British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (review)

British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800. By Colin Kidd (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 302 pp. $59.95

With impressive erudition, Kidd examines the origins of ethnic identities, or to be more precise, historicizes the question of ethnic identity by showing the intellectual pressures exerted upon the Biblical account of human beginnings by the explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. While investigating the permutations of English, Irish, Scottish, and Anglo-American thinking about the postdeluvian diaspora of Noah's descendents in more detail than most readers would wish for, he succeeds in demonstrating the havoc wreaked upon a closed conceptual world when it is ripped apart by events.

As Kidd succinctly puts it, "the defense of Scripture was the primary concern of ethnic theology." Yet, his antiquarians attached their particular national and ethnic identities to the larger truths of universal history, providing a scholarly basis for the patriotism that began to flourish in the eighteenth century. One gets the impression that history could never again be that important to the political assertions or religious convictions of the larger community of readers.

Again with pungency, Kidd asserts that "early modern Europeans were not intellectually programmed for ethnic hatred" because their theology stressed an underlying human unity. The attempt to explain the existence of peoples not mentioned in the Bible, and the nature of their spiritual convictions, promoted three centuries of writing that Kidd dubs ethnic theology. That this situation also encouraged heterodox challenges to the Biblical story of origins only complicated matters.

Kidd's is a dense account, encyclopedic in its sweep and studded with a specialized vocabulary. It explores a succession of British exegetical writings, extricating their intellectual debts from the thicket of biblical and historical arguments. Certainly not interdisciplinary--the study follows a classic methodology of intellectual history--it nonetheless demonstrates convincingly that the roots of cosmology, geology, linguistics, and ethnology lie in sacred history.

Joyce Appleby
University of California, Los Angeles

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