The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (review)

J. G. A. Pocock is a name instantly recognizable to many readers of Victorian Studies, despite the fact that most of his considerable scholarly output over the past fifty years has dealt with early-modern Britain. As one of the founders of the so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history in the 1960s, Pocock established his reputation in a series of pathbreaking books that rigorously contextualized the political thought of James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. But he is probably more familiar to Victorianists for his call in the 1970s for the integration of the national narratives of "The Three Kingdoms" (Scotland, Ireland, England) into a "new British history"—a development that is no longer "new" and has been particularly noteworthy among scholars of the nineteenth century. Pocock's latest book, The Discovery of Islands, is a collection of linked essays written over the past fifteen years that ruminate on themes first raised in his seminal 1973 lecture (subsequently published in the Journal of Modern History in 1975), "British History: A Plea for a New Subject," the very essay that many see as launching the "new British history." The collection is divided into five sections: an introduction which sets out the "new British history" both in the original 1970s formulation and in terms of Pocock's reflections on the historiography generated by it in the thirty years since; section 2 deals with the early-modern roots of the "Three Kingdoms" and, in particular, the role of the Tudor state; section 3 concentrates on viewing the developments of 1688 from a "British" as opposed to Anglo-centric perspective; section 4 views the period of the Second Age of Union (1801–1921), largely through the lens of this New Zealander's understanding of New Zealand history; lastly, section 5 concludes by examining the succession of Britain from its own imperial creation and turn towards a European future. While the book thus follows a more or less chronological structure, many of the essays are, in fact, meditations on the nature of historiography, the utility of history for the present, and both history and historiography's potential for the ordering of political identities in the future.

For Pocock, British historiography ought always to consider the histories of the multiple nations that make up the Atlantic Archipelago (his term for the British home islands, which he admits, never really caught on) and the oceanic reach of the British Empire. But the first key to grappling with Britain's past lies in England's role in ordering the affairs of the core nations of the Atlantic Archipelago. The Statute of Wales of 1536 and the unions of 1707 and 1801 were all profoundly unequal arrangements that benefited the Anglo-British state, and in the nineteenth century, subordination to this state extended across the globe in the form of the Empire. While acknowledging the postcolonial critique of the Empire's operation, Pocock argues that for much of their history the neo-Britains that were settled around the world were based on and fostered an often positive and constructive British cultural and political identity. The relationship between Britain and its non-settler empire has been overemphasized, especially by recent nineteenth-century scholarship, which has occluded the historic relationship between the neo-Britains and the "home" islands. This is a theme also taken up by both sides of the recent debate over the depth of the domestic impact of empire on Britain, characterized by Bernard Porter's Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004) and Andrew Thompson's The Empire Strikes Back? (2005).

Much of Pocock's book is actually concerned with the dissolution of Greater Britain and its Empire, which he sees as the consequences of imperial expansion beyond the settler colonies, and of Britain's industrialization and the subsequent collapse of the social and political forces that the industrial revolution begat. In this collection Pocock argues that a capacious and progressive British cultural and political...