The Making of English

National Identity

Krishan Kumar

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English or British? The question

of English national identity

I am a citizen of a country with no agreed colloquial name.

Bernard Crick (1991aa: 90)
As long as the various peoples lumped together under the heading English
accept this, let us use it. When they start to object we call them Irish or even
Scotch. It really does not matter. Everyone knows what we mean whether we
call our subject English history or British history. It is a fuss over names, not
over things.
A. J. P. Taylor (1975: 622)
It can be said of the English in Britain, as wags say of the Catholics in Heaven,
that they think they are the only ones here.
Conrad Russell (1993: 3)

A natural confusion
English, I mean British this familiar locution alerts us immediately to one of
the enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate English
from British? The reverse problem is nowhere as acute. Non-English members
of the United Kingdom rarely say British when they mean English, or
English when they mean British. On the contrary, they are usually only
too jarringly aware of what is peculiarly English, and are highly sensitive to
the lordly English habit of subsuming British under English. For them it is a
constant reminder of what they perceive to be rightly, of course, Englands
hegemony over the rest of the British Isles.
One has to say immediately though that the problem is not one solely of or for
the English. Scottish friends confess, with some embarrassment, that they too
sometimes say English when they mean British. Foreigners do it all the time,
even though Brits, Britishers, as well as the more conventional British, are
readily, if not gracefully, to hand. All this testies to the imperial reach of
the English, both at home and abroad. The confusions of others compound
1

The Making of English National Identity

the confusion in the minds of the English, and reinforce them in their bad
habits.
But in general it is probably right to say that the elision of English into
British is especially problematic for the English, particularly when it comes to
conceiving of their national identity. It tells of the difculty that most English
people have of distinguishing themselves, in a collective way, from the other
inhabitants of the British Isles. They are of course perfectly well aware that there
are Welsh, Scots and Irish, even that there are Manxmen and Jersey Islanders.
They make jokes about them, imitate their accents, and call upon them for
special effects, as when they lend colour to poverty by portraying it in a Glasgow
slum, or amuse themselves by intoning passages from Dylan Thomass Under
Milk Wood in a ferocious Welsh accent. But these are particular exceptions to the
general rule, which is to see all the major events and achievements of national
life as English. Other ethnic groups are brought on in minor or supporting roles.
Though when it is brought to their attention the English are properly uneasy
and even apologetic about this practice, they can also on occasion offer a robust
defence. Fowlers celebrated view, in his Modern English Usage, is likely to
strike a chord in the heart of every native Englishman (if not all Englishwomen).
It is natural, says Fowler, to speak of the British Commonwealth or the British
navy or British trade, and to boast that Britons never never shall be slaves.
But it must be remembered that no Englishman . . . calls himself a Briton without a
sneaking sense of the ludicrous, or hears himself referred to as a Britisher without
squirming. How should an Englishman utter the words Great Britain with the glow of
emotion that goes for him with England? His sovereign may be Her Britannic Majesty
to outsiders, but to him is Queen of England; he talks the English language; he has been
taught English history as one continuous tale from Alfred to his own day; he has heard
of the word of an Englishman and aspires to be an English gentleman; and he knows
that England expects every man to do his duty . . . In the word England, not in Britain
all these things are implicit. It is unreasonable to ask forty millions of people to refrain
from the use of the only names that are in tune with patriotic emotion, or to make them
stop and think whether they mean their country in a narrower or wider sense each time
they name it.
(Fowler 1983: 157)

This defence, from the heart as it were, certainly tells us something important
about Englishness, and its relation to Britishness.1 But it describes, rather than
explains. Why, given the objective situation of a multinational state, did Britain
and Britishness not gain the ascendancy? Why does patriotic emotion attach
itself so fervently to England and not to Britain? If Britain sounds as
it does colourless and boring, why is that so and why on the contrary is
England so glowingly sonorous (and not, let it be said, just to the English)?
And if neither Britain nor England seems to suit, what else? The mystery is

English or British?

deepened, not diminished, by the accurate observation that none of the available
names for the United Kingdom will do, for various reasons. We live, says Tom
Nairn, in a State
with a variety of titles having different functions and nuances the U.K. (or Yookay,
as Raymond Williams relabelled it), Great Britain (imperial robes), Britain (boring
lounge-suit), England (poetic but troublesome), the British Isles (too geographical),
This Country (all-purpose within the Family), or This Small Country of Ours
(defensively-Shakespearian).
(Nairn 1994: 93)

As a remedy Nairn proposes, with calculated malice, Ukania, a deliberate echo

of the Kakania of Robert Musils famous end-of-empire novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930). This was Musils notoriously satirical (and scatological)
coinage for the Habsburg Empire, a baggy, unwieldy domain that also suffered
from a plethora of names, and for much the same historical reasons (Austria,
Austria-Hungary, the Empire, etc.).2
We shall return to Austria, and to other imperial and post-imperial nations
such as Russia. They have much to tell us, by way of comparison, of the problem
of national identity faced by the imperial English. But rst we must try to do
the best we can with the vexed question of nomenclature. This is of course
more than simply about names. It reveals a history and a culture resonant with
ambiguities and conicts. It is a language of power and prejudice as much as it
is a reection of constitutional proprieties.

Britain and the British

In the Preface to his volume in The Oxford History of England, A. J. P. Taylor
wrote, in his characteristically combative tone:
When the Oxford History of England was launched a generation ago, England was still
an all-embracing word. It meant indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the
United Kingdom; and even the British Empire. Foreigners used it as the name of a Great
Power and indeed continue to do so. Bonar Law, a Scotch Canadian, was not ashamed to
describe himself as Prime Minister of England, as Disraeli, a Jew by birth, had done
before him . . . Now terms have become more rigorous. The use of England except
for a geographic area brings protests, especially from the Scotch. They seek to impose
Britain the name of a Roman province which perished in the fth century and which
included none of Scotland nor, indeed, all of England. I never use this incorrect term . . .
Great Britain is correct and has been since 1707. It is not, however, synonymous with
the United Kingdom, as the Scotch, forgetting the Irish (or, since 1922, the Northern
Irish), seem to think. Again the United Kingdom does not cover the Commonwealth,
the colonial empire, or India. Whatever word we use lands us in a tangle.
(Taylor 1965: v)

The Making of English National Identity

A tangle indeed. Taylor himself, writing the history of England since the First
World War, was forced again and again to speak of the British and even to
use the despised term Britain (sometimes slipped past me by sub-editors).
Nor could English affairs for long be kept separate from those, say, of Ireland;
while in the account of the Second World War Australians, Canadians, Indians,
New Zealanders, South Africans and a host of other members of the British
Empire and Dominions crowd the narrative, as when we are told that over half
the Canadians involved were killed or taken prisoners in the bungled raid on
Dieppe in 1942 (Taylor 1965: 557). How indeed write of the Battle of Britain
without giving up on England pure and simple? How narrate a central strand
of national political life without referring to the British Labour Party, whose
strongholds were in Wales and Scotland; or discuss a central component of
the national culture without reference to the British Broadcasting Corporation,
headed in its formative years by a Scot? (The abbreviation BBC conveniently
helps the English, and many foreigners, to ignore this). As soon as one begins
to think seriously about the subject the self-imposed restriction of dealing only
with English history dissolves in hopeless contradiction.
Taylors insouciance is unlikely to be copied in these politically correct
days, though actual practice, especially among popular writers, is far less
affected. More representative of current scholarly thinking on the subject is
a work such as Hugh Kearneys The British Isles: A History of Four Nations
(1995) or, somewhat differently, Norman Daviess The Isles: A History (1999).
A similar shift in consciousness is reected in the decision to replace the old
Pelican History of England by the Penguin History of Britain. Introducing the
series, its general editor David Cannadine remarked that it will look more
critically and more closely at the whole concept of nationhood and national
identity, and that it will be a three-dimensional history of Great Britain, not a
Watfordesque history of Little England (1995a: 2; see also 1993; 1995b: 16).3
At a time when a former British prime minister, John Major, could still startle
non-English inhabitants of the United Kingdom by declaring that this British
nation has a monarchy founded by the Kings of Wessex over eleven hundred
years ago (The Times, 24 May 1994), such a revision was clearly overdue.4
The four nations approach to Britain, and to England, has it own problems,
as we shall see. But it is a necessary start to correcting the Anglocentric accounts
that have been the staple of standard histories and school textbooks and not
just in England for over a century. It forces us to consider just what are the
meanings of the terms English, British and so on which we use so casually
and promiscuously. No one can ask of native English speakers that they tidy up
their language, that they speak with scholarly precision. That would be absurd
Fowler is right about that. The everyday usages reect real experiences and
real perceptions. They are the result of a real history. But it certainly behoves

English or British?

students of nationhood and national identity to examine carefully what those

unselfconsciously used terms connote, what attitudes and assumptions lie buried
in them, what historical myths they enshrine or promote.
Britain seems to be the most ancient of the relevant terms.5 It was rst
recorded by the Greeks of the fourth century BC as the name of the Celts who
lived in western Europes largest off-shore island. The Romans turned the Greek
Pretanoi into the Latin Britanni, for whose home they then coined the feminine
name Britannia. The Celts themselves appear to have made no clear distinction
between the people and the place. The meaning of the original word evidently
referred to the Celtic practice of painting the body.
When the Angles and Saxons invaded the islands in the fth century AD they
did not associate themselves with Britannia or its inhabitants. They called the
piece of the island they settled Engla-land and ignored the rest. Britain nevertheless persisted during the Old English period, in various forms (Bretayne,
Breteyn, Breoton, etc. it took its present spelling in the thirteenth century),
but thereafter was used only as a historical term until about the time of Henry
VIII and Edward VI [early sixteenth century], when it came again into practical
politics in connexion with the efforts to unite England and Scotland (OED).
Despite the union of the crowns in 1603 James I proclaimed himself King of
Great Britain efforts to promote Britain as an overarching identity appear
to have had limited success until the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, which
established the united kingdom of Great Britain.
From that time Britain came into common use as a shorthand for Great
Britain. It gured widely in ofcial and semi-ofcial encomia to the kingdom,
as in William Somervilles Hail, happy Britain! Highly favoured isle, and
Heavens peculiar care! (1735), and, in its most celebrated form, in the panegyric composed in 1740 by the anglicized Scottish poet James Thomson:
When Britain rst, at heavens command, / Arose from out the azure main . . .
It was Thomson too who in the same work gave Britannia and Britons wide
currency.
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
Rule Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.
(Thomson and Mallet, Alfred, 1740)

Britons and Britannia (the Roman female gure with a shield revived by
Charles II in 1665 when he put her on a coin in an attempt to reconcile Scots
and English) had a success denied to the ofcial efforts in the eighteenth century
to replace the old emotive names England and Scotland with South Britain
and North Britain within the framework of an overall Great Britain (the later

The Making of English National Identity

attempt to turn an uncooperative Ireland into West Britain was even less
successful). The failure in this respect did not however, as we shall see, prevent
the emergence of a strong sense of British identity in this period.
Something of the same lacklustre quality as aficts Britain has carried
over into British. To identify with British , says Bernard Crick, is not the
same as identifying with the warmth and width of English, Scottish, Welsh
or Irish. British is a limited utilitarian allegiance simply to those political
and legal institutions which still hold this multi-national state together (The
Independent 22 May 1993). The majority of English, Welsh and Scots do not
think of themselves as British; only a majority of Ulster Protestants do so
(see, e.g., Rose 1982: 15). Foreigners use British freely; the British to refer
to their trade with other nations, their economy, their armed forces, their legal
nationality, the inhabitants of the pre- and non-Anglo-Saxon cultures of the
island called Britain, and a few other things besides (see Fowler, above; and cf.
Crick 1991a: 97; 1995:1734). But they rarely use it in relation to themselves
in their social, cultural or personal life.
This coldness towards the term British is nowadays highly problematic.
With the revival of nationalist movements in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Island, and the inux of many hundreds of thousands of immigrants who do not
think of themselves as English, Scottish, etc., never can the appellation British
appear more necessary, at least if the political and social unity of the United
Kingdom is to be preserved. Yet it is those very forces that are making the task
difcult.
Britons, Britisher and Brit continue to nd some favour, especially with
foreign journalists. The British Isles similarly does service as a catch-all term
to include not just the countries of the United Kingdom but also the Republic of
Ireland, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man. Some scholars, seeking to avoid
the political and ethnic connotations of the British Isles, have proposed the
Atlantic archipelago or even the East Atlantic archipelago (see, e.g., Pocock
1975a: 606; 1995: 292n; Tompson, 1986). Not surprisingly this does not seem
to have caught on with the general public, though it has found increasing favour
with scholars promoting the new British History (see below).
This is probably the right place to introduce the United Kingdom. Although
a united kingdom came into being with the parliamentary union of England
and Scotland in 1707, the new state (which included the principality of Wales)
did not formally adopt the title until the union with Ireland in 1801, which
brought into being the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (after the
formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland).
There are some English-speaking groups contemporary Indians among
them who do refer to Yookay as a country, in the way we might speak of

English or British?

England, Britain etc. But for the vast majority of the British people the United
Kingdom is a term reserved for passports, visa applications and other ofcial
purposes. The old British passports referred to one as a citizen of the United
Kingdom and Colonies. But few saw or sought a national identity in these
ofcial terms. It is noticeable, though, that with current talk of the break-up
of Britain and threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom, there has been
a rise in references to the United Kingdom in public utterances for instance,
by politicians in radio interviews.
England and the English
For over a thousand years England has been the largest and most powerful state
in the British Isles. It was always and to an increasing extent the most populous
part. In 1801 England contributed just over half of the population of the United
Kingdom; today the English make up more than four-fths (N. Davies 1999:
1153).
It is not surprising that England became, and remains for many people
at home and abroad, a synecdochical expression not just for the island of
Britain but for the whole archipelago. Macaulay called his great work The
History of England (184861) but it included extensive coverage of Ireland and
Scotland, as did W. E. H. Leckys History of England in the Eighteenth Century
(187890). The French historian Elie Halevy, in his History of the English People (1913), similarly and with the same unselfconsciousness included Irish and
Scottish history. Walter Bagehots famous work on the government of Britain
is called The English Constitution (1867). The OEDs report of 1891 on the
established usage of the time perhaps underplayed its inationary tendency:
England: the southern part of the island of Great Britain, usually with the
exception of Wales. Sometimes loosely used for: Great Britain. Often: The
English (or British) nation or state. In later years the practice has if anything
grown, rather than diminished, despite the irritation it causes the non-English
inhabitants of the British Isles. Not just in everyday conversation but in journalistic use and in scholarly writing the confusion of England with Britain
and Britain with England is so common and pervasive that quotation is
largely superuous (for examples see Kearney 1995: 2; N. Davies 1999: xxvii
xxxix).6
England is a highly emotive word. When intoned by, say, an Olivier (as in
Henry V) or a Gielgud (as in Richard II), it can produce spine-tingling effects. It
has served, in a way never attained by Britain or any of the British derivatives,
to focus ideas and ideals. It has been the subject of innumerable eulogies and
apostrophes by poets and playwrights. From Shakespeare to Rupert Brooke it
has been lauded as the font of freedom and the standard of civilization, a place

The Making of English National Identity

of virtue as well as of beauty. Let not England, urged John Milton in 1643
in pleading for a more liberal attitude to divorce, forget her precedence of
teaching nations how to live. Nelson fell at Trafalgar, according to J. Brahams
patriotic poem of 1812, for England, home and beauty a phrase much loved
and oft repeated in the nineteenth century. Shakespeare as always supplied the
best lines. Despite its familiarity, the following deathbed tribute by John of
Gaunt, from Richard II, needs to be quoted because of its innumerable echoes
in succeeding centuries:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the ofce of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
(Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1)

This is truly unbeatable, and could be unpacked at length for what it has contributed to the self-image of the English. Pausing only to note though the usual
conation of England and Britain (this sceptred isle, England, bound in
with the triumphant sea, etc.), we might pass on to the nineteenth century and
an appreciation by Alfred Lord Tennyson almost as well known and almost as
good:
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where, girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.
(You ask me, why, tho ill at ease,
1842)

There were, as we shall see, many challenges to this self-congratulatory account.

But perhaps the most pertinent question was raised by Rudyard Kipling: And
what do they know of England who only England know? (The English Flag,
1891).

English or British?

English and the English follow England closely in the comprehensiveness

of their embrace. As an ethnic adjective, it is often used for British, especially by the English who unlike the Welsh, Scots and Irish, have traditionally
identied themselves with the Union Jack, the composite ag of the United
Kingdom, rather than what is technically their ag, the Cross of St George:
thereby symbolically claiming possession of the whole kingdom.7
This tendency to inate the English to take in other groups began very early.
When the word English rst occurred in Old English, it had already lost its
etymological sense, of or about the Angles, and was used as a collective
expression for all the Teutonic peoples Angles, Saxons and Jutes who had
settled in Britain in the fth century. With the incorporation of the Celtic
and Scandinavian elements of the population into the English people, the
adjective came in the 11th century to be applied to all natives of England,
whatever their ancestry (OED). For a generation or two after the Norman
Conquest state documents distinguished between French and English i.e.,
the descendants of the pre-Conquest English but in practice the distinction
soon lost its meaning. So English began its imperialistic career from the very
beginning; taking in Britain and the British Empire was a continuation,
apparently, of a very old tradition.
The ethnic English, as the core nation of the British Isles and the dominant
group of what became the leading industrial and imperial power in the world,
have been anatomized ceaselessly by native and other writers. A genre of writing
that can be said to have started with Edward Lytton Bulwers England and the
English (1833) was powerfully reinforced by the vivid reections of visitors,
such as Ralph Waldo Emersons English Traits (1856), Hippolyte Taines Notes
on England (186070) and Henry Jamess English Hours (1905). Emersons
and Jamess accounts continued the tradition of travel literature, a favourite
form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which the writer journeyed
through the kingdom and reported on the condition and ways of the inhabitants.
Alexis de Tocqueville thus recorded his impressions of his visits in the 1830s
in the writings which have been published as Journeys to England and Ireland
(1958); later distinguished examples of the genre include J. B. Priestleys
English Journey (1934), A. V. Mortons In Search of England (1937) and George
Orwells The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). The English have also been the subject
of the usual crop of humorous or satirical portraits, many of them not surprisingly by foreigners, such as G. J. Reniers The English, Are They Human?
(1931), George Mikess How to Be an Alien (1946) and Ranjee Shahinis The
Amazing English (1948). The Scots, in the form of A. G. Macdonells comic
novel, England, Their England (1933), cast an affectionate and not too baleful
eye on their idiosyncratic neighbour. But it was the native English themselves
who produced the best example of the genre: W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatmans

10

The Making of English National Identity

wickedly revealing 1066 And All That (1930) the best book ever written on the
English and their history, or what they take to be their history. With the renewed
debates on English identity in the 1990s, the genre revived after a generation
or so of disfavour. But, in the more anxious climate of the times, the model
now was not so much the satirical type as the more considered national portrait of the kind typied by George Orwells The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):
Jeremy Paxmans The English: A Portrait of a People (1999) is a good recent
example.
It is in and from this kind of writing that attempts are conventionally made to
sum up the English national character. With all their pitfalls they are invaluable in helping us understand Englishness and English national identity. My
account begins from a different direction but I shall have plenty of occasion to
refer to these offerings. To ignore them would be to miss a rich harvest.
English as an adjective and noun for a language the English language
has an interestingly parallel history to English as an ethnic description. It
exhibits the same striking elasticity. Starting as a group of dialects originally
spoken in what is now Denmark and north-eastern Germany, it became after the
Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain the general name for the tongue Englisc
used from Kent to Edinburgh. Englisc referred, in other words, to the language spoken not just by the inhabitants of the kingdom of England but also by
those of the south-eastern part of the kingdom of Scotland. Over the centuries
a linguistic polarization took place, with the Kings English in the south and
the Kings Inglis (or Scottis) in the north, the two forms so distinct as to be
virtually different languages (McArthur 1985 (3): 29; see also James 1998:
306). Englishs further conquest took place with its expansion, following that
of the English people, into Wales and Ireland. English was now used in four
countries, three of which were bilingual between an ever-strengthening English
and an ever-retreating Celtic.
From about the fteenth century onwards, the Kings English of the English
court, centred on London, was increasingly recognized as standard English,
though enormous variation existed in spelling and pronunciation. But with
British expansion overseas, starting in the seventeenth century, the English language developed a variety of forms, a number of which gradually emerged as
new standard forms (American English, Australian English, Caribbean English,
South Asian English, etc.). British English, as a language and a literature, has
had to compete with these other Englishes in the world at large. Even in its home
territory, British English, traditionally identied with the speech patterns of the
upper and upper-middle classes of south-east England, has in recent years found
itself challenged by new or revived varieties, as in Mancunian, Glaswegian and
Estuary English, and the English spoken by new immigrant groups such as
West Indians and South Asians. With British English embracing all these groups,

English or British?

11

many of which do not identify themselves as English, English as a badge of a

specically English national identity becomes increasingly problematic.
To turn nally to the group of words formed by the combination term Anglo-,
as in Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Saxon, etc. They exhibit all the ambiguity and, occasionally, arrogance, involved in the parent terms England and English. At
the simplest level, Anglo- is the combining form for England and English,
whether the people or the language. Thus Anglo-Welsh relations are simply
relations between the English and the Welsh. But, following the pattern of
England and English, Anglo-Finnish relations could be relations either
between England and Finland or between Great Britain (or the United Kingdom)
and Finland. Similarly with Anglo-American, Anglo-Russian, etc. The offence
that the imperial use of England and English causes the Welsh, Scots and
Irish is compounded by this multiple meaning of Anglo.
There are further complications. Anglo-Irish, for instance, can mean relations between Ireland and England or between Ireland and Britain, as in AngloIrish talks. But it can also refer to the group of English settlers in Ireland in
past centuries, the group that formed the ruling gentry class and established
the English ascendancy in Ireland. For native Irish therefore Anglo-Irish is
an emotive term with powerful historical overtones. Anglo-Indian is similarly
complex, referring both to relations between India and England (or Britain),
and to the sensitively placed Eurasian community in India descended from
British fathers and Indian mothers. To add to the richness of the term, AngloIndian also refers to those English or British people who spent most of their
working lives in India during the British Raj an Anglo-Indian colonel, for
example.
Most multifaceted of all is Anglo-Saxon. The OED records a complex
history, involving multiple confusions, which led to the term being used by
1600 to cover everything English before the Norman Conquest: language, life,
people. Secondly, and by an equally expansive route, it has come to be applied
to the entire culture, spirit, heritage, ethnic type and set of attitudes(McArthur
1985 (1): 14) associated with the English (or the British) whether at home or
abroad. There is an obvious overlap between the two main uses, in the sense that
the Anglo-Saxon heritage or Anglo-Saxon attitudes are supposed to be somehow
representative of the original pristine culture of the English, especially as that
existed before the Norman Conquest, hence Anglo-Saxonisms, to refer to plain,
pithy, quintessentially English speaking, thinking and doing. Anglo-Saxonism
has historically also played an important political role, in the frequent harking
back to the supposedly popular democratic assemblies of the Teutonic settlers
of Britain, and as the basis therefore for a political ideology of Anglo-Saxonism
that frequently had racial overtones. But the larger meaning of Anglo-Saxon or
Anglosaxondom has equally obviously travelled a long way from its historical

12

The Making of English National Identity

base. It has come to occupy a signicant place in the political culture of all
societies that have a large number of people of English or British descent, and
where English is the principal language the United States, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, South Africa. In this guise it is engaged with debates about
dominant ethnicities and multiculturalism, and embroiled in the politics of
language and of identity.
British studies: in search of the national identity
In a small volume on the national character published in 1941, George Orwell
confessed to some difculty of nomenclature. We call our islands by no less
than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the
United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. He admitted that
the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one
another, and that even the differences between the north and south of England
were signicant. He consoled himself with the observation that somehow these
differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by
a European, and still more so, presumably, when an Indian or a Chinaman
heaves into view. Armed with the conviction that there was a unied national
character, Orwell moved easily between England (England is the most classridden country under the sun, etc.) and Britain (British democracy is less of a
fraud than it sometimes appears, etc.) to conclude with the famous observation
that England [sic] resembles a family . . . a family with the wrong members in
control (Orwell 1970a: 83, 88).
Few scholars today would approach the subject if they dare approach it at
all with such blithe condence. Their self-consciousness about the diversity of
our islands, together with their sensitivity to nationalist feeling within them,
render them modest in the extreme, if not actually speechless in the face of
such terminological and cultural complexity. But some at least have bravely
attempted to grasp the nettle of national identity. Prominent among these have
been the historians, for whom perhaps the question is of more urgent practical
importance than it is to scholars in other disciplines. In writing the history of
these islands, what does one call them? What kind of framework does one
adopt? To what extent is one dealing with a unitary story the story of an
island race, say and to what extent with separate histories, the histories of
four nations?
In 1975 the New Zealand-born historian J. G. A. Pocock, in response partly
to what he saw as a growing assertion of English nationalism he instanced
A. J. P. Taylors volume in the Oxford History of England put in a plea for
British history. Noting the lack of a better term that might satisfy the Irish,
he meant by British history, he said, the plural history of a group of cultures

English or British?

13

situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier and marked by an increasing English

political and cultural domination (1975: 605). Though speaking of a revival of
British history, Pocock was perfectly well aware that very little along these lines
had ever actually been done. For examples he had to turn to the twelfth-century
Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouths largely fabulous History of the Kings
of Britain (c. 1136), and William Camdens sixteenth-century Britannia (1586),
a highly informative survey of the British Isles which nevertheless reads mainly
like a guide-book.
In advocating a properly British history, Pocock aimed his re at two main
targets. The rst was the approach of the John Bull school of English historiography, in which British history was merely English history writ large. (The
history of Britain was merely the history of England as and when it took place
elsewhere: Cannadine 1995b: 16). The rejection of this conventionally Anglocentric view also entailed the rejection of its left-wing variant, the internal colonialism approach. Here England was seen as the core imperial nation which
had colonized its peripheral regions, the Celtic fringe (see, e.g., Hechter
1999). The largely benign view of Englands civilizing and modernizing
role was replaced by a more critical account which emphasized dependence,
inequality and exploitation in the relations between core and periphery; but it
did nothing to shake the impression that British history had been a one-way
ow, with England as the fount and origin of all developments.
Pocock by contrast wished to point to the mutual and reciprocal relations
between the different parts of the British Isles, such that they have not only
created the conditions of their several existences but have also interacted so as
to modify the conditions of one anothers existence.
[British history], which does not yet exist and must be created, cannot be written as the
memory of a single state or nation or as the process by which one came into existence.
It must be a plural history, tracing the processes by which a diversity of societies,
nationalities, and political structures came into being and situating in the history of each
and in the history of their interactions the processes that have led them to whatever forms
of association or unity exist in the present or have existed in the past. This calls for a
multi-contextual history . . .
(Pocock 1982: 317, 320)

The admitted difculty of this undertaking was underscored by a bold extension,

implicit in this formulation. British history must not simply be an account of
the interaction of the peoples and cultures of the British Isles or the Atlantic
archipelago. The British (including the Irish) had also taken themselves and
their cultures overseas. They had crossed the Atlantic to colonize the lands that
later became the republics of the United States and Canada. They had crossed
the world to found societies in its southern half, in Australia and New Zealand.
However different they became, these societies were in the rst instance British.

14

The Making of English National Identity

They added yet new dimensions to what had conventionally been presented as
English history(Pocock 1982: 317; see also Pocock 1992).
No more than in the case of Wales, Scotland and Ireland could these American
or oceanic British societies be regarded simply as fragments or scions
of the parent society, England or in this case Britain. This approach,
associated particularly with Louis Hartz and his followers (Hartz 1964), was
the second target of Pococks assault. The Hartzian view saw American or
Australian society as offshoots of the older British stem; they were related
to it as fragments to a monolith, from which they had broken off. Such
a conception, argued Pocock, mistakes the nature and development of both
fragment and monolith. Both fragment and parent society had to be seen
as formed by a dynamic interaction, by an evolving process of cultural conict
and creation (Pocock 1975a: 620). If Britain in some sense came rst, its
extensions overseas reacted back upon it, modifying it in profound ways just
as its continued presence in their lives shaped their evolution.
Recast in the general form of British history, much of English and British
history could be seen in a new light. Instead of being the story of the evolution
and expansion of one nation, it might be possible to see it as the history of
three kingdoms (English, Scottish and Irish) or four nations (English, Welsh,
Scottish, Irish), all interacting with one another in complex ways. Certain crucial
historical episodes, familiar in one aspect, could take on a new appearance. The
English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century now becomes the war of the
three kingdoms, since without rebellion in Scotland, the English Parliament
would not have been summoned; without rebellion in Ireland it would not have
demanded the kings surrender of the power of the sword (Pocock 1992: 372;
see also 1975a: 602; 1982: 325). Moreover, one might wish also to speak now not
just of one but three British Civil Wars convulsing the peoples of the British
Isles together with their overseas possessions: that of 164246 (the English
Civil War), that of 177683 (the American War of Independence), and that of
191122 (the Irish Rebellion) (Pocock 1975a: 606). Using somewhat different
terminology, some of these episodes could also be recast as the three British
Revolutions of 1641, 1688 and 1776 (Pocock 1980) or more, according
to taste and the task in hand, since the category British Revolution might
encompass not just the Irish Revolution of 191122 but also a good many of
the twentieth-century wars of independence of former British possessions in
Asia and Africa.
Whether as a result of Pococks urging or, more probably, because a number
of scholars had already been moving in that direction, there have in recent
years been some remarkable changes in the historiography of Britain and its
overseas empire.8 Some have tried their hand at entirely new general histories, notable examples being Richard Tompsons The Atlantic Archipelago:

English or British?

15

A Political History of the British Isles (1986), Hugh Kearneys The British
Isles: A History of Four Nations (1995), Jeremy Blacks A History of the British
Isles (1996) and Norman Daviess The Isles (1999). Others have re-examined
key episodes of British and imperial history, such as the seventeenth-century
revolutions (see, e.g., Russell 1987), and the interactions between Britain and
its overseas colonies in the rst British Empire (e.g., Calder 1981; Bailyn
and Morgan 1991b; Canny 1998; Marshall 1998). There has been a magnicent reinterpretation of British nationalism in the eighteenth century in Linda
Colleys Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837 (1994); for the same period
Gerald Newman essayed something similar for English nationalism in a pioneering work, The Rise of English Nationalism (1987). An ambitious and
wide-ranging study of British imperialism sought to locate its springs in the
culture of gentlemanly capitalism operating at the heart of the British economy, in the nancial sector of the City of London (Cain and Hopkins 1993).
Students of cultural history have looked at the way the British Empire affected
the mentality not just of its subject populations but of the imperial nation itself,
the British people (e.g., Mackenzie 1986; Young 1995; Schwarz 1996a). What
stands out in all these studies is the impossibility of considering England
or even Britain as independent or intelligible units of study. Both are fragments of a larger whole whose boundaries extend to the very limits of the
globe.
The historians did not make all the running, though it is fair to say that it is
their rethinking of British history that has most made it possible to approach
the question of English and British identity in a satisfactory way. Other disciplines have weighed in. In 1975 the American sociologist Michael Hechter
published Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 15361966; a brave and impressive study, especially considering that
Hechter at the time had not set foot in the British Isles. Political science also
made sterling contributions. In 1976 Richard Rose (revising a paper of 1970)
published an essay, The United Kingdom as a Multi-National State (Rose
1976), which became the basis and rallying point for a wide-ranging programme
of work largely under his direction (see Rose 1982; Rose and McAllister 1982;
Madgwick and Rose 1982; Bulpitt 1983). Political scientists were also the
mainstay of Bernard Cricks stimulating collection, National Identities: The
Constitution of the United Kingdom (Crick 1991b). Also distinctly political,
but strictly unclassiable in disciplinary terms, were two brilliant contributions
from the left-wing thinker and Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn: The Break-Up of
Britain (1981) and The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (1994). Multidisciplinarity was also the hallmark of three major volumes published under
the auspices of History Workshop: Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of
British National Identity (Samuel 1989a).

16

The Making of English National Identity

Introducing the Patriotism volumes, Raphael Samuel noted a critical shift

in the thinking of the contributors as their work proceeded. It is as good an
indication as any of the new consciousness and the changed approach to the
subject.
A late but important element in the shaping of these volumes was the substitution of
British for English in the subtitle. We had started with the second. For History
Workshop, as for others, it had all kinds of pleasant connotations. It evoked a people
rather than a state, Blakes Jerusalem rather than Westminster, Whitehall, or Balmoral.
Because of its association with the language, it was umbilically tied to English literature.
Because of its subliminal association with the countryside the real England it
conjured up images of rusticity, chronicles of ancient sunlight. English is smaller and
gentler than British, and it has the charm, for the historian, of the antiquated and the
out of date. British was an altogether more uncomfortable term to work with, hard
rather than soft and belonging to specic historical epochs rather than the timelessness
of tradition. It is a political identity which derives its legitimacy from the expansion of
the nation-state. Its associations are diplomatic and military rather than literary, imperial
rather than or as well as domestic. Compared with English it is formal, abstract
and remote. But it allows for a more pluralistic understanding of the nation, one which
sees it as a citizenry rather than a folk. It does not presuppose a common culture and it
is therefore more hospitable both to newcomers and outsiders . . .
(1989b: xiixiii)

Hard rather than soft, citizenry rather than a folk, hospitable both to newcomers and outsiders; these expressions strike the note of the new realism, a
new sobriety in the face of unprecedented problems both at home and abroad.
Gone are the cosy assumptions of Englishness, with its sleepy villages and
ancestral piles. They have gone because the empire has gone, and so has British
economic power. They have gone because the English are not even safe in their
homelands, challenged as they are by the rise of Celtic nationalism and by
the claims of multiculturalism within English society. And then there is the
promise, or threat, of Europe. In whichever direction they look, the English
nd themselves called upon to reect upon their identity, and to re-think their position in the world. The protective walls that shielded them from these questions
are all coming down.
One consequence of this is that we must, initially at least, lay aside the traditional approaches to English national identity. These have tended to consider the
character of Englishness from within, from inside the national culture. They
have scrutinized the past and the present for the evidence they offer of English
traits, of distinctive elements of the English character or the English people.
Of such a kind are the famous works of cultural analysis, such as Priestleys
English Journey and Orwells The English People. Invaluable as they are, they
cannot be our starting point. They take for granted the very thing that needs
investigation: the wider world within which England and Englishness nd

English or British?

17

their meaning. English national identity cannot be found from within the consciousness of the English themselves.9 We have to work from the outside in.
It is within the new terrain of British studies that we are most likely to
nd our most promising leads. But before we come to this, there is a prior
task. To speak of English nationalism, or of English national identity, is to use
the language of a ourishing branch of social and political theory, that part
concerned with the nature and development of nationalism. In recent years
there has been an outpouring of new works in the eld. It would seem sensible
to ask what contribution the new thinking can make to the understanding of
our specic subject, English nationalism. Is English nationalism a recognizable
variety of nationalism in general? What theory or theories might be appropriate
to it?