National Identity in Great Britain and British North America, 1815-1851: The Role of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (review)

Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister, famously proclaimed during the general election of 1891, "A British subject I was born—a British subject I will die." Under the terms of the British North America Act that created modern Canada in 1867, MacDonald was indisputably a British subject. But did that, in itself, make him British? Or was he a Scot? Or should we think of him first and foremost as a Canadian? And were these possible national identities necessarily in conflict with one another? If not, what kinds of hybridities did they permit?

Britishness and its relationship to the established and enduring English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish identities, together with its relationship to identities formed in Britain's far-flung colonies, is the subject of this new study by Linda E. Connors of Columbia and independent scholar Mary Lou MacDonald. It is a useful contribution to the growing volume of scholarship that is now being devoted to British identity as it is destabilized by a range of internal factors: the revival of Scottish and Welsh nationality (and their political expression in nationalist parties and in devolved political institutions), a corresponding renewal of a specifically English identity, ongoing disputes over Northern Ireland's relationship to British nationhood, and the multicultural society created by post-WWII commonwealth immigration. There are also powerful external factors at work, such as Americanization, globalization, and the United Kingdom's pooled sovereignty within the European Union.

Historical, literary, and social scientific scholarship now stresses the intricacy and the contestability of Britishness and accepts its relatively recent origin and development. The welcome effect of this is to correct for earlier tendencies to overestimate the solidity of Britishness, and to read it back into periods in the history of the British Isles where it may have no proper place.

Princeton historian Linda Colley's Britons: The Forging of a Nation 1707-1837, published in 1992 against the background of the intensified debate over British identity occasioned by the Maastricht Treaty on European integration, is a landmark text in this scholarship. The book is an effective challenge to the various internal colonialist interpretations, according to which Britishness is the forceful imposition of Englishness that non-English peoples must either internalize or resist. Instead, Colley argues, a genuinely British national identity emerged between the 1707 union of the English and Scottish parliaments and Victoria's ascent to the throne 130 years later—a national identity that neither supplanted nor contradicted older national and regional identities within the British Isles.

Colley's analysis takes as its starting point Benedict Anderson's widely influential Imagined Communities (1983). In Anderson's view, the nation is not a naturally occurring and perennial form of human social organization. Instead, it is a temporary, contingent, and dynamic cultural artifact in which people come to imagine themselves as sharing an identity with others they will never personally encounter. And key to this imaginative process is a shared print culture.

Colley's explanation of how the British came to imagine themselves a nation rests on the concept of the "other"—broadly speaking, an external entity against which the self is negatively defined. This concept is one of the simpler insights of Continental philosophy, but it has arguably become the preeminent tool of analysis in the postmodern humanities. For Colley, the "other" that was essential for the forging of British identity took two forms. First, there was the French polity, against which Britons enjoyed a series of nationally unifying military successes from the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14) to Wellington's defeat of Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815. Second, and closely related to the geo-strategic rivalry with France, there was the Catholic religion, opposition to which enabled Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists to temper their theological and liturgical disagreements in the cause of...