An Elect Nation? Nation, State, and Class in Modern British History

An Elect Nation? Nation, State, and Class in Modern British HistoryInternational Business in the Nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a CosmopolitanBourgeoisie by Charles A. Jones; The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 by Gerald Newman; Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland by C. H. E. Philpin; 1848:The British State and the Chartist Movement by John Saville; The Gothic Bequest: MedievalInstitutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 by R. J. SmithReview by: Margot C. FinnJournal of British Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 181-191Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175595 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 00:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and The North American Conference on British Studies are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of British Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Fri, 9 May 2014 00:47:49 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=nacbs

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=nacbs

http://www.jstor.org/stable/175595?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


An Elect Nation? Nation, State, and Class in Modern British History

International Business in the Nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisie. By CHARLES A. JONES. New York: New York University Press, 1987. Pp. xi+ 260.

The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830. By GERALD NEWMAN. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Pp. xxiii + 294.

Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland. Edited by C. H. E. PHILPIN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. vi +466.

1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement. By JOHN SAVILLE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. viii +310.

The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688- 1863. By R. J. SMITH. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 231.

"No Other Country is so Favoured as This Country," Mr. Pods- nap explains to a foreign visitor in Our Mutual Friend. Blessed with a constitution "Bestowed Upon Us By Providence" "to the Direct Ex- clusion of... Other Countries," English citizens, Dickens's antihero argues, evince "a combination of qualities, a modesty, an indepen- dence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with the absence of every- thing calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the [other] Nations of the Earth." When pressed to reconcile this sanguine vision of English national character with the recent death by starvation of several fellow nationals-cir- cumstances admittedly "not adapted to the cheek of the young person"-Dickens's bourgeois patriot is unperturbed. The institutions of the English state, free from the continental taint of centralization, en- sure a "noble" provision for the poor; Providence, having bestowed on England its unique constitution, decrees as well "that you shall have the poor always with you." One listener remains unconvinced by Podsnap's panegyric to the English nation. Troubled by the condition of workers within the system thus delineated, he confronts his audi- ence (and the reader) with the possibility that "dying of destitution and neglect" is "necessarily English."'

Dickens's combined caricature of mid-Victorian nationalist sentiment and the middle-class social conscience points to a nexus of rela- tionships between nation, state, and class to which historians and soci-

















1 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 179-80, 186-88. 1 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 179-80, 186-88. 1 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 179-80, 186-88.

REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS 181 181 181



ologists of the past decade have been increasingly attracted. An earlier generation of scholars turned to the study of the nationalism and the state to explain the origin and appeal of European fascism; today's specialists, guided by the trajectory of Third World nations, anatomize these forces from the perspectives of modernization theory and the revival of ethnic solidarities.2 Class figures prominently in the latter schools of analysis but functions primarily as a foil for national consciousness. The recent rise of scholarly interest in nationalism and the state, indeed, must be ascribed in part to a contemporary decline in class analysis. For while writers of the far Left lament a retreat from class in Western theory, students of the nation and the state employ insights garnered from non-Western cultures to explore structures and beliefs that lend social and political groups-including (but not exclu- sively) classes-power and coherence.3

England occupies a precarious position in this new literature on nationalism, a circumstance that stands in sharp contrast to its status in earlier historical writing. To many of the first generation of historians of nationalism, early modern England provided the first example of European nationalist development. Hans Kohn located the source of English nationalism in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notion of the "elect nation"; Edgar Furniss discerned a "dominant nationalism" in English mercantilist structures from 1660 to 1775.4 Subsequent commentators have, however, dismissed such arguments, removing England from the growing debate on the historical significance of nationalism. Geoffrey Best suggests skeptically that "by some definitions of nationalism, the English . . . never properly experienced it at all"; Hugh Seton-Watson asserts emphatically that "English nationalism never existed." And John Breuilly, in a sensitive study of the interplay between the nation and the early modern state. argues that freedom

2 Examples of the older perspective include Nationalism: A Report by a Study Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London, 1939) and Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Historical Development of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931). More recent approaches are found in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), and Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1987).

3 For a sustained diatribe against the decline of class analysis, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New "True" Socialism (London, 1986). Eric Hobs- bawm, however, recognizes the need to augment class analysis with an understanding of the force of nationalism, arguing that "working-class consciousness . . . co-exists with other forms of collective identification and neither eliminates or replaces them." See his "What Is the Workers' Country?" in Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), pp. 49-65, 63.

4 Hans Kohn, "The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism," Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (January 1940): 69-94; Edgar Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston, 1920).











182 182 182 REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS



from foreign incursions (against which a national opposition might be directed) precluded the growth of an English nationalist ideology.5

Gerald Newman's Rise of English Nationalism seeks to dispel this recent trend of nationalist analysis while dismissing as "anachronistic" the earlier generation's attribution of nationalism to seventeenth- century England (p. xviii). Dating the rise of English nationalism from the mid-eighteenth century, Newman argues that a perceived hege- mony of Gallic ideals in England engendered a "well-justified sense of alien cultural invasion" which precipitated Europe's first nationalist ideology (p. 67). In this view, nationalism issues from "the alienation of the bourgeois artist-intellectual" from the cosmopolitan, Fran- cophile English nobility (p. 91). Antiaristocratic in ethos, nationalist literature must be numbered among the factors contributing to industrial takeoff and so-called modernization, for a desire to outstrip France promoted the "rejection of hand-me-down attitudes ... vital to the acceptance and implementation of new technical ideas" (p. 151). Constituted in its essentials by 1789, Newman asserts, English nationalism underwent a "natural unfolding" in subsequent decades to pro- duce "the realities of Victorian Britain" (p. 227).

Newman's hectic synopsis of English nationalist development is as suggestive as it is controversial. A serious attempt to wed history and theory, his book offers both an intelligent introduction to current debates on nationalism and an iconoclastic application of nationalist analysis to the English experience. Written with great panache, the Rise of English Nationalism challenges the prevailing provincialism of nationalist theory and English historical writing, rightly locating En- glish achievements within the wider framework of European development. But if Newman's sweeping analysis is inspiring, it is also problematic. The term "nationalism," as he acknowledges, is an anachronism: contemporaries spoke of "patriotism" in its stead. In Newman's usage, however, patriotism describes a primitive and uni- versal sentiment highly defensive of state power, while nationalism denotes a modern and particularistic ideology radical in its demands for the exercise of individual citizenship and evident only after the 1740s. A sharp dichotomy between "the mere patriotism of early modern Europe" and the emergent nationalism of eighteenth-century England is central to his claim to offer a pioneering study of the genesis of English nationalism (pp. 52-53, 162-63).

Although fully consonant with some strands of nationalist theory, Newman's dichotomization of modern nationalism and primitive patriotism leads him to regard as uniquely modern forces equally evident

5 Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea

(Toronto, 1982), p. 12; Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London, 1977), p. 34; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, 1982), pp. 53-57.
















REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS

in the early modern period, notably the seventeenth century. The reign of George II may well, as Newman asserts, have seen an eclipse of the English spirit by continental influences associated with a French- speaking queen. Hogarth's artistry may indeed represent a protona- tionalist reaction to foreign cultural influence, and John Brown's mani- festo, a nationalist indictment of the effeminacy of the ruling class. But these developments were hardly unprecedented in English culture. Al- ready in the 1620s, proponents of the country interest caricatured the court, graced by a French-speaking queen, as a noisome sink of foreign cultural corruption, effeminate decadence, and political tyranny.6 Far from representing a new departure of the eighteenth century, such diatribes constitute an ideological continuum connecting early modern England with the Augustan and the Victorian eras.

More substantially, Newman's insistence that nationalism necessarily embodies secular ideals born of Enlightenment reasoning both ignores the insights of earlier scholars on the relation between nationalism and religion and flies in the face of twentieth-century developments, in which nationalist and religious revivals are often intertwined. Here again, the lessons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deserve greater consideration. To a surprisingly diverse array of think- ers, the concept of the elect nation has suggested a close articulation between early nationalism or patriotism and the religion of Protestants. For Sir Lewis Namier, religion "is a sixteenth-century word for nationalism," and to Christopher Hill, "the patriotic aspects of the Reformation must have struck contemporaries far more forcibly than any doctrinal change." Early nationalist typology indeed, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has recently argued, was "a Protestant property, and a constant theme of Protestant discourse." 7 Nor can the role of the state, the arbiter of English Protestantism, be ignored in a serious study of English nationalism. Newman's analysis, which privileges artistic culture to the detriment of institutional structures, discounts allegiance to the emblems of state power as a residue of primitive patriotism, but other scholars trace the genesis of national consciousness from precisely this source. G. R. Elton maintains that the crown and Parliament had succeeded by the sixteenth century in welding England and Wales into a single kingdom with "one national selfconsciousness"; two Marxist sociologists, guided by very different precepts, have argued that the Tudor creation of a nation state was predicated on the linkage of nationalism and religion.8 These claims are contentious but merit

6 Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolu- tion (London, 1969), esp. pp. 38-39, 72.

7 Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History (London, 1967), pp. 23 (citing Namier), 21; Conor Cruise O'Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 27.

8 G. R. Elton, "English National Selfconsciousness and the Parliament in the Six- teenth Century," in Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit, ed. Otto Dann (Munich, 1986), pp. 73-82, 75; Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1986), pp. 55-71.











184 184 184




investigation. For if national consciousness and zeal for the state religion did not constitute nationalism, they paved the way for its expression.

Although Newman is largely unconcerned with the institutions of church and state, he provides an engaging narrative of the process by which early nationalists drew on (or concocted) beliefs in England's Germanic institutional heritage to construct racial myths that under- pinned notions of citizenship and nationality. Literary men of the mid- eighteenth century, he asserts, initiated a line of argument in which the Saxons figured as the creators of a democratic community of Britons, deprived of their unique national heritage by the invading Normans. Increasing uniformity of speech, culture, and religion in England laid the groundwork for this Gothic analysis, but hostility to French domin- ion in Europe was required for its expression as nationalist ideology, for "intellectuals would not otherwise have bothered with their nation's supposed identities save in the conditions of cultural disorienta- tion and identity crisis which this brought on" (p. 124).

Newman's linkage of the Gothic revival and nascent nationalism is reiterated in R. J. Smith's Gothic Bequest. Like Newman, Smith finds nationalism issuing from literary culture in the latter eighteenth century and intermingling with the radical, romantic, and revolutionary movements of that period. Gothic legacies stood at the heart of these developments. In Henry Hallam's historical writings, English national character derived from Saxon freedoms associated with-but not confined to-the jury system and parliamentary representation. Elaborated in Coleridge's treatise On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830), this trend of Gothic historical analysis, Smith asserts, produced an interpretation of the constitution "congenial to a dynamic nationalism" (p. 154).

But although Smith's study complements Newman's analysis in arguing for a symbiotic relationship between nationalist sentiment and the medieval revival, it also underlines the limitations of Newman's secular approach. Careful to note the importance of the clergy in En- glish high culture, Smith painstakingly documents the relation between religious and nationalist sentiment that Newman so assiduously denies. Chronology and agency are equally troublesome. Smith's starting point of 1688 enables him to see the Gothic revival of the latter eighteenth century as only one episode in an extended debate on the origin and nature of government, a debate that saw its first efflorescence in the domestic political arguments of the seventeenth century. A preoccupa- tion with racial myths and Saxon legacies figures in this analysis as an endemic feature of British politics, not a uniquely new debate inspired by new-found cultural inadequacy and anti-French xenophobia. Rather than as a reaction against foreign influences, English nationalism emerges from Smith's study as a product of both English political traditions and continental paradigms of history writing and philosophy.

Although his own interests center on the uses of medieval histor-











185 185 185




ical apologetic, Smith duly notes the rise, alongside the historically minded nationalism of Coleridge and the romantics, of abstract reasoning on the proper functions of the nation and the state. By making "disrespect for the historical construction of the English law respect- able," he argues, Benthamite reasoning militated against the Saxon mythology of earlier decades, suggesting in its stead international, cosmopolitan standards of government (pp. 132, 171). The cosmopolitan predilections of Bentham and his varied disciples diverge sharply from the xenophobic nationalism of middle-class intellectuals portrayed by Gerald Newman. Their purchase on the bourgeoisie from the latter eighteenth century is delineated by Charles A. Jones, who in Interna- tional Business finds cosmopolitan tastes and convictions at the heart of the culture of Victorian manufacturers.

The trajectory of bourgeois internationalism traced by Jones be- gins with the economic disruptions of the American War of Indepen- dence, the gradual loosening of trade restrictions, and the transition to increasingly capital-intensive techniques of manufacture. In this con- text, Jones, in sharp contrast to Newman, asserts that internationalist ideologies supplanted the nationalist sentiments associated with mer- cantilism. Within the middle class, a "mercantile diaspora" of Cata- lans, Germans, Danes, Parsees, Greeks, Armenians, Portuguese, Scots, and Englishmen created a mid-Victorian trading community "in which nationality was very often blurred." Centered in London, this cosmopolitan community was united by marriage ties and the secular ideology of liberalism, "a profound faith in the collective virtue of aggregated individual self-interest and the moral validity of market sanctions." Boasting the Sassoons, Frederick Engels, and Sigmund Freud's half brothers among its members, it succumbed to "nationalism and regulation, imperialism and racism" only from the 1890s (pp. 27-28).

International Business pursues the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie from the factories and counting houses of Glasgow, London, and Manches- ter to the farms and markets of South America and South Asia, at- tempting to capture the particular ethos that guided economic transac- tions under early industrial capitalism. Jones consciously eschews many of the dominant concerns of business history, questioning the utility of a historiographical tradition informed by neoclassical eco- nomics and overwhelmingly preoccupied with the history of wars and governments rather than with the lineaments of the business class itself. His approach thus assesses the impact on middle-class aspirations and ideals of shifting markets, technologies, and business organizations more than it emphasizes the policies of the state. If the resulting analysis is admittedly impressionistic and the argument at times ob- scured by extended references to forgotten firms of a bygone era, the portrait of middle-class cosmopolitan culture that emerges from Inter- national Business is nonetheless compelling. The internationalist sym-







186 186 186




pathies that Jones identifies as characteristic of the Victorian bourgeoisie help to locate the British middle class within a wider debate on the social composition of European patriotic movements of the modern period. Most notably, his profile of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in Britain lends support to Miroslav Hroch's contention, based on patriotic movements in the smaller Continental nations, that entrepreneurs were rarely a significant force in early nationalist movements.9

But cosmopolitanism clearly had its limits. In Argentina, intermar- riage succeeded in creating a truly cosmopolitan bourgeoisie that in- cluded Britons; in India and China, however, racial prejudice and the arrival of European women created formidable barriers to social in- teraction between English men of the middle class and the indigenous bourgeoisie. And at home, as Jones noted in addressing middle-class attitudes toward foreign policy and politics, a persistent faction within the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie upheld nationalism alongside internationalism, providing staunch support for movements led by Louis Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi. If their support for foreign patriotic leaders nicely illustrates the nationalist predilections ascribed to the middle class by Gerald Newman, it also contradicts his-and Jones's-dichotomization of cosmopolitan and nationalist ideologies. The complex relation between nationalist sentiment and cosmopolitan ideals that Friedrich Meinecke sought much earlier in the century to disentangle for continental Europe remains to be elucidated for Britain.'?

In the latter nineteenth century, the predominance of cosmopolitanism over nationalism within the British middle class clearly dissipated, a process that Jones associates with the replacements of partnerships by joint-stock corporations. As authority became increasingly centralized within the corporation, he argues, businessmen estab- lished ever-closer ties to the state, and the Cobdenite internationalism of the 1850s and 1860s succumbed to the nationalization of the bourgeoisie. This model has all the merits of familiarity and fits neatly with received notions of later Victorian imperialism, but the analysis of domestic politics in earlier decades calls its chronology of bourgeois dependence on the state into question. John Saville's 1848 explores precisely this conjunction of middle-class ideology and government institutions. Like both Jones and Gerald Newman, Saville locates Brit- ish domestic politics within a wider European framework. Unlike Jones, however, Saville argues that a crucial, openly recognized, and mutually dependent relationship obtained between the state and the

9 Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Compara- tive Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller Euro- pean Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 133-35.

O1 Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton, N.J., 1970).











187 187 187




bourgeoisie even in the heyday of cosmopolitan liberalism. And unlike Newman, Saville depicts a divided nation in which the middle class, far from employing nationalism to unite with workers against the nobility, leagued with the aristocracy under the aegis of the state to quell the threat of working-class radicalism and nationalism.

Central to Saville's analysis is the emergence between 1830 and 1850 of "the bourgeois state" as "the dominant mode of political relations" in Britain (p. 9). Parliamentary reform in 1832, the amendment of the Poor Laws in 1834, and municipal reform in 1835, he argues, marked a fundamental restructuring of British society undertaken at the behest of the bourgeoisie by its representatives at Westminster, the Whig aristocracy. Realigned to meet the needs of a capitalist class, the new state apparatus was an instrument calculated to promote "the unhindered pursuit of profit" (p. 14). As such, it could hardly represent the nation. The troubled course of 1848 in Britain, although triggered by events on the Continent, ultimately bore witness to a basic incon- gruity between the institutions of the state and the needs of the laboring population.

The broad contours of Saville's argument are, of course, familiar, for they rehearse in their essential points the earlier analysis of Karl Marx. But if the analytical framework is now timeworn, the wealth of material with which it is buttressed is nonetheless impressive. Saville deploys Home, Foreign, and War Office papers, metropolitan police, constabulary, and Army reports, the Royal Archives, the Times, and the Chartist Northern Star to detail "the closing of ranks among all those with a property stake in the country" in 1848 (p. 227). Evident in the government's successful recruitment of a civilian police force in April-an enrollment so massive that London's Lord Mayor suffered from an embarrassment of special constables-this process of closure succeeded in uniting Liberal merchants, Tory magnates, and government dragoons in Bradford, Manchester, and Leeds. A common con- cern to preserve public order was wedded to shared conceptions of political economy in much of this "bourgeois" reaction of the state. At the York Assizes, the presiding justice urged a group of prisoners "to work hard" and "spend as little money as they could" in lieu of political activity. "Some people in Yorkshire had acquired a very large property indeed, who had begun life simply as working men," he in- toned, "but he never heard of any one who had raised his condition by going out drilling and joining a Chartist Society" (p. 177).

Saville's depiction of a class-based, monolithic state apparatus lends a coherent, overarching framework to his discussion but obliter- ates many of the relations that linked working-class culture and the national government in Britain. The Chartist movement itself was, notoriously, an attempt to bring the laboring population within the pale of the constitution rather than to overthrow the government. Nor can Saville's tendency to conflate England, Scotland, and Wales within a









188 188 188



single, oppressive state system be accepted at face value. Scottish state trials of the Chartist insurgents, as Saville reports with some surprise, were noted for "the presence of a high-minded and humane judiciary in sharp relief from the rancorous judges and prosecuting counsel in England" (p. 174). In this, the Scottish experience of 1848 recalls the English legal administration of the eighteenth century, in which the law arguably remained above the interests of any single class.'1 The extent to which the ideological predispositions of nineteenth-century officials succeeded in undermining the state's supposed impartiality and the degree to which national discrepancies in the administration of the law undercut the alleged coherence of the British state system deserve investigation.

If Scottish practices at times contravened the precepts of the wider "British" state, Irish experiences departed from those of the other British Isle with a seeming inevitability. Colonial status, economic structure, and the famine both ensured that Ireland felt the full force of the British state long before 1848 and served to divorce the Irish experience from that of most Britons. But 1848, as Saville demon- strates, saw a brief fracture in this pattern of difference. Radical activ- ists throughout the United Kingdom submerged their differences in shared enthusiasm for the February revolution in France, and O'Con- nor's national Charter movement allied with nationalist Irish Repeal- ers. Their shared platforms were broken by the state only in August, with the arrest and imprisonment or transportation of several hundred members of the joint agitation.

Saville's narrative of the Irish-Chartist alliance of 1848 suggests the existence of shared concerns uniting the English and Irish lower classes, but the bulk of Irish historiography has spoken rather to the uniqueness of Irish history. In underlining the centrality of nationalism, Irish historians have both emphasized a force traditionally ignored in English historiography and neglected English developments in the study of class, politics, and the economy. The essays edited by C. H. E. Philpin in Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland offer a corrective to this once-dominant viewpoint. Ranging in subject from the political machinations of landlords, merchants, and priests to the historical significance of the potato, these essays, many of which are reprinted from Past and Present, recognize the need to replace what Roy Foster, in his introduction, terms "the simplifying perspective of nationalist historiography" (p. 7).

The limitations of the earlier, nationalist approach to Irish history emerge with particular clarity from several of the studies of agrarian

1 Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (Lon- don, 1975), pp. 17-63.














protest collected in the volume. Maurice J. Bric and M. R. Beames underline the importance of the commercialization of Irish agricul- ture-rather than nascent nationalist sentiment-in their essays on latter eighteenth-century Rightboy protest in county Cork and prefamine peasant assassinations in Tipperary. Bric finds the main source of Rightboy protest in the efforts of small cottiers and wage laborers to retain the status quo in tithes and rents, in "a reaction from a world of custom and familiarity to new and increasingly impersonal social and economic structures" (p. 190). And Beames's biographical analysis of the twenty-seven victims of Whiteboy assassination in Tipperary in 1837-47 explicitly repudiates the "primitive nationalism" hypothesis, in which rack-renting English Protestant landlords provoke impover- ished Catholic Whiteboys to assassination, emphasizing instead the antagonism generated by improving landlords, whether English or Irish, Protestant or Catholic.

If these analyses of Irish protest benefit from the authors' familiarity with studies of the Swing movement in England, other essays in Nationalism and Popular Protest suggest fields of inquiry which, having proven fruitful for Irish history, deserve to be pursued for England, Scotland, and Wales. Tom Gavin's cautious attribution of nationalism to the underground political organizations of Ribbonmen in prefamine Ireland notes the importance of early "religion-based" nationalism in shaping the political nationalism of the latter nineteenth century (p. 243). And M. R. Beames's occupational analysis of Dublin Ribbonmen in 1821-22 points to the role of small craft producers in stimulating nationalist agitations. Shoemakers, publicans, farmers, blacksmiths, brewery workers, porters, boatmen, and butchers number prominently in his analysis; glaziers, carpenters, and gunsmiths are also present (p. 248). If, as David Fitzpatrick asserts in his statistical analysis of the geography of early tweentieth-century patriotic activity in Ireland, "nationalism is an attribute not of nations, but of nationalists" (p. 403), artisans are clearly potential nationalists who merit equal consideration with bourgeois artist-intellectuals.

V. G. Kiernan's essay, which endeavors to reconcile Irish nationalist history with the Marxist historiographical tradition, both points to an important line of inquiry and illustrates its potential pitfalls. Here nationalism is rapidly subsumed within imperialism, and comparisons of Ireland to other subjects of empire-India, Sicily, Egypt, Algeria, South Africa, and the Canary Islands, to name only a few-prove more numerous than illuminating. Without denying the need to temper the nationalist emphasis of Irish historiography and to bolster the recogni- tion of other British nationalisms, some historians will greet Kiernan's contrast between the "artificialities" of Irish nationalism and "En- gland's aggressive nationalism" (pp. 36-37) with skepticism.

J. G. A. Pocock noted several years ago that we lack a truly "British" history and argued that such a study "must be a plural









190 190 190 REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS




history, tracing the processes by which a diversity of societies, nationalities, and political structures came into being." Each of the works reviewed above contributes to the creation of this plural British history while confirming Pocock's prediction that an all-encompassing historiography will be "notoriously difficult to write."12 Bold in their claims to map the peculiar features of nation, state, and class in Brit- ain, they offer contradictory readings of the role of the middle class in nationalist movements, the relation between workers and the state, and the attempts of all persons, past and present, to fabricate historical legacies for political purposes. Charles Dickens's Podsnap was oblivi- ous to such difficulties. "We know what Russia means, sir . . . we know what France wants; we see what America is up to; but we know what England is," he proclaimed. "That's enough for us."13 Histo- rians, fortunately, are now less complacent.

MARGOT C. FINN University of Chicago

12 J. G. A. Pocock, "The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject," American Historical Review 87 (April 1982): 311-36, 320.

13 Dickens (n. 1 above), p. 887.

Looking for the Left

Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants: Hardie to Kinnock. By KEN- NETH O. MORGAN. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 370.

Aneurin Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism. By JOHN CAMPBELL. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987. Pp. xvii + 430.

R. H. Tawney. By ANTHONY WRIGHT. Manchester: Manchester Univer- sity Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 176.

The British Marxist Historians. By HARVEY J. KAYE. Oxford: Polity Press, 1984. Pp. xii+316.

The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918-1939. By STEPHEN G. JONES. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Pp. ix + 248.

The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Pres- ton, 1880-1940. By MICHAEL SAVAGE. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 280.























191 191 191



Documents

An Elect Nation? Nation, State, and Class in Modern British History