British national identity

Transcription

With the question of Scottish independence very much on the political agenda, the very idea of a unified British state is in question and with it the notion of shared British identity. But the rise of nationalism is one in a long line of problems to beset modern Britain. The ongoing issue of industrial and economic decline has troubled both statesman and political commentators, the winding up its empire so quickly after the end of the second world war brought an end to Britain's claim to be the dominant global power. Many anticipated that Britain would have to take its place as a part of a Greater Europe, accepting the associated loss of sovereignty as the price paid for securing the country's future prosperity. These external questions about Britain's place in the wider world have been accompanied by fears about social fragmentation at home. Post-war immigration, bringing with it a diversity of language, religion and custom, and the creation of Britain's multicultural society was accompanied by a rise in political organizations with a distinctively anti-immigrant agenda. The radicalization of young British Muslims and the emergence of homegrown terrorism at the turn of the century seemed to critics to demonstrate the failure of so-called state-sponsored multi-culturalism. This so it was claimed was a terrible manifestation of a wider failure to integrate immigrants and their descendants into the British Way of life. Responses to this set of sometimes interlocking problems have called for the strengthening of a collective sense of national identity. If the British could only discover or rediscover who they are so the argument goes the new found confidence and unity that would follow would help them overcome the problems of the present. It has been a recurring theme for those from both the political left and right to talk about history teaching, or a particular kind of history teaching, as a vital part of putting Britain back on the right track. Whether what is sought is a positive articulation of common values or restoring your pride in one's country, school history has been seen as the vehicle for the transmission of a longer British narrative, a continuous evolving and often glorious national story. But does the study of the British past reveal an easily understood national narrative one which when grasped would bring the people of this island together? Does history provide us with answers to the complex problems of British identity in the present? Was there an early a simpler time when Britons collectively knew who they were what they stood for? This series of films explores the ways in which the people who have inhabited these islands have tried to make sense of a British identity and how these national ideas have been shaped by and adapted to fit a changing world. But it also seeks to address a perhaps more important question whether the teaching of history in schools can and should be used to instill in young people a sense of national identity. Historically, the geographical and political uses of the word Britain have not neatly overlapped. According to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing in the 4th century BC, there were two large Britannic islands, Albion and Ierna, in the ocean at the northwestern edge of Europe's trade routes. The Romans used the word Britannia to refer to the part of the larger of the two islands that they ruled as a province of their wider empire for nearly 400 years. At times Roman Britain included parts of modern day Scotland up to the Firth, but it never extended over the whole island nor across the waters to Ireland. With the retreat of Roman power and the subsequent waves of invaders and migrants that followed, other national identifications came to the fore and were to play a major role in state formation in the centuries that followed. For the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede writing in the 8th century, Britannia was purely a geographical term referring to the island itself. The British were a distinct people with their own language whose ancestors pre-dated the Roman occupation, but they now inhabited only the west of the island having been displaced by other groups. Perhaps because of the Roman legacy, perhaps because its boundaries were so ambiguous, the word Britain seemed to attract imperial ambitions. In Wales annalists of the tenth and eleventh centuries looking for grandiose titles to give their rulers spoke of them as head and glory of all the Britons. Anglo-Saxon kings, too, when they had any political ambition were apt to designate themselves as kings of all the British even though their writ did not run further than the limits of their own tribal kingdoms. Both Edward I and later Henry VIII drew on mythic visions of a Britain united under a single ancient ruler to legitimate their claims to overlordship of the whole island. And it was under Henry's rule that Wales was formally brought into England's administrative orbit. But ideas of Britain were not simply expressions of an unsatisfied English imperialism. Political unification could also be championed by those north of the Anglo-Scottish border. Whilst some Scots in the 16th century saw English invasion as a vehicle for religious Reformation in Scotland, others, on the defensive against English claims, saw a genuine union of equals as an alternative to English domination of the whole island. For the 16th century Scottish historian John Mair a common British interest - the common good of those who inhabited the island of Great Britain - transcended the particular, conflicting and tragically misunderstood interests of the separate Scottish and English Kingdoms. The fortuitious Union of Crowns in 1603, an accident of hereditary succession, seemed to confirm to many that Providence had pre-ordained the union of the two, by now Protestant, kingdoms. The new monarch, James the 6th of Scotland and 1st of England, self-consciously styled himself as king of great britain and the royal and merchant ships were instructed to fly the new British flag. But James' vision of a perfect union of laws and belief to accompany the new union of crowns foundered on the resistance of his English subjects fearful of the king's real motives. For a brief period amidst the great and bloody upheavals of the 17th century there was a single polity in the British Archipelago. England, Scotland and Ireland were ruled via London as a single Cromwellian Commonwealth, an arrangement that was to end with the Restoration of the monarch in 1660. And it wasn't until the beginning of the 18th century that a lasting political union was to be achieved and with it the creation of a new British state. I don't think any historical development or circumstance is inevitable but you can say that the Treaty of Union of 1707, a lot had anticipated it. So there had been that union of crowns through the seventeenth century, there'd also been growing connections between England and Scotland in trade in mobility and in forms of Protestantism. And in fact many Scots of the political elite had been pressuring for a closer union still in the late seventeenth century and it had been the Westminster parliament that had been resistant. But what really makes a treaty of union in 1707 inevitable in the short term is the pressure of war with France and the problem of the succession, the feeling that unless the whole island of Great Britain is tied up in one system you may get a Roman Catholic Stuart trying to come back when childless Queen Anne finally dies. The two kingdoms each had autonomous successions. The fact that they shared the same monarch was as yet merely dynastic happenstance. So when the dynasty died out Scotland could technically choose an entirely different dynasty to succeed Queen Anne and the Protestant line of Stuarts than England. The net result is that indeed deliberately pass legislation through their parliament saying that unless they could reach accomodations in their relationship with England, particularly in regard to trade, then Scotland's incoming new dynasty after Queen Anne's death would have to be different than that taken on in England. What concentrated minds after 1702 was that England and Wales alongside Scotland were again at war with France. A breakdown in Anglo-Scottish relations, the possible restoration of a pro-French monarch north of the border, might tip the scales in France's favour, they might become, as many contemporaries feared, powerful enough to dominate the entire European continent. From the English perspective, political union was seen very much as a way to eliminate the potential threat posed by the action of an independent Scots parliament, who could if they wished chose to destabilise relations between the two countries. The achievement of a political union that incorporated Scottish members within a Westminster parliament headed off this possibility and would preserve English security. But if this objective was to be achieved it first had to be approved by a majority in the Scots parliament. English politicians and Scots supporters of the union hammered away at the threat of a Catholic restoration and the danger it would pose to Scots Protestantism. The proposed terms of union guaranteed a separate Scottish Church within the boundaries of the old Scotland, helping to placate much hardline Presbyterian opinion. But there were also those who hoped that their voting for union would bring material gain, some for wider patriotic reasons, others for more selfish ones. Scotland was felt by many to be in a dire economic situation which could only be remedied by free access the the English empire to which the Scots had no formal right of access, I mean they busily traded illegally with it with that English Empire but they had no formal legal right of access. There was this kind of hope that since England had a burgeoning for the time relatively modern economy that Scotland would be kind of lifted on an English tide economically. And the final reason it passes is manipulation. The Scots administration with considerable financial help from England and by dint of some very good political footwork on their part is able to twist arms, persuade, cajole, charm a lot of Scottish politicians into backing their project of union. One should never detract from the genuine sincerity of many Scots unionists, they genuinely believed in what they were doing - others were out for the main chance. The treaty of union remains profoundly controversial and people tend to stress different aspects of it according to their nationalist or political perspectives. Its important to remember that it was controversial at the time and people were divided about it at the time on both sides of the border. Its controversial in England in part because it is a deal. By the Treaty of Union the Scots lose their Edinburgh parliament and are given a quota of seats in the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Westminster but they keep a lot, they keep their educational system, they keep their ecclesiastical organisation, they keep their Scots law of course, but they are given access to the commercial goodies. They can trade much more easily across the border, and they get access to a burgeoning British empire on much more preferential terms. And some English politicians, and particularly of course some English merchants, really don't like this. They feel that the Scots are getting too much in the deal and England isn't getting enough. Now of course on the other side of the border there is controversy too, some Scots don't like the loss of their ancient independence, they have - to put it mildly - ambivalent feelings about England in some cases, and there are elements of bribery involved in 1707, just as theres elements of bribery going to be involved in the act of union with Ireland in 1800 1801, bribery I should say was fairly common in eighteenth century politics generally so this is not really that unusual. The idea of equal partnership within a British union was absolutely essential to the Scottish perception of what it represented. The arrangement of the new British state was supposedly one of equality between the two former kingdoms - technically England ceased to exist in 1707 as well. But the reality was an English ascendancy; Scottish representation at Westminster was less than that of Cornwall. The net result was that when something was seen as a national issue by English MPs they easily overbore a Scottish opposition. Scots found out the hard way in the first 10 years after the union, that they were very junior partners and would get what they hoped for out of the union only when it did not inconvenience English interests. Historians and political scientists differ in what they think a nation is. Some people view a sense of nationhood as something organic, something waiting to be discovered, something very much bound up with ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. Other scholars tend to put much more emphasis on issues of fabrication, invention, active creation, so it isn't as if nations are always there waiting to be discovered. People make political decisions or come together due to particular pressures and help to forge a nation, and I use forge all sorts of senses obviously. There were senses of, very strong sense of Scottish identity, Welsh identity and perhaps most of all, English identity already by 1706 1707, but these sense of identity were complicated by other forms of loyalty, loyalty to region for example, there are big divisions between attitudes in the Scottish lowlands and the Scottish highlands. Cornwall still at the beginning of the eighteenth century has people living in it who can only speak Cornish. The great bulk of the Welsh people speak only Welsh, on the other hand, north and south Wales are still very much divided in terms of communications. So the treaty of union of 1707 creates a unified parliament, it creates in name a unified British state, but there is a lot of work, a lot of time needed to mesh this into something more than a political arrangement. In the early years of the eighteenth century the future of the new British state was far from secure. North of the border the union remained a live issue. In 1713 a motion for its repeal in the House of Lords failed by only four votes. In 1714, after the Hanoverian succession had taken place, there were calls in Scotland for its dissolution now that its principal objective had been achieved. And the group best placed to capitalise on this discontent were the Jacobites, supporters of the exiled Stuarts, the dynasty ousted from power in the late seventeenth century. It had been James Stuart's desire to promote, however gradually, his own Roman Catholicism combined with the prospect of a Catholic succession that had raised considerable alarm within England. An unofficial invitation was extended to William of Orange, the Dutch, and more importantly Protestant, husband of James's daughter Mary, to mount an invasion of England. When James fled London for France in the face of the invading army he was offered the vacant throne. Although principles of hereditary succession and divine right appeared to have been sorely compromised the so-called Glorious Revolution was secured within England without recourse to civil war. In Scotland and Ireland, however, significant forces remained loyal to James and although William assumed the thrones of both countries the transition was not nearly so smooth. Jacobite armies were raised and had to be defeated in both kingdoms and residual support for the Stuart cause persisted through into the eighteenth century. Whilst they were technically united by their wish to restore the exiled House of Stuart, the Jacobites were three different movements within the three kingdoms, each of which saw a Stuart restoration as a stepping stone to the acheivement of larger objectives. In England and Wales, a small minority of the Anglican clergy had refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the incoming monarch in 1688 but their numbers and influence were minimal. More serious was the potential support of the Tory party whose members intermittently flirted with Jacobitism. Traditionally Tories had aligned themselves with loyalty to the Church of England and the monarchy. But in 1715 George I, the new German king, although Protestant was a Lutheran and thus a dissenter and many feared, rightly or not, that the change of monarch combined with a Whig political ascendancy would seriously undermine the Church of England. Many English and Welsh Tories who had not stood in the way of the revolution back in 1688, perhaps surprisingly, came to see the restoration of the Catholic House of Stuart as a way to perhaps reassert both their own political power and the primacy of the Anglican Church. Whilst the small Roman Catholic community in England and Wales merely hoped for the return of a sympathetic monarch to protect them from their over-zealous Protestant neighbours, Catholic Jacobites in Ireland, however, sought the restoration of the Catholic church, the return of confiscated land and the breaking of English control over the Irish parliament. Ireland should, in fact, have been a major source of Stuart strength, yet the defeat of its Jacobite army at the end of the seventeenth century - and the consequences that followed from it - were to effectively mark the end rather than the beginning of organised Irish support. Although primarily Protestant, Scotland was a nation often bitterly divided along religious lines. The Scottish version of the glorious revolution had seen the re-establishment of the Presbyterian Church at the expense of the Episcopalian, the reward for its support of William III. Despite their Protestantism, many Episcopalians remained loyal to the exiled monarch and were to form the core support for the Stuart cause in Scotland. This seemingly straightforward sectarian divide was, however, further complicated by the political union with England. Almost as soon as it was passed the Jacobites promised to repeal the union. This identification of the Stuarts with the cause of independence won over a minority of Presbyterians who were more hostile to the union than they were to their Episcopalian rivals and the Catholicism of the exiled dynasty. But Jacobitism was also able to mobilise wider discontent with life under the Hanoverians. Those who opposed agricultural enclosoure, for example, or objected to the new taxes being imposed by the state, looked to the Stuarts as defenders of customary rights. Forms of criminality, like smuggling, an activity often associated with Jacobite sympathisers could be justified as an act of resistance to duties imposed by an illegitimate king. Its important to realise that if you were unhappy with what Britain was becoming in the eighteenth century - one colleague described it as a grubby, political machine, but it was a grubby, political machine that was creating, generating, great mercantile and commercial wealth - and that divided the public, for lack of a better term, which included quite a large proportion of the population who may not be the greater percentage of the population, might not have been politically sophisticated but they were increasingly becoming engaged in this issue of whether the development of a British economic and political statewas good or bad. There were always those who were against it and the Jacobite dynasty was the only alternative available to them, that was the only place to go. The seconday aims of the different factions within the movement were clearly not compatible. English and Welsh Tories had no desire to relinquish control over Ireland or Scotland. Neither they nor the Scots wanted to see a Catholic state in Ireland. In addition, the Tories were contemptuous of the Scots, whom they regarded as importunate beggars, and the Scottish Jacobites were the heirs to the fine old tradition of anglophobia. Yet despite these very evident tensions the Jacobite movement was to pose a continuous threat to the Hanoverian state throughout the first half of the century. Between 1688 and the 1750s the Jacobites were constantly plotting to overthrow the post-revolution regime. As well as the two civil wars fought in Ireland and Scotland there were at least two occassions in the 1690s when invasion of England was attempted in alliance with the French. There was an attempt to invade Scotland in 1708, further rising in 1715 and 1719, and another in 1745. And between these events there was an ongoing drumbeat of conspiracy and attempted alliance with European Great Powers. The rising of 1745 was the last serious attempt to return a Stuart monarch to power in the British Isles. Jacobite forces had seized Edinburgh, and then crossed the border into England, making it as far south as Derby. However, after the English support promised by Charles Edward had failed to materialise, his Scottish officers fearing isolation in a hostile country demanded a retreat. The Jacobite army was finally defeated by government forces at Culloden in 1746. The Jacobites did take control of a very large area, possibly most of Scotland, for a brief period in the autumn of 1745. It never even came close, however, to doing so in England. And there you see the disparity in strength between the proportion of the Scottish population that were willing to either acquiesce in or support a Jacobite restoration in Scotland as compared with that proportion that were willing to support a Jacobite restoration in England. The defeat of the Jacobites in 1746 is often taken to be the point that marks the effective end of the movement as a serious political alternative. The British government and its forces took decisive steps to remove the threat once and for all. In the months that followed the defeat at Culloden, the Scottish Highlands - a stronghold of Stuart support - were to witness the systematic use of military terror in an attempt to intimidate and punish the local population. This was followed by a systematic attack on indigeneous language and culture. Parliament passed the notorious laws banning the wearing of Highland dress, the use of certain surnames and the playing of the pipes. This was reinforced by the intensified educational offensive of the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. The aim was to transform the culture of the Highlands, by undermining the traditional clan structure, by disseminating English language and manners, and by instilling in the natives the values of industry, morality and the true religion. This transformation was not to be acheived by force alone. Basic industries like tanning, whaling and paper-making were subsidised, albeit with money from confiscated Jacobite estates, and schools were set up to teach the mechanics of linen production. In order to ensure their loyalty, it was believed that Scottish Highlanders would need to see first hand the benefits and prosperity that union would bring. I think there is a neglected element that within Scotland Jacobitism is seen as a broken reed. Scotland suffers the repercussions of failure in 1746. The Jacobite claimant to the throne is rescued by the French, his leading Scottish adherents, many of them escaped to France and don't suffer the repression and the reprisals, the loss of property, the loss of lives, that became the fate of many of those who had become associated with the Jacobite rebellion at that time. So although there continue to be Jacobite plots into the 1750s, theres still interest in the Jacobite cause up till at least the 1760s, many families that had formerly been Jacobite, and sometimes it could be in generational terms, that the sons, the children of those who had been loyal to the idea of a Jacobite cause having witnessed the very real cost of that loyalty changed their priorities as their parents became older and passed away and they took over responsibility for family fortunes. By the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, even Scotland's most rebellious elements appeared to have been successfully integrated into the British state. For the first time ever, the British army had been able to recruit men on a massive scale from the Scottish Highlands. Those clans that had taken up arms against the Union in 1715 and 1745 had been wooed to the British cause by way of favours and promotions for their former cheiftains. For nearly seventy years Jacobitism had been the mortal enemy of the prevailing political order in the British Isles. Yet the new British state survived its severest internal threat, and emerged from this period strengthened and empowered. As much as Jacobitism gave the opponents of the established order a common cause to rally around, it also gave the supporters of the status quo a defining Other. The preservation of the Hanoverian state became a genuinely British interest. English, Scots, Welsh and Irish all fought to defend the established Whig order against the enemy within. Many came to see the status quo as the only way to preserve their way of life and their property as well as their religious beliefs. But just as Jacobitism was a complicated phenomenon with many strands, so too was an emerging British patriotism. In the early eighteenth century Britishness still had strong Welsh associations. The ancient Britons were believed to have been completely driven out of England by the Saxons during the dark ages, and the modern Welsh were viewed as their descendents. Although the Tudors had appropriated Britishness for the English court as an aspect of their legitimising programme, the identification no longer persisted. In common parlance the word British was used in Ireland, especially in the province of Ulster, as a shorthand meaning English and Scots, but within Britain Welsh distinctiveness was often still expressed in British terms. The Celtic antiquary Edward Llyud claimed to be not an Englishman, but an old Briton, and the Society of Ancient Britons was a London Welsh organisation. The union itself that had brought about the creation of the British state wasn't the political realisation of a deeper sense of nationhood that united the peoples of the mainland. How then can we account for the growing acceptance of a British identity, something that emerges particularly during the course of the eighteenth century? It has been powerfully argued, and often repeated, that what was important was not a consensus at home but a strong sense of dissimilarity from those without that would provide the essential cement in the creation of a lasting British identity. And it was Britain's often actively hostile relationship to France that would bring Britons together and shape how they thought about themselves and their country. Relations between Britain and France have been far more mixed than is often thought, but it is the case that between 1689 and the battle of Waterloo in 1815 there was a succession of wars that got bigger and bigger between Britain and France. Wars over the succession, wars over trade, increasingly wars over imperial domination and this succession of wars inevitably embittered, or could embitter, relations on both sides. There was also the religious dynamic. Although there are many forms of Protestantism in Great Britain, Protestantism is by far the majority position, whereas by the end of the seventeenth century France has established itself as the foremost Catholic power. So, for some, this is the essence of the divide, the fact that France is Catholic, Britain is predominantly a Protestant polity. Theres also rivalry, rivalry for trade, rivalry for colonies. But theres also collaboration and a kind of mutual obsession which can turn into admiration. Increasingly as the eighteenth century progresses and Britain becomes more and more a successful state you get French intellectuals studying the British constitutional system, in some cases admiring British fashions in manufacturing, clothes, the freedom of print. Conversely you get on the British side of course lots of traders have close commercial links with France and know a lot of French people, a lot of French authored works are translated into English, and among the aristocracy it is normal to, both male and female elite figures, learn French automatically, its very unusual if they don't. So at one and the same time you get real sources of hostility, but you also get close engagement and a degree of mutual obsession. They've got their hooks into each other so closely its difficult for Britain and France to draw entirely apart. For much of the century the contrasts drawn by caricaturists in England were between emaciated French peasants and sturdy English yeoman, between absolutist, Catholic France and tolerant Protestant England. Although these stereotypes persisted, by the time of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars it was the contrast between French and British versions of political liberty that had become the dominant theme. And whilst the wars of the eighteenth century were certainly important in creating a new matter of Britain, a shared military history with its own pantheon of heroes, the image of Britons as a peculiarly free people was sustained by more than just warfare; it drew on a longer tradition of political liberty, but one that was distinctively English. At the heart of English national consciousness was a pride in the nation's ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, much admired for their libertarian ways. But the story of English liberty also had to incorporate the original British population plus the more problemmatic waves of Danes and Normans who followed. Whigs and Tories, royalists and radicals, could all make use of this English past; with continuity or disruption being stressed according to political or ideological imperatives. The influential whig interpretation of English history that emerged in the eighteenth century laid especial stress on the events of 1688 and the so-called Glorious Revolution as the culmination of a longer process of modernisation that had led to the civil liberties enjoyed by contemporary Englishmen. Scotland had its own tradition of libertarian writing that celebrated the preservation of its historic independence and the dynastic integrity of its monarchy. However, this older history collapsed under criticism from a new breed of Scottish historian, men like David Hume and William Robertson, who, as part of a wider European Enlightenment, sought to explain the emergence of a distinctively modern kind of political liberty. This was not simply about the preservation of national borders or the keeping in check of tyrannical kings, but a liberty which allowed all men to enjoy security of property and person under the rule of law. The new history in Scotland was based on the insight that true liberty was a by-product of the forces of modernity and that Scottish society had historically been more backward and benighted than England's. Not only had Scotland's union with England transformed its economic fortunes, Scottish society had been rescued from its feudal past through incorporation with its more civilised neighbour. This is not to say that the likes of Hume saw the achievement of liberty within England as the inevitable by-product of progress or the flowering of some genius inherent in its people. Rather it was the result of complex causes and fortuitous circumstance. Liberty was a fragile thing, liable to obstruction or even erosion, and it was the responsibility of enlightened Scots to remind their English neighbours, so often prone to self-congratulation, of this fact. Despite the intellectual revolutions of mid-century, some literati continued to believe that Celtic manners or Scoto-Gothic institutions were parts of a special Scottish contribution to the British whig heritage. To them, liberty could be traced, albeit in an unrefined form, in Celtic as well as Anglo-Saxon history. These, however, were lone voices against a wider academic tide, one that was to have a profound influence on the Scottish political nation. While educated Scots might retain an emotional bond to the Scottish past, the history to which they had been admitted was more relevant to an understanding of contemporary institutions, politics and society. Some, like David Hume, were even seemingly happy to forget their own Scottishness. Hume retitled his History of Great Britain as a History of England and felt comfortable referring to himself as an Englishman. The slippage between the use of the terms England and Britain, so often construed as simple arrogance on the part of the English, reflected a wider assumption within British political culture about the nature of the new state. The de facto continuity of the historic English parliament after 1707, albeit with additional Scottish members, seemed to confirm that Britain's political heritage resided in the history of English institutions. This acceptance of an English past to the British present even provided a convincing platform for Scottish radicals who, during the 1790s, demanded the restoration of the ancient Saxon consitution of their forefathers suppressed by the Norman Yoke of 1066. The growing acceptance of the union north of the border, as both beneficial and transformative for Scotland, was not accompanied by a rethinking of a new and distinctively British political identity. English politicians were comfortable with the idea of Britain as little more than a benign extension of England, and this view was not radically challenged by the new history in Scotland which saw a country, hitherto backward and benighted, positively transformed by the experience of Anglicisation. For enlightened Scots, the British liberties in which they now participated rested on a much longer English tradition. One of the cements in Britishness is a very widespread view that Briton are peculiarly free that their mixed constitution is the envy of the world, that they have more religious tolerance, they have a freer Press, they have a more limited monarchy than other European powers. Now not all of this complacency was entirely unjustified although it was sometimes excessive, but this cult of superior liberties can be used in two ways. By conservatives it can be used to legitimize the existing order, but of course radicals can plug into this to you by saying yes we are free Britons and therefore we must become even more free and we must protect our freedom, and we can only do this by carrying out further reforms. And increasingly from the 1750s 1760s you're getting different strands of radical protest saying that patriotism really belongs to us in a particular way because we are taking this icon of British freedom and we are pushing it further. Despite being considered the freest in the world British society during the 18th century remained divided by a hierarchy of orders. The ruling aristocratic elite dominated the royal court, the cabinet, both houses of Parliament and the law courts, and expected the state churches to teach the common people to obey those in positions of authority. They believed they had a right to govern their social inferiors and viewed democracy as inherently unstable and destined to degenerate into anarchy. Although only a propertied minority had an active role in government this didn't mean that they believed they could act in a tyrannical or oppressive fashion. They were expected to maintain public order, to deliver justice, and to uphold the lives liberty and property of all British subjects. But during the course of the 18th century we can see the emergence of groups critical of this social arrangement and coming to demand change and political reform. This development is often associated with that rather vague and amorphous group, and irritant of the professional historian, the ever-rising middling classes many of whom increasingly sought a great influence in both local and national politics. All the recent historiography of the late 17th and early 18th century stresses the extent to which these sorts of people are already incorporated and active and vocal in politics already. So whereas an older historiography made it sound as if they were newly emerging and having their voices heard for the first time I don't think but can still say that in the light of recent research. But in the first part of the century they tend to be active and involved under elite leadership that's fairly acceptable to them because the kind of issues which divides people religious issues, issues about which dynasty should be ruling the country are not issues which divide opinion along straightforwardly social lines. So you get kind of vertical political groupings within which these middle classes very broadly defined can play a part, make a contribution. Later in the century partly what's happening I think is that a reshuffling in the positions of the political elite is leading quite a lot of these people who inherit a tradition of political activity to think we just can't trust these elite leaders anymore they're all just out for themselves, none of them are really going to serve the interests of people like us so we need to find a way of developing independent voice in politics, so it's not the voice, it's the need to have an independent voice that's the novelty. Reform ideas however were to come from a wide spectrum. From within the political class itself their were opposition MP's who simply wanted to reform the practices of parliament, and at the other extreme dissenters and natural rights radicals advocates of universal suffrage who wanted a root and branch reform of the system. Part of the reason radicalism is becoming more explicit in the second half of the 18th century is the coming first of the American Revolution and the French Revolution competing systems of liberation competing sets of political ideals. And as a result you are getting some dissidents, some radicals, some reformers throughout Great Britain and indeed in Ireland arguing that well we were the freest people in Europe but perhaps we no longer are and we must go back and make things even better. You get people who are adopting ideas from the United States and France as for example the idea of a written constitution. So you get someone like Tom Paine who spends his life moving between Britain, France and the United States saying well actually everybody talks about the glories of the British constitution but you don't have a constitution because it isn't written down so we need reform. And many of the supporters for Paine, these corresponding clubs that really start mushrooming through Great Britain in the 1790s, call themselves patriotic societies because they want to claim patriotism for themselves, as people who are struggling to make things better. So there are people in a kind of Thomas Paine mould who say what we want is a rational system, the British system is not rational and should be reconstructed from the ground up, so we can all live better, the 18th century has been a disaster, self-aggrandizing nations have gone around fighting wars that kill people and waste a lot of money and we need to turn our back on all that kind of thing and create a new sort of state and society. And then you get another view which is that the past is not sacrosanct but it's only safe imprudent to try to change things gradually and that's Edmund Burke's position, so Edmund Burke is actually very unusual in the 1790s in that although he's very worried about the French Revolution he still says reform is a good thing, that's not a common position to hold. There's a third view which I think people sometimes adopt tactically because it sounds like something you're much more likely to get away with than the Paineite kind of stuff, and sometimes adopt because they think it will resonate with more people and maybe in some ways resonates with them too, and that's an approach which says let's not think that anything we want is abstract let alone foreign we quite understand why it doesn't appeal to people to think we can just discard the whole of English history and start doing things in some new way, but actually in the English past, perhaps in the quite distant English past, the Anglo-Saxon past we've got models of how to do things which are the true Englishness, its way of presenting the case for radical change that tries to suggest its grounded in something local and natural to the environment rather than being something philosophers have dreamt up or some kind of foreign import. The outbreak of evolution in France in 1789 was to be a pivotal moment for the reform movements in Britain many welcomed what was happening across the channel as France's own version of the Glorious Revolution and saw these events as only furthering the cause of reform back home. But as the violence escalated and war with the new France seemed imminent the very word reform became tainted by its association with these bloody consequences. Now that's not to say that what you get is straightforwardly a conservative reaction because a lot of these people who are worried about what's happening in France are people who weren't previously quite interested in reforming things in Britain and they haven't totally abandon that notion they've just become very very cautious about whether this is the right time to be doing it and how one might go about doing it. Of course the French Revolution taught people that you can change your rulers, that you can abolish feudalism, you can execute your king, you can do all these things, but it seemed to many people in Britain that the immediate consequences of these actions anarchy in France, Civil War, European war were in fact was so disastrous that we certainly musn't do them here and so in its early stages, and indeed in its middle stages, the French Revolution and its consequences frightened British people off. Now having said that of course, the theories underpinning the French Revolution about the transformation of subjects into citizens the need for reform, the need for the better treatmentment of the lower orders and so forth, these messages in spite of what was happening in France, in spite of these unhappy consequences did inspire intellectuals, reformers and so on, and these were the seeds that were to be harvested the in the nineteenth century. And in Ireland, at least, they were to lead almost directly to the revolution, the attempted revolution, of 1798. So we shouldn't eliminate the possibility that the French Revolution had really quite significant consequence upon the British state. Including Ireland in any discussion of ideas of Britishness is deeply contentious the result of the turbulent history of the union in the 19th and 20th centuries. English kings and statesman had for many centuries seen Ireland as a legitimate sphere of influence as subordinate in fact to the interests of the mainland this relationship was confirmed in the 16th century when Ireland's status was changed from a separate Lordship to a puppet Kingdom a possession of the English crown. But it was the religious Reformation in England the attempt to export it to Ireland that was to cast a long shadow over the history both islands. From the mid 16th to the mid 17th centuries successive English administrations pursued a policy of settlement or plantation. English and Scottish settlers, through their exemplary model of civility and the true Protestant religion, would have it was hoped a transformative effect on the barbarous Catholic Irish it was the strengthening of this religious divide between Catholics on the one hand, a group that included the so called Old English descendants of an earlier wave of migration, and more recent Protestant settlers on the other that was to become the key faultline in Irish political life during the eighteenth century. Ever since the Reformation a struggle for power had been waged between the Catholic and Protestant elites of Irish society. Following the victory if we might forces in 1691 the Protestant community determined to crush the Catholic threat once and for all. Over the next three decades legislation was passed that was designed to severely curtail the civil and religious rights of Ireland's Catholic population. Many people not just Irish people believe that the British government of Ireland in the eighteenth century was harsh, oppressive, colonial and so forth, and in certain respects it was. The presence of a British army, of a British settler class reinforced by the penal laws which in the early eighteenth-century excluded Catholics from power almost entirely, in theory at least almost outlawed the practice of the Catholic religion. The political relationship between the two countries was one of subordination. Whilst the Declaratory Act of 1720 effectively established the right at the Westminster Parliament to legislate directly for Ireland British politicians also sought to manage Irish affairs through a network of elite patronage. It is possible of course to condemn the British rule over Ireland in the eighteenth century which was certainly harsh but two things perhaps need to be said if not entirely to be believed. One is that in spite of all this ferocious legislation it was pretty patchily enforced and in effect in the last analysis the practice of the Catholic religion continued. I'm not sure if nobody was executed for their religion but if so it was a very rare occurrence. The other thing is this, certainly in the first half of the eighteenth century nothing is more significant than the relative rural peace of Ireland. Ireland isn't in flames with risings and rebellions and so on, Ireland is no different from many European countries in having a reasonably settled if difficult and in many ways poverty-stricken environment. Now in the second half of the eighteenth century all this was to change. During the American War of Independence with Britain overstretched abroad Protestant Patriots were able to negotiate significant concessions and a greater degree of autonomy for their parliament, but it was to be the French Revolution that was to catalyse radical opinion and provide the inspiration for the events of 1798. Those within the Protestant tradition had for a long time seen their Catholic neighbours as people enslaved by their church, people who couldn't be treated as common citizens. But the revolution in France, where the population was overthrowing the shackles of monarchy and papacy, seemed to a small but significant minority of Protestants to open up the possibility of the engagement of Catholics as citizens in a secular Irish Republic. Against a background of a wider European Enlightenment that promoted ideas of religious toleration and with an eye on Ireland's large reserve of manpower, potential recruits to the British military cause, significant concessions had already been granted to Irish Catholics in the 1780s and nineties. Although still excluded from Parliament and the top civil and military posts, these relief acts removed restrictions on religious practice, education and economic activity, and restored to Catholics the right to vote to sit on juries, to practice law and to hold military commissions and offices under the crown. But by the mid 1790s alarmed by the strength of the reaction to the concessions already granted the government set out to reassure Protestant opinion and to damp down Catholic hopes of further gains. All the while popular disaffection continue to grow. The demographic explosion of the second half of the century had not been accompanied by either agriculture reform or sufficient levels of economic growth. Existing tensions within Irish society have been exacerbated and rural terrorism was on the increase as landlord sought to squeeze profits from their Irish estates. From the summer of 1795 the Republican United Irishmen, originally a movement for parliamentary reform, reorganized themselves as a clandestine organization working for an armed insurrection with the backing of revolutionary France. They also formed an alliance with Catholic defenders a proletarian body inspired by combination of Catholic sectarianism and crude but potent aspirations to social and political revolution. As armed raids and assassinations multiplied the authorities replied with increasingly ruthless repression. And the sense of imminent crisis also encouraged an ever more open alliance between the forces of the state and those of militant Protestantism. The rebellion which finally broke out in the summer of 1798 has been described as probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history. An estimated 30,000 people died in four separate outbreaks, one of which was inspired by the belated arrival of a small French force. In the southeast in particular the insurrection turned into a vicious sectarian war. I think it was clear that existing arrangements namely the existence of an Irish parliament and a relatively independent Irish political system in the age of the French Revolution, in the age of Napoleon, wasn't enough, Ireland was running out of control. The existing system was no longer working and while it might be possible after 1798 to quell the rebellion and to reassert English power of course it could happen again. And therefore what the rebellion 1798 taught British politicians was that for Ireland to be safe for England and that meant not being used as a launching pad for a French invasion of England, Ireland could be secured by integration with England, by Union, and that was the legitimation, the justification for the act of union of 1801. I think the political union with Ireland in 1801 was carried out at the instigation of Scots, not all Scots, but Scottish politicians who argued that union had worked for Scotland and that it would work for Ireland. In retrospect we know that that's wrong but at the time there was great confidence, that I think reflects the confidence of the Scottish Enlightenment, that education, political stability, the rule of law, would mean that any people would be able to achieve modern economic benefits and cultural progress. And I think I've heard it observed that Enlightenment thinkers, and in Ireland Enlightenment thinkers were confident that the linguistic and religious divisions that were so deeply entrenched in Irish society would inevitably pass away as a consequence of Ireland through modernization increasing its wealth and the level of education of its population. The British Prime Minister William Pitt had hoped that the creation of the new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland would be accompanied by the full emancipation of its Catholic subjects. However George III having sworn to uphold his coronation oath and the powers and prerogatives in the Anglican Church refused to sign any such act if it was passed to him. In the face of this threatened veto Pitt resigned and so was unable to deliver on his promise of emancipation. Even in the wake at the rebellion the act of union had actually been supported by the great majority of propertied Catholics who believed that it would be swiftly followed by full admission to civil liberties. The common assumption is that following the disappointment of 1801 Catholics turned to demand the repeal of the union and for the restoration of parliamentary independence, leaving Protestants to discover that the Union many of them had initially opposed was in fact their best defense against an increasingly well-organized and assertive Catholic majority. There can be no doubt the religion was a major reason for the failure of the British state to turn political control into political integration but it's easy with the perspective of hindsight to conclude that the union was necessarily doomed to failure from the start. Following the achievement of full Catholic Emancipation in 1829 the leader of the mass agitation and future republican icon Daniel O'Connell between 1834 and 1840 abandoned his demand for the repeal of the Act of Union in favour of alliance with the Whig Party, announcing that the people of Ireland were prepared if treated with justice and equity to become a kind of west Briton. Even at this point allegiances where it seems still negotiable and in effect Irish-Catholic politics were to balance uncertainly for another half century between two alternative lines of development, on the one hand the pursuit of self-determination on the other assimilation, along with Wales, Scotland, English nonconformity, and a section of the English working class into the anti-establishment coalition that was British Liberalism. In the late 17th century the Irish, Scottish and English elites, while no doubt there were contacts between them on the political and military level, they remained reasonably discreit. One of the great themes of the eighteenth century is the emergence of a relatively anglicised, British, elite. There was much intermarriage in the eighteenth century between members of the elite of different countries and certainly a tendency for English heirs to estates to marry wealthy Scots and Irish heiresses and daughters and so forth. An increasing tendency for them to receive a common education and to embark upon common careers especially in the military and so forth. So rather than having three or four separate elites you can see them coming together to fuse, to become a much more coherent ruling order. I think theres also a growing sense of national bombast, national conceit, which is British national bombast, and British national conceit as far as some people are concerned, and you can see that in shifts in language, shifts in cartography, shifts in the naming of societies, this emphasis on Britishness. And an early aspect of that is the creation of the British Museum, and you get a growing number of these British organisations. I think these politicians are aware of themselves as running a British empire, maintaining a British army, a British navy, ruling through a British constitution, I think by the early nineteenth century we have reached that point where the notion of Britishness has come to serve as a phrase which they use, of which they're conscious. Now that doesn't mean to say that what one may term the sub-national identities - Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England - have disappeared, far from it, in fact you can argue quite potently that notions of Scottishness and Irishness strengthen during the eighteenth century, but that almost all Scots and some members, some of the Irish, come to believe that it is within a Britannic, a Britannic state, a Britannic universe, that their Scottishness can be expressed and developed and strengthened, and to some extent that is true of Ireland as well. Historians always talk about the problems with Ireland, we have to remember that British government started to rearm the celtic countries in the late eighteenth century, the British army was full of Irish, in fact many of the people who put down the Irish rebellion in 1790 were Irish. So Britishness is establishing itself as a viable political identity and practice, to maintain the British Isles, the British empire, and so forth, at just the same moment as some of the sub-national identities are strengthening, but coming to accept their existence within a Britannic framework. There were strong dynamics, particularly at the patrician level of society, that encouraged integration and fostered a shared sense of British identity. The monarch, whose figure had been so divisive for much of the 18th century, had emerged during the Wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France as a unifying symbol of British loyalty. But Britain remained a complex polity; difference persisted and continued to matter. At times a loose Protestantism, often pointed to as one of the pillars of British identity, could act as a force for cohesion, but at other times the divides between Protestant denominations seemed far worse. The Church most vigorously persecuted in Britain was not the Catholic but the Episcopalian, Protestant Church in Scotland, effectively broken by the persecution unleashed against it by the Whig regime in London. Especially further down the social scale a distinct sense of national difference persisted. Scots were renowned in London for their tendency to cluster together, to favour each other in business, essentially to look out for each other, so too the Welsh. And a sense of being surrounded and to some extent overwhelmed by the English was present in both Scots and Welsh culture. Well I think this idea of inventing and resisting Britain has been explored by several historians, that there are those in Scotland - and there are those in Wales - who see British union as offering a broader arena offering opportunities either to safeguard Protestantism or provide greater economic opportunities for economic development, those two reasons I think in particular, but there were always elements in Scotland and I think in Wales as well that resisted the idea of Britain out of a belief that intrinsically it would involve greater domination by English interests over what could be seen as peripheral regions within a British island. I think that again is something that emerges or develops over the course of the eighteenth century as financial power, political power, social change gathers pace in the south east of the island of Britain and that accentuates these changes. For a long time, historians have tended to assume that the lower orders of society, lacking the sophistication and cosmopolitan inclincations of their superiors, were more responsive to stereotype and crude prejudice - and easily roused by nationalist tub-thumpers. Recent research, however, reveals that we should be more wary about making such a generalisation. Even when their countries were at war English and French fishermen could set aside questions of nationality in pursuit of a shared interest. Fishing communities in places like Harwich and Dunkirk negotiated their own peace treaties to protect their boats from warships and privateers and then lobbied their respective governments for their enactment. Whats perhaps even more interesting is that whilst a commonality with their fellow fishermen might be stressed when negotiating these cross-channel treaties, they might also then employ patriotic rhetoric when dealing with the agents of the state, making much of their contribution to the wider, public good. Rather than being simply imprisoned by the shackles of national hatred the people of the eighteenth century, even towards the bottom of the social scale, were able to negotiate multiple identities in the pursuit of their own interests. They inhabitited a complex world of belonging in which a national identity was one among many. The metaphor I used when I wrote Britons, and it was a metaphor that I borrowed from Eric Hobsbawm, and most of us do in fact although we may not necessarily work it out or put that into words. In some cases I think a growing sense of Britishness could crowd out other identities or put pressure on them, but if you look at people's writings and their behaviour in different contexts you often find that they're drawing on different identities at different times. It has been argued that the main unit of belonging for most people in the eighteenth century, and in fact well into the nineteenth, was not the nation but the parish. Despite increasing urbanisation, and developments in communication and mobility, most of the population still lived - by today's standards - in relatively isolated rural communities. The word foreigner itself was most frequently used to describe someone not from another country but from outside the local area. Far from documenting the steady, growing awareness of a collective class consciousness, records reveal a resistance to outsiders, the fierce protection of local rights, and village rivalries at times escalating into open violence. Emerging ideas of Britishness, and of a wider national identity, would have remained largely irrelevant in the everyday life of communities divided not by national borders but by village boundaries. Perhaps during the nineteenth century Britain's expanding empire would provide the wider context in which the British could overcome their own internal differences and embrace an inclusive imperial identity.