Four Nations Approaches to Modern 'British' History

A (Dis)United Kingdom?

Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Margaret Scull, Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Margaret Scull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137601421
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars to evaluate the viability of four nations approaches to the history of the United Kingdom from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It recognises the separate histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and explores the extent to which they share a common, 'British' history. They are entwined, with the points at which they interweave and detach dependent upon the nature of our inquiry, where we locate our 'core' and our 'periphery', and the 'cause' and 'effect' of our subject.
The collection demonstrates that four nations frameworks are relevant to a variety of topics and tests the limits of the methodology. The chapters illuminate the changing shape of modern British history writing, and provide fresh perspectives on subjects ranging from state governance, nationalism and Unionism, economics, cultural identities and social networking.

Part I
Methodology

© The Author(s) 2018

Naomi Lloyd-Jones and Margaret M. Scull (eds.)Four Nations Approaches to Modern 'British' Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60142-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. A New Plea for an Old Subject? Four Nations History for the Modern Period

Naomi Lloyd-Jones^{1, 2} and Margaret M. Scull¹

(1)

Department of History, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

(2)

Hertford College, University of Oxford, Catte Street, Oxford, OX1 3BW, UK

Naomi Lloyd-Jones (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Margaret M. Scull (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Four nations historyUnited KingdomHistoriographyMethodologyBritish history

The authors are grateful to Joel Barnes, Matthew Glencross, Andrew Harrison and Paul Readman for reading drafts of this chapter.

End Abstract

J.G.A. Pocock’s famed clarion call for the recovery of the concept of ‘British history’ and the inauguration of a ‘new subject’ is now more than forty years old. Pocock lamented a lack of ‘histories of Britain’ and the dominance of what grievously amounted to ‘histories of England’, in which the Welsh, Scottish and Irish appeared ‘when, and only when, their doings assume[d] power to disturb the tenor of English politics.’ This unevenness was compounded by the parallel writing of ‘histories of Wales, Scotland [and] Ireland’ as ‘separate enterprises’ within ‘separate historiographical traditions’, encountered by ‘limited and fragmented publics’. ¹ He would later describe Anglocentric and Anglophobic historiographies as two sides of the same coin, which, if fused, would afford but a synthetic imitation of a true British history. ² For Pocock, within its more immediate cartographical confines, ‘British history’ denoted ‘the historiography of no single nation but of a problematic and uncompleted experiment in the creation and interaction of several nations.’ ³ His challenge was most comprehensively taken up in the 1990s by early modernists who emphasised the need to place given points in history into their ‘British’ context, to tease out ‘forgotten’ dimensions and establish more complete narratives. The edited collections generated by a flurry of symposia led to the emergence of what David Cannadine has called a ‘school of self-consciously “British” historians’. ⁴ The Pocockian inheritance was conspicuous in these historians’ vocabulary: where Pocock’s suggested prototype had been for a ‘pluralist approach’, ⁵ proponents of the ‘New British History’ strove to achieve ‘a multiperspectival history’ and ‘an holistic or organic account’ of events in the isles. ⁶ This was, at last, the ‘“Britishing” of British history’, as Keith Robbins deftly described it. ⁷

The aim of this collection is not to reinvent the wheel that Pocock crafted and the New British historians spun. The ‘British’ ‘turn’ has already taken place. Crucially, it problematised a field of enquiry. It confronted our taxonomical presuppositions and encouraged us to think critically about the criteria with which we establish the geographical breadth and margins of our studies, prompting both the decentring of historical accounts and the refashioning of a ‘British’ metanarrative. ‘British history’ was to an extent a subject interposed between the discrete histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and (to a far lesser degree) Wales, designed primarily to interrogate the dynamics of their coming together. It was at the same time an endeavour to establish an overarching frame of reference with which to describe a shared existence. The New British History replaced neither the practices of ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘Irish’ histories nor Anglocentric readings of critical episodes and phenomena in which the non-English parts of the United Kingdom are unhelpfully, and often inaccurately, partitioned into a ‘Celtic fringe’. ⁸ It has indeed been accused of discounting their dissimilarities and of sustaining a focus on a suspiciously ‘English’-looking core. It took nearly twenty years for Pocock’s historiographical and semantic experiment to be embraced with any urgency or consistency, and a further two decades for a collection such as this, with an explicit emphasis on the modern period, to emerge. The stop–start nature of this field of historical enquiry can in part be attributed to fatigue: by the early twenty-first century, the debate over the New British History and its nomenclatures had in one sense come full circle, culminating as it had begun, in a dispute over how not to write history.

Does this collection therefore represent a new plea for an old subject? In a sense, yes: fundamentally, its intention is not to totalise the histories of these islands, but to explore how polycentric narratives can be achieved. However, it also embodies a desire for a new ‘new’ subject: a practicable, sustainable ‘four nations history’ for the modern period. The disjuncture between modern ‘British’ and ‘national’ narratives is alive and well, with too few bodies of work concerned with both their multifaceted interplays and distinctive experiences. With the exception of an underutilised collection edited by Sean Connolly, ⁹ the application of Pocock’s entreaty has been directed principally at understanding the mechanics of early modern state construction. If it is to be successful, ‘British’ history must be occupied by more than the making of Britain. Nor should four nations history by extension concentrate on how, once made, the state was maintained and administered. This collection is less a study of integration and more one of interactions, across and within national boundaries. It does not discount the importance of state formation but rather proposes fresh angles from which this process can be considered. The shift in periodisation makes new themes available, necessitates the asking of different questions, and presents distinct problems for the conceptualisation and analysis of that period’s history. This collection encompasses the cultural, social, economic, intellectual and (low) political history of the United Kingdom in the period between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among other aims, we aspire to rebalance what Colin Kidd has called the ‘lopsidedness’ of the New British History, ¹⁰ in which Wales occupied but a tangential position. That said, we do not seek to impose a symmetry upon the United Kingdom. Although it has its shortcomings, by its very terminology, ‘four nations’ is less ‘wholeistic’ ¹¹ and perceptibly more pluralistic than ‘British history’.

If we are to construct genuinely polycentric narratives, there is not, and cannot be, a one-size-fits-all model. It is for this reason that we encounter a semantic minefield when attempting to define our subject. It is ironic that the absence of a categorical label—and indeed category of study—is indicative of precisely why we need multidimensional histories. The Union project, as Robert Colls has put it, resulted in ‘a set of British peoples with a sense of their own nationality but never quite sure of how to talk about themselves as a collective of nations’, ¹² an awkwardness that somehow feels familiarly ‘British’. As editors, we use the umbrella term ‘four nations’—popularised by Hugh Kearney—as a heuristic device, in recognition of the separate national histories and in acknowledgement of the complications arising from the fact of their forming a larger polity, represented in and governed by a united parliament, for the majority of the period covered by this collection. If Pocock envisaged ‘British history’ as archipelagic and diasporic in scope, ¹³ ‘four nations’ more firmly situates the parameters of study within the United Kingdom.

We view ‘four nations history’ as a methodology—a perspective with which our contributors agree to varying extents. From Kearney’s point of view, ‘The label “Four Nations” history is a reminder that the United Kingdom is a union of peoples’. ¹⁴ To this we may add that it is a prompt that we should recognise heterogeneities within the composite state. While its history is more than the sum of its parts, they should be considered in conjunction. The term’s (un)satisfactory tidiness invites us to question how we ought to conceptualise the relationships between the nations and their peoples, which were in turns linear, binary and parallel. This is not to suggest that the study of one, two or even three nations affords but an abridged history; it is instead an attempt to offer inclusive narratives of coexisting nationalities and ethnicities. Their histories shaped and informed one another’s—the extent to which they shared a ‘British’ history is interrogated, rather than assumed, throughout the pages of this collection. A ‘four nations’ history can be comparative, employed to study points of convergence, interaction and conflict, but it should also be capable of acknowledging that developments in the one were not always present in the other(s), and of asking why. In Raphael Samuel’s words, such history ‘widens the scope of scholarly enquiry’, ‘puts in question some of our more cocksure generalisations’ and ‘encourages us to think more geographically’. ¹⁵

*****

Pocock used the term ‘British history’ to ‘denote the plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier and marked by an increasing English political and cultural domination’, while emphasising that the ‘fact of a hegemony does not alter the fact of a plurality.’ ¹⁶ If English history was the ‘old subject’, the new was sensibly presumed to consist of, and be familiar with (but not to synthesise), ‘three modes of historical consciousness’: English, Scottish and Irish. ¹⁷ And yet, in acknowledging that such history was ‘remarkably difficult to write in other than English terms’, ¹⁸ Pocock’s examples of how a ‘British history’ might be realised certainly revolved around how the English polity infiltrated neighbouring societies and how the political and socio-cultural entities within its orbit responded to successive attempts at integration. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the New British History comprised two main thrusts: comparative and supra-narrative. For Joanna Innes, the benefits of comparison were threefold: it presented the opportunity to highlight ‘broader patterns of similarity and difference in the governance societies of the four nations’; it could enhance ‘our knowledge of the form and character of intellectual and cultural exchange’; and, finally, it provided us ‘with a richer context in which to assess and interpret the choices made in each.’ ¹⁹ Moreover, as Rees Davies surmised, ‘developments which are taken for granted in one country might appear much more surprising—and therefore demanding of an explanation—if we are forced to contrast them with what happened (or did not happen) e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Methodology
• 2. Practice
• Backmatter