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Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2000) 151-153



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Book Review

Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850

Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730

Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660-1780


Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds. Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pp. 318. $64.95 cloth.

Paul Halliday. Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pp. 393. $69.95 cloth.

Carl B. Estabrook. Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660-1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Pp. 316. $79.95 cloth.

The late 1980s were difficult times for early modern British history. It seemed then that the entire enterprise consisted of the issuing of stern rebukes that condemned the entire profession for having both overlooked evidence that was important to the story, and for fragmenting the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to such a degree that historical writing had been reduced to a series of vignettes. Others noted that one really couldn't write proper history without surveying events in all three kingdoms. Still others (and here, as elsewhere, a bitter generational / disciplinary battle ensued) intoned about the dangers of present-mindedness, and the trend toward "periodisation." To a very real extent then, historiographical criticism replaced the business of writing history itself. However, there were positive results as well; not the least of these was a renewed interest in religion and "identity," whether national or local. Yet religion and identity are difficult categories, and while the works under review demonstrate the ways in which they improve our grasp of a difficult period, they reveal also that such categories must be treated with precision, and demonstrate the consequences of the failure to do so.

Tony Claydon and Ian McBride have assembled a fine range of essays which evaluate the contribution made by Protestantism to national identity. There are chapters by those who have been instrumental in redirecting our interest toward the crucial problem of religion: Colin Haydon on the impact on anti-Catholic feeling in eighteenth-century England, Steven Pincus on the revolution of 1688, Brian Young on the fragmented Church of England, as well as essays on Scotland, Ireland and the New World. Protestantism, suggest the editors in the introductory essay, stood as "an objective of the community," by which people "put faith at the center of their identity"(26).

Religious identity also figures prominently in Halliday's analysis of England's corporations, among which he finds an early notion of "party" government. This is not party in the sense of those bodies present in parliament, but rather in a litigious sense, as in parties to a law suit. For it was the courts to which various local personalities turned when opponents needed to be thrust from office. As Halliday helpfully reminds us: "The basis for exclusion came to be defined overwhelmingly in terms of religious sympathies"(18). The study takes as its focus the courts of the King's Bench, in order to show how both the crown and local politicians employed them in the attempt to diminish the ill effects of partisanship in the localities. The result Halliday terms the "paradox of partisan politics," that is, "Partisan strife persisted as the efforts of each local party to gain [End Page 151] control, expel its opponents, and recreate the unity of the righteous cancelled one another out"(15).

From the nation and the towns, we move straight into the cupboards of Bristoleans. Professor Estabrook examines the geographical divide between Bristol and its environs in order to show that there existed also discrete habits of mind, characterised here as "urbane" and "rustic." This is a detailed analysis, and so we learn...

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