughout the major cities, in daily school rituals, such
as the “pledge of allegiance” in US public schools, the nation is repeatedly and
routinely drummed into the consciousness of people – but at so banal a level as to
be virtually unnoticed. This is “mindless”, as opposed to “mindful”, nationalism.
It involves not simply the collective amnesia with regard to certain past events
that Ernest Renan saw as necessary for the existence of nations, but a further act
of forgetting, a parallel “forgetting of the present” that results from frequent, daily,
repetition (Billig 1995: 38). That does not however mean that the attitudes and
sentiments of nationalism are not latently there, waiting to be activated, as for
instance in times of national emergency.
It has similarly been argued that there is a perceptual gap between the
pronouncements of nationalist statesman and intellectuals and the “everyday
ethnicity” of ordinary people as they go about their daily lives. People have many
other identities than national ones – as spouses, friends, co-workers, members of
different classes and religions. For much of the time national and ethnic identities
are not particularly “salient” to individuals in the business of getting on with
their lives. But several things – an openly nationalist mayor intent on favouring
a particular national group, a flare up of ethnic violence across the border – can
bring home to individuals the fact of their ethnicity or nationhood and propel them
into action.6
We need to bear this in mind when considering the question of empire and
identities. Nation and empire are at one level divergent but, at other levels, also
convergent phenomena (Kumar 2010). Just as there is banal nationalism, there can
also be “banal imperialism”. The way in which the British Empire affected the sense
of identity of the various groups within Britain cannot be gained from any simple
source, whether conscious recollection and self-identification or the assertions of
statesmen and other public figures. We have to consider the multiplicity of ways –
public and private – in which the Empire impacted on the lives of individuals and
shaped their sense of themselves.7 It is even possible that we have to go beyond
the individual altogether – whether as one or many – and consider identity as a
matter of structure or position, rather than of consciousness. There is no guarantee
that even then we will come up with definite and incontestable conclusions. But,
by situating England and Britain in the world, by placing them in relation to
other nations and empires as well as their own, we will at least have indicated the
“field of meaning” within which individuals in Britain were able to understand
themselves and form some idea of their collective identities.
6 For the general argument, see Brubaker 2004; and for a detailed application in one
case, the town of Cluj in Transylvania, see Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox, and Grancea 2006.
7 A sensitive study that indicates how this might be done is Colley 2004; see
also Jasanoff 2005. There is also the question of the variety of meanings of empire and
imperialism, and the different uses to which the discourse of empire might be put: see, for
a good example, Thompson 1997.
Nationalism and Imperialism
Benedict Anderson, in his influential Imagined Communities, suggests that the

European imperial experience was largely a matter of class, “as suggested by the
equanimity with which metropolitan popular classes eventually shrugged off the
‘losses’ of the colonies … In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois
certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires” (Anderson 2006:
111). A similar suggestion had been made by George Orwell in the 1940s when he
remarked that “it is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire.
In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire
exists” (Orwell 1970: 80).8 More recently Bernard Porter has mounted a full-scale
assault on the idea that the Empire was a formative experience of British society
as a whole. He too argues that it was mainly the people who ran the Empire, the
public-school educated upper-middle and upper classes – the “Prefects”, he calls
them – who were most affected by it and who most regret its passing.
[T]he empire, huge and significant as it was, did not require the involvement
of any large section of British society for it to live and even grow. So long as a
minority of men (and their female helpmeets) was committed enough to actually
ruling it, the rest of the population could be left to concentrate on other things.
The empire made no great material demands on most people, at least none that
they were aware of, and did not need their support or even their interest. All that
was needed was a minimum of apathy. (Porter 2004: 307)9
One should note that it is quite possible to take the view that the Empire was an
upper-middle/upper-class affair – that “the British Empire was first and foremost
a class act” (Cannadine 2001: 10) – without concluding that it therefore had
little effect on the rest of the population. That is roughly speaking the position
of David Cannadine in his engaging Ornamentalism (2001). Cannadine sees the
Empire as reflecting and promoting the hierarchical structures of British society
itself, thereby establishing a correspondence and consistency between empire and
domestic society to create “one vast interconnected world.” The fact of class rule
8 On working class “indifference” to empire, specifically at the time of the Boer
War, see also Price 1972. That the working class was more interested in social reform at
home than in empire abroad is also argued by Pelling 1968. Jonathan Rose (2002: 321–64)
generally endorses this picture of working class indifference to, and ignorance of, empire,
but some of his evidence – e.g. the popularity of the stories of the imperialist G.A. Henty,
and the vivid impression left by imperial exhibitions such as the great Wembley Exhibition
of 1924 – allows for an alternative account. A more complex picture of the relation of the
working class to the British Empire is provided by Thompson 2005: 64–95. For a vigorous
repudiation of the idea that the working classes were not caught up in imperialism, see
MacKenzie 1984: 61–2, and passim.
9 This is a view that, without the extensive documentation that Porter gives it, has
been common among a number of recent commentators – see, e.g., Miller 1995: 159.
did not cut off the rest of the population from the empire, any more than it did from
British society as a whole. Quite the contrary. The British people, of all classes,
shared a vision of British society as ordered, graded, and hierarchical. This was the
vision of society that shaped the Empire, an Empire constructed in the image of the
home society. There was a “shared sense of Britishness” that linked metropole and
colony, centre and periphery. The British saw their hierarchical society mirrored
in the practices and institutions of Empire: the same system of honours, the same
cult of monarchy, the same ceremonials and rituals, the same forms of deference.
Both parts of this common British world reacted upon each other in a mutually
reinforcing pattern. “The British exported and projected vernacular sociological
visions from the metropolis to the periphery, and they imported and analogized
them from the empire back to Britain, thereby constructing comforting and
familiar resemblances and equivalences and affinities” (Cannadine 2001: 122).10
Cannadine’s Burkean picture of British society no doubt exaggerates the
consensus and underplays the conflicts and contestations between groups and
regions over the past two centuries. But it has the merit of recognizing – what the
Marxist model of class conflict often disguises or ignores – the very real linkages
between different groups in society, no matter what their differences of perception
and interest. A ruling class model of society does not, and should not, portray classes
in isolation or separation from each other; rather, particularly through the concept
of ideology, it indicates the manner in which society comes to be perceived, at every
level, as a more or less coherent and integrated whole, with each part having its
allotted place and function. That is what Marx himself showed in his major works,
and it is what his most gifted disciples, such as Antonio Gramsci with his concept
of “hegemony”, also stressed.11 If British society was hierarchically ordered, and
if this structure came to be reflected in the dominant culture of the time, then one
would expect all groups to be affected by this perception, however unequal their
actual condition. “False consciousness”, perhaps; but real nonetheless.
The relation between socialism and nationalism illustrates this graphically.
By the early twentieth century powerful socialist movements and parties had
developed in Germany, France and Italy. Even in Britain a largely non-Marxist
but significant labour movement had come into being. Though not exclusively
class-based, these movements all invoked the working class in their ideologies
and looked to the working class for their core membership. The working class was
10 The view of British society contained in this account was first elaborated in
Cannadine 1999. For further exploration of the idea of a common “British world”, see
Bridge and Fedorowich 2003.
11 It is this understanding that seems to be lacking in E.P. Thompson’s hugely
influential The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which studies the working
class more or less in isolation from other classes. In his later work, especially on the
eighteenth century, Thompson was acute in his analysis of class interaction and in the shared
perceptions of different groups. He seems to have assumed – wrongly, in my view – that this
pattern was decisively broken in the nineteenth century. See further on this Kumar 1988.
announced to be the class of the future, the class that would dissolve all classes.
If war were to break out between the capitalist nations, the working classes were
enjoined not to take part; such wars would be capitalist wars, fought in the interests
of the capitalists, not of the working class. The working class had no nation; its
movement and aspirations were international, expressed in the successive Socialist
Internationals.
What happened in 1914, when war did indeed break out between the capitalist
nations? With remarkably few exceptions – the Italian and American socialists
– the vast majority of socialist and labour parties committed themselves to the
war effort on behalf of their own nations. Nationalism triumphantly trumped
socialism, a defeat from which the socialist movement never really recovered.
Nationalism showed itself to have become the dominant ideology in Europe by the
early twentieth century, an ideology that absorbed and overshadowed all others,
and that drew in all groups and classes. “Nationalism”, as Oliver Zimmer (2003:
34) writes of this period, “provided the most powerful source of moral authority –
and thus of political mobilization – for those wishing to gain political recognition
and success. Thus conflicts over politics tended to take the form of struggles over
the definition of national identity. Nationalism became an integral part of political
culture”.12
Britain was not of course immune from these powerful currents. Irish nationalism
had already by the end of the nineteenth century joined the ranks of “historic”
nationalisms, along with the Poles, the Germans, the Italians, and the Hungarians.
Welsh nationalism too, fuelled by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of
South Wales, the equally explosive growth of religious nonconformity, and the
revitalization of Welsh culture through the eisteddfodau and the choral festivals,
began to stir. “By the early 1880s, a sense of Welsh nationality and of national
distinctiveness within the wider framework of the United Kingdom was present
as never before” (Morgan 1998: 90). Jogged by Irish nationalism, and claiming
a like Celtic ancestry and culture, Scottish nationalism also began its slow and
erratic ascent in the 1880s, with the formation of an all-party Scottish Home Rule
Association – and the establishment of a separate Scottish Football League – in
1886 (Harvie 2004: 15–20).
Scottish and Welsh nationalism never matched the fire and energy of Irish
nationalism; and for Scots and Welsh independence from the United Kingdom
was never a seriously considered goal until late in the twentieth century. Moreover
whatever the feeling about the United Kingdom and their place within it, there was
little inclination to dispense with the Empire – even in the case of the Irish, despite
their achieving independence in 1922. For much of the time Celtic nationalism and
British imperialism marched together, often framed within the idea of an imperial
federation. “Scotland within the Empire” was the slogan of the Scottish National
12 See also Hobsbawm 1992: 101–30; Anderson 2006: 83–111. For a good study
of how socialism in Britain was undermined by the patriotic teaching of the elementary
schools in the pre-First World War period, see Heathorn 1999.
Party, formed in 1934, and Irish nationalists such as Erskine Childers were fervent
imperialists, as were many Irish Home-Rulers.13 Celtic nationalism in fact fared
best, and was most actively fomented, in the overseas Empire, among the emigrant
communities of Scots and Irish in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (not to
mention the former American colonies). “Indeed”, says Raphael Samuel, “it is
possible to see the growth of Empire and the ethnic revival of the 1870s and 1880s
as two sides of the same coin; each, after its own fashion, worshipped at the feet
of race consciousness” (Samuel 1998: 35; see also Forsyth 1997; Thompson 2005:
199–200; Devine 2006: 166, 170).
This phenomenon can be seen most clearly, naturally, in the colonies and
dominions of white settlement, where the ties between the settler populations and
the metropole could most plausibly be asserted. Here, despite discordant voices
at various times, the development of colonial nationalism was accompanied by
equally fervent declarations of imperial patriotism. On could both be a nationalist
and an imperialist; in fact nationalism was an expression of a certain “imperial
nationalism. “Everyone”, says Douglas Cole, “was a nationalist and … most
nationalists had no difficulty in becoming imperialist” (Cole 1971: 163). That
was because the aim of most so-called “nationalists” was not the creation of an
ethnically-defined nation but of a more or less autonomous state, and such people
could see nothing but gain from stressing the continuing ties with fellow Britons
in the Empire. If their consciousness can be described as nationalist, this was not a
Canadian or Australian nationalism but an Anglo-Saxon or Britannic nationalism.
In any case it was perfectly compatible with empire. That was why so many of
their spokesmen supported schemes of imperial federation (Cole 1971: 172–3; see
also Thompson 2000: 28–32).
The same point could also be made from a contrary direction. Ethnic Scots,
Welsh and Irish in the United Kingdom could find sustenance and support in the
vigorous cultural and economic life of the overseas communities where so many
of their members had settled. Of particular importance here was the swelling tide
of British migrants to the Dominions, from about 1900 replacing the United States
as the most popular destination (Constantine 2003: 20–1; idem 1999: 167). The
two-way visits, letters, and other forms of cultural communication and interaction
played an enormously significant part in maintaining the sense of common
13 For the Irish leader John Redmond’s embrace of empire, from the 1880s onwards,
see Marshall 1995: 388. This view survived independence: the “vision of empire or
Commonwealth as a union of free peoples in which the Irish could play a full and distinctive
part was still alive in the 1920s, when the Cosgrave government in the Irish Free State
was maintaining Ireland’s Commonwealth membership” Marshall 1995: 389; see also
McMahon 1999; Finlay 1992. For a similarly powerful assertion of the coincidence of
Welsh national identity with imperial patriotism, see the petition of Welsh MPs to Churchill
in 1943, quoted Richard Weight 2003: 51–2; and, for the theme of “unity in diversity” as
applied to Wales in the United Kingdom and the Empire – “a family of distinct nations each
contributing its essential talents and characteristics to the organic whole” – see Ellis 1998.
identity, and in bolstering attachment to the Empire. Nationalism could flourish in

both the Dominions and the United Kingdom without, in either case, necessarily
threatening empire. “The crimson thread of kinship which runs through us all” –
in the famous phrase of he Australian statesmen Sir Henry Parkes – entwined all
Britons, at home and in the Empire (Cole 1971: 169 n.25).
Elsewhere in the Empire however a different and, from the point of view of
its rulers, more ominous form of nationalism was finding its voice. In 1885 the
first meeting of the Indian National Congress took place in Bombay, spurred on
by furious European reaction to a bill (the Ilbert bill) that would have put Indian
judges on the same footing as European ones in the Bengal Presidency, and which
therefore involved the possibility that Europeans might be tried by an Indian
judge without a jury. Moderate at first, Indian nationalism took on increased
fervour under the new Viceroy, Lord Curzon, with his high-handed behaviour
and indifference to Indian sensibilities. In a pattern that became familiar from
a host of anti-colonial nationalisms in the twentieth century, Western-educated
professionals and intellectuals turned the ideas of the West against the legitimacy
of its own rule.14
As elsewhere, nationalism and imperialism in India went hand in hand, the
one modifying the goals and tactics of the other. The practices and policies of
the imperial state shaped the responses of the nationalists, which in turn led to
attempts to conciliate and, as far as possible, neutralize nationalist demands. As
in the settlement colonies, there was for a considerable time the possibility that
Indian nationalism could be contained within a modified conception of empire
(Seal 1973; Breuilly 1994: 170–83). What one has to see is that this pattern was
one that also applied, mutatis mutandis, to the United Kingdom, John Bull’s “other
empire”. Over the course of the centuries the English had in effect constructed two
types of empire. The first was the “inner empire”, the result of the Anglo-Norman
conquest of Wales and Ireland and the later shotgun marriage with Scotland.
This was the land empire of the United Kingdom, what some eighteenth-century
writers called “the Empire of Great Britain” or “the British Empire in Europe”. The
other was the more familiar overseas empire whose construction began with the
sixteenth-century settlements in North America.15 These two empires interacted
in complex ways with each other – for instance, working class movements in
Britain could receive moral and material support from other parts of the Empire,
and vice versa; but so too British workers could react with hostility to the threat
of cheap colonial labour, as in South Africa, and seek to resist competition from
14 Seal 1968: 163–70, 346–51; Spear 1981, II: 158–80. It is worth noting that the
Indian National Congress was actually founded by an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume –
son of the great mid-Victorian anti-imperialist Joseph Hume – a retired administrator who
believed that the best way of preserving the permanence of British rule in India was to give
qualified Indians some share in the running of the country. See Tidrick 1992: 223–4.
15 See for the general argument, Kumar 2003: 35–8, 180, and passim. For the key
medieval period, see Davies 2000.
workers and industries elsewhere in the Empire, as with the Indian textile industry
(Thompson 2005: 64–82).
The two empires were not strictly parallel or symmetrical, of course. Most
importantly, the native peoples of the United Kingdom shared in the rule of the
overseas empire in a way that was not true of the native peoples of that empire,
“the British Empire” as normally understood. Scots above all, but also Irish and
Welsh played key roles in the running of the Empire, as administrators, soldiers,
missionaries, merchants, engineers, doctors, botanists, explorers and educators. This
was bound to give them a feeling of having a stake in the empire, and to mute
any national consciousness that might have arisen out of a sense of resentment at
English domination of the British Isles. Pride in the Empire, and a real share in its
fruits, was by no means restricted to the English.16 Moreover, the British did not just
collectively rule and run the Empire; they to a good extent also occupied it, in the
form of settlements of British people that formed extensions of Britain throughout
the world, often displacing the native inhabitants – above all in Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and South Africa, but also in significant sections of East Africa.
Still there was never any real doubt that the British Empire was an English
empire, founded originally by the English and developed largely according to the
template of English practices and institutions. In that sense the overseas empire
was the continuation of the original English empire – the “inner empire” of
Great Britain – by other means (as Seeley [1971: 13], among others, had noted).
It was English common law, English administration, the English parliamentary
system, the English monarchy, English education, English culture and the English
language that were diffused throughout the Empire (though Scottish educational
and ecclesiastical practices also left their mark). If, as Niall Ferguson has
contended, the British Empire was one of the first and most powerful sponsors
of globalization, it took the form, as he rightly notes, of ‘Anglobalization’ – the
worldwide spread of an essentially English system of values and institutions.17
One of the consequences of English domination of the Empire, as of the United
Kingdom, was that they were obliged, by that very fact, to play down their own
role as a nation. This is common among all imperial peoples, from Romans to
Russians. To stress one’s own ethnicity, to beat the nationalist drum, is a dangerous
16 See MacKenzie 1993, 1998; Fry 2001; Devine 2003; Jeffery 1996; Kenny 2004;
Jones and Jones 2003; Williams1991: 221–26; Hopkins 1999: 212.
17 Ferguson 2004: xxiv. A.G. Hopkins has suggested that this is a general feature of
all forms of globalization, that they all carry the “imprint of nationality”, and that they are
all in that sense species of “national globalization”. “Links across space and cultures could
be sustained only by generating common core values and a lingua franca, and these were
put in place by a few dominant nations with the power to spread their own diasporas while
also inspiring imitation and instilling deference in other societies … From constitutions to
consumer tastes, from weights to measures, and from the creation of postal services to the
colonization of time, it was the national stamp that sealed global connections” (Hopkins
2002: 31–2).
strategy for rulers concerned with the management of highly diverse peoples and
cultures, as is the case with all empires. “Mere” ethnicity or nationality has to
be seen as something suited to other, “lesser”, peoples; imperial peoples have
larger concerns, whether it be peace, religion or, in a more secular vein, la mission
civilisatrice.18 English nationalism therefore, in comparison with nationalisms
elsewhere, even in the United Kingdom, remained low-keyed and severely
underdeveloped. In an era of nationalism, for the English at least empire meant the
suppression of a strong sense of national identity.19
The great nineteenth-century Russian historian Vassily Kliuchevsky once
wrote that “all of Russian history is the history of a country that colonizes
itself” (in Woodworth 2007: 507). He was referring to the seemingly inexorable
movement of the Russian people across the vast inland space of the Eurasian
steppe, a movement seen as almost natural and foreordained. One effect of this,
frequently noted by commentators on Russia, was that Russians found it difficult
to separate themselves from their creation, or to think of themselves as a distinct
nation in relation to the other peoples of the empire.
Compared to the Russians, the English had a far more restricted inland space
in which to expand. But, having filled that, they found ample scope for their
colonizing impulse overseas. They too can be said to have been a people who
colonized themselves. They too found it difficult to separate themselves from
their creation, whether it was the United Kingdom or the British Empire. The
most obvious and telling evidence of this is the difficulty most English have of
distinguishing themselves from British – compared to all the other peoples in “the
British world” (Bryant 2006: 4–7).
All this can help us understand the differential impact of the Empire on the
peoples of Britain in the twentieth century. For much of the time the common
designation of “British” served as an adequate badge of identity for most people.
But there were always fault lines; and with the end of empire they were bound to
show themselves more clearly. By the end of the twentieth century commentators
could talk about “the break-up of Britain”. There were many reasons for this; but
the experience of empire, and of its passing, was one it was impossible to ignore.
18 A typical view was that, as Harold Nicolson put it in explaining why the British,
unlike the French, Germans and Italians, had not established a cultural institution for
promoting the their way of life, the “genius of England [sic], unlike that of lesser countries,
spoke for itself”. Another diplomat added that “good wine, we optimistically feel, needs no
bush”. Quoted in Donaldson 1984: 11–12. In the climate of the 1930, with the competition
offered by Russian Communism and Italian and German Fascism, such insouciance, it was
felt, was no longer justified, and the British Council was established in 1934 “to make the
life and thought of the British peoples more widely known abroad”.
19 See further Chapters 2 and 6, above.
Empire and National Identities to the Second World War
In the final volume of Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet”, Guy Perron, one of the central
characters, reflects that “for at least a hundred years India has formed part of
England’s idea about herself and for the same period India has been forced into a
position of being a reflection of that idea.” But the nature of that part had changed
dramatically since about 1900, “certainly since 1918”. From being based upon a
moral right of possession it had moved to its direct opposite: the duty to let go of
India. “The part played since then by India in the English idea of Englishness has
been that of something we feel it does us no credit to have. Our idea about ourselves
will now not accommodate any idea about India except the idea of returning it to
the Indians in order to prove that we are English and have demonstrably English
ideas” (Scott 1977: 105). These reflections occur on the morrow of the Labour
Party’s victory at the 1945 election and the commitment to Indian independence
as soon as possible.
These thoughts express admirably some of the complexities of the relationship
between empire and identities in the first half of the twentieth century. The century
began with Britain at the height of imperial power. Not much more than half way
through most of that empire had disappeared. From seeing themselves at the
centre of the world the British – and most notably the English – had to reconcile
themselves to a position on the sidelines. On the way they had to change from a
situation where the Empire was England or Britain writ large to one where the
changes in the Empire were ricocheting back on Britain itself, forcing profound
modifications in its self-conception.
Here the parallels between the inner empire of the United Kingdom and the outer
overseas empire continued to show themselves. At the beginning of the century
all the nations of the United Kingdom – even those that experienced nationalist
stirrings – shared in the imperial enterprise and identified themselves with it. As
nationalist movements seeking independence grew within the Empire, and as the
Empire itself weakened through war and economic dislocation, the nations of the
United Kingdom lost confidence in their imperial mission, and in their right and
ability to hold on to empire. The Irish were the first to break away, using the anti-
imperialist rhetoric common to all nationalist movements. But the other Celtic
nations also felt the “demonstration effect” of the rising tide of nationalism in
the post-1918 world (Gallagher 1981: 355–68; Thornton 1968: 232–300). In the
latter part of the twentieth century, with the Empire gone and Europe beckoning,
they could contemplate, for the first time in more than two centuries, exit from the
United Kingdom. Nor were the English themselves immune from these currents.
Reacting partly against Scottish and Welsh nationalism, the English – or at least
some of them – also began to reconsider their place in the United Kingdom, and
wonder whether they too might not be better off without it.
Actually Guy Perron dates the onset of the new attitude somewhat too early.
The importance of the Empire to the British gained in significance during the First
World War and was strengthened by the post-war settlement. The contribution
of troops from all the corners of the Empire to the war effort was not lost on
the British public – episodes such as the Gallipoli landing and the deaths of so
many Australian and New Zealand soldiers there were especially telling. After
1918, with the addition of the League of Nations Mandates in the Middle East –
Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Palestine – together with Tanganyika and other African
territories taken from the Germans, the British Empire increased to its greatest
extent ever, covering a quarter of the world’s territory and incorporating nearly
a quarter of the world’s population.20 Undoubtedly there were questions about
the Empire’s future, posed especially by the nationalist movements within the
Empire. But there had always been questions, ever since the eighteenth century
when Britain in effect lost one empire and acquired another. There was little in the
debates following the First World War to suggest that the Empire was in a course
of dissolution and might be wound up in the next few decades.21
In fact, as John MacKenzie has argued, there was, compared with the period of
anxiety before the First World War, increased confidence and increased interest in
the Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. It was in these decades that the Empire began
to impact most directly on popular consciousness, spurred on by such events as the
great imperial Wembley Exhibition of 1924, the activities of the Empire Marketing
Board, the Christmas Day broadcasts by the monarch to the Empire, and the rise
of a popular cinema of empire (MacKenzie 1984: 255–6; 1999a; Constantine
1986). This was the period too when Britain’s foreign trade also began to turn
more decisively in the direction of the Empire: trade with the Empire in the 1930s
for the first time topped fifty per cent of the total, matching and overtaking trade
with the United States and Latin America. The British Empire, after the struggles
and turmoil of the First World War, seemed to have emerged strengthened and
a more necessary presence in the world than ever before, given the dangers and
instabilities of the post-war order. Such was the conviction of public figures such
as H.G. Wells, Halford Mackinder, and Ernest Barker (Wells 1929; Kumar 1987:
194–205; Deudney 2001; Barker 1923).
20 Although strictly speaking, as Ashley Jackson points out, it was in 1945, not in the
wake of the First World War, that the British Empire achieved its greatest territorial extent
ever, as Britain reconquered its own colonies lost earlier to the Japanese and Italians and
acquired new territories – in Somaliland, Libya, Madagascar, southern Iran and elsewhere
– from its defeated enemies: Jackson 2006: 5.
21 Charles Meier claims that after the First World War, “the spectacle of internecine
European warfare and the advent of Woodrow Wilson’s idea of self-determination
undermined the legitimacy” of the French and British Empires, despite their massive
postwar territorial gains (Meier 2006: 154). But he gives no evidence for this. Concerns
and anxieties about their empires, and the sense that they would inevitably go the way of
all mortal things – what Meier calls “the melancholy of empire” – were common among the
French and the British (as among all imperial peoples) throughout the lives of their empires.
But there is little evidence that this deepened particularly in the wake of the First World
War. For the British Empire, see especially Gallagher 1982: 86–99; see also Darwin 1986.
Not that the Great War did not leave its mark on national consciousness.
Students of post-war national identity in Britain have discerned a certain retreat,
a certain turning in and turning away, from the turbulent events of world politics.
The trauma of the First World War, the utterly unexpected savagery and brutality
of the war in the trenches and in the unprecedented impact on civilian populations,
had taken something of the glamour away from tales of glory and heroism. Manly
attitudes of struggle and sacrifice yielded to a more “feminized” view of the national
character. There was a reaction against the blustering, aggressive, John Bull-ish
image of the Englishman. This was the era of the cartoonist Sidney Strube’s “little
man”, and of the sense that Dickens’ good-hearted and eccentric Mr Pickwick
was closer to the average Englishman than the heroes of Rider Haggard’s novels
of adventure and derring-do. George Santayana’s Soliloquies in England (1922),
with its portrait of a gentle, modest, domestic, England, whose heart was in the
countryside, was a popular and influential work throughout the interwar period.22
But did this mean, as some have claimed, that this represented a retreat from
empire, a decline in imperial consciousness?23 Only a very selective reading of the
evidence can point this way. The intellectuals and publicists of the Round Table,
which included some of the most prominent politicians from all parties, continued
their work of educating the public in the task of Empire, and in proclaiming the need
for empire in a parlous world situation (the world-wide community of the British
Empire, Jan Smuts remarked, was the only truly successful League of Nations). If
Strube and Santayana were popular, so too was the novelist and Governor-General
of Canada, John Buchan, an ardent imperialist. Imperial adventure storywriters
G.A. Henty, Edgar Wallace and “Sapper” were widely read. Kitchener, the hero
of Omdurman, remained an emblematic figure of imperial glory in the 1920s and
1930s. The same period also saw the romanticization and idealization of T.E.
Lawrence, as the tortured intellectual turned imperial warrior. School textbooks of
history continued the pre-war theme of England and Britain’s march to imperial
greatness through the exploits of its famous heroes, from Drake and Hawkins to
Clive and Kitchener. The “cinema of empire”, which reached its apogee in the
1930s, was almost wholly celebratory. Empire Day became an established and
widely-observed holiday. As Valentine Cunningham has observed, the much-
22 On these changes in the image of the English between the wars, see Light 1991;
Mandler 2006: 143–76; Colls 2002: 315–16. One further reaction to the war seems to have
been a somewhat nostalgic retreat to the regions. England was seen not as an urbanized,
centralized, mass society, centred on London – as it really was – nor even as the countryside,
as in Stanley Baldwin’s famous utterance, but as a complex of regions, each with its own
distinctive qualities, and each of which exemplified something quintessentially English.
The sum of these individual and unique parts made up England. See Brace 1999.
23 See, e.g., Grainger 1986: 324–7; Rich 1989: 33–40.
remarked “collapse of the idea of heroism” in the wake of the Great War “did not
last very long” (Cunningham 1989: 156).24
Far-reaching changes in the structure of the Empire itself seemed to promise
it a longer, not a shorter, lease of life. The Statute of Westminster of 1931, in
granting the Dominions autonomy and equality within the British Empire, seemed
to provide a firm framework for future development. The Ottawa agreement of
1932 established, in the most comprehensive way so far, the system of imperial
preferences, linking all parts of the empire to each other as well as to the metropolis.
India had been repeatedly promised Dominion status since 1917, and the India
Act of 1935, though rejected by the Congress leaders, was seen by many others
in the party as well by officials in London as representing a stepping-stone to
full Dominionhood.25 The Empire seemed to be set on a relatively smooth path
towards its evolution into a Commonwealth – but still a British Commonwealth.
John Darwin has in fact suggestively put forward the idea of a “Third British
Empire”, built around the Dominion principle, that emerged during the interwar
decades. In this view, “the Empire offered a capacious mould into which the special
identities of the Dominions could be poured. Like Britain, herself a four-nation
state, they were synthetic nations united through common adherence to British
ideals and institutions.” A shared “Brittanic identity” could unite all parts of the
Empire, offering “a distinctive blend of national status and Imperial identity”,
“a permanent reconciliation of national autonomy and Imperial identity.”26 True
the ideal could be most easily applied to the White Dominions, with their shared
British “racial” heritage (which was why Seeley, the originator of the basic idea,
had excluded India from “Greater Britain”). But it was thought that it could in time
also include other parts of the Empire. The fact that nationalists in several of the
colonies – including India – were attracted by this prospect made it seem all the
more capable of realization. What had been granted the White Dominions in 1931
could be the model for future settlements with other dependencies.
Equally importantly, perhaps, the Dominion idea could be applied to the
United Kingdom itself, as a constitutional device to sort out its own nationality
problems (“Scotland within the Empire”). Proponents of the idea – frequently
couched in the terms of “federal Britain” – clearly recognized its potential in this
regard.27 Ironically, though the Dominion ideal finally failed within the wider
24 See also May 2001; Tidrick 1992: 228–32; MacKenzie 1984: 174–97, 217–24,
231–6; MacKenzie 1991; Richards 1997: 31–59; Chapman 2006.
25 Brown 1999: 430; Darwin 1980: 676–7; Gallagher and Seal 1981: 406–7 – though
they stress the “ambiguities” in the term “Dominion status”.
26 Darwin 1999: 70–1, 85. See also Thompson 2000: 25–32; Hopkins 1999: 218–20,
235–6; Brown 1999: 435–6; Bridge and Fedorovich 2003: 1–15.
27 Such a link had been made since the late nineteenth century, especially in the
context of discussions of Irish Home Rule. See Kendle, 1997: 46–78; Bogdanor 2001:
19–54; Robbins 1980: 87–90. At the time of furious debates over Irish Home Rule in the
early 1900s, the Liberal Daily News linked Home Rule within the United Kingdom to the
British Empire, towards the end of the twentieth century it could re-appear (if not
so-called) as a possible solution to nationalist demands within the “inner empire”
of the United Kingdom. Yet again one sees the permeability of the boundary
separating the domestic and the imperial, the constant interaction of ideas and
events in the overseas Empire and British society “at home”.
The Second World War and Its Aftermath: The Re-affirmation of

Imperial Identities
The Dominion idea, in its intended form, did not long survive the Second World
War. Nor in the end did the Empire, though the war was fought in part to preserve
it and with it Britain’s place in the world. The impact of the war on Britain was
devastating, weakening it on all fronts, domestic as well as foreign. Although it
took time for this to become clear, Britain lost its hegemonic position as a world
power. Whether or not without the war the British Empire – as the French or Dutch
– might have survived for a considerable period longer is an interesting and by no
means idle counter-factual question. But the fact was that the war did supervene,
with consequences that were both a speeding up of pre-war developments and
the result of dynamics specific to the war itself. Particularly important was the
Japanese conquest of much of South-East Asia, with repercussions throughout
the European empires in Asia. The belief in European superiority was shattered
forever. Nationalists throughout the region were encouraged and emboldened
to pursue their dreams of complete independence. Nationalist struggles and the
altered balance of world power – with the United States and the Soviet Union
now the major players on the world stage – turned the stakes against the European
empires.
But though we, from the vantage point of the present, might see the war as the
decisive turning point, and the end of empire as inscribed in the logic of events,
that was not necessarily how it appeared to contemporaries. Our tendency to
read the twentieth-century history of empires teleologically – to see their end as
somehow foreordained, and discernible in various stirrings at the very beginning
of the century – tends to foreshorten their lives and to obscure their continuing
Empire: “The nationalities within the British Isles are the natural units for devolution and
their nationalization does not take from but strengthens a common Imperial patriotism”.
Daily News, 5 August 1910 (quoted in Ward 2004: 97). A similar point was made by a Scots
nationalist, W. Scott Dalgleish, in 1883: “the maintenance of [Scottish] nationality will not
only be just to Scotland but will also strengthen the Empire, of which Scotland forms an
integral part” (quoted in Kendle 1997: 183, n. 15); see also Forsyth 1997: 11. For the idea
of “imperial federation”, see Bell 2007: 12–20, 93–119. For discussions in the interwar
period, largely centred on the ideas of the Round Table group, see Kendle, 1997: 79–104;
MacKenzie 1993: 738; Finlay 1992.
impact on their own societies.28 The British Empire, as conventionally understood,

did indeed come more or less to an end a mere two decades or so after the close of
the Second World War. But, in the first place, that was not an outcome that seemed
at all inevitable to contemporaries during and immediately after the war. In the
second place, our telescoped vision of empire has the effect of preventing us from
seeing its long afterlife in the metropolis, in British society itself.
From one point of view the Second World War can be thought of, not as
administering the coup de grâce, but as the acme of empire.29 If a “Britannic
identity” was one of the unifying marks of the Empire, the Second World War saw
Britishness reach a new peak and intensity of expression.30 It was a Britishness
that was freely and deliberately extended to all the subjects of the Empire, through
such media as the Empire (later Overseas) Services of the BBC, the Colonial
Film Unit, the royal broadcasts at Christmas, and perhaps even more the films
and broadcasts of the popular actor Leslie Howard – a virtual compendium of
the best British qualities – to all the corners of the Empire. Newsreels in Britain
showed Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, South African, Indian and West
Indian servicemen coming to Britain as well as fighting in the war zones. Films
such as 49th Parallel (1941) showed the multinational empire in action against the
threat of the Nazi’s “New World Order”. The common theme was of a loyal empire
coming to Britain’s aid in a time of dire emergency. The common image was that
of “one great family”, as George VI said in his Christmas broadcast of 1941, “the
family of the British Commonwealth and Empire.” There was a calculated stress
on the ordinary people of the Empire as of the nation, the men and women in the
fields and factories as well as at the front. The spirit of the “people’s war” was
complemented by that of the “people’s empire”.31
The Second World War also qualified somewhat the picture of a more inward-
looking, peaceful, and quiet national character that had been one significant
development of the interwar years. It did so in a direction that laid the stress on
28 Cf. John Gallagher (1982: 86): “There is a general notion that [the] empire rose,
flourished, declined, fell, and that in its fall lay its fulfilment. But this is a sentimental view,
arising from a banal teleology. In fact, the movement towards decline was reversible and
sometimes was reversed”. Cf. John Darwin (1984: 187): “Decline … is a treacherously
ambiguous phase in the history of empires”; see also Darwin 1986: 27.
29 “The Second World War saw the apotheosis of the British Empire” (Jeffery 1999:
326): This is a view comprehensively and powerfully presented by Jackson 2006; cf. also
Thornton’s comment that, with the war, “the Empire was on the march again” (1968: 362).
30 See Kumar 203: 233–8; Weight 2003: 23–118; Mandler 2006: 187–95; Harvie
2000: 328–40.
31 See Webster 2007: 19–54; Haggith 1998: 59–88; Nicholas 2003; MacKenzie
1986. Though Sonya Rose stresses divisions and exclusions in wartime consciousness, she
too acknowledges that “there was a left-leaning, populist, progressive shift in the dominant
political culture that inundated the United Kingdom” in these years, leading to a “utopian
vision of renewal” (2004: 24–5; see also 69–70, 290–91); and see also on this question the
review article by Brooke 2001.
more heroic, soldierly, and, in a word, imperial qualities. There could of course
be no imitating the Nazis with their bullying and glorification of militarism. To
that extent there was the “pipe-and-slippers” Little Englander, J.B. Priestley,
with his nightly BBC radio “Postscripts”, to indicate continuity with the pre-war
period. A tempered, restrained, masculinity was celebrated as against the “hyper-
masculinity” of the Nazis (Rose 2004: 151–96). But against this, or rather perhaps
combining with this, was the ample figure of the cigar-smoking Winston Churchill,
the epitome of empire, the Churchill who famously declared in 1942 that “I have
not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of
the British Empire.” It was Churchill who most clearly embodied the imperial
character of the war effort, and the aspiration to continue the Empire in some form
after the war.
The British people rejected Churchill in 1945; but did they also reject
the Empire at the same time? Anticolonialism, championed by a few fringe
groups on the left, had not been popular during the war nor had it much impact
immediately afterwards (despite, or perhaps because of, considerable popular
confusion and ignorance about what the Empire was, as we have seen).32 The
theme of the “people’s empire” continued in the popular culture of the post-war
period, shown partly in the increasing preference for the term “Commonwealth”
over “Empire”. The Sunday Times in 1947 even proclaimed a “Fourth British
Empire of independent peoples freely associated”, much what people had come
to understand by the “British Commonwealth of Nations”. Such a theme reached
its climax with the great procession of representatives from the whole Empire
at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. “The ‘people’s empire’
promoted in coronation year emphasized the ideal of a multiracial community
of equal nations that would maintain Britishness as a global identity through
transforming and modernizing its imperial dimension” (Webster 2007: 8; see
also 55–6; 92–118).
In fact what is most apparent in the post-war period is not so much a resigned
acceptance of the end of empire as rather a surge of energy and new thinking,
especially in official circles, as to how to reform the Empire in order to preserve
it. In that sense John Gallagher was right to say that “in the short term, the
impact of war considerably strengthened the empire” (1982: 139; see also
Jackson 2006: 527). The new Labour Government, especially in the persons
of the Prime Minister Clement Atlee and the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin,
had no intention of giving up on the Empire. Burma and India might get their
independence, though this was not the same as severing ties with them nor ceasing
to expect continuing British influence upon them. But perhaps for the first time
the government turned its serious attention to its African colonies, seeking to
32 Howe 1993: 82–142. In this the British public was only reflecting the muted
anticolonialism of most of the major left-wing groups and parties, including the Communist
Party, preoccupied as they were with the imperialism of the Axis powers rather than their
own.
stimulate economic development there to offset the losses in the eastern empire.
“The same Labour Government which had liquidated most of British Asia went
on to animate part of British Africa. Africa would be the surrogate for India,
more docile, more malleable, more pious” (Gallagher 1982: 146; see also Hyman
2006: 94–5, 162–7). In other areas too the British sought not so much to wind-up
their empire – that never seems to have been the goal of any important groups –
as to allow it to continue by other, more indirect, means. The belief in Britain’s
role, as a power for both the good and the stability of the world, remained strong.
The veteran liberal imperialist Ernest Barker remonstrated with his old friend
Alfred Zimmern, now settled in America, when he seemed to be forgetting this:
“To me … the hope of the world is the continuance of our Commonwealth as the
great sane via media power of the world” (in Stapleton 1994: 192).
The most radical attempt to renew the Empire came with the British
Nationality Act of 1948. Common citizenship, as the bond of solidarity, had
been a major theme of both official and popular propaganda on the home front
during the Second World War (Calder 1992; Morgan and Evans 1993; Rose
2004: 1–28). It was a long-standing promise also held out to other peoples of
the Empire, though in many cases slow in its fulfilment. Now, spurred on by the
mobilization of the whole Empire for the war effort, the British Government
at last delivered on that promise. At a stroke all members of the Empire – all
inhabitants of the dominions and dependencies, as well as former colonies, such
as India, which had achieved Commonwealth status – were made equal subjects,
with the right to live and work in the United Kingdom. While each dominion
was left free to create its own citizenship laws, the United Kingdom as the
“Mother Country” made it clear that all subjects of the Crown were equal in its
eyes, and that it remained the centre to which all members of the Empire would
be drawn. As the Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross stressed, “the Bill’s
whole purpose is to maintain the common status, and with it the metropolitan
tradition that this country is the homeland of the Commonwealth.” The image of
the family, common in the war, was once more drawn upon: the conception of
an “all-pervading common status, or nationality”, said Lord Chancellor Jowitt,
was ‘the mark of something which differentiates the family from mere friends”
(Paul 1997: 16–17).
Conservative critics of the 1948 Nationality Act at the time thought that, with
its exceptionally liberal immigration provisions, it was storing up trouble for the
future; those on the left have said that its liberal pretensions were undermined by
a “racialisation” of immigration policy in the actual implementation of the Act,
as well as by a discourse of race and nation that increasingly defined Britishness
as whiteness against the threat of “dark strangers” (Paul 1997: 111–30; Waters
1997; but cf. Randall 2000: Chapters 1–3). No-one however has denied that the
Act represented, realistically or not, an extraordinary declaration of faith in the
British Empire, and an expression of the determination to continue it, albeit in
transformed form, in the changed circumstances of the post-war world.
Empire and Identities After Empire
By the late 1960s most of Britain’s formal empire had gone. But neither in the
former colonies nor in the metropolis itself did that mean “the end of empire” –
not, at least, if that suggests the end of imperial impact and influence. One does not
so easily shrug off nearly four hundred years of imperial existence. By comparison
with some other empires, such as the Chinese, that may not seem very long. But
in modern conditions that may be long enough. “The empires of our time were
short-lived”, says the protagonist Ralph Singh in V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic
Men, “but they have altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least
significant feature”.33
The Empire had given the British, and more specifically and especially the
English, a sense of themselves. They were an imperial people, not a merely
“national” people. In the heyday of empire, all the peoples of the United Kingdom
– Scots, Irish, and Welsh, as well as English – shared in the enterprise of empire.
The Empire, in this sense, was a force for convergence, enabling the creation of
an overarching British identity that could incorporate not just the peoples of the
“inner empire” of the United Kingdom but also those of the “outer empire”, the
overseas British Empire.
But while the Empire contained and controlled possible fragmentation, it
also to some extent provided the pattern of a less cohesive post-imperial British
state. Here, once again, the United Kingdom participated in some of the same
developments as in the rest of the Empire. Just as the requirements and practices of
the Empire called into being a series of nationalist movements that eventually took
over rule as independent states, so – though never to the same extent – the character
of the Empire also led to the strengthening of distinct national identities within the
United Kingdom itself. While never sufficient to threaten the unity of either the
Empire or the United Kingdom, the development of these national identities at
home meant that there were national communities “in waiting”, capable of being
mobilized and deployed when the need or the opportunity arose.
John MacKenzie has argued that, far from the Empire stifling national identities
in the British Isles, it had the effect – similar to what occurred elsewhere in the
Empire – of preserving and promoting them.34 For the Scots, Welsh and Irish, the
33 Naipaul 1969: 32. For the various ways in which the end of empire impacted on
British culture and society, ranging from the satire boom of the 1960s to the “literature of
decline” from the 1950s onwards, see the essays in Ward 2001, especially the “Introduction”
by Stuart Ward, pp. 1–20; for the impact on British political culture, see Hartley 1980.
34 John M. MacKenzie 1998: 229–31; see also MacKenzie 1993: 738; MacKenzie
199b; Forsyth 1997: 10; Williams 1982. An instructive comparison with this process is the
development of the identities of the Slav nations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in
response to domination by Germans and Magyars. More recently it has been shown how
the Soviet Union also played a major role in the creation of national identities within its
borders, thus, as with the United Kingdom, establishing “nations in waiting” – waiting for
cultivation of their distinct identities was a means of offsetting the dominance

of the English – the old enemy – in both the Empire and the United Kingdom.
The Empire afforded them an opportunity to do so on a scale and in a manner
impossible within the home country itself. Scots, Welsh and Irish were able to
carve out distinct “niches” for themselves within the Empire. Cities such as Belfast,
Cardiff, Glasgow and Dundee became in effect imperial cities, performing specific
economic functions within the overall economy of the Empire. Scottish, Welsh
and Irish regiments maintained and developed a sense of ethnic pride within the
overall framework of the imperial armed forces – and were encouraged to do so, as
a matter of esprit de corps. Colonial settlements of Scots, Welsh and Irish all over
the Empire became in many ways the central breeding grounds of their respective
nationalisms, maintaining strong connections with their home communities and
supporting and promoting their distinctive identities.
The end of empire did not eliminate the need for it, or something like it, as a
wider theatre allowing the different nationalities of the United Kingdom to find and
express their identities. This was as true for the English as the other nationalities,
but characteristically the problem expressed itself differently in the two cases.
For the other nationalities the difficulty remained as always the overwhelming
preponderance of England, within the United Kingdom as within the Empire. All
attempts to “federalize” Britain and the Empire since the late nineteenth century
had fallen foul of this basic asymmetry. The Kilbrandon Commission on the
Constitution of 1973, the last serious attempt to consider a federal solution for
Britain, pointed precisely to this obstacle in its conclusion that a United Kingdom
federation was “not a realistic proposition”.35
But if not the Empire, why not Europe? If, with the end of empire, the “Celtic”
nationalities had lost one of the principal reasons for remaining attached to the
United Kingdom, as well as one of the central means by which they had been able
to assert themselves against English dominance, might they be able to find in the
developing European Union a functional alternative to the British Empire? Could
“Scotland in Europe” substitute for “Scotland within the Empire” (cf. MacKenzie
1993: 739)? Ireland seemed to have shown the way. Since its accession to the
European Union in 1973, it had blossomed economically and socially, reversing
its former position as one of the most backward regions of Europe to become one
of the most dynamic and progressive – a magnet for migrants not just from the
European Union but from other parts of the world as well. Could not Scotland and
the break-up of the Soviet empire (which, as with the British Empire, was not brought down
by nationalism). See Martin 2001.
35 Kendle 1997: 8, 165, and passim. Kendle rightly stresses that most demands
for “home rule all round” since the nineteenth century have been basically demands for
decentralization and devolution, rather than for true federalism. Almost no-one was prepared
to demand, or concede, that the Westminster parliament should divide its sovereignty with
the devolved units, whether in the Empire or the United Kingdom – so denying a basic
requirement of federalism.
Wales repeat the Irish miracle? Could they not also find salvation within Europe?
And would that not, in a way, continue the old imperial story of small nations
finding a protective niche and nest within the larger framework of a multinational
empire? For “British Empire” read “European Union” – an expansive, still
growing, multinational entity that some have already begun to compare to the
empires of old (e.g., Zielonka 2007).
The relation between empire and identities is one not so much of consciousness
as of structure. People may or may not know much about the empire; as with
national identity (of which it can of course be an element), their imperial identity
may, as a matter of consciousness, be highly fuzzy or unstable. They may even
deny point-blank that they have one. But we are given our identities as much as we
choose them. To live in an empire, as in a nation, is to be located in set of institutions
and practices which daily infuse in us a sense, however imperfectly understood or
articulated, of who we are and to what we owe allegiance. It becomes part of our
common understanding of the world, and of our place in it. We need be no more
self-conscious about it than we are about being a man or a woman.
As John Seeley and later John Pocock so clearly showed, the United Kingdom
and the British Empire were entities that evolved together, in a “symbiotic”
relationship. As Pocock puts it, the British Empire was “essentially an extension
… of the complex of marches and polities by which the archipelago underwent
consolidation”. Both were fundamentally achievements of the eighteenth century,
and both have marched in step ever since. The identities of the different peoples
of the United Kingdom were given – not chosen – by their place in the division
of labour that constituted the running of the kingdom and the Empire. The blows
to the Empire, especially as the result of the world wars of the twentieth century,
were also blows to the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom. The peoples of
the United Kingdom were to a good extent held together by the common enterprise
of empire; with its demise, that glue has begun to melt. People begin to look
elsewhere for the satisfactions of their interests. “The connections between loss of
empire, assimilation to Europe, and loss of Union are without doubt confused and
contradictory, but they seem to exist”.36
In an oft-quoted passage, written at the height of the nationalist agitation
of the late 1970s, the historian of empire Jan Morris observed: “In the days of
the never-setting sun all the pride of Empire was there for the sharing, and to be
part of one of the most vital and exciting of the world’s Powers was certainly a
compensation. But who gets satisfaction from the present state of the Union? Who
is really content with this grubby wreck of old glories? Is there anyone, except
those with a vested interest in the thing, who does not yearn for a new beginning?”
(quoted in Robbins 1980: 83; see also Robbins 1998: 302–7). It was a diagnosis
and a sentiment frequently expressed at the time, most powerfully in a work that
became almost a rallying-cry in certain quarters, Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of
Britain ([1977] 2003). In a similar vein Kenneth Morgan, at the end of his history
36 Pocock 1982: 333–4; see also McCrone 1997; McLean and McMillan 2005: 239–56.
of modern Wales, commented that “the loss of empire … has wrought powerful
changes in the psyche of the British people”, among them the erosion of “the
certainty that had once attached to English and imperial values”. But he noted
that the loss of confidence in these values and the other “dissolving certainties”
of late twentieth-century Britain have been, if not for the English at least for the
Welsh and perhaps others in the United Kingdom, “to some degree liberating and
invigorating”. They have made Welsh nationalism and Welsh national identity,
with their different values and different modes of attachment to place and race,
more relevant than ever before (Morgan 1998: 419–21).
The “break-up of Britain” has not so far occurred, nor may it, despite the fillip
given to Scottish and Welsh nationalism by the substantial devolution measures
introduced in 1997. “Euroscepticism” remains strong throughout Britain, though
certainly less so in Wales and Scotland than in England. Without Europe, without
the shelter and support that the European Union makes possible, it is difficult to
see how any of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom could make it on
their own, least of all the smaller and less prosperous nations on the periphery.
Nevertheless empire, or rather its demise, has done its work. It has loosened
the bonds that held the nations of the United Kingdom together.37 It has made
it possible, perhaps for the first time since the union of 1707, to conceive of the
dissolution of the British state. If, as John Pocock says, a truly “British history”
can be defined as “the creation of an offshore empire”, then “a case might be
made for holding that the history of Britain is coming to an end and is about to
be written by the owls of Minerva” (1982: 334; see also Colley 1992: 327–9;
Political Quarterly 2000).
But if British history comes to an end, what does this say about English
history? Where do the English fit into this story? The English are the anomaly,
the joker in the pack. It is they who masterminded the whole imperial venture,
from the conquests of Wales and Ireland in the thirteenth century, to the forced
incorporating union with Scotland in 1707, to the global expansion of the Empire
from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. They did not do this alone, of course;
the other peoples of both the “inner” and the “outer” empires were in most cases
willing accomplices and often beneficiaries. But the Empire, just as the United
Kingdom, carried an English stamp, in its dominant culture and institutions. The
English were the imperial people par excellence, the ones who could afford to
suppress ethnic and national pride in pursuit of a wider and more-encompassing
imperial mission.
The end of empire was bound to affect the English even more than Welsh,
Scots and Irish (Hartley 1980: 68; Vernon 1997). Those others had to some extent
created their identities against the dominant English; without empire they felt free
37 Though one should note T.M Devine’s view that Scotland’s disenchantment with
the Empire long predated its end, starting with the economic and social crisis of the interwar
period (2006: 174–80). See also, for a sceptical note on the argument that the Empire was a
critical force in holding the United Kingdom together, Robbins 1980.
to accentuate those identities and to find an alternative theatre of operations in

Europe and perhaps elsewhere as well (the continuing links with the former white
dominions might prove important in this respect). This left the English feeling
doubly exposed: the loss of the outer empire – the British Empire – was now
also matched by the possible loss of the inner empire – the United Kingdom.
Moreover, if the Scots and Welsh had problems with Europe, the English had, for
good historical reasons, even greater ones, thus making the European card even
more difficult for them to play.38
The legacy of empire in the English case is an acute question of national
identity. The Scots, Welsh and Irish seem relatively secure in theirs: in this case
their subordinate position in the United Kingdom and the Empire has served
them well. Nothing creates identities better than exclusion and opposition. The
English were able to look with lordly disdain on “mere” nationalism – in their
eyes, something akin to tribalism and best suited to an earlier stage of civilization.
For them, the main opponents were other imperial powers – France, Russia, Japan,
perhaps Germany and the United States. But imperial competition is of a different
nature from national competition. Nations look to a world of nations, equal in
principle. Empires seek universality – the realization, on a world scale, of the
“civilizing mission” that most empires aspire to carry. Ideally there can be only
one empire – a world empire (Kumar 2000; 2012).
The fact that the British Empire came close to realizing that ideal only makes
things more difficult for the English once that empire has gone. If you have been
lords of the world, it is a little hard to shrink to being a mere nation. The difficulty
is compounded by the fact that the English, engaged in empire and other global
enterprises, had no need for and therefore did not develop the resources of a
tradition of reflection on national identity and national character.39 This was by no
means disabling for much of the time – one might think it almost fortunate, given
the excesses of nationalism in the last century or so. But it became problematic
with the loss of empire, and the rise of nationalism in other parts of the United
Kingdom. Whether or not the United Kingdom broke up, it seemed apparent
that from now on the four nations would need to be more conscious of their own
character and take more control of their own concerns. After 1997, the Scots,
Welsh and Northern Irish had their own parliaments, or something close to it; the
English did not. To many in England this began to seem unfair and anomalous.
One began to see a movement for the establishment of an English parliament,
alongside the British parliament at Westminster; even the rise of that historical
oddity, English nationalism.40
38 See Chapter 4, above.

39 For the opposition of English intellectuals to English patriotism and nationalism, as a
threat to the wider – and potentially non-national – concept of citizenship, see Stapleton 2005.
40 See, among others, Perryman 2008; Goodhart 2006; Aughey 2007; Weight 2003:
706–26; Bryant 2003.
“The danger for the English is that they will be left holding on to the symbols
and institutions of Britain long after it has been cleared out of any emotional or
political meaning … England should prepare itself for the abandonment of Britain
and give some thought to its own political future” (Goodhart 2008: 5). Is this
what the four-hundred-year story of empire has come to? The Empire reduced
to its English core, the protective layers surrounding England one by one peeled
away, leaving it to fend for itself? Certainly there is no reason to think that it
could not survive in this form. England’s wealth and population – far greater than
that of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined – are sufficient to allow
it to compete on equal terms with virtually any nation on earth, only the very
largest such as the United States and China perhaps excepted. Its membership of
the European Union, for all its occasional holding back, gives it additional support
and direction. Even the perhaps residual goodwill of the Commonwealth, and the
sometimes misguided sense of kinship with the United States, can serve it well, in
drawing upon a common store of basically English institutions and understandings
with which to confront the problems of an increasingly disorderly and turbulent
world. If not the English themselves, the English inheritance in the world remains
rich and powerful.
Nevertheless there may be good grounds for mourning the death – if that is
what comes to pass – of the United Kingdom. It has been some kind of experiment
in multinationalism, as was the larger British Empire of which it was a part.
In an increasingly multicultural world, marked by mass migrations and new
intermixings of peoples, the wiser choice would seem to be the larger and more
capacious political unit rather than the smaller and potentially more exclusive one.
It may not be entirely a matter of intellectual fashions that empires are once more
arousing serious scholarly interest. They embody a wealth of experience in the
management of difference and diversity. The British Empire was one of the most
imposing of these attempts. Ernest Barker, reacting against the narrowness and
intolerance of the nationalism that was sweeping Europe at the time of the First
World War, observed in 1917 that “whatever the sins of the British Commonwealth,
exclusive nationalism is not one of these sins. The Commonwealth has not sought
to proselytize all its peoples into acceptance of a single culture … It flourishes on
diversity”.41 There is enough truth in this to make it a fitting epitaph on the British
Empire, as it conceived itself and as it operated. It may be that not the least of the
Empire’s legacies are the lessons that can be learned from its history.
41 Quoted in Stapleton 1994: 99. For Anthony Hartley (1980: 73–4), “Empire brought
with it a knowledge of foreign languages, of strange peoples, a habit of responsibility and
government in conditions remote from those of the British Isles. The loss of these assets can
be observed as signs of a greater provincialism”.
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Chapter 8
Sociology and the Englishness of
English Social Theory
“By the English way of looking at things, a tree must be known by its fruits, and
theory judged by practice. A truth has no value unless it leads to useful applications
in practice … Knowledge is necessary, not for its own sake but as a basis for action.”
Hippolyte Taine [1868–70] 1958: 248.
“Among a people who consider their institutions everything they ought to be,
nothing can incite thought to apply itself to social matters.”
Emile Durkheim [1915] 1960: 383.
An Old Question: Why No Sociology in England?
In his engaging account of the rise of sociology in nineteenth-century Europe,

Wolf Lepenies (1988) makes the familiar though essentially correct observation
that while France developed a strong sociological tradition, and Germany was
well on its way to doing so until blown off course by the Nazi experience, in
England a dominant literary and moralistic influence severely constricted
the sociological imagination. For reasons of national history or institutional
prominence, certain social science disciplines (not always so called or so
regarded) continued their vigorous development. This was true above all of
economics (“political economy”), but also of law and jurisprudence, reflecting
the importance of constitutional developments. Political theory and political
philosophy, reinvigorated by a strand of English Hegelianism, also continued
to thrive, though they never regained the heights reached in the era of Bentham
and J.S. Mill, not to mention that of Hobbes and Locke. Most strikingly, and
most relevant from the point of view of sociology, there was the development
of anthropology, in the hands of Tylor, Maine, McLennan, Lubbock, Frazer
and ultimately – stemming from a very un-English provenance – Malinowski.
But not only was anthropology closely tied, intellectually and practically, to
the fact of empire. Its origins in evolutionism, and its concern with the exotic
and “irrational”, made it an unpromising bedfellow for sociology; and by the
time Malinowski arrived on the scene anthropology was already established,
institutionally and intellectually, as a separate discipline, indifferent to and for
the most part condescending towards the pretensions of sociology.
Sociology cannot be said to have been wholly absent from the nineteenth-
century English scene. After all was not Herbert Spencer a household name
throughout Europe, and indeed beyond; a fit antagonist for Durkheim, and the
venerable sage to whom the Japanese turned when in the 1890s they sought
Western guidance on their new constitution (Peel 1971: 233)? Then there
was H.T. Buckle, another thinker with a European-wide reputation, whose
History of Civilization not only played, as Julien Freund says, “a determining
role” in early German sociology, but came upon Vilfredo Pareto “like a bolt
of lightning”, and appeared to him “the ne plus ultra of reasoning applied to
the social sciences” (Freund 1979: 150, 185n). John Stuart Mill, admirer of
Comte and Tocqueville, might also make a passable candidate as a “founding
father of English sociology” – if such an idea did not sound quaint. And
behind all English social thought of this time was the fertilizing influence of
the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment – the writings of Smith, Hume,
Kames, Ferguson and Millar that via such journals as the Edinburgh Review had
become the intellectual legacy of all thinking Englishmen and Englishwomen.
Here surely was the breeding ground for a native sociology, as could be seen by
the generous borrowing from the Scottish thinkers in the works of continental
European theorists such as Hegel and Marx.
And what of Edmund Burke, the British (sc. English)1 writer who had the
most powerful influence on continental social thought in the nineteenth century?
His stress on society as opposed to government and the state makes him one
of the most promising candidates for the title of (a) founding father of English
sociology. But, apart from some influence on Coleridge and certain other English
conservatives, Burke’s sociological thought was never firmly incorporated into the
English intellectual tradition. Perhaps, as with Swift, Shaw and Wilde, it was his
very Irishness that made it difficult for native English thought to assimilate him
(see, for example, O’Brien 1982: 41). Certainly, as with these other writers, he
seems to have made a far deeper impact on continental than on English thought.
It is clear enough at any rate that English social theory in the nineteenth
century was not bereft of ancestry – indeed few other countries could boast of
one so rich or fertile. It is equally clear that the old charge is true: England did
not produce sociological thinkers comparable to those of France, Germany, the
United States or even Italy or Russia. There is no English Marx, Weber, Simmel,
Comte, Tocqueville, Durkheim or Pareto – not even a Gurevitch or Sorokin. The
nearest thing to these is Herbert Spencer; and great as Spencer’s achievement
was, it left no legacy and gave rise to no tradition that could be developed.
1 This essay is mainly concerned with English social thought. But one has to
acknowledge the frequent and familiar annexation by the English of thinkers hailing from
the rest of the United Kingdom – Burke and Hume being prime examples. That the rest
of the world as commonly endorsed this practice, rendering British as “English”, only
compounds the problem. While this can matter very much in certain contexts – e.g. on
the question of the national identities of the different parts of the United Kingdom – I do
not think this otherwise indefensible procedure particularly affects the present discussion.
The writers discussed – e.g. Noel Annan – move blithely between “English” and “British”
without apparently feeling that it matters; and in this case I think they are right.
Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory 167
Indeed for many would-be English social scientists it was precisely Spencer’s
thinking – his evolutionism and his individualism – that together with the
weight of his prestige led them away from sociology altogether, towards other
fields. The sociology that was constructed – piecemeal, fragmented, narrowly
empirical – lacked any unifying or systematic theory, precisely the element that
Spencer had provided almost too well. In that sense “modern British sociology
was built, more than anything else, as a defense against Spencer” (Abrams 1968:
67; cf. Peel 1971: 224–38) – a tragic loss of opportunity. After his death – indeed
for a considerable time before it – Spencer was forgotten in England with a
completeness that in the light of his European reputation still seems astonishing.
Retrospectively, Spencer appears a very un-English thinker: not because England
does not produce thinkers like him – Buckle is another example, as is perhaps
Arnold Toynbee in our century – but because there seems to be something in
English intellectual life that resists theorizing on the grand scale, at least as far
as human affairs are concerned.2
Why this great lacuna in the English intellectual tradition? Why did the
country that became the first urban society in history, and launched the world
on the course of industrialization that it still follows, not develop a form of
inquiry appropriate to these momentous developments? Why – at least until
very recently – no sociology in England? Several interesting attempts have
been made to answer this question, and in what follows I consider some of
them in detail. Their general tone and tenor, and indeed the main impetus for
raising the question at all, is a lament for a lost or missing tradition of thought.
English culture has suffered immeasurably, so the claim is, from the absence of
sociology – from the lack, that is, of a discipline that takes systematic inquiry
into the nature of society, and especially of modern society, as its object. The
loss has been both intellectual and institutional. Not only are there virtually no
English thinkers among the “founding fathers” of sociology; when sociology did
develop in England, after the Second World War, it was almost wholly dependent
on foreign models, mostly American, for the substance of its theoretical and
practical work in universities and research institutes.
I do not in the main want to disagree with this view. The absence of sociology
from English intellectual life for most of the past century has been a serious
weakness. It has severely limited the English contribution to twentieth century
social thought. The loss is particularly noticeable when comparisons are made
2 And mainly in modern times. There seems to have been no such inhibition in earlier
centuries, as the names Hooker, Hobbes and Locke eloquently testify. Herbert Butterfield
(1944: 7) long ago plausibly suggested that part of the reason for the English suspicion of
grand theory sprang from their revulsion against the French Revolution, and the abstract
theories of the philosophes that were supposedly its cause. For an influential view of the
contrast between French and English styles of thought, noting the dominance of empiricism
in England, see Taine [1868/1870] 1958: 242–77; see also for this feature of the modern
English intellectual tradition Thompson 1978: 56–64; Collini 1991: 342–73.
with past English contributions. Donald Levine, for instance, in a wide-ranging

account of the origins and growth of sociology, gives pride of place to Thomas
Hobbes as “the central foundational figure for modern social science.” The
theoretical frameworks not just of sociology, he claims, but of all the other social
sciences, “consist of elaborations, revisions, or replacements of the Hobbesian
conception of social science” (Levine 1995: 121). The melancholy fact is, as
he shows, that so far as sociology is concerned it was not Hobbes’s native land,
England, that led the way in this work of criticism and elaboration but thinkers
from the European continent and North America.
So there is clearly something to regret. But that is not the whole story. There
were good reasons why sociology did not develop – good not only in the sense of
making intelligible this fact, but, in a more positive vein, in pointing us towards
those forms of thought (and action) that did arise in response to the challenges
of the times. That these did not amount to sociology in the currently received
sense is undeniable; so too is the fact that sociology might have been a better
tool for the purpose. But in the pressing circumstances of the time – a new
kind of society facing unprecedented problems, for which there were simply
no time-honoured solutions – we might feel that the intellectual responses were
not so negligible or irrelevant. Certainly that was the feeling of many foreign
observers, who were sufficiently impressed by the English way in thought and
policy to seek to emulate it in their own societies.
There is a further point. Though sociology did not take root in England,
other relevant intellectual disciplines did. These included the study of literature,
especially English literature, and the study of history, especially English history.
Both these subjects, as systematic disciplines, were relative latecomers on the
English scene – later than most people realize. They established themselves in
the universities only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at just
about the time that sociology was being institutionalized elsewhere, notably
in the United States. Why were these disciplines successful in England, when
sociology was not? What does this tell us about forms of national development
and forms of thought?
One of the purposes of the following discussion is to examine this question
in the English case. The antipathy to sociology – or what was perceived to be
sociology – has to be understood in relation to some dominant characteristics of the
national culture, at least as this had come to be defined by the nineteenth century.
By those criteria, sociology did not fit (though other forms of social inquiry did,
and were vigorously prosecuted). By contrast, literature and history appeared to
go along the grain of the national culture – to be consonant not just with what
were seen to be its strengths but also what were seen to be its peculiar needs,
at a particular stage of development. Moreover, since both literature and history
were in England deeply involved with social and political issues, they could in
certain respects stand for a peculiarly English sociology – sociology by another
name, perhaps, or sociology by stealth, or “implicit sociology.”3 They could, that

is, offer sociological understanding along with what were often seen as their more
explicit purpose, to give moral and practical guidance. Building on this tradition, I
shall argue, later intellectuals working within these disciplines were able to make
important contributions to social theory. English sociology, in the strict sense,
arrived very late; but that does not mean that the English intellectual tradition
lacked sociological awareness and understanding, nor was incapable of making
its own offering to sociology, even though much of this took place outside the
confines of formal academic sociology. In a sense it was the very richness of the
offering that crowded out sociology, and drew many intellectuals into history and
literature who in other countries might have gone into sociology.
The place of literature and history in the national culture, and their
sociological contribution, will be considered later. First we must look at the fate
of sociology itself, and the reasons why it found it so difficult to establish itself
in English culture.
The Obstacle: Individualism, Rationalism and Reform
“Even today Weber and Durkheim are not names which penetrate and suffuse
the consciousness of the British intelligentsia” (Annan 1959: 9). So declared
Noel Annan some years ago in a famous lecture delivered in memory of the first
professor of sociology at London University, L.T. Hobhouse. As portrayed by
Annan and others, in their account of why English intellectuals (the very word of
course being suspect in English ears, as redolent of continental abstraction) had
not developed a sociological consciousness, Hobhouse himself exemplified the
main problem. He had tried valiantly to fuse English liberalism with continental
Hegelianism, but his English moralism and Protestantism kept getting in the
way of the more systematic, collectivist vision that he also sought to promote.
Striving to resist the individualism of the Social Darwinism that was rampant in
late nineteenth-century English thought, he was unable to throw off the deeper
heritage of evolutionary progressivism that characterized English thinking in
the second half of the nineteenth century (Burrow 1966; Collini 1979: 147–70;
Sanderson 1992: 1–35). The peculiarly English brand of “ethical socialism”
that he elaborated – a concoction compounded of “moral collectivism” and
“Idealist teleology” (Collini 1979: 253) – may have avoided the conventional
forms of individualism, but since for Hobhouse socialism was merely “advanced
Liberalism” (Collini 1979: 129) his thinking inevitably carried many of the
individualist premises of liberal thought. In any case it proved wholly incapable
of providing the tools for a systematic sociology. Since Hobhouse was for
the first three decades of the present century the only professor of sociology
3 I owe this felicitous term to one of the anonymous reviewers for Sociological
Theory. See further the discussion below on “concealed sociology”.
in England, and since his successor Morris Ginsberg, equally solitary, loyally
carried on in the following two decades the same tradition of thought as his
teacher, it is not difficult to see why sociology should not have developed as
an academic discipline in England (Shils 1970: 768–70; Halsey 1982: 152–3,
159–60; Hawthorn 1987: 111).4
Hobhouse was simply one of the many victims of what Annan, using the term in a
somewhat eccentric fashion, called the dominant tradition of English “positivism”.
By this he meant, as is common with the term, a scientific approach to human
behaviour; but, more debatably, he associates it with a resolutely individualistic
approach. English thinkers, argued Annan, had from the seventeenth century
onwards constructed a model of the rational individual making choices on the basis
of the dictates of reason and conscience. The great expression of this view, and
the one that ensured its triumph in English thought, was classical economics: the
branch of social science that since the eighteenth century had been the one in which
the English most excelled, and which had achieved paramount and paradigmatic
status.5 Such a dominant influence, taken with the laissez-faire policies that had
apparently brought England to the pinnacle of economic and political success in the
nineteenth century, had made it almost impossible for alternative accounts of the
relation of the individual to society to establish themselves. Even Spencer, despite
his heroic efforts to construct a theory of the social system, notoriously ended
4 It is telling that the first and, for half a century, the only chair of sociology in
England – the Martin White chair established in 1906 at the London School of Economics
– should be endowed by a private philanthropist; that it should be offered to an Oxford
classics don turned journalist (L.T. Hobhouse); and that the first sociology chair at one of
the two ancient universities – the Cambridge chair, established in 1969 – should be given
to a social anthropologist (John Barnes): a not uncommon practice in the new sociology
departments established in the 1950s and 1960s, as for instance the appointment of Paul
Stirling as professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Michael Banton at Bristol, and
Peter Worsley at Hull.
In 1925 the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, an American institution wishing to
help their less well endowed English brethren, and perhaps also spread the light of the new
thinking, offered Cambridge two chairs, one in Political Science and the other in Sociology.
Cambridge accepted the first (Ernest Barker became the first Professor of Political Science,
though characteristically his chair was placed in the History Faculty), and rejected the
second (Soffer 1982: 779). Cambridge later relented, but Oxford held out for much longer.
Only in 1999 did it finally decide to establish a chair in sociology, though the sociologist
A.H. Halsey was given a chair in “social and administrative studies” there in the 1970s.
5 It is probably right to point out that Annan here, as do many others, thinks of Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations as establishing the pattern of English classical economics but fails
to consider it in the context of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which severely qualifies
the individualism of the former work by exhibiting the mechanism of sympathy that makes
the individual take into account the responses of others. This may be one respect in which the
differences between Scottish and English thought are important; though given the general
incorporation of the Wealth of Nations in English thought and the comparative neglect of the
Theory of Moral Sentiments, it does not seriously affect Annan’s general point.
up privileging the individual over society: a case perhaps of his liberal politics
overwhelming his intellectual system, as was to happen with Hobhouse and other
English Hegelians.6 So too Tylor’s evolutionary anthropology was governed by
the belief that differences in customs and beliefs could be explained in terms of
individual psychology; while the relentless rationalism of Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, with its theme that all religion is a gigantic fraud, ruled out any functional
or other sociological explanation of religious beliefs and practices – along the
lines, say, of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The immense
influence of The Golden Bough on English intellectual life in the first part of the
twentieth century was a distinct deterrent to the growth of an outlook that accepted
non-rational and non-psychological explanations of human behaviour and beliefs.
Even Malinowski, who did so much to break the hold of positivism on English
anthropology, nevertheless gained wider acceptance in the culture at large mainly
because he remained a prisoner of nineteenth-century mechanistic ideas (see
Leach 1957).
English individualism and rationalism were complemented by that moralism
that many foreigners have always noted as a hallmark of English writing, both
fictional and non-fictional. Annan, along with many other observers, sees this
as the consequence of England’s unique history of peaceful and gradual change
in modern times. “To see individual and social action in a single framework
of right and wrong is possible only in a country with a peaceful history; it is
impossible where there is no general moral consensus and where the claim of
one group competes violently with that of other groups” (Annan 1959: 15; see
also Taine 1958: 258–71; Bergonzi 1979). While not disdaining morality in social
and political theorizing, Annan observed that “the passion … in this country for
laying down how men ought to behave and how society ought to be reorganized
in order that they may behave better” had led to the neglect of the new techniques
for describing how in fact men do behave and of what might be involved in
trying to bring about comprehensive social reorganization (Annan 1959: 18).7
For Durkheim too, England’s peaceful evolution, and the self-satisfaction that it
bred, were precisely what had inhibited in England that self-reflectiveness that
was essential for sociological thinking. The contrary condition of France, he noted
6 It is true that Spencer himself regarded his evolutionism and his individualism
as two sides of the same scientific coin (the theory of progress through natural selection
and the “survival of the fittest”). But as most students of his thought acknowledge, the
passionate advocacy of individualism (by which he largely meant non-interference by the
state) in his later writings – see, e.g., Man versus the State (1884) – went far beyond what in
principle was proper to its place in a supposedly scientific theory. See Peel 1971: 185–91,
234–35; Collini 1979: 26–7, 154–55; Hawthorn 1987: 90–104.
7 It is perhaps worth noting that Annan’s account of the reasons for the absence of an
English sociology largely reprises that of Talcott Parsons’s in The Structure of Social Action
(see Parsons 1949: esp. 87–125). It is from Parsons too that Annan appears to derive his
characterization of positivism as “individualistic”.
with some complacency, was what made of sociology “an essentially French
science” (Durkheim 1960: 376).
Annan’s account of English intellectual development has been strikingly
influential. So far as English sociology goes, it has been complemented, rather
than replaced, by two further important contributions, those of Philip Abrams
(1968) and Perry Anderson ([1968] 1992a). Abrams largely accepts Annan’s
picture, but whereas Annan took the English intellectual tradition to task, Abrams
puts the stress on the institutional tradition. The reason why sociology did not
develop in England, according to Abrams, was that the unique permeability and
responsiveness of British government – relative at least to other governments of
the time – made it appear unnecessary to develop a special science of society. The
tools to hand – in the concepts of classical political economy, the strong statistical
tradition, and the beliefs in progress and the possibilities of reform – seemed
to intellectuals and administrators alike sufficient to enable them to get on with
the urgent task of ordering and reforming the newly developing urban-industrial
society; and English political and social institutions offered no real barrier to
such an intent. In bodies with apparently promising titles such as the Statistical
Society of London, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,
and the Sociological Society, intellectuals, politicians, civil servants, and civic-
minded philanthropists, clergymen and doctors met and debated schemes of social
reform, many of which they had the satisfaction of seeing put on the statute book.
They rarely debated social theory, for what was the need?8 The orderly progress
of English society, under the beneficent direction of a responsive and responsible
elite, seemed capable of indefinite extension. “Social action without social theory”
is how Abrams (1968: 39) characterizes the “ameliorism” that was the principal
feature of nineteenth-century English society; “boring from within” was the
rendition of the Fabians, the most representative and theoretically-sophisticated of
the groups that pursued the strategy of operating according to, rather than against,
the grain of national institutional life.
The casualty in all this was English sociology. Theoretical and practical
energies went elsewhere. As Abrams puts it: “[English] society provided numerous
8 Speaking of the work of the National Association for the Promotion of Social
Science, whose annual five-day congresses between 1857 and 1886 attracted great
public attention and whose members included many of the leading public figures in the
land, Abrams says: “What is missing is any developed concept of the social system, any
extended or general analysis of structured interactions between individuals or classes, any
theory of the social basis of the state. Where there is a model of society it is typically
an administrative one suffused with moral judgment” (Abrams 1968: 48–9). For a more
charitable reading of the activities of the NAPSS, which nevertheless concurs in the main
with Abrams’s characterization, see McGregor 1957: 152–54; Goldman 1986, 1987; Yeo
1996: 128–37, 148–80. Yeo remarks that “the Association was the first middle-class forum
in Britain to welcome the public voice of women”; it was also unusually open to a broad
range of working-class views and voices. She too though, notes the “moratorium on theory”
(1996: 129, 157).
outlets for social concern of a legitimate, satisfying, and, indeed, seductive nature;
all these were disincentives to role-innovation … Performing administrative and
intelligence functions for government soaked up energies which might have gone
towards sociology had such opportunities not been there” (Abrams 1968: 4–5). It
was not so much, or not only, the English intellectual tradition that discouraged
the growth of a native sociology. It was the very system of British government,
as it had evolved since the settlement of 1688, that was the obstacle, by the
fact that it made reform seem relatively easy and unproblematic and offered
English intellectuals practical and political roles that were hard to come by in
neighbouring countries. The idea of social “intelligence” became not so much
a matter of understanding society in all its dimensions as of giving practical
guidance on what were seen as largely technical problems for government. “The
[English] intelligentsia, positively oriented to government and enmeshed in the
country’s social, ecclesiastical, and political elites, found a solution which directly
discouraged the growth of sociology. They reduced the idea of intelligence to
a matter of facts and figures, creating an empirical tradition of which the great
monuments are government inquiries, massive but intellectually sterile levers of
social reform. Statistician, administrator, reform politician – these were the roles
the system encouraged” (Abrams 1968: 5; see also 148–9; and cf. Hawthorn 1987:
110–11; Lepenies 1988: 154). It was symptomatic that, when forced to choose
between the department of sociology and that of social administration at the
newly-founded London School of Economics, the more able and active recruits to
social science, such R.H. Tawney and Clement Atlee, chose the latter. In this they
marked out the future. Booth, Rowntree, the Webbs, Geddes, Galton, Beveridge:
these, rather than Spencer, Hobhouse, or Ginsberg, are the representative figures
of the English tradition of social science.9
If Annan stresses ideas, and Abrams institutions, Perry Anderson (1992a,
1992b) puts the accent on class. For Anderson, classical European sociology was
the product of a bourgeois class in its engagement, on the one hand, with the
traditional agrarian ruling class and, on the other, with the challenge posed by
the new industrial working class. Sociology was the “synthetic” or “totalizing”
response to both aristocratic conservatism and Marxism. The condition of
9 The split between sociology and social administration continued to mark the London
School of Economics for most of this century, with most of the important names appearing in
the latter department – Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend, David Donnison, Brian Abel-Smith.
It was entirely characteristic that the leading British sociologist at the School, T.H. Marshall,
should for most of his time there hold a Chair of Social Administration rather than one of
Sociology; and that Ginsberg’s successor in the Martin White Chair of Sociology should be a
demographer, David Glass, who had almost no interest in social theory.
At a lower and more personal level: The William Ellis School in north London, which
I attended as a pupil, was founded in 1869 to further the principles of William Ellis, a
Victorian follower of John Stuart Mill and one of the pioneers of social science education.
Unusually for an English school in the 1950s and 1960s, the school taught government and
economics – but it was inconceivable that it would teach sociology!
continental societies, marked by violent class conflicts, allowed for the development
of both sociology and Marxism (and, as Karl Mannheim noted, a reinvigorated,
combative, conservatism).
In England by contrast, Anderson argues, the industrial bourgeoisie emerged
and developed as a subordinate member of a composite ruling class headed by
an agrarian aristocracy that had already vigorously and successfully embraced
capitalism. At the same time the English working class and its supporters
adopted Labourism, rather than Marxism, as their ideology, thereby removing
any revolutionary threat to the capitalist order and its principal beneficiaries.
Hence, asserts Anderson in an interesting variant on Abrams’s account, there
was no structural requirement for sociology in England. Unlike their continental
counterparts, the English bourgeoisie saw no need for developing a justificatory
ideology.
Britain … lacking – unlike fin-de-siècle Germany, France or Italy – the spur of

an insurgent socialism, missed the moment of a Weber, Durkheim or Pareto; and
never knew the Marxist reprise of a Lukács, Sartre or Gramsci. Its dominant bloc
had no interest in, or need of, any social theory liable to look too analytically
at the social formation it governed as a natural kingdom. Piecemeal empirical
research, serving practical adjustment or partial reform, was all that was
required. (Anderson 1992b: 205; see also 1992a: 56–7, 92–3; and cf. Hawthorn
1987: 169–70)10
Annan, Abrams and Anderson differ in their emphases but together they present
a remarkably coherent, consistent and largely persuasive account of the failure
of sociology to develop as a distinct discipline in England. Later scholars have
rounded out the picture without adding anything essentially new (see, e.g. Soffer
1982, Goldman 1987, Yeo 1996). Reba Soffer thus sums up the consequences of
this failure.
After a promising beginning in 1903 [the founding of the Sociological Society],

sociology in Britain virtually had disappeared by the outbreak of the Great War.
In the long period between the eclipse of Herbert Spencer in the 1890s and
10 While revolution was never a serious threat to the modern ruling order in England,
and therefore no systematic alternative theory to Marxism needed to be elaborated, there was
certainly a sense that the disorder of early industrial society had to be confronted, to head
off potential discontent. Abrams shows (1968: 58–61, 84–88) that insofar as continental
sociology impinged on English social thought in the nineteenth century, it was the work of
Comte and, especially, Frédéric Le Play, that was most influential. This was because what
both offered was a theory of “social peace” through social reform, as an antidote to class
conflict and socialism (see also on this Sanford Elwitt in Elwitt and Goldman 1988: 209–14.
Elwitt includes Durkheim in this perspective). On early English sociology as a response to
the socialist challenge, see also Yeo 1996: 235–7.
the revival of sociology in the 1950s, sociology hardly existed in the British
Isles as an intellectual enterprise or even a series of pragmatic prescriptions. In
Britain, aside from the London School of Economics where L.T. Hobhouse and
his successor Morris Ginsberg taught an evolutionary sociology, there were no
academic courses in sociology, no synthetic theorists, no genuinely professional
associations, no commanding journal of sociological work or opinion, and no
sociologists. Within just four years after its enthusiastic launching in 1903, the
field of sociology declined absolutely in Britain both as a theoretical and as an
applied study. Until after the Second World War there was no academic or public
demand for sociologists. In the long and barren hiatus between 1907 and the
1950s, only schools of social work survived. (Soffer 1982: 768; cf. Yeo 1996:
233–7)
This is a fair and largely accurate summary, though some may demur at the
implied slight to the native tradition of empirical social science (see, e.g. Kent
1981). Sociology was a blank space in English intellectual life in the first half
of this century. The question is: How much does this matter? Was it so different
elsewhere? Does England suffer by comparison with the greater theoretical
sophistication of other cultures? Is social theory in any case to be equated with
sociology?
English Exceptionalism?
Science and reform, it is clear, were conjoined in the Victorian mind.11 This made
the English somewhat impatient with abstract social theory. Were they so wrong?
English society was the first in the world that had to deal with the novel problems of
industrialization. The urgent need seemed to be to do something, and to do it quickly,
to alleviate the condition of the great body of people subjected to its unprecedented
stresses. This was the contribution of Victorian “ameliorism”, a tradition continued
in the twentieth century by a host of social scientists who saw it as their task to link
their studies to the work of public policy and social reform. William Beveridge and
social security, Richard Titmuss and the national health service, Peter Townsend and
Brian Abel-Smith in relation to poverty programmes, A.H. Halsey and the reform
of English selective education – these were the kinds of thinkers who exemplified
the English traditions of social science.12 Together with their Victorian forbears
they delivered a British welfare state that, with all its deficiencies, has been widely
11 “A notion of objective science for reform … might … be called the dominant
British tradition until the 1950s” (Yeo 1996: 300).
12 For brief accounts of the work of these social scientists see Kent 1981, Halsey
1982, and Bulmer 1985. One might also of course wish to include in this list John Maynard
Keynes – one of the two pillars, with Beveridge, of the British welfare state – though unlike
Beveridge and the others Keynes was also a major contributor to theory.
admired for its humaneness and breadth of compassion. It was created, moreover,
with a degree of orderliness and consensus that is remarkable when comparisons
are made with similar efforts elsewhere. Who might not feel that the sacrifice of
academic sociology was a price worth paying?
This feeling is heightened when we see that academic sociology elsewhere,
especially in Europe, was at least in part a response to the failure of social reform in
those countries. Lawrence Goldman has provocatively argued, in a series of articles
(1983, 1986, 1987, 1998), that Abrams’ and Anderson’s lament for the absence of
sociology in England might be better converted into a glow of satisfaction that
England accomplished what others could only aspire to. All Western intellectuals
in the nineteenth-century, he claims, were seized with the same sense of urgency
as the English; and all conceived social science as the tool to facilitate reform.
Positivism, as the dominant tendency in all European societies, is a case in point.
“Savoir pour pouvoir” was the slogan of Comtean positivism – or, as Comte
himself put it in the Cours de Philosophie Positive, “science, d’ou prévoyance:
prévoyance, d’ou action”. Thus in considering the case of the English National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science – a prime example for Abrams
of English policy-oriented “ameliorism” – we have to see that its aims were no
different from that of the most influential school of continental social theory.
The Social Science Association must be located in the context of this nineteenth-
century positivism where science was to lead to control. The very idea of a science
of society had emerged in late eighteenth century France as ‘a conception of a
unified science of public policy’ [Brian Head], and it retained those instrumental
associations even as it crossed frontiers and entered public consciousness in
Britain half a century later. To divide between science and reform is to fail to
appreciate a distinguishing characteristic of the tradition. (Goldman 1987: 149;
see also Goldman 2002)
But where England largely succeeded in marrying “science” and “reform”, the
opposite was the case on the European continent and even in the United States.
In considering the efforts of the American Social Science Association, founded in
Boston in 1865 on the English model, the German Verein für Sozialpolitik, started
in 1872 as a reform association by liberal thinkers and publicists, and even the
Franco-Belgian International Social Science Association, also modelled on the
English example, Goldman finds a record of marked failure to influence policy-
making in their respective countries in any serious way. The consequence was
a turn to academic sociology, to “theory” as a refuge from the unaccomodating
world of practice. This is precisely how Marianne Weber, for instance, saw the
evolution of the Verein für Sozialpolitik. She noted its early involvement with
practical politics, its attempts to influence legislators. “But when at the beginning
of the eighties Bismarck started to engage in social politics, thus reducing the
prospects for a direct influence upon government machinery, the Association gave
up its activities of agitation and replaced propagandistic with academic discussion.
The accent was shifted to strictly scientific investigations of current problems”

(quoted in Goldman 1987: 164).
The message seems clear. The organization of the English Social Science
Association was, pace Annan, Anderson and others, “no ‘peculiarity of the English’,
no exemplification of a stubborn indigenous empiricism, but an institutional
example and an intellectual inspiration to similar liberal constituencies in other
countries.” It offered a model of the relationship between social science and reform
politics that, largely successful in England, proved unattainable elsewhere. “In this
model, sociology only found an academic haven when, for a variety of reasons,
it failed to find its place in the world of affairs. It was not that a reformist social
science ‘frustrated’ the development of an academic sociology: rather, ‘sociology’
had its origins in the frustration of reformism” (Goldman 1987: 168, 171).
Goldman does not so much, as he thinks, turn Abrams’s argument on its head as
give it a novel gloss. He agrees in fact with Abrams that sociology was “unnecessary”
in England because there was a more commanding model of inquiry available, one
that yielded more satisfaction than pure theory. The difference is that what Abrams
(and Annan and Anderson) regrets as a “failure” of English culture Goldman is more
inclined to see as a matter for congratulation. The English model, far from being
something that needs apology, was in fact widely envied and emulated by European
and American liberals. It represented a triumph of “Englishness”, and of the English
aptitude for mixing social inquiry with practical politics.
Goldman thus ironically reinstates the “peculiarity of the English”, despite his
intention to emphasize common concerns in all Western societies. But he does
so largely to protest at the unhistorical and anachronistic nature of most attempts
– including that of Abrams’s – to write the history of sociology (see especially
Goldman 1983: 587–89). Most of these are efforts at a retrospective reconstruction
of their discipline, as currently conceived and practiced. The intention is to
discover the “origins” or “seeds” of the subject, in the frequently disparate and
disconnected intellectual elements that actually existed at any one place or time.
These elements – or, as Robert Nisbet (1967) has put it, “unit-ideas” – are then
bundled together to form a “sociological tradition”.
The English case, as Goldman presents it, shows the dangers of this procedure.
England is contrasted with more “successful” models of the development of
sociology elsewhere, and is berated for its backwardness. Not only does this ignore
the actual history of the matter, which is that several societies sought to emulate
the English model and only turned to academic sociology when these efforts
failed. More importantly it neglects the variety and specificity of the different
forms of “social science” in the nineteenth century, and of their relationships to
their respective societies. Sociology was not some unified, teleologically-willed,
collective project of the European mind. It emerged out of various attempts to
make sense of the new kind of industrial society, and to harness social knowledge
to ameliorative ends. The English model was one such – a particularly significant
and widely-noted one, as it happened, since England was the first society to
struggle with the novel problems of industrialism (as Tocqueville, Marx and
Weber in their different ways acknowledged). That it did not, in the end, give rise
to the academic study of sociology may have become a cause for regret for certain
English intellectuals later; but that should not affect our appreciation of its relevance
and legitimacy for its own time nor, more importantly, its considerable success in
achieving a goal that seemed to elude many other contemporaneous societies.13
There is a further way in which the standard accounts of the history of
sociology need to be challenged. Goldman largely accepts the conventional view
that, while sociology languished in England, it flourished vigorously in other
Western societies, notably France, Germany and the USA. It is indeed implicit in
his thesis that sociology was a response to the failure of reform in those societies.
But is this not too the stuff of myth? Is it not the product of the same retrospective,
“Whiggish”, writing of history that he charges Abrams and others with in
the English case? Because sociology has come to be a strong presence in the
intellectual life of those societies, the tendency has been to construct sociological
“traditions” that begin somewhere in the late nineteenth-century century and are
shown – or, more commonly, assumed – to continue in the course of the twentieth
(see, e.g., Bottomore and Nisbet 1979; Soffer 1982).
The evidence suggests that only in the United States can sociology be truly
said to have been institutionalized in the decades around the turn of the century.
Europe had the big names – Comte, Spencer, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim,
Weber, Tönnies, Simmel, Pareto – and American sociology was largely indebted,
in its early stages at least, to European, especially German, intellectual influences.
But the institutional instruments for furthering sociology that we associate with the
13 Speaking of nineteenth-century American attempts to learn from the British

example, Goldman remarks that it was not only British ideas that Americans admired but
also “British ways of organizing and harmonizing social knowledge, expertise and politics.
What was respected and replicated was not a philosophy so much as a modus operandi, a
method and procedure” (Goldman 1998: 23). It was this “method” that American society
as much as continental European ones found difficult to institutionalize; and their failure
in this respect can plausibly be held to be at least one of the impulses towards a more
academic and theoretical form of inquiry. For a critical exchange on this position see
Elwitt and Goldman (1988). There is an interesting parallel to Goldman’s argument in
Steven Seidman’s view that “whereas Anglo-American social theory emerged as part of
the triumph of liberal civilization, European social theory was elaborated in the context
of the failure of liberalism and developed, in part, as its critique” (Seidman 1983: 13).
The difference here is that Goldman also sees a failure of liberal reformism in America at
a critical juncture. A further parallel to Goldman’s analysis is Edward Thompson’s wide-
ranging defence (1978) of the English intellectual tradition against the onslaught of Perry
Anderson, Tom Nairn and other New Left critics. Like Goldman he partly concedes the
case: “The English experience certainly did not encourage sustained efforts of synthesis:
since few intellectuals were thrown into prominence in a conflict with authority, few felt
the need to develop a systematic critique” (1978: 59). But, once more, the argument is that
in the conditions of English life and politics such a synthesis was not necessary and other,
more relevant, strengths developed.
universities of Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, and later Columbia and Harvard,

were conspicuously absent in the European case. As is well known none of Weber,
Tönnies, Simmel or any of the other leading figures of German sociology ever
held chairs of sociology, and their work gave rise to no systematic tradition of
teaching and research in sociology. Weber was virtually unknown in the Germany
of the 1920s; and the Nazi experience put paid to any further serious sociological
work.14 It was left to the American Talcott Parsons, in The Structure of Social
Action (1937), to rehabilitate Weber, Tönnies and the other German sociologists –
even for the Germans – and so bless them, retrospectively, as among the “founding
fathers” of sociology.
And France, and Durkheim? We are accustomed to thinking of France as
the one European country where sociology did become firmly institutionalized,
mainly because of the work of Durkheim, his disciples, and his editorship of
L’Année Sociologique. But we should not forget that Durkheim was for most of his
professional career, both at Bordeaux and the Sorbonne, a professor of education,
and only in his later years at the Sorbonne was he able to convert this to the
title “Professor of Education and Sociology”. Moreover, and more importantly,
Durkheim succeeded in establishing sociology in France mainly through his own
individual effort, not through institutional provision. He gathered around him a
band of enthusiastic disciples, but there was no research career and no academic
posts for them, and most of them did not go on to become professional or
academic sociologists. “Hence when Durkheim passed from the scene, the body of
interpretation which had developed from his teaching and writing ceased to grow,
and French sociology as the study of modern society practically disappeared for
more than a quarter of a century” (Shils 1970: 767; see also 786–88).15
England, it appears, was not so different after all. Nowhere in nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Europe did sociology establish itself as a serious, systematic
14 This needs to be qualified. Thanks to the work of his wife Marianne Weber,
his brother Alfred, and some of his friends and followers such as Karl Jaspers and Karl
Mannheim, Weber’s reputation continued to be high, especially in Heidelberg circles, in
the 1920s, and his ideas debated by German scholars. It was indeed in Heidelberg that
Parsons first encountered Marianne Weber and her circle, and became convinced of Weber’s
importance. It remains true however that Nazism cut short the development of a strong
sociological tradition in Germany, and that it was Parsons and other American scholars,
such as Edward Shils and C. Wright Mills, and not Germans, who were responsible for
establishing Weber as one of the canonical “founding fathers” of sociology. See Derman
2012: 33–45, 139–41.
15 This is clearly not the place to provide extensive documentation on the sweeping
generalizations of this and the previous paragraph. Fortunately there is no real need to
do so as they are more or less accepted now, and there are several good general accounts
with full references to the relevant studies. Most stimulating I have found Shils 1970; see
also Hawthorn 1987: esp. 164–216; Soffer 1982; Lepenies 1988, especially Part III on
Germany; Mazlish 1989. On Durkheim and French sociology, see Lukes 1973; Clark 1973;
Karady 1981.
discipline, in the way that it did in the United States. Sociologists there might be
on the Continent, in the form of imposing thinkers who thought sociologically,
and this marks an important difference from the English scene.16 But to develop
sociology as a discipline Europe had to await an intellectual Marshall Plan from
America, which duly arrived in the post-Second World War period in the writings
of Parsons, Merton, Mills and others. Only then did European universities set
up or revive departments of sociology and begin the massive expansion of the
subject that continued until the early 1980s. To all intents and purposes sociology
in Europe is a post-war phenomenon – which means that, as with much else in
post-war Europe, it has a heavy American accent.17
This has certainly been the case in England, which shared in the general
European expansion of the subject. Graduate students in sociology in the 1960s
and 1970s – of whom I was one – cut their teeth on Parsons, Homans, Blau, Bell,
Lipset, Shils, Gouldner and Goffman. Later came the Marxists: the recovery of
Lukács and Gramsci, and the influence of continental theorists such as Althusser
and Habermas. But this then raises again the question: what is specifically English
(or British) sociology? If the dominant influences in the post-war period, when
sociology finally arrived on the scene in England as in the rest of Europe, have
been American and continental European, what if any is the native strand of
thought that can be counted English sociology?
English Sociology Today18
Writing in 1968, Perry Anderson had this to say about English sociology following
the first wave of post-war expansion: “To this day, despite the recent growth of
sociology as a formal discipline in England, the record of listless mediocrity and
wizened provincialism is unrelieved. The subject is still largely a poor cousin of
16 We might therefore say, adapting the old formulation, that the question should be,
not so much why no sociology, but why no (or so few) sociologists, in England?
17 In this sense I very much agree with Jeffrey Alexander’s verdict, contra Richard
Munch and certain other contributors to Nedelmann and Sztompka 1993, that “virtually
every strand of contemporary European sociological theory builds in fundamental ways
upon American post-war thought” (Alexander 1994: 6). This does not of course mean that
American social thought was purely indigenous. Just as European thinkers, including the
Englishman Herbert Spencer, were highly influential in American sociology before the First
World War, it has been argued that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments should be
considered as in important source of the American school of symbolic interactionism that
flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, since Smith’s work was highly regarded by Cooley and
Mead, the founders of the school. The point however is that it was largely in American
vessels that the work of these European thinkers was carried back across the Atlantic. For
some interesting reflections on “the American tradition”, see Levine 1995: 251–68.
18 For further discussion of English sociology and English social thought, especially
since this chapter was first written, see Chapter 1, above.
‘social work’ and ‘social administration’, the dispirited descendants of Victorian

charity” (Anderson 1992a: 53). Twenty years later – in 1990, to be precise –
Anderson noted a remarkable change. By now there had emerged “an outstanding
indigenous sociology”. As representative of this school he instanced the work of
Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, W.G. Runciman and Ernest Gellner (1992b: 207).
This is not the place to conduct an assessment or give even a schematic history
of post-war English sociology. One simply has to note, what is obvious to anyone
who reads a representative selection of texts produced by English sociologists
over the past forty years, that the bulk of English sociology has either continued
the pattern of Victorian empirical investigation – in the Booth-Rowntree-Galton
vein – or has been a response to models and ideas stemming from American and
continental European sources (see, e.g., Eldredge 1980, Kent 1981, Abrams,
Deem, Finch, and Rock 1981, Bulmer 1985, Albrow 1989, 1993). That much
important and constructive work has been done under these two heads cannot
be doubted. What must be questioned is Anderson’s observation that a true
“indigenous sociology” has emerged in England, one that is recognizably so to
the outside world.
His own selection of representative figures, apart from being somewhat
eccentric, makes the point. W.G. Runciman is virtually unknown outside Britain,
and even in Britain his works rarely appear on sociology reading lists. Ernest
Gellner taught for a while in the sociology department at the London School of
Economics, but his post was “with special reference to philosophy” and he later
became Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. He has always been
better known to philosophers and anthropologists than to sociologists. In any case
to pigeon-hole so many-sided a thinker – one of that dazzling band of anti-Marxist
“white émigrés” that settled in England before and after the Second World War
(Anderson 1992a: 60–65) – as a native sociologist is seriously to misrepresent
his intellectual contribution, whether in England or abroad (see Davis 1991; Hall
2010). Mann’s multi-volume Sources of Social Power (1986–2012) is certainly
outstanding, but it has not created any kind of intellectual following in England
and Mann himself has continued the work abroad, at the University of California
at Los Angeles (where, incidentally, Perry Anderson also seems to have found
some kind of intellectual home).
Only Anthony Giddens, of contemporary English sociologists, is of true
international stature, a position confirmed by his recent appointment to the
Directorship of the London School of Economics. Giddens has raised the profile
of English sociology as no other thinker in this century. But one swallow does not
make a summer, and one English sociologist does not make English sociology.19
19 There are of course exceptions to this stark statement. I should like to instance
Zygmunt Bauman, though here again his influence, both in sociology and more generally,
seems to be greater outside England than within (it took the Italians to recognize his
worth by awarding his Modernity and the Holocaust the Amalfi prize for sociology. One
cannot imagine the English having a national prize for sociology at all). It should also be
English sociology may perhaps have escaped its “wizened provincialism” but the
creative impulses still seem to come from outside.
It has to be said that the failure of English sociology to make much of a mark
abroad has been matched by its failure to make much impression within its own
national culture. Not only is what Noel Annan said in 1959 still true – that the
English intelligentsia is largely unaware of Weber and Durkheim; it has stoutly
resisted Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Touraine, Beck, Habermas, Luhmann and even
Giddens as well.20 The English public has followed suit. A recent account notes
that “sociology today scarcely registers with the public” (Christie 1999: 1). This
is despite what the author believes to be considerable sociological thinking and
research, of an imaginative and important kind, in England today. But not only has
that failed to be communicated to the general public in any forceful way, along the
lines, say of Richard Dawkins’s books in biology or Asa Briggs’s in history; it has
also, according to the author, mostly taken place outside departments of sociology
and indeed outside universities altogether, in independent “think-tanks” and
policy-related institutes. In any case English sociology, as a body of knowledge
systematically created by professionals within scholarly institutions, does not
come out well. The situation appears to be one of “sociology without sociologists”
remembered that Norbert Elias lived quietly among the English (as a sociologist at Leicester
University) for several decades without anyone paying much attention to him.
Another outstanding figure is Michael Young, “the most original and influential sociologist”
in England, according to Noel Annan (1991: 348). Intellectually fertile, enterprising and
energetic, he nevertheless exemplifies precisely the predicament of English sociology in
being known and respected mainly in England – and then more by non-sociologists than
sociologists. For an appreciation, see Dench, Flower, and Gavron 1995.
One further indication. The International Sociological Association in 1998 conducted
a plebiscite among its members as to what they regarded as the outstanding works of
sociology in the twentieth century. Of the ten works that came out at the top, five were
by Americans, four by Germans, and one by a Frenchman; there were none by English
sociologists. See International Sociological Association 1998: 324.
20 In the 1970s, as a BBC Talks producer, I once proposed a programme on Durkheim.
The meeting gave me its blessing, on the grounds that producers should be allowed to
pursue their passions, however quaint. But many at the meeting – composed of cultural
“Third Programme” types – confessed that they barely knew the name and certainly could
attach no meaning it. (See my letter on this experience in the Times Literary Supplement,
12 April 2013: 6).
For Annan’s later assessment of the state of English sociology see Annan (1991: 345–
55). It is not flattering, and explains for him why the best sociologists, such as Michael
Young and Gary Runciman, have been mavericks with very little influence on the subject.
As for Giddens, it is only with his appointment as Director of the London School of
Economics, and the concomitant arrival of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government, that
he has begun to play the role of “public intellectual” – the first sociologist in England since
Hobhouse to do so (though a case could be made for A.H. Halsey or Michael Young). See
further on the fate of English sociology, Chapter 1, above.
(Christie 1999: 1) – a familiar refrain in English intellectual life, if we interpret the

term “sociology” generously.
It is significant that the one English journal of sociology to break through the
national barrier is Theory, Culture and Society (cf. Albrow 1993: 87). This is not
because it deals mainly with English thinkers – quite the contrary, the luminaries
it treats are for the most part the usual crop of classic and contemporary European
and American theorists. It is more that the type of theory, cultural theory, that it
has taken as its main focus seems peculiarly congenial to the English intellectual
temperament. It suggests that in looking for the contributions of English social
theory, past and present, we might be best advised to look not to English sociology
but to other regions of the national culture. Is there an “English sociology” that
does not so much not know its name as refuse to acknowledge it?
Social Theory without Sociology?
I have already suggested (in the first section) that other disciplines established
in nineteenth-century England may have “taken up the slack”, or filled the gap,
created by the absence of sociology. One such was literature.21 Here England was
in the forefront of what has been noted as a general phenomenon in nineteenth-
century Europe. Wolf Lepenies (1988) and Bruce Mazlish (1989) have both in
different ways suggested that the rise of sociology was to an important extent
bound up with an engagement with literature. For Lepenies sociology emerged as
a kind of third way, or a “third culture”, following a battle of the books between
literary and scientific intellectuals for the soul of the new industrial society.
Mazlish describes the growth of a certain literary sensibility, in the face of the
tremendous problems of the new society, and sees sociology as the “scientific”
heir to the new sensibility.
But not in England, as both Lepenies and Mazlish acknowledge. Here the
literary sensibility continued to hold sway. The prestige of literature, the pride that
English people took in their rich literary heritage, would in any case have ensured
that any new discipline would have had to struggle for public attention. But the
fact was that for the English their poets, novelists and literary critics seemed to be
doing a more than adequate job of analysis and criticism of the novel problems
of nineteenth-century industrial society. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles
Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, George Eliot,
Matthew Arnold, H.G. Wells and a host of others wrote passionately, both in fiction
and in non-fiction, about poverty and the poor, the new industrial city, the new
21 Had anthropology chosen to turn its lens on its own society, as to some extent was
the case in France, we can imagine an intriguing alternative avenue. But for various reasons
this did not happen in England. For the development of British anthropology, see Kuklick
1992; Kuper 1996. Both Kuklick and Kuper argue that British anthropologists, though they
did not study their own culture, were intensely aware of it in their studies of other cultures.
social classes, the impact of the new utilitarian philosophy, the rise of mass politics
and mass culture. It was a characteristically clever move on the part of the rising
politician and future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to make his contribution
to the public debates in the form of novels.22 The fact is that nineteenth-century
English literature, especially in the form of the novel, made as profound an anatomy
of the new industrialism, the more powerful for being imaginatively expressed, as
the new social science – a view shared, for instance, by Karl Marx.23
For Lepenies, indeed, one of the reasons why sociology did not develop in
England was that the English already had it – or rather, that they had a “concealed
sociology” (Lepenies 1988: 195). Lepenies pays particular attention to the
dominant school of literary criticism that ran from Matthew Arnold to F.R. Leavis.
Here the attempt was made to see literature as the vehicle for a particular kind of
social and moral analysis, a representation of society that was at once an account
of it and a critique of its spiritual and moral content. This was indeed very much
in the long-standing English vein identified by Annan. Carried through into the
twentieth century it had a profound effect on the character not just of literary
studies but of humanistic studies in general, including those concerned specifically
with social analysis. Hence for Lepenies the typical English product of the post-
war period was not sociology proper but “cultural studies” – a “blend of sociology
and literary criticism” that was already present in the thinking of nineteenth-
century English literary intellectuals (Lepenies 1988: 155–95).
Lepenies’s perception seems to me essentially correct. In the nineteenth century
there took place an intensification of the role of literature that lifted it higher than
the already elevated position it occupied in the national culture. For critics such
as Matthew Arnold, literature – the writing and the study of it – had to play the
part of a secular religion. It had to provide the moral force once contributed by the
traditional religion of Christianity that Arnold saw as being in irretrievable decline.
Literature took on a missionary quality. Its task was not simply to moralize but to
civilize. This is why towards the end of the century it was seen as the most suitable
vehicle for the education of new public constituencies such as women and the
22 The best known of which are Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). Disraeli was
perfectly well aware of what he was doing. “In the temper of the times,” he wrote, “the form
of fiction … offered the best chance of influencing opinion” (in Kumar 1995: 9). For an
account of the literary response to the new working class, and the new problems of poverty,
in Victorian and post-Victorian England, see Kumar 1995.
23 See Marx’s well-known tribute to “the present splendid brotherhood of fiction
writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political
and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and
moralists put together …” (in Baxandall and Morawski 1973: 105). Engels’s comment on
Balzac’s picture of French society, “from which … I have learned more than from all the
professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (in Baxandall and
Morawski 1973: 115) shows that he and Marx would include the social scientists in their
unfavourbale comparison with the novelists.
working class. Literature would heighten their moral sensibilities and help them
understand their new civic duties (Baldick 1983; see also Collini 1991).
The nineteenth-century sanctification of literature has ensured that the
dominant tradition among the English intelligentsia in the past two centuries
has been literary – if by that we understand the writing not just of poets and
novelists but also of literary and cultural critics. The intelligentsia’s function of
social analysis and criticism, of establishing authoritative standards and values
for society, has been carried out by a series of commanding literary figures – from
Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Carlyle, Dickens, Kingsley and George Eliot,
to Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Leavis and Williams. F.R.
Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society
1780–1950 (1958) jointly map that tradition and mark out the terrain that, in their
different ways, they both wished to cultivate. It is clear that both are as much
concerned with analyses and visions of society as they are with qualities of literary
merit. In Williams’s case this is explicit in his political and theoretical writings,
such as Marxism and Literature (1977) and Politics and Letters (1979). But it is
no less clear from the contributions to Leavis’s journal Scrutiny, which contain
precisely that “blend of sociology and literary criticism” noted by Lepenies.24
The Leavis–Williams type of “literary sociology” was taken up by Richard
Hoggart, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham school of “cultural studies” that
throughout the 1960s and 1970s produced some of the most creative theoretical
writing in England. Unlike English sociology, this had a distinct international
impact, as shown for instance in the success of Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour
(1977) in the United States. Once more England’s contribution to social theory came
not from the professional sociologists but from a new synthetic field of studies that
drew equally on the native inheritance of literary and cultural criticism, American
symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, and continental Marxism.25 The
influential work of Terry Eagleton (e.g. 1976), a radical disciple of Williams’s,
has also to be seen as arising out of this creative synthesis, though in his case the
continental stress was stronger.
It would be wrong to say that the literary critics have made all the running
in defining the mission of the English intelligentsia (for an alternative view, see
Hall 1979). In areas where English thought has always been strong – economics,
political theory, social anthropology – important additions to social theory
24 This is well-tilled ground. For some good overviews and discussions of this
literary and cultural tradition, see Johnson 1979, Mulhern 1979, Inglis 1982, 1995, and
Sinfield 1989.
25 For a sample of the work of the Centre, see Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and
Roberts 1978; Hall, Hobson, Lowe, and Willis 1980. One should also mention Richard
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), which in its blend of literature, autobiography,
sociology and the analysis of popular culture can almost be considered the “foundational
document” of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, of which Hoggart was the
founder and first director. See further on Hoggart, Inglis 2014.
continued to be made.26 But one further source was perhaps even more important,
in matching the contribution of the literary intellectuals. This was the work of the
English historians. What is interesting here is the extent to which they too have
often drawn on the native tradition of literary analysis and cultural criticism.
History, as we have noted, was established in the universities only in the late
nineteenth century – at about the same time as the study of English literature.
Both faced the problem that they were regarded by the scholarly establishment
as redundant, if not intellectually negligible, disciplines: for did not the classics
provide, to an unmatched degree, all that was necessary in the way of historical and
literary instruction, quite apart from the training in language and logical thought
that they also supremely offered? English gradually – at first in the provincial
universities, then in the cultural heartland of Oxford and Cambridge – broke
down this resistance by offering itself as an acceptable substitute, a sort of “poor
man’s classics”, for the less able students – as well as for women – in an era of
expanding higher education. It was also seen as important to train students in the
study of literature so that they could go out as teachers to the schools and the new
institutions of adult education to perform their civilizing function (Baldick 1983;
Doyle 1986).
Literature in any case had the prestige of the great tradition of English letters
behind it, recently enhanced by the advocacy of such influential critics as Matthew
Arnold. Gaining acceptance for its study in the universities, and in the national
culture generally, was rendered the easier by this fact. But what of history? Why
should it have succeeded? And why in particular should it have succeeded where
sociology failed?
History succeeded in part for the same reasons as English. It was seen to offer,
in a more appealing and more easily assimilable form, some of the qualities of
intellectual discipline and moral education traditionally provided by the classics.
But there were more important contemporary reasons for its acceptance. It came
to be seen as a more fitting preparation for statesmanship and public life than a
classical education, hitherto the favoured discipline to that end. This was largely
because of England’s new role in the world. England was the first industrial society
26 One can do no more than list some names here. In economics, J.M. Keynes,
Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, John Hicks, Fred Hirsch, Amartya Sen; in political theory
Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Quentin Skinner, Alasdair McIntyre; in
social anthropology, Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, Ernest
Gellner. There are problems with disciplinary attribution in a number of cases; but with
the exceptions of Gellner and McIntyre who for a while taught sociology, all the others
contributed to social theory from outside sociology. For a brief account of some of these
figures, see Annan 1991, Anderson 1992b. A case could also be made for psychoanalysis,
in the contributions of Melanie Klein and her followers, as well as in the writings of the
“anti-psychiatry” school of R.D. Laing and David Cooper. But apart from the fact, noted
by Anderson, that psychoanlaysis has had “virtually nil” impact on English culture, these
on the whole are not the schools that have had the greatest impact on social theory. See
Anderson 1992a: 87–8.
and the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. By the time of the First
World War its empire had vastly outstripped Rome’s, occupying nearly a quarter
of the world’s landmass and incorporating a quarter of the world’s population. It
was imperative that English statesman should know about their own history, not
just that of a dead civilization with its dead language. England’s development
was widely regarded as unique, in the context of both the ancient and the modern
worlds. It had succeeded not just commercially, to an unprecedented degree, but
more importantly it had led the way in the invention and elaboration of free political
institutions. This was why history, especially English history, was necessary. Its
task was to teach future statesmen and public leaders how this unique evolution
had come about, what qualities of character and conduct had been responsible
for this fortunate outcome, and how best therefore to secure this inheritance and
pass it safely on to posterity. Truly nothing could compare in importance with
this task, and with this role allotted to historical study. That this would amount to
what a later generation of professional historians would characterize and criticize
as the “Whig interpretation of history” is obvious. But the point was not to train
future historians. History was for service to the nation. It was to enhance the
understanding of national life so that public servants, at home and abroad, could
strengthen English institutions and spread as far as possible the English way of
doing things.27
It was inconceivable that sociology, as currently understood, could have
played that role. Sociology, despite what Durkheim and his disciples were trying
to do in France, was more likely to undermine faith in national institutions than
strengthen commitment. Throughout the Western world in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, history was taught as a celebration of the nation and
national life – “1066 and All That” (see Chapter 9, below). Sociology by contrast
was a critical and questioning discipline, not simply in the version developed by
left-wing thinkers but even in the more influential positivist forms that took their
descent from Comte and Spencer.28 In its German variant, as presented in the
27 On the establishment of history as a university subject, and the arguments for its
adoption, see Burrow 1981; Robbins 1981; Heyck 1982: 140–50; Soffer 1987. See also,
specifically on Cambridge, Rothblatt 1981: 155–80. And cf. an address to the Historical
Association in 1909 by W. Mercier: “Teachers of history should interpret the national
character, the national ideals, and educate their pupils in the ethos of their own race. Nations,
no more than individuals, can afford to dispense with their own peculiar characteristics” (in
Robbins 1981: 418–19).
28 It should be remembered that Spencer, the man with whose name sociology was
more or less synonymous in England, was a controversial and combative figure in his later
years, seen as threatening the emerging national consensus on the need for state intervention
and state regulation. See Peel 1971: 224–48. He was also a passionate opponent of empire,
and one of the last things he wrote was a denunciation of British policy in South Africa
during the Boer War (Spencer 1902). Durkheim too, as his activities during the Dreyfus
affair made clear, was as much a critic as an apologist for the institutions of the Third
Republic; while his sociology as a whole can plausibly be read as a critique of the main
work of Weber, Simmel, Tönnies and others, it offered a penetrating and distinctly
disquieting critique of the institutions and values of modernity. English sociology
hovered uneasily between all these influences, settling finally for a weak positivist
version that was an easy target for the criticisms of anthropologists, economists, and
historians. Given the dominant inheritance of English individualism, empiricism,
and “amerliorism”, sociology was quite incapable of offering an alternative “grand
narrative” of the kind that the “Whig interpretation of history” so commandingly
supplied, with its own vastly more elaborated and unabashed celebration of the
unique English qualities.
It is no surprise that budding social scientists in England, such as the
Hammonds and R.H. Tawney, should turn to history (Soffer 1982: 772); or that
later intellectuals with a talent for social analysis and social criticism should feel
that, in England at least, history (or literature) rather than sociology would be a
stronger base, institutionally and culturally, from which to work.29 History, blessed
from the top of society, promoted by its elite institutions and some of its most
prominent public figures – think of Winston Churchill – established itself in the
national culture in a way impossible for sociology. By the beginning of the twentieth
century it had already overtaken classics as the preferred subject for students in
the major public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge (Soffer 1987: 82). Nor was
this simply as the most favourable route to public positions at home and abroad.
For any bright aspiring intellectual with a critical mind and outlook, history was
the obvious subject to study (where indeed, apart from one college in London and
a few provincial outposts, could one have studied sociology in England if one had
wanted to before the Second World War?). History could therefore lead away from
its original celebratory, propagandistic purpose. In the right hands it could become
a tool of acute theoretical analysis and penetrating social criticism – a form of
“concealed” or “implicit” sociology even more powerful and wide-ranging than in
the case of English studies. Mixed with literature, as indeed was often the case, it
could be an even subtler and more persuasive form of inquiry.
Thus it is that the post-war English historians have not just been internationally
recognized for their history-writing, they have arguably also made a significant
contribution to social theory – more so, indeed, than English sociologists. This
tendencies of modern capitalist society. See Turner 1992; on Durkheim and the Dreyfus
affair, see Lukes 1973: 320–60.
29 I well remember this advice being given to me by the social historian Raphael
Samuel, who had tutored me for my Cambridge entrance examination in history. Samuel
himself, after undergraduate history at Oxford, had tried sociology for one unhappy year
at the Institute for Community Studies in London, before returning with a sense of relief
to history. “See you back in history!” he sang out to me as the doors closed on the Tube
train taking me to my first day as a graduate student in sociology at the London School of
Economics. I did not in fact follow his return path, but sometimes wonder whether I should
have done. For some sparkling specimens of his work, showing how historical inquiry can
contribute to sociological understanding, see Samuel 1994, 1998.
has been true especially of the left-leaning and Marxist historians. In the work of
Rodney Hilton on the English Middle Ages, Christopher Hill (and before him R.H.
Tawney) on the Reformation and the English Revolution, Keith Thomas on religion
and magic in early modern times, Eric Hobsbawm on the “long nineteenth” and
the “short twentieth” centuries, Edward Thompson on the English working class,
Asa Briggs on Victorian cities, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop group
on popular culture, English historians have offered major insights on such matters
as the origins and nature of capitalism, the role of ideas in social change, the
social functions of religion, the causes and meaning of revolution, the character
of rural and urban uprisings, the social consequences of industrialism, the form
of the industrial city, the concept of social class, and the nature of nationalism.30
It is difficult to imagine a more creative sociological contribution, one moreover
that has the added appeal of constructing theory out of, rather than in the face of,
history. Nor is it only left-wing historians, with the obvious stimulus of Marx,
who have been fertile in theory. Liberal and conservative historians, such as Hugh
Trevor-Roper, Harold Perkin, Peter Laslett, and Jonathan Clark have offered
stimulating insights into the nature of religious movements and beliefs, family
structure and political change in pre-modern society, and the class systems and
forms of knowledge typical of modernity.31 In many of these cases – as in Trevor-
Roper on Thomas More, Hill on Milton and Richardson, Briggs on Charlotte
Brontë and H.G. Wells – the role of literature in shaping perceptions and aiding
our understanding is fully acknowledged.
Edward Thompson deserves a special mention. Not only has his work been
highly influential in sociology – his The Making of the English Working Class
(1963) appears on innumerable sociology reading lists – but he exemplifies in
the highest degree that fusion of literature, history, and social theory as social
criticism that has been the hallmark of the English intelligentsia for the past
century and more. Starting with a monumental study of William Morris, he
moved on to the classic account of the rise of the English working class, and
continued with numerous studies of class, culture and conflict in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century England. In the process he has illuminated the study of the
crowd and crowd psychology, he has explored the impact of industrialism on
modes of thinking and feeling, he has shown the persistence of customary norms
and beliefs in mediating the effects of modern market economies, he has made
it impossible for us to think seriously of class without adding a historical and
30 Some of this work is described, with the relevant references, in Kaye 1992; Annan
1991: 356–78; Anderson 1992b: 281–93.
31 See, for example, Trevor-Roper 1978; Perkin 1969, 1990; Laslett 1985; J.C.D.
Clark 1985, 1986. We might add that in current debates about English national identity,
no English sociologist has contributed as much as historians such as Raphael Samuel (e.g.
1994), Linda Colley (e.g. 1994), and David Cannadine (e.g. 2014). Similarly, on nationalism
in general, only Ernest Gellner can match the contributions of the historian Eric Hobsbawm
(e.g. 1992).
dynamic dimension, and he has helped us to understand what it is to reconstruct

and understand a culture and a community, past or present. It was fitting, and
entirely characteristic, that he should conclude – prematurely, by all the signs – his
work with an account of William Blake, the English radical whose combination of
literary and social concerns supremely illustrates the English cultural tradition (as
also in the case of William Morris, Thompson’s other hero).32
“Englishness” and “the Sociological Tradition”
Each nation gets the social theory it deserves – or rather, that which is consonant
with its political and social development. For various historical reasons, a political
system emerged in England which made it peculiarly easy for certain kinds of
intellectuals to get close to the machinery of government. Their intellectual
interests were fashioned by the possibilities opened up by this unusual and
attractive situation. In this context sociology, as a theoretical and academic
discipline, appeared irrelevant.
But this is not quite the same as saying that English thought was hostile to
social theory, if by this we mean an understanding of the nature of past and present
32 For some of Thompson’s best-known essays, see Thompson 1993. Thompson’s

work is discussed extensively in Kaye 1992, Kaye and McClelland 1990, and Palmer 1994.
For an explicit recognition of Thompson’s contribution to social theory, see also Calhoun
1994. One need hardly say that despite one of Thompson’s best-known books’ being
entitled The Poverty of Theory, the essays that make up the book are alive with theoretical
insights – not least the famous essay “The Peculiarities of the English” (1978). It is this
that makes me dissent from the view, frequently voiced, that Thompson was “anti-theory”
and would not have liked to be included in a discussion that saw him as a significant social
theorist. It is no doubt true that Thompson would not be comfortable in being assimilated
to any sort of “sociological tradition” – but that would also be true of almost anyone,
sociologist or non-sociologist, working within the Marxist tradition, which has often
thought of sociology as a “bourgeois science” and resisted many of what they see as its
working assumptions (consensus, integration, an a-historical approach, etc.). It is also true
that Thompson polemicized vigorously and, on occasion, vitriolically, against what he saw
as the excessively abstract theorizing of certain Marxists within both Britain and France.
But I would contend that whatever scepticism Thompson may have expressed occasionally
about theory, his own work shows him to have had a consummate grasp of theory, if by that
we mean a general understanding of social behaviour, social institutions, and the dynamics
of social change. Whigs and Hunters (1977), his study of the responses to the eighteenth-
century Black Act against poaching, is as good an example of all this as any, showing
his meticulous handling of detail and his general grasp of social structure. This powerful
combination of qualities is mentioned by almost all commentators on Thompson, see e.g.
Calhoun 1994. See also Calhoun’s study (1982) of the nineteenth-century English working
class, which, noting Thompson’s “theoretical intentions”, is a full-scale engagement with
Thompson on the theoretical understanding of concepts such as class, community and
collective action – hardly worth doing unless Thompson had posed a theoretical challenge.
society. In literature, history, anthropology, even at times economics and political

science, the resources were found to engage with society in such a way as to
produce an impressive body of work, much of which carried clear theoretical
implications. That not all practitioners realized this, nor were much concerned
when it was drawn to their attention, is not the point. Sociologists at least should
be able to recognize it, and to profit from it.
The claim is not being made that all this amounted to a fully-fledged indigenous
sociology. One only has to look to the United States, or perhaps contemporary
France, to see what such a claim would imply. English sociology is indeed
manifestly an “unfinished project”; the construction of a distinctively English
school of sociology still seems a distant prospect, and there is nothing to suggest
that it is an inevitability. The English government, and the English public generally,
exhibit a marked lack of interest in sociology, and seem largely unimpressed by
its record to date. That could no doubt be said of many Western societies today.
The difference is that in many cases sociology has been sufficiently vigorously
launched to develop a momentum of its own, which at least gives it a certain
protection against the vicissitudes of public policy and intellectual fashions.
Nothing of the kind is true in England.
What I have been trying to argue is that though England did not produce a
distinctive sociology, it did encourage a form of inquiry that is sufficiently close
to the concerns of sociologists to count as an important contribution to social
theory. We may if we wish call this an “implicit” or “concealed” sociology.
“Implicit sociology”, as the term implies, often hints at rather than spells out
its theoretical presuppositions or concerns. It teaches by example rather than
in the form of systematic statements of principles. One often has to dig out the
theoretical insight or principle lurking, sometimes unsuspected by the author, in
the body of the work. But this can be a gain rather than a loss. Works which, like
many works of history, do not wear their theory too obviously on the outside can
be enjoyable to read and impart their theory without a conscious striving on the
part of the reader. Education by stealth has always been the preferred strategy of
good pedagogues.
Or we may, considering the central role of literature and history, also call the
English contribution a kind of “literary”, “cultural”, or “historical” sociology. It
may not have the systematic quality or explicit theoretical purpose of what currently
passes under those heads, but it is noticeable how often one sees references to the
work of Williams and Thompson in sociologists’ writing in the areas of history or
culture (see, e.g., Hays 1994; Corse 1997). An analogous case of a figure highly
influential in certain branches of contemporary sociology would be the American
cultural critic Edward Said. Said not only in several places acknowledges a debt to
Williams and Thompson, but in his blend of literature, history and cultural criticism
exemplifies just that kind of synthetic social theory that marks the contribution of
the English thinkers (see, for example, Said 1993). All this suggests that what the
English thinkers were doing overlaps in important ways with some of the most
interesting current developments in sociology.
The “Englishness” of English social theory leads us finally to reflect briefly

on the sociological tradition in general. It has become common to try to identify
particularly important figures, and certain lines of descent, that went towards the
making of the discipline that we as sociologists currently practise. That endeavour
seems to me entirely worthwhile, even if there will never be complete agreement
on who belongs to the sociological pantheon, or which are the most important
tributaries to the broad sociological stream. The danger however is that we end
up reifying or “essentializing” the subject, seeing it as a single project when in
fact it has always been multi-stranded. However important are Marx, Weber and
Durkheim, what we have drawn from them may be only a relatively restricted set
of themes and approaches. Not only does it leave out certain “micro” varieties
of social theory that are always having to be re-discovered; more damagingly it
leaves out large areas of literary and cultural life that are regarded as the province
of other disciplines. Until recently one would have wanted to say that it also
leaves out history – despite Marx and what following from him should have been
a continuous engagement with history in the discipline. That has now come to be
remedied to a certain extent, though the battle is far from won. But other areas,
such as literature, remain highly controversial.
Again, that is as it should be. It would be a bad thing if any area were annexed to
sociology in a full and final way. The lines of demarcation and debate must remain
permanently fluid and open. What the English case demonstrates is that the absence
of something called “sociology”, in any of its definitions or manifestations, should
not lead us to construe this as a lack of interest in social investigation or social
theory. We need to keep our eyes open for the less obvious signs of their presence;
and when we look there we may well, as in the English case, be richly rewarded.
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Chapter 9
1066 and All That: Myths of the English
Myth and History
Myths in general are, almost by definition, factually false. They cannot be tested
empirically or scientifically, for among their components they manifestly contain
objects, places, persons and events which have not existed and mostly could
not possibly exist. The popular use of the term “myth” therefore, as signifying
something erroneous – “the myth of progress”, the “myth of the nation-state” –
misses the essential point. Myths, as Percy Cohen says, “are not errors, for their
truth, for those who accept them, is preserved for eternity” (Cohen 1969: 337).1
National myths – myths about the origins, character and destiny of nations
– partake of the general nature of myths. They are not meant to be subjected to
empirical investigation. “Unlike a programme or a prediction, a myth cannot be
refuted” (Tudor 1972: 16). That is why, as Ernest Renan says, “the progress of
historical studies may often be dangerous to nationality”, undermining cherished
and deeply-held myths that are central to national identity (Renan [1882] 2001:
166). But it seems to be feature of national myths – and perhaps of all myths? –
that whatever and however many fanciful and fictitious elements they contain, they
must also contain at least a tincture of truth (Schöpflin 1997: 26). Even in what
might seem the ultra-fanciful myth of Rome’s founding by the twins Romulus
and Remus, suckled in infancy by a she-wolf, the mythic claim that Romulus and
Remus founded their settlement on Rome’s Palatine hill is certainly consistent
with the archeological findings that one or more villages were established on the
hills of Rome – including the Palatine – from the end of the bronze age (c. 1000
BCE) (Hornblower and Spawforth 1998: 605).
Most national myths in fact go well beyond this in appealing to some well-
known events and personalities for which there is reasonable historical evidence
(there is no historical evidence for the existence of Romulus and Remus). They
are, to that extent, historical. The difference between myth and history is not the
difference between fantasy and reality, error and fact, but in the ways in which
these are mixed and the manner in which the story is told.2 Myths have no
1 Cohen further clarifies: “Myths are not errors, since they are not failed attempts to
make correct empirical statements” (1969: 353, n. 1). Cf. Karl Jaspers, who says that “the
language of myth” is “the language of a reality that is not empirical, but existential” (quoted
Tudor 1972: 60).
2 It is relevant to note that for the Greeks of the 8th–4th centuries BC, the opposition
was not so much that of muthos (myth) and historia (inquiry), as between muthos and logos
(reasoned discourse). See Vernant 1990.
inhibition about inventing lavishly when necessary for their purposes, finding their
ingredients in all sorts of unlikely places (myths are indeed, as Lévi-Strauss saw
them, the product of bricolage, made up of bits and pieces). Nor are they – unlike
history – at all precise about dates; indeed they are indifferent to chronology
(Finley 1975: 15). Since they exist for specific social or political purposes, myths
in addition are usually couched in colourful and memorable language, more akin
to poetry than to historiography (Overing 1997: 2). But for all that they – like
dreams – maintain a toe-hold in reality. “National myths”, as David Archard says,
“contain a portion of truth, and would probably not be successful if they did not”
(1995: 474; cf. Tudor 1972: 17, 138).3 It was not really, alas, the armada of “little
ships” and the pluck of the ordinary British people that saved the troops at Dunkirk
in 1940 – Hitler’s decision to halt his panzers on the outskirts of the city had a
lot more to do with that.4 But it is undeniable that many little ships, manned by
courageous fisherman, lifeboatmen, and yachtsmen, did go over, and they did ferry
several groups of soldiers back to England (though many of the small civilian
ships were destroyed by the Luftwaffe en route). The “myth of Dunkirk” is not all
fabrication; there is a sufficient sub-stratum of fact on which it rests.
Myth and history cannot therefore be rigidly separated, the one fanciful the
other real. They are however different in what they do, what their aim or effect is.
Unlike history – or, more properly, historiography – myths concretize in a particular
way people and events such as to display universal or general truths – or what are
thought to be universal or general truths – about the human condition. Myths can
3 Tudor further adds that, although myths share with history-writing a belief in the
truth of the facts narrated, their intention is different from that of historical writing. “Myths
are believed to be true, not because the historical evidence is compelling, but because they
make sense of men’s present experience. They tell the story of how it came about” (1972:
124). This would be a pretty fair summation of much history written under the influence
of the “Whig interpretation” of history, so perhaps emphasizing its mythic status. See on
this below.
4 This is how Liddell Hart tells it: “The escape of the British Expeditionary Force
in 1940 was largely due to Hitler’s personal intervention. After his tanks had overrun the
north of France and cut off the British Army from its base, Hitler held them up just as they
were about to sweep into Dunkirk – which was the last remaining port of escape left to the
British. At that moment the bulk of the BEF was still many miles distant from the port. But
Hitler kept his tanks halted for three days.
His action preserved the British forces when nothing else could have saved them. By
making it possible for them to escape he enabled them to rally in England, continue the war,
and man the coasts to defy the threat of invasion. Thereby he produced his own ultimate
downfall, and Germany’s, five years later. Acutely aware of the narrowness of the escape,
but ignorant of its cause, the British people spoke of ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’” (Liddell Hart
1973: 80). For a full account of what actually happened ay Dunkirk, and of the making of
the myth, see Harman 1980: esp. 235–49. For an account of a related myth, the behaviour
of the British people during the Blitz of 1940, see Calder 1991 and, more generally, Morgan
and Evans 1993.
1066 and All That 201
hence be called “concrete universals”. As Peter Munz puts it, “the fashioning of
a myth is the fashioning of a concrete story which embodies universal features
which make it more important to us than any particular historical event” (Munz
1956: 3).5 The myth of Oedipus or of the Garden of Eden tell us things about
ourselves that mere history telling, the mere recital of events, does not.
National myths concretize, in the most general way, certain features about a
nation. They tell us how a nation sees itself, what it aspires to be, how it differs
from other nations, what its deepest values are. But national myths are not simply
normative or descriptive. They are also mobilizing and energizing devices. In this
aspect they exemplify what Georges Sorel saw as a general feature of all political
myths, that they are “ not descriptions of things but expressions of a determination
to act” (Sorel [1908] 1961: 50). In their telling and re-telling, in the memories
and emotions they evoke, in their invocation at particular critical moments in
a nation’s life, they summon up energies and commitments that make difficult
tasks easier, and apparently impossible ones feasible. War is the obvious example.
How often in English history is the myth of Agincourt appealed to – the story of
how “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”, in Shakespeare’s rendering
(Henry V, IV: 3), overcame great odds to win a glorious victory. In the midst of the
Second World War, at the time of greatest danger, Shakespeare’s phrase was used
to striking effect by Churchill; and England called upon one of its best-known
actors, Laurence Olivier, to play Henry V on screen and re-create the scene at
Agincourt, the whole set to stirring music by William Walton.6
5 This distinction is similar to the famous one made by Aristotle in the Poetics (1963:
17) between “poetry” and “history”: “The historian and the poet differ from one another
not by virtue of the fact that one is writing prose and the other verse … Where the historian
really differs from the poet is in his describing what has happened, while the other describes
the kind of thing that might happen. Poetry therefore is more philosophic and of greater
significance than history, for its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of
history are particulars”. For poetry, read myths? See Finley 1975: 13. A similar distinction,
in this case between history and religion, is made by J.J. Bachofen. History provides the
“facts”, religion the form, the “universal” or spiritual meaning of the events: “Historical
events provide the content, religion the form and expression … One and the same myth
encompasses religious and historical facts, and the two are not separate but identical”
(Bachofen 1967: 185).
6 Henry V, produced and directed by Laurence Olivier, was released in 1944. Just to
make plain the mythic status of “Agincourt”, it hardly needs to be said that the battle of
Agincourt, and the whole French campaign of 1415, were not quite as Shakespeare paints
them. Even Shakespeare sounds a warning – here as elsewhere in the history plays. He has
the Archbishop of Canterbury – Henry Chichele, founder of All Souls College, Oxford – in
the midst of a tortuous speech arguing Henry’s claim to the throne of France, urge the King
to “Stand for your own, unwind your bloody flag”, and offers, should “right and conscience”
be offended, to take “the sin upon my head, dread sovereign!” (Henry V, I: 2). The Fellows
of All Souls still pray for the souls of those slain at Agincourt. For a comparison of
Shakespeare’s account of the battle and what actually happened – including the massacre
One last point about myth and history. Although myths can, and perhaps in
some sense always do, have a future dimension, they are inescapably linked to the
past.7 We can think of Marxism or socialism as myths in this sense. Even though
they have their faces turned towards the future – as, in describing their mythic
dimension, Sorel (1961) stressed – they are premised upon past developments (in
Marx’s case, previous modes of production). They are philosophies of history,
similar to and no doubt derived from Jewish and Christian eschatologies. They link
past, present and future as elements in a fixed chain of being and becoming. The
future is simply the fulfilment of the past. Most national myths recount past events
– the foundation of a city or people, the performance of great and stirring deeds
of daring and courage – which are so to speak the building blocks of the national
narrative. What the narrative announces is that this people, with these virtues and
capacities, will mark out for themselves a particular place in the world.8 They will
have a future that the past already presages, in laying down the basic elements of
the national character and the forms of national life. In this sense myth does not
merely, as Cohen says, “anchor the present in the past” (Cohen 1969: 349); it also
points to a future that is a continuation of that past and present. Arthur of Camelot
is rex olim et futurus, “the once and future king”: he was so once, in a defining
instance, and so he will be again. No-one should be surprised, again, if both Russia
and the United States act and continue to act in imperial ways. Both have national
myths that since their origins emphasize the world-transforming destiny of their
nations, whether to spread Orthodoxy, Communism, or Democracy.
Myths of the English?
The English have myths a-plenty, or so it seems. All partake more or less of the
nature of myth as outlined above; all, that is, are a mixture of reality and fantasy,
of French prisoners on Henry’s orders – see Lewis (1995); a full account of the battle is in
Barker (2007). It should be noted that Kenneth Branagh’s remake of Henry V (1989), made
in the wake of the Falklands conflict as well as the Vietnam war, emphasizes the brutality
of war and the ruthlessness of ambitious kings – a deliberate riposte, evidently, to Olivier’s
portrayal.
7 Cf. Friedrich and Brzezinski: “A myth is typically a tale concerned with past events,
giving them a special meaning and significance for the present and thereby reinforcing the
authority of those who are wielding power in a particular community” (1961: 99). Hobbes
in addition stresses the link between past and future: “No man can have in his mind a
conception of the future, for the future is not yet. But of our conceptions of the past, we
make a future” (quoted in Hill 1968: 63).
8 For example, for the Romans, in Virgil’s famous words: “tu regere imperio populos,
Romane, memento/ (haec tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,/parcere subiectis et
debellare superbos” (Aeneid VI: 851–3) – “Roman, be this thy care – these thine arts – to
bear dominion over the nations and to impose the law of peace, to spare the humbled and
to war down the proud!”
fact and fiction. There is Alfred the Great (he of the cakes), maker of England; the
Norman Yoke; Magna Carta; Robin Hood and his Merry Men; the Reformation
as a return to the ancient “Protestant” English Church; the heroic defeat of the
Spanish Armada; Good Queen Bess; the immemoriality of English Common
Law; the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688; Trafalgar and Waterloo; Khartoum
and Mafeking; Dunkirk, the Blitz and the more or less single-handed defeat of
Nazism. Many of these receive their glorious send-up in that satirical compendium
of English myths, 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman [1930] 1960). One
problem, as readily seen from this list, is how antiquated many of these myths are.
To what extent do they have any meaning today? How far can they still perform
their mobilizing and integrating function?
Then there are what we might call “meta-myths”, master narratives which seek
to encompass larger and longer tracts of English history and culture, and which
often incorporate the lesser, more event-based, myths of the kind noted above. The
narrative of “the British Constitution”, that mythical, unwritten and impalpable
entity, is one such. There is the myth of English exceptionalism, as exemplified
in notions of England as the “elect nation”, always essentially Protestant, or, in
more secular form, in the “Whig interpretation” of English/British history. There
are the deeply-held beliefs by and about the English – most of which can readily
be shown to be misplaced or misleading – as that they are anti-industrial, anti-
urban, anti-European, and anti-intellectual. These can be deemed mythical in that
they are often embodied in popular stories or icons, such as the much-used (and
abused) figure of John Bull. There is the myth of Anglo-Saxonism, the idea that it
is the mission and destiny of the English-speaking peoples to conquer and civilize
the world. There is the idea of the English as an “island race”, and of England as a
fortress, “a precious stone set in a silver sea”.9
There are problems with these meta-myths as well, some of them also having
to do with their datedness and their continuing relevance to England today. But
a greater problem, evident in both the lesser and the greater myths, is that of
regarding England and the English as their sole subject and referent. To what
extent do they refer to Britain, or the United Kingdom, rather than England alone?
How to separate England from Britain, English myths from British myths? How
can England, the southern part of the island of Britain, be by itself “the sceptred
isle” and its inhabitants the “island race”?
At his meeting with Queen Elizabeth in April 2009, on a visit to London to
take part in the G20 economic summit, President Obama upset several groups
of natives – the Northern Irish especially – by repeatedly saying “England”
when he should have said – and meant – Britain or the United Kingdom (The
Times, 2 April 2009). Obama is not of course alone in this common practice. It
has been customary for the English so to do since at least the creation of the
United Kingdom in the eighteenth century; and it has been common also among
9 For statements and critical discussion of these myths and beliefs, see Jones 2000,
Wiener 2004, Mandler 1997, Collini 2007, Horsman 1981: Ch. 4.
foreigners.10 Moreover, “the loose use is not restricted to English people: French
Angleterre, Italian Inghilterra, etc., are sometimes used in the same manner,
and when a German speaks of ein Englander he is not necessarily excluding the
possibility that the person referred to is Scottish, Welsh, etc.” (Burchfield, 1996:
s.v. “England, English”).
The confusion of English with British can have significant consequences for
myths of the English. John Major, the former Conservative prime minister, was one
who fell frequent victim to the English/British elision, especially when he sought
to evoke the nation at its deepest and most characteristic levels. Thus he could
refer to the “thousand years of history” in which “British identity” was formed and
in which “Britain” stood against the Continent, ignoring the fact that “Britain”, in
its present form at least, was less than three hundred years old.11 Clearly Major had
some other entity in mind. Later in the same year, in a speech given on the eve of
St George’s Day, Major returned to the theme of British national identity. Warming
to the earlier emphasis on longevity and continuity, he declared that Britain would
survive for a long time “in its unamendable essentials.” “Fifty years from now,
Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer,
invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell
10 The English were of course doing this – taking England to be the whole of Britain
– long before the creation of the United Kingdom. The most celebrated instance of this
must be the famous speech in praise of England that Shakespeare gives to John of Gaunt in
Richard II (“this sceptred isle”, “this precious stone set in a silver sea”, “England, bound
in with the triumphant sea”, etc. – Act 2:1). This frequent usage expressed England’s
longstanding imperial ambition; but it was not until the union with Scotland (“North
Britain”) in 1707 that the English/British fusion or confusion became both more normal
and more politically sensitive. See further, on the English–British elision, Lunn 1991: 87;
Jones 2000: xvi; Kumar 2003: Ch. 1.
11 The occasion was a speech to rally the party faithful, anxious that Britain’s
accession to the Treaty of Maastricht of 1991, by which the European Community was
transformed into the European Union, would undermine British independence and
parliamentary independence. “I will never”, declared Major, “come high or hell water, let
our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe … If there are those who have in
mind to haul down the Union Jack and fly high the star-spangled banner of the United States
of Europe, I say to them: you misjudge the temper of the British people! … And to those
who offer us gratuitous advice, I remind them of what a thousand years of history should
have told them: you cannot bully Britain” (The Guardian 10 October 1992). In 1994 Major
returned to the theme of British antiquity: “This British nation has a monarchy founded by
the Kings of Wessex over eleven hundred years ago, a Parliament and universities formed
over seven hundred years ago …” (The Times 24 May 1994). Once again Major was clearly
thinking of another country. There was no “British nation” at the time of the kings of
Wessex. Although “Britain” and the “British” have a long history, as the designation of the
Celtic people of pre-Roman Britain and as the name of the Roman province of Britannia, it
was only in 1707, with the union between England and Scotland, that the United Kingdom
of Great Britain came into being (James I called himself “King of Great Britain”, but the
title was rejected by both the English and the Scottish Parliaments).
said – ‘old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’” (The
Guardian 23 April 1993). Once more, Britain seems to be standing for England.
As many commentators pointed out, county cricket, warm beer, green suburbs
and dog lovers evoke quintessentially English images, images indeed of “Middle
England”; they are not noticeably part of the cultures of the Scots, the Welsh and
the Irish.
George Orwell himself tended to be rather careless of the English–British
distinction, though the essay from which Major quoted, “The Lion and the Unicorn”
(1941), was quite clearly subtitled “Socialism and the English Genius”, and its
famous first section is entitled “England, Your England”. But in his insouciance
Orwell was in the company of most commentators and observers of the English
character and temperament. All of this makes for peculiar difficulties in studying
the “myths of the English.” For who are the English? What is the entity, England,
that is referred to? “English” has been an unusually free-floating signifier for much
of its history. This is because the English have been, not just for the last four
hundred, but the last thousand years, an imperial people (Kumar 2003). As Anglo-
Normans, they conquered the Welsh and the Irish – the “British” – in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. They then came within an ace of conquering the Scots, a
goal finally achieved by a forced union with Scotland in 1707 (though the Scots
had been fairly thoroughly “Englished” – in their laws and language – long before
that). Having created one empire, the “inner empire” of Great Britain or the United
Kingdom, the English went on be the lynch-pin of a second, overseas, empire.
Though Scots, Welsh and Irish were willing and indeed enthusiastic partners in the
overseas venture, it was always clear the “British Empire” contained an English
core, with the English language, English law, English parliamentary institutions,
and English culture generally furnishing the main elements of imperial rule.
Thus did England, from earliest times, unmoor itself from its territorial base
in the south of the island of Britain. Englishness became something displaced,
deterritorialized, “a global identity into which others could always translate
themselves” (Young 2008: 3). Rupert Brooke’s “corner of a foreign field/That is
forever England” well captures this extrinsic character of English ethnicity. And
that has meant that the myths of “the English” are inextricably bound up with other
places, other peoples. When Kipling wrote, “And what do they know of England
who only England know?” (The English Flag, 1891), he was pointing not just to
the need for comparisons, to understand one’s own culture. He was suggesting
something much more literal and direct, that England and Englishness could only
properly be viewed from the outside in, from the vantage point of the whole globe,
into which the English had spread and which had played a formative part in the
making of their identity.
We can see the impact of this externality, this interfusing of English with
other, extraneous, elements, in one of the earliest and most celebrated examples
of English mythologizing. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,
History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136) is, as its title clearly proclaims, an account
of the fortunes of Britain and its rulers. It shows how they flourished under the
Romans, receiving from them the inestimable boon of Christianity (the first
Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, is even declared to have had British
origins). But with the withdrawal of the Roman legions, and despite the valiant
exploits of King Arthur and his knights, the British are faced with a series of
increasingly deadly attacks from the Continent. Eventually they succumb to the
“odious race” of Angles and Saxons. Now known as “Welsh” – the derogatory
Anglo-Saxon term for barbarians – instead of Britons, they are driven from their
lands, some to escape across the Channel to Armorica (Brittany), others to live
precariously in Wales, “in the remote recesses of the woods. From that time on the
power of the Britons came to an end in the islands, and the Angles began to reign”
(Geoffrey of Monmouth 1966: 282).
Nothing, it seems, could be plainer. This is a British epic in which the villains
are the Saxons, the ancestors of the English. Geoffrey’s purpose seems to have
been to rescue the British/Welsh from the oblivion into which they had fallen, and
to counter the growing tendency among the learned Anglo-French world of the
twelfth century to write off the Welsh “as barbarians, as brutish creatures without
a history” (Gillingham 1990–1: 110).
But how then was this myth of a glorious people oppressed by the English
turned into one which celebrated their very oppressors, the English themselves?
How was it that Geoffrey’s British history – or the Brut tradition, as it was also
called – “came to form the basis of an English national epos which, continued,
expanded and elaborated by a host of medieval chroniclers, helped to underwrite
– however paradoxically – the continuity of English experience and the antiquity
of English kingship”? (Mason 1987: 61). Scholars are undecided about the
precise mechanisms, but the outcome is clear enough. By the late twelfth century,
Geoffrey’s History was being used to justify English claims to rule over the whole
of Britain. Edward I famously invoked it to justify English overlordship of Wales
and Ireland, and to press his claim to Scotland. Following his example, English
kings down to the seventeenth century regularly called upon Geoffrey’s authority
in support of their arguments for English hegemony in the British Isles (Mason
1987: 61–2).
It appears that among the reasons why Geoffrey’s mythical History was so
attractive to the English kings was that he had presented a portrait of a united
Britain, a Great or Greater Britain unified by such great kings as Arthur and
inhabited by a single people, the Britons. The Anglo-Saxons and the Normans
after them could be seen as following in succession to the Britons, as the legitimate
heirs by conquest of the whole island of Britain (Leckie 1981; see also Hanning
1966: 121–72).12 The Normans after all had defeated the enemies of the Britons,
12 There is a distinct echo here of the way in which the legend of Aeneas, as originally
an Etruscan founder-hero, was turned by Etruria’s enemy Rome into the myth of the Trojan
origin of Rome, as founded by Aeneas. With the defeat of the Etruscans Romans became
progressively less averse to seeing a connection between themselves and the Etruscans, the
original power in Italy. “Indeed, it is possible that, by reviving the legend of the Etruscan
the Anglo-Saxons. Now united with them, as Anglo-Normans, they could be seen
as continuing the work of Arthur and the other British kings. The destiny of Britain
seemed plain: whether under Saxons or Normans, its future was to be once more
a united kingdom. Since the English were by the twelfth century already the most
powerful nation in the island, it seemed natural for them to argue that they should
take the lead in this task (Davies 2000: 35–53).
The transformation of Geoffrey’s British History into an English myth of
legitimate conquest and descent is exemplary of the English way. Events and
personages belonging to other places, other peoples, and other traditions are
annexed to become part of a national story. England’s own expansiveness, its
imperial ambitions, become the motives for a comprehensive transformation
of the myth, turning it in this case at least almost into its opposite. The British
become the English, Arthur of Camelot becomes Alfred of Wessex. England, not
Britain, becomes the master theme – or rather, Britain seen through English eyes,
with England as its centre.
Something similar can be shown with another well-known historical myth –
the myth that has come down to us in the form of “the Whig interpretation” of
English history. This is basically a myth of progress, which can take several forms.
But it is best known in the form that was named in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig
Interpretation of History (1931). Here Butterfield criticized accounts of history that
were always written from the point of view of the present. They were designed to
show that the past only had meaning insofar as it could be represented as leading up
to our present, supposedly enlightened, condition. They tended “to emphasize certain
principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not
the glorification of the present” (Butterfield [1931] 1951: v). It was history written
from the point of view of the winners, not the losers. It was not therefore a true
history but a self-flattering national myth (Jones 2000: esp. 70–78).
The irony is that having identified this fault, Butterfield – admittedly in the
midst of a devastating world war, and at a time of great national crisis – went on
to give precisely such a Whig interpretation of English history in his book The
Englishman and His History (1945). Though still criticizing the Whig method of
writing history in general, Butterfield argued that in the case of England at least
the Whig historians had been right in emphasizing that the English had found
the secret of progress through a peculiarly blessed inheritance, in which past and
present were linked in a process of orderly evolution:
Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs
who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with
change, discovering mediations between past and present, and showing what
can be achieved by man’s reconciling mind (Butterfield 1945: 138; see also
Mandler 2002: 50–54).
Aeneas, Rome announced that she had now taken the place which formerly belonged to
Etruria” (Tudor, 1972: 67).
What is interesting about the Whig interpretation of English history is that it

figures as a kind of master or meta-myth, incorporating many other famous mythical
moments and episodes. As Butterfield showed, the elements of this master myth
were already firmly in place by the end of the seventeenth century. They included
the idea of the antiquity and independence of the House of Commons; the “myth
of Magna Carta”, as the foundation of the liberties of all free-born Englishmen;
the belief in a tradition of constitutional rule, limiting monarchy, which stretched
unbroken from the Middle Ages through to the seventeenth century; the theory
of primitive Teutonic freedom and of “the Norman yoke” that had attempted,
unsuccessfully, to stifle it (Butterfield 1945: 69).
What later commentators, such as the historians Macaulay, Stubbs, Froude,
Freeman and Green, added to this older account was a decisive temporalization
of the myth. English liberty was not an immemorial, timeless, inheritance, but
had been won, slowly but steadily, through a series of incremental victories: from
Magna Carta, through the break with Rome, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution,
the American revolution (seen as a triumph of English constitutionalism), to the
1832 Reform Act, which opened the door to a progressive democratization of
English society. It was in this form, basically a Victorian creation, that the Whig
account of English history entered the school textbooks and turned it into a central
element of the English tradition, “part of the landscape of English life, like our
country lanes or our November mists or our historic inns’ (Butterfield 1945: 2).
But the Englishness of this invocation, as with many other quintessentially
English myths, hides a very non-English origin and a largely non-English context.
The Whig myth of English history – and it is of course a myth, for most of its
elements, such as Magna Carta, the Norman yoke, the long-standing supremacy
of the House of Commons, have long been challenged by historians – is in many
respects, particularly in the form it took in the nineteenth century, a Scottish
invention (and we might remember that the very term “Whig”, comes from Scottish
politics and was imported into England in the late seventeenth century).13 It took
its inspiration from the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment,
notably Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson, Adam Smith and David
Hume (Forbes 1985; Burrow 1983: 11–35; Kidd 1993: 108–28).14 It was these
figures who elaborated the stadial theory of progress, whereby societies advanced
successively through stages of development, from “savagery” to “civilization”. It
13 The term Whig – originally “whiggamore” – was first applied to the Scottish
Covenanters of the mid-seventeenth century, and later to the English opponents of the
Duke of York (the future James II) in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81. Their opponents,
the Yorkists, were designated Tories, also of Scottish origin. Both Whig and Tory were
originally abusive terms, meaning literally bandit, rustler, outlaw.
14 Colin Kidd calls the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment “the intellectual
praetorian guard of the English Whig tradition” (1993: 213). To that tradition John Burrow
also acknowledges the importance of the thought of another non-English figure, the
Irishmen Edmund Burke, with his emphasis on change-in-continuity (Burrow 1983: 22–3).
was this that allowed the timeless antiquarianism of seventeenth-century writers of

English history to be displaced by a more historicized view that put the emphasis
on growth and evolution. English history, and English freedom, had emerged from
a barbarous past – Anglo-Saxon “liberties” were a myth, so too was the idea of
the “free constitution” of the seventeenth century which the Stuarts had attempted
to overthrow. But ultimately the progressive spirit of English history did triumph,
in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Whig settlement, meant to endure
for all time. So taught the Scot David Hume, whose History of England (1754–
62), heavily influenced by Scottish theories of progress, held the stage for nearly
a century.15 It was finally displaced by the work of another Scotsman, Thomas
Babington Macaulay, whose History of England (1848–55) continued Hume’s
enterprise, and with much the same message. If Anglo-Saxon liberties and the
Norman yoke were indeed myths, they could be absorbed in the larger narrative
and the greater myth that was the story of England’s rise to freedom and greatness.16
What is perhaps just as interesting as the Scottish provenance of this progressivist
and providentialist myth of the English is the extent to which its development
was shaped and strengthened by considerations of Scottish history and politics. In
the eighteenth century the Whig interpretation of English history was paralleled
15 See Forbes 1985: 233–307. It is symptomatic of the synecdochical English/British

relationship, in which “England” and “Britain” can be substituted for each other almost
at will or whim, that Hume began his history as the History of Great Britain, containing
the reigns of James I and Charles I (1754), but quickly realized that what he was really
writing about was the history of England, as appeared in the subsequent volumes and as the
complete, much-revised, work is usually known (Forbes 1985: 260–1, 324–6; Kidd 1993:
210). But this was “English” history written with Scottish methods, and with Scottish as
much as English aims in mind. “Hume … was self-conscious about his success in exposing
the errors of English Whig culture, believing he had shown English history to be authentic
only on Scottish sociological criteria which bore little relation to those of vulgar English
patriotism” (Kidd 1993: 212–13). Another important Scottish Whig history of England,
exhibiting the progressivist philosophy even more strongly, was John Millar’s An Historical
View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons (1787).
16 It was fitting that it should be another Scotsman, Edward Caird, Master of Balliol
College, Oxford, who in a lay sermon given in 1898 should give one of the most eloquent
and passionate statements of the Whig account of English development. The English
people, said Caird, were “a chosen people, with a special part to play in the great work of
civilization and of Christianity.”
It was in this country … that a great movement towards political freedom was
first initiated; indeed it was carried to a considerable point of advance, when it
was hardly begun in any other country … There was from an early time at once
greater liberty for individuals and a more ready reaction of the opinions of the
people upon government. At the same time, with this freedom of the individual
and as the complement of it, there has gone a great facility of association …
It is perhaps not too much to say that this country first showed to the modern
world the immense power that lies in the associated action of free citizens … (in
Stapleton 1994: 41).
by and ultimately fused with a reformulated “scientific” or “sociological” Whig

interpretation of Scottish history (Kidd 1993; Davidson 2000: 79–85). Needing to
justify the union of 1707 with England, against those who denounced it as a betrayal
and a sell-out, Scottish Whig historians of the eighteenth-century presented it as
the natural and organic outcome of the course of Scottish history. Scottish history
before the Union, the history of an independent Scotland, was portrayed as a
tumultuous and disorderly affair of overmighty feudal lords, a weak monarchy
and even weaker parliament, an undeveloped middle class and a backward
economy. The Union resolved all these aspects of Scottish “backwardness” by
binding Scotland into England’s more advanced political institutions and more
prosperous commercial economy. Scotland’s destiny was to become British, or
at least “Anglo-British”, as already intimated by the Reformation and the 1688
Revolution. With the union of 1707 Scottish history ceased and British history
began (Kidd 1993: 205–15; 268–80).
Once more therefore we can see how a mythical account of another
country’s history could be appropriated to serve the purposes of English national
development. If the Welsh served the purposes of the English in the Middle Ages,
the Scots served them equally well in the later centuries. It was Scottish thinkers
who, since the sixteenth century, had most clearly developed the idea of “Britain”,
and proclaimed the future of both England and Scotland to be a united kingdom
(Williamson 1983). With the actual establishment of Britain in the eighteenth
century England could insinuate itself even more firmly into the wider British
archpelago, annexing in the process Scottish historical methods and the Scottish
philosophy of history. The line between England and Britain was erased. English
history was British history, and vice versa. It only remained for a Scotsman, James
Thomson, to write the patriotic ode, “Rule, Britannia!”, and for another Scotsman,
John Arbuthnot, to invent that quintessentially English Figure, John Bull.17 The
English happily embraced both, seeing no contradiction between celebrating the
one – Britain – while insisting that it was the other, John Bull, who supplied its
essential character.
England without Britain?
English myths, I have argued, are rarely free-standing expressions of the national
culture and the national history. They have an elaborate scaffolding of non-English
17 The Scottish contribution to Englishness does not stop there, of course. We might
mention in addition that the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, that monument
to the English language, was a Scot, James Murray, who started it in 1879. Moreover the
University of Edinburgh established a Chair of English Literature in the eighteenth century,
a hundred years before any English university followed suit. Sir Walter Scott gave the
English, in their definitive forms, the medieval heroes Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, together
with the myth of the Norman yoke.
structures, myths and memories that have come from elsewhere, especially from
the wider context of Britain. In that sense perhaps we should speak not so much
of “myths of the English” as of “England” and “the English” as themselves myth.
Perhaps too this is a feature of all national myths, to some extent. Since the idea
of the nation only took root firmly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it
is likely that there was much borrowing from a non-national past in the making
and elaborating of myths of the nation. The Russians, for instance, an imperial
people like the English, have freely borrowed from the Ukraine, the Crimea and
the Caucasus in the construction of their national myths – making, for instance,
the fifteenth-century Cossack (i.e. Ukrainian) hero Taras Bulba part of Russian
nationalist mythology.18
What happens though when the external scaffolding falls away? What happens
when a nation finds itself bereft of those extraneous props of its national identity?
What are the myths, new and old, appropriate to that situation? The English in
recent times have suffered a double loss, or what could be a double loss. In the
1950s and 1960s they lost the greater part of their 400-year old overseas empire.
In the 1990s and the early part of the twenty-first century they are confronted with
the possible break-up of Britain and the loss of their 1,000-year old land empire.
What are the resources of myth and memory that they can draw upon to bolster a
sense of themselves as a separate nation, an English nation tout court?
It is possible that W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930)
is the best, perhaps the only guide, we have to English national memory. This
uproarious, perennially popular, “Memorable History of England, comprising all
the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings, and 2
Genuine Dates”, is a compendium of many of the best-known, half-known, half-
remembered and mis-remembered facts and legends of English history. It starts
with Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC (“a Good Thing, since the Britons were
only natives at that time”), and ends with the Peace Settlement following the First
World War, which is seen as marking the emergence of America on the world stage
and the decline of English power. This is therefore a “Bad Thing: America was thus
clearly top nation, and History came to a .” (Sellers and Yeatman [1930] 1960: 123).
In between are all the well-known, or partially known, episodes of English history,
including King Alfred (“not to be confused with King Arthur, equally memorable
but probably non-existent”) and the burning of the cakes, William the Conqueror’s
conquest of England in 1066 (“The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from
this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become
top nation”), and Magna Carta (“A Good Thing for everyone, except the Common
18 For the disputes between Russians and Ukrainians – and Belarusians – on the
origins and ownership of various badges of national identity, see the essays by Andrew
Wilson and Geoffrey Hosking in Hosking and Schöpflin (1999: 182–210). We might think
too of the Romans who, having conquered the Greeks, naturalized many of their myths,
crucially including the Homeric myth of the Trojan war, expanded by Virgil to include the
flight of the Trojans and their founding of Rome.
People”). There is also Robin Hood (“very good at socialism”), Henry VIII (and
his “VIII wives”), the Reformation and the “Disillusion of the Monasteries”, the
Gunpowder Plot (“the best plot in History and … utterly and even maddeningly
memorable”), Cavaliers (“Wrong but Wromantic”) and Roundheads (“Right and
Repulsive”), “Williamanmary” (“The Dutch Orange and … on the whole a good
King”), Walpole (“memorable for inventing the new policy of letting dogs go to
sleep”), the American War of Independence (“a Good Thing in the end, as it was
the cause of the British Empire, but it prevented America from having any more
History”), “the Industrial Revelation” (“the discovery … that women and children
could work for twenty-five hours a day in factories without many of then dying
or becoming excessively deformed”), votes for women (“Manhold Suffrage”),
the Crimean War and “the Charge of the Fire Brigade by Lord Tennyson” at the
“Battle of Balaclava”, and “the Great War to End War” (“the cause of nowadays
and the end of History”).
This is satire on textbook history and schoolboy howlers raised to a new level,
the more effective, as with all satire, the more one knows about the subject. The
humorousness of the treatment, far from being an obstacle to the serious purpose,
only adds to it. This ebullient and at times mordant exercise in de-mystification
recognizes that it is the nature of myths to stir half-remembered memories and
emotions, scraps of history that evoke the particular qualities and character
of a people. In drawing our attention to the mythical character of many of the
most popular episodes of English history, 1066 and All That offers an incisive
commentary on the meta-myth of the Whig interpretation of English history.
Moreover, 1066 and All That is distinctive in having an entirely English
perspective on the world. Scots, Welsh and Irish have walk-on parts conceived
in terms of English stereotypes (barbarous Scots, disorderly Irish, garrulous
Welsh). Foreigners beyond the shore are all fair game for ridicule, the French
especially. The English defeat all comers and become Top Nation, although it is
delicately conceded that Edward the Confessor was the last English king, “since
he was succeeded by Waves of Norman Kings (French), Tudors (Welsh), Stuarts
(Scottish), and Hanoverians (German), not to mention the memorable Dutch King
– Willamanmary” (Sellers and Yeatman 1960: 23).
However, History came to a . in the 1930s, according to 1066 and All That.
What do we have for the later twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries? What
for the English are “the myths we live by” (Samuel and Thompson 1990), in these
times? A volume edited by Roy Porter, entitled Myths of the English (1993), gives
us studies of the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the commemoration of the Fifth
of November (no-one remembers the year, any more than most people remember
the year of “9/11”, fast achieving mythical status), the English bobby, the memory
of the Great War, Wellington the gentlemanly hero contrasted with Napoleon the
Corsican bandit-adventurer, the tramp romanticized as a free spirit. It is hard to
see any of these as particularly relevant to today’s England, beleaguered – as many
English see it – by a host of threats to its national identity: uppity Scots and Welsh,
the European Union, mass immigration, the forces of globalization. For most of
the English, especially the young, the old myths seem dated, of interest only to
historians and antiquarians. What, if any, are the newer myths that would give the
English a purchase on the new challenges?
The possible break-up of Britain, together with the move towards
Europeanization and globalization, have given rise to a movement of English
nationalism that, though generally muted (except on sporting occasions), has
stimulated the search, once more, for a usable past. But when one looks at a
representative sampling of the offerings they do not inspire much confidence.
Thus Jeremy Paxman, in his highly popular The English, argues that “the norms
of the 1940s are dead and buried and they have not been replaced by new ones.”
But when he seeks to find these new ones, he finds himself driven back to a very
distant past indeed, a past before the creation of Britain. The English, he says,
are “simultaneously rediscovering the past that was buried when ‘Britain’ was
created, and inventing a new future. The red-white-and-blue is no longer relevant
and they are returning to the green of England” (Paxman 1999: 265). This conjures
up images of a pastoral England, a bucolic world of peasants (or Pheasants in
the Sellar and Yeatman version), Robin Hood, and the green of fields and forest
– hardly, it seems, the stuff of the “nationalism of the future” that, “in an age of
decaying nation states”, Paxman looks forward to (Paxman 1999: 266; see also
Lunn 1996: 98).
No more reassuring is the return to the Anglo-Saxon world of sturdy freemen
and individual liberties advocated by a group of English patriots (Linsell 2000).
“If”, writes one, “we seek for our Englishness and trace back our nationality
through the leaves and branches of time, through the manifold patterns in our
English landscape, our English countryside, our English earth, we follow our
Englishness to its roots, to its Anglo-Saxonness …” (Littlejohns 2000: 106).
Tacitus’s Germania, with its portrait of the rough but independent and freedom-
loving Germanic tribes, must now – rather than Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of
Britain – be the guide to the national character and the national destiny.
Roger Scruton similarly betrays nostalgia, but in a clear-sighted way. He
knows the past cannot be restored, even as he celebrates it. In his England: An
Elegy (2001) he blames, not global capitalism or the European Union, but the
English themselves for turning their backs on their most important institutions and
practices.
Venerable customs and wise institutions are under threat or already abolished:
the grammar schools, the old House of Lords, the Prayer Book and the English
Bible, English weights and measures, English currency, local regiments, the
Royal Tournament – every practice in which the spirit of England can still be
discerned seems fated now to arouse contempt, not in the world at large, but in
the English. (Scruton 2001: 247)
Scruton notes that neither the Welsh, nor the Scots, nor the Irish are as bereft of
a sense of their national traditions and national history as the English. “Unlike
the Celts, the English students come to university with no knowledge of their
national heroes, and only the vaguest awareness of what happened before their
time. Nelson, to the majority of them, is Nelson Mandela, and Wellington no
more than a boot” (2001: 248). Against this wilful ignorance and indifference to
their traditions on the part of the English Scruton can only counsel stoicism. The
English pass has been sold; all one can do is to try and live – like Scruton himself
– quietly in some corner of the English countryside that is, one hopes, forever
England (though Scruton, as others, also indicates the “true England” may now
be overseas).
Lest it should be thought that only conservatives and the Right are preoccupied
with re-inventing English identity by finding suitable resources in the past,
we should note that the Left too has recently taken on the mantle of English
nationalism, and are concerned to identify the features of English national life
and English history that can be used to formulate an acceptable identity (see, e.g.
Chen and Wright 2000, Perryman 2008). There is a decisive rejection of nostalgic
pastoralism, and of a selective attention to attributes associated especially with the
upper classes (e.g. the ideal of the country gentleman). Instead these thinkers seek
to uncover a tradition of toleration and of urban cosmopolitanism in England’s
past, one indeed not unrelated to England’s imperial heritage but shorn now of
the racism and exclusiveness that accompanied empire (see, e.g. Hickman 2000).
This is a hopeful turn, and would certainly seem more suited to the multicultural
society that is England’s likely future. The problem is the difficulty that its
proponents have in finding any commanding episodes or myths by which to shore
up such a vision. The history is there, no doubt, but it has not been shaped into
the kind of myths that have the rallying and mobilizing force of past myths – the
myths of Agincourt, the Spanish Armada, Dunkirk, the Blitz; of great generals
and public figures such as Nelson and Wellington, Gladstone and Churchill; of
seafaring heroes and explorers such as Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins; of working
class heroes, such as John Ball, Wat Tyler, the Diggers, the Chartists. For better
or worse these myths relate to a world that has largely gone; they have ceased to
perform their function today. Nor are the myths of empire – which might have
supplied relevant material to a more outward looking vision – much more helpful.
What can urban cosmopolitanism derive from the Black Hole of Calcutta, Clive
of Plassey, the death of General Wolfe, the Indian Mutiny, Gordon of Khartoum,
the relief of Mafeking?
Here England’s imperial past returns to haunt the search for a new identity.
What was suitable for a large empire might not be so suitable for a small nation.
The clothes are too big; they fit uncomfortably and awkwardly on the more modest
body. The imperial experience gave England a sense of itself as something more
than a mere nation (Kumar 2006). It developed a “missionary” outlook, geared to
purposes and causes – “Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization”, to use David
Livingstone’s summation of a longer and more complex story – that took it into
the wider world beyond its borders. Its myths were fitted to this history. With the
change in England’s condition, with its reduction to the status of a small nation
off the European mainland, these myths cease to have much meaning. But it has
proved difficult to find or invent new ones.
One difficulty for the English is the very assumption, in the Whig tradition, of
a long, orderly, evolution that privileges continuity and distrusts abrupt change.
This has meant a playing down of real episodes of radical change, as occurred in
the seventeenth-century revolutions, and in the democratic agitation of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (as vividly chronicled in E.P. Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which truly attempted to give
these movements mythic status). Episodes that may have led to an alternative,
more inclusive – and more radical – formulation of identity never really established
themselves in the national culture. Compare the Americans and the French with
their eighteenth century revolutions, which have supplied the foundations of their
national republican identity. Nations that have had such foundational moments,
that have made or remade themselves anew, have a repertoire of myths and images
deriving from those moments that are constantly renewed on an almost daily basis
(thus confirming Renan’s view that “a nation is a daily plebiscite”). This can lead
to awkward situations, as the Americans found with their Civil War and the French
faced with their succession of nineteenth century revolutions (not to mention their
difficulty in dealing with recent immigration). But it does mean that they have the
main elements of a national tradition that can be re-tooled to adapt to the changing
political and social environment.
Bur perhaps the English case is not so peculiar after all. All nations are
faced today with forces and currents that are pressing against their historically-
determined forms of national identity. The myths that they live by are increasingly
seeming inadequate to the present needs. Myths, based on an imagined past, are as
necessary now as utopias, based on an imagined future. Both seem in short supply,
perhaps for the same reasons. They must, it seems, now take planetary form, as
it become increasingly clear that the fate of all nations are bound to each other.
Some of the elements of what is called “global civil society” might well provide
the building blocks – human rights, environmental responsibility, economic
sustainability – of the new myths. But the task has barely begun.
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Chapter 10
William Morris and Englishness 1
“The land is a little land … it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.”
William Morris 1914–15a: 17.
Morris the Internationalist
Morris was a Marxist and an internationalist. He was a passionate admirer of

the Gothic, an international style found throughout northern Europe, and whose
monuments Morris sought out on memorable visits to northern France during his
student days. His opposition to the imperialist policies of Disraeli’s government
during the Balkan crisis of 1876–8 precipitated him into political life; he was
equally unmoved, except in a negative way, by the outburst of imperialist hysteria
that greeted the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. In a period which
saw nationalism and jingoism reach new heights of frenzied popularity, Morris
remained the least chauvinist of men. He reviled “that thrice-accursed spirit of
nationality which so hampers us … in all attempts towards the realization of a true
society”; and he spoke of the “feeling of national hatred and prejudice for which
I shall always feel the most profound contempt” (Morris 1914–15b: 388; Kelvin
1987: II, 280).
These points are all well made by Peter Faulkner in his 1991 Kelmscott Lecture,
“William Morris and the Idea of England” (1992). Faulkner is fully aware of
Morris’s love of the English countryside, and his profound knowledge of English
history. He cites the numerous references in Morris’s writings to things English
– English art and architecture, English cities, the social and political history of
England (not, despite Morris’s Welsh ancestry, British history), English historical
writing, the English language. These are not, as he makes clear, simply the result
of the obvious fact that Morris was an Englishman (as he surely was) writing and
speaking in England for an English audience. They had a special significance for
him. Faulkner goes so far as to say at one point that “Morris’s ‘dream’ … of a
better future depends on his vision of the English past, and is one with his sense of
the beauty of the English landscape” (1992: 12).
And yet the whole burden of Faulkner’s lecture is to play down Morris’s
Englishness and to stress instead his cosmopolitanism and internationalism.
Speaking of Morris’s evocation of medieval Peterborough, for instance, he
comments that “it is very clear that Morris’s enthusiasm for the English medieval
1 Acknowledgement: This chapter was originally given as a paper at the Conference,

“Pilgrims of Hope: William Morris after 100 Years”, at the Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa,
Naples, 13–14 December 1996.
past was not that of a nationalist but of a man for whom the zeal of the patriot
was dangerous and atavistic.” A discussion of Morris’s “Northern enthusiasms”,
his liking for Nordic literature and early Teutonic institutions, is accompanied
by the reflection that “the modern Morrisian can only note with relief that the
author of Sigurd the Volsung thought as an internationalist.” News from Nowhere
supplies some more material for reflections of this sort. Ellen’s well-known lyrical
apostrophizing of nature and the countryside when she and Guest reach the old
house on the upper Thames – evidently Morris’s own country house, Kelmscott
Manor – prompts the comment that “although the landscape is English, the feeling
is simply human.” The encounter with the bent old man at the end of the book,
which joltingly brings home to Guest that he has been returned to his own miserable
times, similarly leads Faulkner to ecumenical thoughts. Morris, he says, did not
view such a wretched specimen of humanity as “the representative Englishman.”
He is merely an example of the depths to which the working class as such has
sunk since happier past times. The future will similarly be shorn of nationalist
particularities. The Englishman – and Englishwoman – of the future, Faulkner
supposes Morris to hold, “would be a truly human person, living in harmony with
the earth, in an England seen simply as a place rather than a nation-state.” This
leads Faulkner to conclude, by way of comment on some of Morris’s last writings,
that “the social revolution to which Morris looked forward would be international;
its beneficiary, the English only in so far as they are part of humanity” (1992: 18,
19, 20, 22, 24).
There is a certain paradox, as Faulkner is well aware, in this stress on Morris’s
internationalist credentials. It was one thing to stand out against rampant jingoism
and imperialism. So much was achieved by many a Gladstonian liberal. It was more
remarkable that Morris should have been immune, as Faulkner in effect claims, to
the current of “Englishness” that was running so powerfully in the national culture
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This was an affair not – or not largely – of
politicians and publicists, but of historians, folklorists, linguists, literary scholars,
novelists and poets: in short, the selfsame group of intellectuals that in other parts of
Europe had been the animating spirits of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth
century. The English had, perversely, resisted this trend for much of this time, as
indeed they had resisted the cultivation of a distinctly national identity for most of
their history. Now, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they entered
the game in zestful earnest. The English language was cleaned up, and given its
“received”, standardized form; English history was given its canonical “Whig”
interpretation, as a story of increasing progress, material and spiritual; English
literature too was canonized, by the selection of a particular group of writers seen as
embodying the genius of the race at its best or most typical. Even English landscape
and the English countryside were rescued from their generic pastoralism and put
to the service of an explicitly nationalist idea (Colls and Dodd 1986; Collini 1993:
311–73; Gervais 1993: 1–27; see also Kumar 2003: 175–223).
Was Morris so removed from this movement? Was he one of the band of
defiantly anti-nationalist socialist internationalists who treated all expressions of
nationalism as reactionary, mere grist to the bourgeois mill? It is difficult to believe

this could have been so in one whose formative intellectual influences were, as
Edward Thompson in particular shows, so quintessentially English. A writer who so
revered Chaucer, Spenser, Keats, Dickens, Carlyle and Ruskin was hardly likely to
be ashamed of his English inheritance, or seek to expunge its traces in a new-found
enthusiasm for continental Marxism (Thompson 1977: esp. 763–816).
One is not of course speaking of a self-conscious nationalism, or a deliberate
engagement with the definitions and promotions of Englishness taking place at
the time. Morris was too independent a spirit, and too suspicious of nationalism,
to have joined in any such enterprise. No man could have been less infected by
the virus of narrow-minded chauvinism. But Morris was also an intellectual and a
man of his times. With his literary and artistic bent, and his delight in the English
countryside, it is inconceivable that he should not have been affected by the
widespread involvement with questions of national culture, nor that he should not
have played his own part, albeit unconsciously, in the work of defining the national
identity. Morris was a Marxist and an internationalist, truly; but he was also a
thinker and artist whose work bears the unmistakable stamp of English culture.
Romanticism, Socialism and “Organic Englishness”
When Edward Thompson came to write a new preface to his magnificent study,
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, he was inclined to think that he had
overstressed Morris’s Marxism at the expense of his Romantic roots. So concerned
had he been, against the then prevailing impression of Morris as mainly an artist,
to stress his politics that he deliberately laid out Morris’s revolutionary, Marxist,
credentials in as emphatic a way as possible. Morris was made to appear to have
learned his politics in the school of Marxism as much as any continental socialist.
Later Paul Meier pushed this line in an extreme direction in making Morris appear
an orthodox Marxist, a follower of the Engels’ camp and a more or less card-
carrying member of the Second International (Meier 1978).
Partly in reaction to Meier, and inspired also by Miguel Abensour’s subtle
recovery of Morris’s utopianism, Thompson now felt that he had to put the stress
the other way. Morris’s Romanticism had to be seen not simply as an early stage
on his way to Marxism but as an informing and determining influence throughout,
qualifying precisely the Marxism that he later encountered in the 1880s. It was
this Romanticism that was at the heart of his utopianism; and far from being a
contradiction to his Marxism, it enhanced it, making it attend to the elements
of hope and desire without which Marxism remains a mechanical materialism.
Morris, said Thompson, “was a Communist Utopian, with the full force of the
transformed Romantic tradition behind him” (1977: 792).
This understanding has a two-fold implication for Morris and the English
tradition. Firstly it draws attention to the importance for Morris of the English
utopian tradition, from More through Owen and Samuel Butler to such works as
W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887). This includes of course English dystopian
writing, as is found in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Richard Jefferies’ After
London (1885) – two works much admired by Morris. Within that utopian tradition,
as Thompson indicates, Morris could have found a good deal of his communism
as well. The Kelmscott Press edition of More’s Utopia is sufficient testimony to
the inspiration of the English utopia both as a form of writing and as embodying a
particular political vision.
Morris’s politics drew additionally on a native English strain of radicalism,
stretching from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, passing through the Levellers and
Diggers of the seventeenth-century English Civil War, and going on to Tom
Paine, William Godwin, William Cobbett, John Stuart Mill and the radical wing
of Gladstonian liberalism that was eventually to take Morris into active politics.
Cobbett seems to have been a clear influence on the language of Morris’s politics,
with “its forthright polemical style”; and as for Mill we have Morris’s own
testimony that it was to Mill’s posthumously published lectures on socialism that
he owed “the finishing touch to my conversion to socialism” (Thompson 1977:
269; Morris 1973a: 242).
The English tradition of political radicalism in turn suggests a particular
reading of English history as a formative element of Morris’s thought. This is
clear enough from the reference to the Peasants’ Revolt, and Morris’s rendering of
it in A Dream of John Ball. There is a whole theory of English social and political
development behind this, to which we shall come back.
But to speak first of Morris’s Romanticism. Here we are talking not simply
about a poetic sensibility, Morris’s well-known love of Keats and Shelley, and the
elevation of feeling and the imagination that went with that. We are talking also of
a social and political sensibility that was shaped by the Romantic Movement. This
put art and culture – the culture of daily life and everyday things as much as “high”
art and culture – at the centre of social transformation. Not that this necessarily
took revolutionary form, at least in the sense of political revolution. It could be
expressed in the “High Toryism” of Carlyle and Ruskin, as well as in what we
might call the “popular Toryism” of Charles Dickens. Robert Colls has referred
to what he calls the tradition of “organic ‘Englishness’” in the works of Ruskin,
Kingsley, Carlyle and Rossetti, and which had an influence on many liberal and
radical thinkers and statesmen at the end of the nineteenth century (Colls 1986:
51; see also Williams 1963). This stood in stark opposition to the rationalism of
the Enlightenment and to the individualism of English Utilitarianism. Rejecting
parliamentarism and purely political reform, it emphasized the organic nature of
society and pointed to the need to change the expressive and educational structures
of society as much as its political forms. For many English socialists at the end of
the nineteenth century it was this tradition, joined to native English nonconformity,
that was the stimulus to their thought and action (Pierson 1973; Yeo 1986).
It is hardly necessary to stress, given this recital of names all of which are known
to have meant so much to Morris, how plausible it is to see Morris’s evolving
socialism as deriving from this native tradition of “organic ‘Englishness’”. None
of this takes away the importance to him of Marx and other socialist thinkers,
such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, not to mention the unconventional socialism
of the American Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty (1879) had such an
impact on all English socialists of Morris’s generation. These all helped Morris to
systematize his thinking, to give it stronger theoretical form. But we have Morris’s
own clear testimony as to what drove him to the ideal of socialism, before he
threw himself into the practical struggle for its realization. It was Ruskin, he says,
“before my days of practical Socialism”, who was “my master towards the ideal
… It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent …” (1973a:
243–4).
History and the Dream of England
Romanticism was also a theory of history. As Georg Lukacs argues in The

Historical Novel, it was through Sir Walter Scott’s novels of medieval times that
a historical consciousness was established in the European Romantic imagination.
History was used as a form of contrast with the present, as a form of criticism,
and as a way of establishing connections with the present and a possibly different
future. Certainly this was what “romance” meant to Morris: “the capacity for a
true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present” (Morris
1936: 148).
This is a general position; how does it relate to Morris’s Englishness? I want
to argue that in his reflection on the condition of England in his own time, Morris
deployed a view of English history that was not – as, say, with Marx – simply
an expression of a generalized view of the development of capitalism or modern
industrial society, but depended on the particularity of English development.
England’s path had been in some degree exceptional; this meant that its future too
might be different.
Bruce Glasier records the following remarks of Morris on a visit to Glasgow
in 1888:
The truth is … that there has always been a making of Socialists, and a making
of Society towards Socialism, going on since human history began. I have
recently been looking a good deal into the literature of the Middle Ages and
earlier periods of European history, and have been struck with the definiteness
of Socialist feeling, and even Socialist customs, among the people and monkish
sects of those days. I am writing some chapters for Commonweal on the Revolt
of Ghent, and on John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt in England in Richard II’s
day, in which I hope to make this better understood in the movement. (Glasier
1921: 68–9)
It is indeed in medieval England that Morris finds the origins of socialist hope.
A Dream of John Ball was published in Commonweal during 1886–7. In it Morris
depicted the rising of the English peasants under Wat Tyler and John Ball in 1381.
The message of this is well known: that the peasants will be defeated, and though
serfdom will be abolished it will be followed by an expansive “conquest of the
earth” which, far from bringing the desired (and possible) “heaven down to the
earth”, will rather “bring hell up on to the earth.” Eventually, however, in “the
change beyond the change”, the dream of John Ball will be realized.
The account of capitalist development is indeed generalized; and Morris follows
the Marxist schema in arguing for the necessity of these centuries of toil and
tribulation, for only thus will men see the way clearly and without wishful thinking:
Yet forsooth, it may well be that this bright day of summer which is now dawning
upon us is no image of the beginning of the day that shall be; but rather shall that
day-dawn be cold and grey and surly; and yet by its light shall men see things
as they verily are, and no longer enchanted by the gleam of the moon and the
glamour of the dream-tide. By such grey light shall wise men and valiant souls
see the remedy, and deal with it, a real thing that may be touched and handled,
and no glory of the heavens to be worshipped from afar off. And what shall it be
… save that men shall be determined to be free; yea, free as thou wouldst have
them … The time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine that this shall
one day be, shall be a thing that men talk about soberly, and as a thing soon to
come about … . (Morris 1973b: 110)
But two further things have to be said about A Dream of John Ball. The first is
that it deals with English social development, a pattern of change following upon
England’s early abolition of villeinage and pioneering move towards capitalism and
industrialism. Here Morris may well be said to have taken a page out of Marx’s book,
for Das Kapital similarly stresses the uniqueness of English development; indeed
Marx goes so far as to say that this pioneering role, taken with certain peculiarities of
English political development, might allow England to escape revolution altogether
in its construction of a socialist society. Morris does not follow Marx here; News
from Nowhere depicts a bloody, long-drawn-out revolution before the new society
is established. But Morris is as aware as Marx that England’s history has been very
different from its continental counterparts, and that the prospects for the future are
accordingly also different in England. For one thing, the Anglo-Saxon inheritance,
mythologized as it might have been by the “Whig” historians of Morris’s time, was
seen by Morris as having had a real and living presence in English social and political
life. It is no accident that he revives the Anglo-Saxon moot in News from Nowhere,
and absorbs the state into society, much as had been the case in the early Teutonic
community. Moreover again and again he finds reason to regret “interruptions” to
and “deviations” from the course of English history as laid down by the early English
settlers of the Middle Ages. Speaking of the Norman Conquest he says:
England had fallen into the hands of a Romanized landlord and from henceforth
was a part of the great European Feudal System: its development as pure branch
of the Teutonic family was stopped forever; because the countries to whom it
was now to be bound were, whatever their blood was, developed from Roman
provincials, and had not even a language of their own, but were compelled to
speak a dialect of Latin.
The consequences for literature were particularly to be regretted:
[L]iterature also became Frenchified and here to its great misfortune … the great
works of the English poets ever since Chaucer’s time have had to be written in
what is little more than a dialect of French and I cannot help looking on that as
a mishap. If we could only have preserved our language as the Germans have
theirs, I think we with our mingled blood would have made the world richer than
it is now … . (Morris 1969: 176–7; see also 1914–15c: 40–41)
This makes Morris almost sound an adherent of the popular tradition of “the
Norman Yoke”, a tradition that produced a strong upsurge of “Englishness” during
the English Civil War; and it certainly expresses a sentiment that chimes in well
with the recovery, and celebration, of England’s Teutonic past that was going on
apace in the Whig historiography of Morris’s times, in the writings of Stubbs,
Freeman, Froude and Seeley (Burrow 1981). Morris never succumbed to such
provincialism; no one was less of a “Little Englander”, at least in his understanding
of English history. But he certainly seems to have believed in a distinctly English
strain of history, a distinctly English tradition, that though strongly overlaid by
other cultures and practices could still be distinguished.
This is shown again in Morris’s discussion of the medieval guilds. Many of
his writings celebrate the conditions of life of the fourteenth century guildsman,
who “worked for no master save the public, made his wares from beginning to end
himself, and sold them himself to the man who was going to use them.” The guilds
are seen as “ a new and mighty force … for the help of labour, the first signs of
secular combination among free men, producers, and distributors.” Though they
later declined into narrow monopolistic organizations, their conditions of life and
work are frequently seen by Morris as an anticipation of the free conditions of the
future society. They provide a “foretaste … of what the pleasure of life might be
in a society of equals.” It is one of the chief reasons that, in founding the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, he fought to protect the “monuments of
art and history” that he saw as the legacy of the medieval artisan. He sought to
show his contemporaries that these monuments “are part of their present lives, and
part of themselves.” In preserving the relics of the old order they were keeping
alive the resources for “the instruction, the pleasure, the hope of the new” (Morris
1914–15d: 303–4; 1914–15e: 345–6; see also 1914–15f; and cf. Kinna 2006).
The guilds were of course a general phenomenon of medieval Europe – Morris
especially admired the cloth-weavers of Flanders. But he is at pains to point out
that their origins and development had nothing to do with the Roman legacy,
otherwise so strong, and that in the case of England in particular, their origins
are to be found in the practices of the Germanic tribes of pre-Conquest England.

It is in the mutual “benefit societies” of the Germanic peoples, and not in the
hierarchical ecclesiastical organization that was the principal beneficiary of Roman
administration, that the guilds find their origins and true spirit. Hence it was that
“England and Denmark were the foremost countries in the development of the
gilds, which took root latest and most feebly in the Latinized countries” (Morris
1914–15d: 303). Once more the distinctively English pattern of development
asserts itself, the source at once of some of its characteristic social forms and of
the hope that they bring of their more complete realization in the future society.
The pattern of English history, its narrative of struggles, failures, breathtaking
economic and social changes which bring hope as well as despair, is a central
feature of Morris’s political vision. It is, if one likes, an aspect of his romanticism,
as he understood that term; but the past that he seeks to make a part of the present
is no generalized past. It is a distinctly English past, and its message is couched
in distinctly English terms. The defeats and victories he mentions are those of
a particular people, at particular times in particular places. It is with reference
to these very concrete historical events that the narrator of A Dream of John
Ball muses on “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought
for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be
what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another
name …” (Morris 1973b: 53; see also Grennan 1945: 86–105).
There is something else about A Dream of John Ball that is obscured by a
discussion simply in terms of its general political message. In this “dream of
things past, present, and to come”, there is an intense particularity of description,
of buildings, places and people. The account opens with an imaginative evocation
of the Kentish countryside, in medieval garb, its land unhedged and cultivated
in strips, and yet with a “garden-like neatness and trimness of everything.” It
continues with detailed descriptions of a yeoman’s house, a tavern of the common
people, and a village church – the latter first espied some way off by virtue of
its “tall spire white and brand-new, but at once bold in outline and unaffectedly
graceful and also distinctly English in character.” All are, as one would expect
from English fourteenth-century buildings, simply but beautifully made and
finely ornamented – in the church where John Ball and the narrator converse, all
is “rich and fair colour, and delicate and dainty form.” In the midst of the general
discussions of the fate of the peasantry and the future of England, Morris interposes
striking portraits of individuals such as Will Green, with his “short black beard and
black eyes and berry-brown skin, with a huge bow in his hand bare of the case”;
or the tavern maid, “clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth, with a broad
silver girdle, daintily wrought, round her loins.” The effect is like that of one of
those brilliant medieval illuminations, with their clear and intense colours and
their delicate portrayals of scenes of everyday life. This, Morris wishes us to see,
was a real England, an England still capable of being fitfully glimpsed in the towns
and countryside of his day; its hopes and struggles form a living continuity with
the hopes and struggles of the common English people of his time.
An English Land
The manner of Morris’s portrayal of his vision in A Dream of John Ball should
not surprise any reader who comes to it from News from Nowhere, or indeed
from any other of Morris’s writings. Morris’s politics is always embedded in the
concrete details of life. The abstractions arise out of, they never substitute for, the
details. And where could the details come from but from Morris’s understanding
of English history, English towns and villages, English buildings and the English
countryside? Peter Faulkner quotes the opening words of Morris’s lecture, “Early
England” (1886):
I am no patriot as the word is generally used; and yet I am not ashamed to say
that as for the face of the land we live in I love it with something of the passion
of a lover. (Faulkner 1992: 5; see Morris 1969: 158)
This, as Morris owns, makes him partial. To love the land he lives in with the
passion of a lover is to love it “more than its beauty or interest in relation to other
parts of the earth warrants.” Morris is not blind to the prejudices of patriotism;
but he cannot, patriot that he is, do other than dwell on the history, culture and
countryside of his own English society. Much of his hope for the future comes
from his sense of the accomplishments of the past, of how in particular medieval
Englishmen and Englishwomen beautified their homes, their cities, their work.
So he dots his lectures on politics and on art and industry with sparkling sketches
of English medieval towns, vividly imagined. Medieval Oxford he catches in a
single sentence: “a vision of grey-roofed houses and a long winding street and the
sound of many bells came over me” (1973b: 44). And here is medieval London:
“a smallish town, beautiful from one end to the other; streets of low whitewashed
houses with a big Gothic church standing in the middle of it; a town surrounded
by walks, with a forest of church towers and spires, beside the cathedral and the
abbeys and priories; every one of the houses in it, nay every shed bearing in it a
certain amount of definite, distinct conscientious art” (Morris 1914–15a: 11; see
also 1914–15g: 61–2).
None of these often elaborate imaginative reconstructions of past scenes are
merely “background” or “setting”, of course, any more than the descriptions
of town and country in News from Nowhere; rather one might almost say that
they go to the heart of what Morris is advocating to his fellow countrymen
in his own time. In them, in these details of English people, English places,
English faces, Morris constructs his utopia – as much as he does in his almost
axiomatic understanding of this utopia as communist (see further Kumar 1993,
1994). Morris is, as Thompson says, a Communist Utopian; he is also an English
Utopian.
Nowhere is this Englishness more evident than in the significance of landscape
and the English countryside in Morris’s vision. Again this is so obvious as perhaps
not to call for detailed comment. But some words are needed.
Morris’s landscape is not the landscape of conventional English pastoral

poetry – the poetry say of the eighteenth century. It is not idealized – or rather,
it is idealized but not in the classical way. It is observed in a highly realist way.
There are real workers and real, not prettified, work, in Morris’s countryside. In
the utopias of course that work is pleasurable and creative as Morris held all work
should be, but it is still work concerned with production and the necessities of life.
Although work and play are to an extent fused, this is not “playful”, in the sense
of merely ornamental, work. Nor is it light work, as the chapter on “the obstinate
refusers” in News from Nowhere testifies. Northrop Frye’s description of News
from Nowhere as an Arcadia is to that extent misleading, conjuring up as it does an
image of happy shepherds and shepherdesses not so much intent on minding their
flock as carolling and canoodling.
Here too Morris was more a part of the late nineteenth-century movement
to define “Englishness” than is generally acknowledged. Alun Howkins (1986)
has shown how at that time the English landscape came to be redefined in the
literary and cultural imagination. No longer now the landscape of “the sublime”,
the wild landscape of the north and west as celebrated by Wordsworth and the
early Romantics, it came to centre on “the south country”, the gentle rolling
landscape of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somerset
and Dorset (and, for good measure, since such imaginings are careless of the
real geography, Shropshire). This was, as compared with the earlier landscape, a
cultivated landscape, a post-enclosure landscape of trim hedges and prosperous
and well-kept farms. Moreover it was specifically a landscape of regions, an
area marked by an enormous variety of physical and social life. Such was the
imaginative terrain cultivated by such “country” writers as W.H. Hudson (also
author of A Crystal Age), George Sturt and Edward Thomas (Thomas Hardy is
an ambivalent figure in this movement, though in the popular understanding of
his works he belongs firmly within it) (Gervais 1993: 1–66).
Again it is obvious how far Morris was from identifying himself with the
ideology that underlay this redefinition of the English countryside (an ideology that
reflected the importance of the Empire, with its metropolitan bias, as against the
regions of the old Industrial Revolution). But it is equally obvious how much this
“south country” is also very much “Morris country”, the country that he describes
so lovingly in his essays and lectures, the country that figures so centrally in News
from Nowhere, above all in its final part. This is to a good extent, moreover, even
in the descriptive essays, an imagined countryside, an imaginative vision – a point
made even more firmly by its being variously placed in the medieval past and in
the distant future. Such a historical displacement, as David Gervais says, puts
Morris closer to, not more distant from, other writers of his time, such as George
Eliot and Thomas Hardy. All saw the need to reinvent the English countryside if it
were to serve their critical or constructive purposes (Gervais 1993: 13).
The vividly blended mixture of past and present is notably present in one
of Morris’s most celebrated essays, “Under an Elm-Tree”. Morris lies under an
elm-tree in the Berkshire Downs. It was and is one of the best-known country
areas of the south, especially beloved of Londoners. From where he lies Morris
can see the gigantic figure of the White Horse carved into the grassy hillside
by the country people to commemorate Alfred’s victory over the Danes at
Ashdown in 871. The beauty of the countryside provokes Morris to meditate
on that battle of long ago, when the people of the day “did verily fight for the
peace and loveliness of this very country where I lie, and coming back from
their victory scored the image of the White Horse as a token of their valour,
and, who knows? perhaps as an example for their descendants to follow.” It is a
characteristic reflection, this last; but what gives it force, in this context at least,
are not so much Morris’s thoughts on that famous English victory as his glowing
description of the countryside which commemorates it and for which it was
fought. This is a countryside still inspiring and alive, still “worth fighting for, if
that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace.”
Midsummer in the country: here you may walk between the fields and hedges
that are as it were one huge nosegay for you, redolent of bean-flowers and clover
and sweet hay and elder-blossom. The cottage gardens are bright with flowers,
the cottages themselves mostly models of architecture in their own way. Above
them towers here and there the architecture proper of days bygone, when every
craftsman was an artist and brought definite intelligence to bear upon his work.
Man in the past, nature in the present, seem to be bent on pleasing you and
making all things delightful to your senses; even the burning dusty road has
a look of luxury as you lie on the strip of road side green, and listen to the
blackbirds singing … .
And all, or let us say most, things are brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in the
river down yonder, which – ignorant of the fate that Barking Reach is preparing
for its waters – is sapphire blue under this ruffling wind and cloudless sky, and
barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every
yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry,
and comfrey and bed-straw: from the bleak in the river, among the labyrinth of
grasses, to the starlings busy in the new-shorn fields, or about the grey ridges of
the hay, all is eager, and I think all is happy that is not anxious. (Morris 1973c:
215–16)
One further example can illustrate how the English countryside, as it still is,
mediates for Morris between the happiness of times past and the happiness of
times to come. A glimpse of an old workman’s cottage in the Cotswolds is a
reminder of the craftsman’s skill of the past, his pleasure in his work and the
artistry he spontaneously brought to it. But once more this reminder leads not just
to general historical reflections but also to the concrete evocation of a very real
place, the Cotswold countryside that Morris lived amidst and loved so much, and
that always seemed to inspire in him hopeful thoughts for the future. Morris sees
in his mind’s eye the old cottage and its setting:
Such an one, and of the smallest, is before my eyes as I speak to you, standing
by the roadside on one of the western slopes of the Cotswolds: the tops of the
great trees near it can see a long way off the mountains of the Welsh border,
and between a great county of hill, and waving woodland, and meadow and
plain where lies hidden many a famous battle-field of our stout forefathers:
there to the right a wavering patch of blue is the smoke of Worcester town, but
Evesham smoke, though near, is unseen, so small it is: then a long line of haze
just traceable shows where the Avon wends its way thence towards Severn, till
Bredon Hill hides the sight both of it and Tewkesbury smoke: just below on
either side the Broadway lie the grey houses of the village street ending with
a lovely house of the fourteenth century; above, the road winds serpentine up
the steep hillside, whose crest looking westward sees the glorious map I have
been telling of spread before it, but eastward strains to look on Oxfordshire,
and thence all waters run towards Thames: all about lie the sunny slopes,
lovely of outline, flowery and sweetly grassed, dotted with he best-grown and
most graceful of trees: ’tis a beautiful country-side indeed, not undignified, not
unromantic, but most familiar. (Morris 1914–15h: 126–7)
Morris’s “Englishness” cannot neatly be labelled. He is no “representative” type

– either of a specifically English (or British) socialism, or of a more nativist
“English” cultural movement, though both can be identified in the late nineteenth
century. The most striking thing about him remains his fiercely independent mind
and character. But he was, firstly, a man of his times, and could not be unaffected
by the political and cultural currents around him. More importantly, though, he
grasped his English inheritance not as something to be ashamed of or to apologize
for – though he was unsparing in his criticisms of much that England had done, and
become – but as something to build on. The utopia that is implicit in much of his
writing, and is explicit in News from Nowhere, is fed from many sources: Nordic
mythology, Germanic customs, medieval towns, Gothic architecture, European
socialism. But its building bricks, the things that give it life and force, are English.
… when we think what a small part of the world’s history, past, present, and to
come, is this land where we live in, and how much smaller still in the history of
the arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care and pains
they adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land of England, surely by
this too our hearts may be touched, and our hope quickened. (1914–15a: 18)
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Index
1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman) Britishness

211–12 death of 12–19
decline of among the English 15, 96–8
Abrams, Philip 172–3 empire and establishment of British
Acts of Union and Disunion (Colley) 15 identity 121
Agincourt, myth of 201, 201n6 and Englishness 101–6, 204–5,
Alagiah, George 103 204n10, 204n11
ameliorism 172, 175, 176 Englishness subordinated to 39–40
American sociology 178–9, 180n17 immigrants’ self-identity as 17, 17n11
Anderson, Benedict 136 institutional 16–17
Anderson, Perry 173–4, 180–1 instrumental 15–16
Annan, Noel 169, 170, 171 making of 39
anthropology 165 as mechanical 14–15
Archard, David 200 overlapping with Englishness 12,
Aristotle 201n5 204–5, 204n10, 204n11
Armitage, David 34 separation from Englishness 96–101
assimilation 56, 56n8 as subsuming other identities 4
Aughey, Arthur 93 Britons (Colley) 3–4, 14–15, 36
Brown, Gordon 10–11
Bagehot, Walter 114 Brzezinski, Z.L. 202n7
Baldwin, Stanley 125 Buckle, H.T. 166
banal imperialism 135 Burke, Edmund 75, 166
banal nationalism 134–5 Butterfield, Herbert 47, 48, 207–8
Barker, Ernest 150
Baucom, Ian 17–18 Caird, Edward 209n16
Bauman, Zygmunt 181n19 Campaign for an English Parliament
Bayly, Christopher 33 (CEP) 99n13
Bell, David 117 Cannadine, David 136–7
Bogdanor, Vernon 72 Catholic Church 77–8
Bragg, Billy 39n14 Celtic nations as benefiting from empire
Break-Up of Britain, The (Nairn) 153 121
Breuilly, John 118 Charlie Hebdo, killings at, impact of
Britain 57n10
break-up of 71–3, 154 Christianity in Europe 75
and the English nation 118 class
European Union as counter to 79 and empire 136–8
inner empire of 35, 118–19, 120–1 sociology, lack of in England 173–4
relation to Europe 76 classical economics 170
as Shakespearean theme 111–14 Cohen, Percy 199, 202
British Nationality Act 1948 150 Cole, Douglas 139
Colley, Linda 3–4, 14–15, 36, 121 European Union as alternative to

Collini, Stefan 124 152–3
Colls, Robert 3, 222 first half of 20th century 143–7
colonialism. see empire French citizens as France’s goal 56–7
concealed sociology 191 French/English rivalry 51–5
concrete universals, myths as 201 ignorance of 133
Connor, Walker 118 impact on home population 134, 142
Conrad, Joseph 41 imperial nations 117–22
core ethnies of states 35 India, duty to let go of 143
Cunningham, Valerie 145–6 informal, British empire as 40–1, 54
Cymbeline, King of Britain (Shakespeare) inner empire of England 35, 118–19,
111 120–1, 140–1
legacy of, French and English 55–9
Darwin, John 146 missionary consciousness of imperial
Das Kapital (Marx) 224 peoples 37–8
Davies, Rees 35 missionary nationalism 38, 120–2
De Grazia, Victoria 74, 76 modesty in 38, 40
decolonization, French and English 54–5 as mythical resource for national
see also empire identity 214–15
devolution and English national identity and nation-states 31–5
debates 4 national identity after 151–6
Dodd, Philip 3 pluralism of British empire 58–9
Dominion idea of empire 146–7 preserving and promoting of national
Dream of John Ball, A (Morris) 223–4, identity by 151–2
226 pride in 133
Dunkirk 200, 200n4 as progress for subjects 41
Durkheim, Emile 165, 171–2, 179 race relations following 55–9
in 1920s and 1930s after World War I
‘Early England’ (Morris) (lecture) 227 144–7
economics, classical 170 suppression of English national identity
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 91 141–2
emigrant communities, nationalism in symbiotic relationship with UK 153
139–40 and the working class 136–8, 136n8
empire during World War II 148–9
after World War II 147–8, 149–50 Engels, Friedrich 184n23
British Nationality Act 1948 150 England
Celtic nations as benefiting from 121 end of empire and national identity of
and class 136–8 154–6
as convergence force 151 exceptionalism of 80–4, 175–80
Dominion idea of 146–7 external focus of 205–6
end of, and national identity 152, as imperial state 36–8
154–6 inner empire 35, 118–19, 120–1,
England as imperial state 36–8 140–1
Englishness and 17–19 institutional tradition in 172–3
and establishment of British identity moralism in 171–2
121 myths of 202–10
and Europe, England’s relations with obstacles to sociological development
82 in 169–75
Index 235
reluctant nationalists 122–7 surveys on from 1990s 9

sociology, lack of in 165–8 void needing to be filled 98–9
sociology today 180–3 of William Morris 227–30
England: An Elegy (Scruton) 126, 213–14 Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-
English, The (Paxman) 213 1920 (Colls and Dodd) 3
English Constitution, The (Bagehot) 114 etherized, Englishness as 89–91
English Hours (James) 91–2 ethnic minorities, Englishness of 102–3
English National Association for the ethnies of states 35
Promotion of Social Science ethno-symbolic approach to nations 115
176–7 Europe
English nationalist historiography 117–18 Britain’s relation to 76
English parliament, lack of 99 distinctions drawn with England 81
English Traits (Emerson) 91 England as integral to until 15th
Englishman and His History, The century 80
(Butterfield) 207 England’s withdrawal from 80–1
Englishness exceptionalism of England 80–4
attention given to since 1990s 1, 3–4 historical development of 74–6
beginnings of 94–5 myths and interpretations of in England
and Britishness 101–6, 204–5, 204n10, 81–2
204n11 sociology in 178–80
causes identified with 39–41 world role and responsibilities of
defining, as difficult and unnecessary England 82
93 European Union
and empire 17–19 as alternative to British empire 152–3
as etherized 89–91 ambivalence towards by England 82
of ethnic minorities 102–3 as counter to Britain 79
and Euroscepticism 5–6 and English national identity 73
immigration, impact on thinking about Ireland as member 77–8, 152
10 membership of and national identity
lack of close study of 3 69–70
lack of resources on 35–6 and national sovereignty 84
literature on since 1990s 9–10 Northern Ireland, solution for with
in literature prior to 1990s 2–3 78n11
moment of Englishness 124–6 Scotland, ties with 76–7
nationalism 4–6 Wales, ties with 78–9
need for account of 93 Euroscepticism 5–6
as organic 14–15 Evans, Richard 8
outside in approach to 95–6 exceptionalism of England 80–4, 175–80
outsiders’ observations of 91–3
overlapping with Britishness 12 Faulkner, Peter 219, 220, 227
popular works on since 1990s 7–8 federal United Kingdom 100
as primary identity, chosen as 97–8 Ferguson, Niall 141
racial connotations of 102–3 Ferry, Jules 54n7, 56
re-invention of as needed 94 First World War, empire following 144–7
scholarly works on since 1990s 8–9 folk music, English 125
Scottish referendum 2014 1–2 foreign literature, Englishness in prior to
separation from Britishness 96–101 1990s 2–3
as subordinated to Britishness 39–40 France, sociology in 179
Frazer, J.G. 171 history

free trade 40–1 and the dream of England 223–6
French and English national identity and myths 199–202
conflicts and rivalry between countries and poetry 201n5
49–51 as sociology in England 168–9,
decolonization 54–5 186–90, 191
defeat, experience of 49 History of Civilisation (Buckle) 166
Germany, French rivalry with 50 History of Civilization in Europe (Guizot)
history of each country 47–51 75
internal events and crises 59–62 History of the Kings of Britain (Geoffrey of
legacy of imperialism 55–9 Monmouth) 205–7
pluralism of British empire 58–9 Hobbes, Thomas 168, 202n7
policies towards subject peoples 56–9 Hobhouse, L.T. 169–70
race relations following imperialism Hobsbawm, Eric 6, 93
55–9 Hobson, J.A. 33n5
struggle between as imperial nations Hopkins, A.G. 141n17
51–5 Howkins, Alun 228
Freud, Sigmund 47 Hume, David 122, 209, 209n15
Friedrich, C.J. 202n7 Huskisson, William 41
‘Future of England’ survey 2011, 2012 13
Idea of English Ethnicity, The (Young)
Gallagher, John 149 89–90, 91
Gellner, Ernest 23–4, 31, 32, 32n3, 181 Identities and Social Change in Britain
Geoffrey of Monmouth 205–7 since 1940 (Savage) 19–21
German sociology 179b14 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 136
Germany, French rivalry with 50 immigration
Giddens, Anthony 23, 181–2 Britishness, immigrants’ self-identity
Glasier, Bruce 223 as 17n11
globalization 6–7, 141, 141n17 Englishness, impact on thinking
Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 171 about 10
Goldman, Lawrence 176, 177, 178, race relations following imperialism
178n13 55–9
Goodhart, David 93, 99, 103 imperialism
Gorski, Philip 115 banal 135
Grant, Bernie 102 Celtic nations as benefiting from
Greenfield, Liah 50 empire 121
Guizot, François 75 and class 136–8
decolonization 54–5
Hastings, Adrian 112 England as imperial state 36–8
Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 41 and establishment of British identity
Heath, Anthony 96–7 121
Hechter, Michael 119 first half of 20th century 143–7
Henry V (Shakespeare) 201, 201n6 French citizens as France’s goal
Herder, Johann Gottfried 32, 32n3 56–7
Hickman, Mary 102 French/English rivalry 50–1, 51–5
Hirst, Derek 112 imperial nations 117–22
Historical Novel, The (Lukacs) 223 India 140
historical studies of Englishness 8 informal, British empire as 40–1, 54
Index 237
inner empire of England 35, 118–19, since 1990s 9–10

120–1, 140–1 as sociology in England 168–9,
legacy of, French and English 55–9 183–6, 191
missionary consciousness 37–8 Whig interpretation of 124–5
missionary nationalism 38, 120–2 Lukacs, Georg 223
modesty in 38, 40
and nationalism 31–5, 119–20, MacKenzie, John 144, 151
136–42 Major, John 204–5, 204n10
pluralism of British empire 58–9 Making of English National Identity, The
race relations following 55–9 (Kumar) 12
suppression of English national identity Making of the English Working Class, The
141–2 (Thompson) 137n11, 189
implicit/concealed sociology 191 Mann, Michael 24, 181
India Marx, Karl 184n23, 224
duty to let go of 143 Mazlish, Bruce 183
nationalism and imperialism in 140 McIntyre, Alasdair 24n23
individualism 170–1 Meier, Charles 144n21
Industrial Revolution 40 Meier, Paul 221
inner empire of England 35, 118–19, Mill, John Stuart 166
120–1, 140–1 Milward, Alan 70
institutional Britishness 16–17 missionary consciousness of imperial
institutional tradition in England 172–3 peoples 37–8
instrumental Britishness 15–16 missionary nationalism 38, 120–2
internal events and crises, impact on modesty in imperialism 38, 40
national identity 59–62 moment of Englishness 124–6
Ireland 72 Mommsen, W.J. 33, 33n5
empire and national identity of 152 moralism in England 171–2
as EU member 77–8, 152 Morgan, Kenneth 153–4
Morris, Jan 153
James, Henry 91–2 Morris, William
as an internationalist 219–21
Kenny, Michael 13–14 descriptions of English landscape 125,
Kingsnorth, Paul 14 227–30
Kliuchevsjky, Vassily 142 Dream of John Ball, A 223–4, 226
Kumar, Krishan 12 ‘Early England’ (lecture) 227
Englishness of 227–30
language, English 125 guilds from medieval times, interest
Leavis, F.R. 185 in 225–6
legacy of imperialism 55–9 history and the dream of England
Lepenies, Wolf 165, 183, 184 223–6
Levine, Donald 168 Marxism 221
Liddell Hart, B.H. 200n4 News from Nowhere 125, 220, 224–5,
literature 227, 228
and empire in 1920s and 1930s organic Englishness 222–3
145–6 political radicalism 222
outsiders’ observations of Englishness Romanticism 221–2
91–3 socialism 223
prior to 1990s 2–3 ‘Under an Elm-Tree’ (essay) 228–9
multiculturalism imperial 117–22

English genius for 102 medieval/early modern period 117
Englishness, impact on thinking about and nationalism 114–17, 116n7
10 national identity
music, English 125 after empire 151–6
myths attention given to 1990s 4
Agincourt 201, 201n6 and devolution 4
aim of 200–1 end of empire and 152
British/English confusion 204–5, England as imperial state 36–8
204n10, 204n11 English, and the break-up of Britain 73
as concrete universals 201 Euroscepticism 5–6
Dunkirk 200, 200n4 first half of 20th century 143–7
England and the English as 211 lack of resources on English 35–6,
English 202–10 57–8, 58n11
Europe, interpretations of in England and lack of sociology in England
81–2 168–9
and external focus of England 205–6 membership of the EU 69–70
and history 199–202 and multiculturalism 10
History of the Kings of Britain myths as resource for 211–15
(Geoffrey of Monmouth) 205–7 national events, significance of 11n6
meta-myths 203 politicians’ entry into debate 11
as mobilizing and energizing devices preserving and promoting, empire as
201 151–2
national 199–202 in 1920s and 1930s after World War I
Norman yoke 81, 225 145
past, present and future as linked by suppression of English due to empire
202 141–2
as resource for national identity as unconscious 153
211–15 see also French and English national
Whig interpretation of history 81, 124, identity
178, 187, 207–10 nationalism
banal 134–5
Nairn, T. 71n5, 116n7, 153 causes English identified with 39–41
nation, English defence of sovereignty 6n4
and British developments 118 as dominant ideology by early 20th
ethno-symbolic approach to nations century 138
115 in emigrant communities 139–40
history 111–14 English 99–101
nations and nationalism 114–17, English, appropriateness of 42
116n7 English as reluctant nationalists 122–7
as reluctant nationalists 122–7 for English thinkers 105–6
nation-states globalization’s impact on 6–7
core ethnies of 35 and imperialism 31–5, 119–20,
defining 116 136–42
and empires 31–5 India 140
England as imperial state 36–8 lack of resources on English 57–8,
ethno-symbolic approach 115 58n11
European rescue of 69–70 missionary 38, 120–2
Index 239
and nations 114–17, 116n7 Savage, Mike 19–21

presence of in English political life Scotland 72, 73
118 empire and national identity of 152
rise of English 12–19 ties with Europe 76–7
Scottish and Welsh 138–9 Scottish Enlightenment 166, 208–9
and socialism 137–8 Scottish nationalism 138–9
Thatcher’s espousal of 4–5 Scottish referendum 2014
as varied phenomena 115 and Englishness 1–2
Nations and Nationalism since 1780 impact on Englishness debate 14
(Hobsbawm) 93 Scruton, Roger 126, 213–14
Newman, Gerald 58n11 Second World War
News from Nowhere (Morris) 125, 220, empire after 147–8, 149–50
224–5, 227, 228 empire during 148–9
Norman yoke 81, 225 Seidman, Steven 178n13
Northern Ireland 73, 78n11 Sellar, W.C. 211–12
Seton-Watson, Hugh 118
O’Leary, B 71n4 Shakespeare, William 111, 201, 201n6
Ornamentalism (Cannadine) 136–7 Smith, Anthony 35, 115, 116n7
Orwell, George 136, 205 Smout, T.C. 84
outsiders’ observations of Englishness 91–3 Snow, C.P. 21
social science
Patriotism (Samuel) 3 contemporary 24–5
Paxman, Jeremy 213 history of in Britain 19–25
pluralism of British empire 58–9 see also sociology
Pocock, John 153, 154 Social Science Association 176–7
poetry and history 201n5 socialism and nationalism 137–8
political parties and national identity, entry sociological studies of Englishness 8–9
into debate about 11 sociology
Politics of English Nationhood, The ameliorism 172, 175, 176
(Kenny) 13–14 American 178–9, 180n17
Porter, Bernard 136 class in England 173–4
positivism 170–1, 176 classical economics 170
Powell, Enoch 18 contemporary 24–5
Protestantism 39 English, Englishness of 190–2
English National Association for
race relations following imperialism 55–9 the Promotion of Social Science
racial connotations of Englishness 102–3 176–7
reluctant nationalists, English as 122–7 English today 180–3
Renan, Ernest 48–9, 61, 199 in Europe 178–80
Richards, Jeffrey 133 exceptionalism, English 175–80
Ringen, Stein 99 France 179
Roman Empire in Europe 74 German 179, 179b14
Runciman, David 14 history as in England 186–90, 191
Runciman, W.G. 24, 181 history of in Britain 19–25
implicit/concealed 191
Sa’adah, Anne 48, 54n7 and individualism 170–1
Said, Edward 191 institutional tradition in England
Samuel, Raphael 3 172–3
lack of in England 165–8 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 71–2

literature as in England 168–9, 183–6, Trumpener, Kate 58n11
191 Tudor, H. 200n3
moralism in England 171–2 Turner, Bryan 24, 24n23
as multi-stranded 192
obstacles to development in England ‘Under an Elm-Tree’ (Morris) (essay)
169–75 228–9
and positivism 170–1, 176 United Kingdom
19th century Europe 165 federal 100
Soffer, Reba 174–5 symbiotic relationship with empire
Sorel, George 201, 202 153
sovereignty vulnerability of 104
and Europe 84
nationalism as defence of 6n4 Verein für Sozialpolitik 176–7
Spencer, Herbert 166–7, 170–1, 171n6,
187n28 Wales 73
states empire and national identity of
core ethnies of 35 152
defining 116 nationalism 138–9
and empires 31–5 ties with Europe 78–9
England as imperial state 36–8 Weber, Marianne 176
ethno-symbolic approach 115 Weber, Max 93, 179, 179n14
European rescue of 69–70 Wellings, Ben 6
imperial 117–22 Whig interpretation of history 81, 124,
medieval/early modern period 117 178, 187, 207–10
and nationalism 114–17, 116n7 Whig Interpretation of History, The
surveys on Englishness from 1990s 9 (Butterfield) 207
Whig interpretation of literature 124–5
Taine, Hippolyte 165 William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Thatcher, Margaret (Thompson) 221
espousal of nationalism 4–5 Williams, Raymond 185
Euroscepticism of 5, 5n1 Wittrock, Björn 74
sociology/social science, attitude working class and empire 136–8, 136n8
towards 22–3
Theory, Culture and Society (journal) 183 Yeatman, R.J. 211–12
Thompson, Edward 137n11, 189–90, Young, Michael 181n19
190n32, 221 Young, Robert 89–90, 91
Tilly, James 96–7 Younge, Gary 102
travel literature, Englishness in prior to
1990s 2 Zimmer, Oliver 138

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The Idea of Englishness

To the memory of Ray Pahl (1935–2011), Frank Parkin (1931–2011),

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 9781472461957 (hbk)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

1 Englishness and English National Identity 1

2 Empire and English Nationalism 31

3 English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts 47

4 Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow 69

5 Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness and the

6 When Was the English Nation? 111

7 Empire, Nation and National Identities 133

8 Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory 165

9 1066 and All That: Myths of the English 199

10 William Morris and Englishness 219

Chapter 2: “Empire and English Nationalism”. First published in Nations and

Chapter 3: “English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts”.

Chapter 4: “Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow”. First published

Chapter 5: “Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness, and the Future

Chapter 7: “Empire, Nation, and National Identities”. First published in Andrew

Chapter 8: “Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory”. First

The Discovery of England and Englishness

If the systematic study of Englishness was a relatively undeveloped field until as

and is impossible to discuss Englishness without discussing Britishness (see

1 Thatcher’s Euroscepticism was powerfully, and provocatively, expressed in her

Hobsbawm may have underestimated the resilience of the nation-state, but

Whatever the principal reason – devolution, Thatcherism, Europeanization,

(2003). Christopher Bryant, in The Nations of Britain (2006), produced an

“English ethnicity”. Simon Featherstone’s Englishness (2009) was a wide-ranging

5 “One of the paradoxes of modern Conservatism is that the party is perceived of as

“The Dog That Finally Barked”: The Rise of English Nationalism?

I conclude that there is a considerable body of evidence to support the conclusion

the construction of British identity as largely a state-directed, top-down affair

11 The Parekh Report on a Multicultural Britain stirred up controversy by suggesting

Sociology and English Social Thought

A note, finally, might be in order concerning the subject of Chapter 8, “Sociology

12 Bryan Turner interestingly suggests, within the context of a discussion of “British

We see here the crystallization of a managerial identity through the mobilization

Bogdanor, Vernon. 2001. Devolution in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford

Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of

Kenny, Michael. 2014. The Politics of English Nationhood. Oxford: Oxford

Skey, Michael. 2011. National Belonging and Everyday Life. Basingstoke:

Empire and Nation: Foes or Friends?

It is more than as a pious tribute to the great scholar whom we commemorate

In pitting nation against empire, nationalism against imperialism, Gellner

It is one thing however to see a connection between nationalism and imperialism,

its superiority to other nations, it may be fitting to speak of imperial or missionary

English Nationalism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?

12 It is of course problematic to speak of missionary nationalism in the case of those

The Rise of English Nationalism?

no English Herder or Fichte; no English Mazzini or Garibaldi; no Michelet or

Koebner, Richard. 1961. Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

It is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in

History and Identity

More so than that, was the worldwide dominance of Britain’s “informal

So the British retreat from empire can in no way be considered an unqualified

conform to the basic model of secular republican citizenship; religious symbols

10 The killing by two radical Muslims, on 7 January 2015, of a group of French

249–69).11 For another, the place of non-white or non-European immigrants in

11 This is of course a matter of relative emphasis, rather than the assertion of a

Threats to Nationhood: France and England

13 For an illuminating examination of this tradition of historiography and national

1 Englishness and English National Identity 1

2 Empire and English Nationalism 31

3 English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts 47

4 Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow 69

6 When Was the English Nation? 111

7 Empire, Nation and National Identities 133

8 Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory 165

9 1066 and All That: Myths of the English 199

10 William Morris and Englishness 219