Greater Britain : A Useful Category of Historical Analysis ?

THE FIRST "BRITISH" EMPIRE imposed England's rule over a diverse collection of territories, some geographically contiguous, others joined to the metropolis by navigable seas. The various peoples who inhabited those territories were not all treated alike by English colonists, who extended their power by military aggression. At first, a commission to evangelize pagan populations had legitimated English expansion; subsequently, a cultural mission to civilize the barbarian maintained the momentum of conquest; later still, an ideology of domination and a historical mythology together encouraged further English migration and the resettlement of native peoples on the conquered lands. Although the English did export their governing institutions, the exigencies of colonial rule demanded that control of the outlying territories be left in the hands of absentee proprietors or entrusted to a creolized governing elite. That elite in time grew to demand its independence, and appropriated legislative institutions to affirm its autonomy. The English nonetheless remained the cultural arbiters and commercial masters of what remained formally an Anglo-British empire, over which they steadfastly asserted their sovereignty. They had acquired this empire haphazardly and with little determining forethought. Within two centuries of its inception, it had disintegrated, apparently for good. Failure to enforce institutional uniformity, incomplete assimilation of subject peoples, the cultural estrangement of the English settlers from metropolitan norms, and monarchical indifference all conspired to bring about its collapse. Even though such- a narrative of colonial expansion, cultural divergence, and imperial implosion might seem to fit that of the British Atlantic empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it in fact describes the "British" empire that reached its apogee in the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), not the one reconstituted under George III (1760-1820). Its dependencies were not the colonies of British North America, the western Atlantic, and the Caribbean but rather Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, the constituent kingdoms and principalities of the northwest European archipelago.1 Yet the very fact that the structure of this medieval narrative so

closely parallels another in early modern British and colonial American history indicates the close connections between European state formation and extra-European empire building in the pre-modern period.2Conventional historical accounts of the consolidation of European nation-states and the expansion of those states beyond Europe have tended to obscure the continuity between the two processes, both as they were projected outward from metropolitan centers and as they were experienced by provinces, colonies, and dependencies.3Early modern empire building was an extension of state formation, although the one did not necessarily follow smoothly from the other.As the American Revolution showed, an empire could split apart when the demands of the state came into conflict with the aspirations of a wider British nation.Empire therefore revealed the limits of any equation between nation and state.4 The disjuncture between national and extra-national histories has been particularly abrupt within the history of Britain.None of the major modes of English historiography in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth had any place for the imperial enterprise.An insular history of English exceptionalism maintained a willful amnesia about England's outlying dependencies, whether British, Irish, continental European, or ultramarine.5The historiography of English religion grounded such exceptionalism in an Erastian tradition that could be extended back to Bede, or at least to John Wycliffe, but that had gained its true distinctiveness and its enduring embodiment in the Church of England, born, Athena-like, from the head of Henry VIII at the English Reformation.6 The parallel whig narrative of constitutional development provided an institutional account of the reasons for England's apartness while also appealing to geographical determinism as a partial explanation for the peculiar resilience of England's constitution.In the words of John Burrow, "Empire [was] not salient in Whig history."7Isolationist imperialism remained vigorous well into the twentieth century: Herbert Butterfield suggested in 1944 that "the real alternative to whig history in recent times-the real tory alternative to the organization of English history on the basis of the growth of liberty-was the story of British expansion overseas."But even he realized that "the shock of 1940" had shaken the English from their narrowly whiggish slumber only to discover that the history of the British Empire was in fact the extension of the history of liberty, not the alternative to it.8By 1944, it was almost too late for such a reconstruction of the English history of liberty as a B3ritish history of empire, Winston Churchill's long-meditated History of the English-Speaking Peoples  and Arthur Bryant's even more belated History of Britain and the British Peoples  notwithstanding.9Historians on the left, suspicious of the paternalist claims made on behalf of the British Empire, yet embarrassed by the part played by the empire in shaping a conservative patriotism, all but avoided the subject.10Only with the end of the empire would the necessary rewriting of English, British, and imperial histories become both viable and generally acceptable; only in the last two decades has that review actually begun to take shape.'1How COULD THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE-STATE be written?J. R. Seeley's Expansion of England (1883) offered one possible model.As every schoolchild once knew, Seeley's compact volume was one of the best of all best-sellers in late Victorian Britain.Seeley had presented his theses as two sets of lectures to Cambridge undergraduates in 1881-1882, and would have left them unpublished were it not for the urging of Florence Nightingale.The book remained in print until 1956 (the year of the Suez crisis), returned to circulation in 1971, and has only recently lapsed once more.12Seeley is still remembered by historians of the British Empire as the founding father of their subfield;13 historians of Britain have also begun to recall him from the intellectual oblivion into which he had slipped.14Seeley protested against just the separation of domestic and imperial history that these recent successors have also deplored.In particular, he condemned the whiggish introversion of his contemporaries who "make too much of mere parliamentary wrangle and agitations about liberty" in the eighteenth century but "do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia."'15By shifting the horizons of historiography, Seeley hoped to create-or even recreate-a consciousness among his listeners and readers that they were inhabitants not of little England but rather of "Greater Britain." Although Seeley put the term "Greater Britain" into general currency, he had not coined it.The credit for its invention goes to Sir Charles Dilke, whose imperial travelogue of 1868 had used it to describe the colonies of white settlement through which he had earlier toured.16Seeley's strictly armchair survey of the same territories encompassed the Canadian Confederation, the West Indies, southern Africa (especially the Cape Colony), Australia, and New Zealand as part of an "ethnological unity" with "England" that was held together as a community by common ties of "race" (or "nationality"), religion, and "interest."'17There were many peculiarities in Seeley's conception of Greater Britain.He excluded India, because it had been acquired by conquest rather than settlement, although he still included the West Indies and Australia.He described the settlements as racially homogeneous-far from true even for the white settler populations, which included the francophone Quebecois and the Boers of the Cape.He also assumed a community of interest between white Britons at home and abroad that would not be tested until World War I some thirty years later.Even though Seeley's work gave comfort to the Imperial Federation movement of the 1880s, on whose political fringes he operated, his main aim was to effect an expansion of the English historical imagination, particularly as it remembered the eighteenth century.He argued forcefully that Greater Britain was the eighteenth century's legacy to the nineteenth, "the single monument of a state of the world which has almost passed away."18The English had striven to forget this fact, but Greater Britain would not be overlooked so easily.
The political conception of Greater Britain lasted only as long as the hopes for Imperial Federation, just as the decline in the popularity of Seeley's work followed the same trajectory as the British Empire itself.Why, then, should his ideas matter  Pocock's "New British History" would be a history of Greater Britain as a fluid, dynamic, and interactive system, rather than the majestically static "ethnological" union Seeley had envisaged.It would recover the white settler communities of the former British Empire from the distant verges of the globe, so that by encompassing them within an imperial past they might remain partners in a Commonwealth present.It explicitly defined Britain as an oceanic entity that looked to the west and the south, and whose connections with Europe were implicitly accidents of submarine geology rather than a determining set of relations (this despite the fundamental place of French and Italian humanism within Pocock's own two most influential books).21Pocock's "New British History" therefore attempted the revivification of British history as an imperial history, both within Britain and Ireland and across the oceans; however, it still gave comfort to a species of Euro-skeptical exceptionalism, now cast as the attribute of Greater Britain rather than of little England.British and Irish historians, however."England" can no longer be used as a synecdoche for "Britain," let alone for "Britain and Ireland"; what was once the marginal "Celtic fringe" to English historians is now the encompassing "Celtic crescent" around the southeastern English core-state.22England is now rightly recognized as but one among three kingdoms and at least four nations that have of law; and, more broadly, the disenchantment of the world and the emergence of rationality under the sign of science.45This broadly Weberian master-narrative owed a great deal to modernization theory, which had posited the postbellum trajectory of political, social, and economic development in the United States as a normative path to be followed by other "developing" countries.Curiously, though, this narrative of "American" modernity did not generate a preceding narrative of American "early" modernity.46This is all the more remarkable in that the "discovery" of America, intercontinental migration, and the globalization of commerce once figured prominently in earlier, European models of modernity, from the sixteenth century to the 1950s, and had been central to the historical visions of David Hume and Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Otto von Bismarck.47Like contemporary "colonial" Spanish America, British America evidently missed out on "early" modernity.Such comparative, postmodern, and diasporic models for the history of the Atlantic world challenge the relationships of dependency and marginality implied by the term "colonial" as a period of "American" history before the great caesura of 1783."Colonial" carries the freight of the "Imperial School" of American historiography without its institutional framework or, more regrettably, its geographical expansiveness.This approach originated in the late nineteenth century, as an offshoot of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism and the "germ theory" of institutional transmission.Even as J. R. Seeley was giving his lectures as Regius Professor in Cambridge in 1881-1882, the man soon to be his opposite number at Oxford, E. A. Freeman, was simultaneously touring the United States to recall the common racial and institutional ties that bound together two English peoples on either side of the Atlantic "as brethren in a higher brotherhood, born of one ancient stock, speaking one ancient tongue, sharers under different forms in one ancient freedom."52Such connections underlay the origins of professional medievalism in the United States, which, in the work of Charles Homer Haskins and Joseph Strayer, tied the field to a narrative of state building and institutional formation that lent particular weight to the history of "England": in Haskins's words, "English history is in a sense early Americau history."53In the hands of historians Charles McLean Andrews, George Louis Beer, and Herbert Levi Osgood, British history became fully part of early American history, as they revised the standard Bancroftian account of the American Revolution in favor of the imperial and institutional synthesis that would characterize their work as members of a distinctly "Imperial School" of early American historians.54 Although their emphasis on an extra-American context for the undertanding of American history was salutary, their object of inquiry remained the colonies that would later make up the United States rather than the British Empire as a whole.This certainly coincided with the division of labor within contemporary British imperial history, which also separated the so-called "First" British Empire in the Americas from the "Second" British Empire in South Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.Each of these strains of historiography has had lasting consequences for the possibility of writing both Atlantic histories of "America" and imperial histories of "Britain."The reaction against the Imperial School within American historiography rendered the consideration of the links between Britain and America unfashionable until the new wave of British-American history broke in the late 1960s, by which time social, economic, cultural, and religious interactions took precedence over political and institutional continuities.55Meanwhile, British historiography maintained a separation between the history of the two supposedly distinct empires but treated both as extraterritorial histories divorced from the domestic history of Britain.56THE REINTEGRATION OF IMPERIAL AND DOMESTIC HISTORY and the union of the New British History with Atlantic History could provide a historiography capable of eluding the pull of nationalist teleologies in both British and American history.Atlantic History potentially offers a transnational challenge to American particularism,57 while the New British History confronts the whiggish pieties of Anglo-British self-congratulation.However, if Atlantic History ignores the wealthiest and most numerous British colonies in the Caribbean58 and overlooks the territories that would later comprise the Canadian Confederation, it risks becoming merely the acceptable face of American (for which, read "United States of American") exceptionalism.Likewise, the New British History has been charged with becoming simply a more comprehensive means to explain the peculiarities and processes of English history (especially in the seventeenth century), with little obvious benefit for Scottish, Irish, or Welsh history.The most recent developments in both Atlantic History and the New British History have consciously taken account of these charges and have turned away from the dynamics of the "English" Civil Wars to the "Celtic dimensions of the British Civil Wars" and from the colonies that would become the United States to consider British North America in the widest sense.59The next stage in the recreation of both British and American historiography in the period before the late eighteenth century should be to effect that rapprochement between the New British History and Atlantic History.Since the benefits of such methodological mingling have been perceived more often by historians of America than by those of Britain,60 the latter part of this essay will consider the potential impact of an Atlantic turn on British historiography of the early modern period.
"What did its great overseas extension, its heroic conquering and colonizing effort, its attempt to rule over and defend its far-flung possessions, mean for the history of Habsburg Spain?" asked J. H. Elliott in 1982.61The parallel question has only just begun to be asked for Hanoverian Britain, but it has hardly been broached at all for the Stuart multiple kingdom of the seventeenth century.62As in the case of the parallel inquiry into the "impact" of the New World on the Old (however mal posee this way of framing the question now appears to be), those who have asked the question at all have been either minimalists or maximalists.63The minimalists stress the aggressive amnesia of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britons: even though their lives were transformed by the colonial consumer goods, they remained insularly unaffected by the invisible influence of empire and cared little about the colonies.64The maximalists meanwhile have argued for the determinative force of the imperial experience on British popular politics, literature, and culture.65Both could, of course, be right, but only if the question were broken down further: for whom did the overseas extension of the Three Kingdoms have meaning, at what times, and why?How was nationhood defined by the experience of empire?In particular, why did so many people in the metropolitan nations seem to remain resistant to the lure of empire and so indifferent to the experience of expansion, yet also find their conceptions of themselves quietly altered as "Britain" annexed and conquered ever wider territories, populations, and markets?66 A constrictedly archipelagic account of British history only reproduces such imperial introversion; it should instead be attempting to understand it.One approach is suggested by the classical conceptions of colonization that informed the first century of English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.67Indeed, in the first century of transatlantic colonization, the classical tradition may have repressed imperial ambitions (at least among the significant proportion of the male population that had received a grammar-school education) more than it encouraged them, by transmitting skepticism about the wisdom of expansion and by constraining political theory to being literally the theory of the polis-the freestanding, autonomous, unitary community-rather than more complex forms of political organization such as unions and federations.68The model of composite monarchy that has been so fruitfully used by recent historians to examine the dynamics of the Three Kingdoms was more often experienced than conceptualized by contemporaries, especially by those-in Ireland and Scotland particularly-who felt the force of English claims to unitary sovereignty, whether backed by crown, Parliament, or church.69However, it does have its uses as a heuristic device for understanding the continuities between the challenges of domestic and transmarine governance, in order to connect the history of the Atlantic world more firmly to the problematics of early modern European history.70 The New British History has expanded, but also has not entirely abandoned, the statist and institutional perspective of English Whig historiography; even the historiography of the Anglo-British state must admit the shaping force of the imperial experience, both within and beyond Britain and Ireland.This reunion of the history of the state with the history of empire is one positive legacy to be taken from Seeley, for whom all history was the history of the state, of which the empire was but the extension.71Seeley's assumption that the empire exported the characteristics of the "English" state can be turned around in order to examine how the experience of expansion colored the growth of the state.The recent work of Robert Bliss has restored the American colonies to the context of English politics (although the larger, British dimension of their political salience is overlooked); David Ransome has emphasized the contribution of the disputes over the Virginia Company to the breakdown of consensus in the English Parliament of 1624; Karen Kupperman's reconstruction of the continuities between the activities of the Providence Island Company in the 1630s and the overlapping personnel of the parliamentary "Middle Group" in the 1640s has made the English Civil War partly appear to be the pursuit of the colonial undertakers' aims by other means; and Mary K. Geiter has firmly linked the foundation of Pennsylvania to the political horse-trading of the Exclusion Crisis.72 Seventeenth-century English men and women were evidently not as insular as later historians might have believed; the demands of extending the nation oceanically tested their political imaginations, just as international conflict in Europe did.73 The findings of these scholars show the necessity of bringing the colonies into a pluralist account of the British Civil Wars, to see, for instance, how "British" populations outside the archipelago fought their own "American Civil Wars."74Activities in the Caribbean shaped the politics of the Interregnum, as the hostile response to the failure of Oliver Cromwell's "Western Design" may have been responsible for his decision to refuse the crown in 1658, and certainly provided a focus for discontent that struck at the very heart of the Protectorate and its policy ambitions, domestically and diplomatically.75 The character of the post-Restoration state was partly shaped by the duke of York's experience as proprietor of New York and architect of the Dominion of New England.76The role of the colonies in the patronage system has been brought to light by Stephen Saunders Webb, although his thesis perhaps reveals more that the empire helped make a late seventeenthcentury "opportunity state," especially for former military officers, than that it was the creature of "garrison government."77Finally, the very formation of the British state itself, by the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, was an event incomprehensible without its imperial context, since the compulsions that drove the Scots and the English together were cast on a global screen-from the Isthmus of Panama to the Low Countries-and the union provided an alternative to an independent colonial empire for the Scots, who had come late to the arguments of commercial reason of state.78 Seeley saw what later historians have largely forgotten: the great process of the seventeenth century had been "the internal union of the three kingdoms" between the accession of James VI to the English throne in 1603 and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707; alongside that process, and growing out from it, "was the creation of a still larger Britain comprehending vast possessions beyond the sea."79 The greatest potential for the convergence of British and American history lies in the study of the eighteenth century, where the reigning, albeit frequently competing, syntheses of the period by J. C. D. Clark, Paul Langford, John Brewer, and Linda Colley can all be linked to developments in American historioqgraphy.80Colley's Britons has been accompanied by Edward Countryman's Americans, Clark's English Society by the opening chapters of Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, and Richard L. Bushman's Refinement of America by Brewer's Pleasures of the Imagination.81 The receptivity of historians of eighteenth-century America to the British dimension of their subject means that some of this work has already been absorbed into an Atlantic historiography, although the compliment has only just begun to be repaid by British historians.82As Edmund Morgan suggested forty years ago, the historiography of the American Revolution has always been peculiarly dependent on British history for its various explanatory frameworks.American historians are perhaps now long past the Namierite, maixisant, and localist explanations Morgan took to be the major shaping arguments in his own time.83Indeed, following Morgan's lead, T. H. Breen has recently taken explicit inspiration from the work of Brewer and Colley to suggest that the British state in the eighteenth century, with its lean and efficient administrative apparatus, extraordinary capacity to raise revenue and make war, and above all the aggressive patriotism it projected, "forced the Americans to leap out of history to defend colonial and human equality on the basis of timeless natural rights."84 The absorption of the American war and revolution into the internal history of Britain-foreshadowed by Seeley, who thought it "an event ... on an altogether higher level of importance than almost any other in modern English [sic] history"has shown how imperial history can be reintegrated into domestic history, even if British historians of the period before the late eighteenth century otherwise seem to remain largely unaware of the bridges thrown across to them by historians of the western sector of the British Atlantic world.85The United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States of America were both political unions created in the context of international war during the eighteenth century, their fictive nationalisms were generated by many of the same conflicts, and the political-rather than ethnic, linguistic, or historical-categories of citizenship within each state make them comparable as few other states are.This fact alone should encourage historiographical convergence, even more so because such a comparison denies exceptionalism and disrupts cherished nationalist teleologies.
Is "GREATER BRITAIN" therefore a useful category of historical analysis?"Greater British" history can be a prophylactic against other, more partial, histories that dissociate the processes of nation making at all points in the North Atlantic from those of state formation and empire building.By acknowledging the constitutional primacy of the British state (after 1707, at least), it would recognize the relations of power within the early modern British Atlantic world and draw attention to the cultural, economic, and emotional bonds that tied inhabitants of that world together as Britons in the broadest sense.Law, politics, and economics, as well as culture, religion, and social order, shaped and defined relationships between the Atlantic archipelago and the Western Hemisphere, from Central America and the Caribbean to Cape Breton, and from the Leeward Islands to the Oregon Territory.Both the extent and the limits of those relations need to be more closely defined if the full usefulness of Greater Britain as an analytical category can be realized.The history of "colonial America" can thereby be seen as an arena of internal comparisons just as much as the history of "early modern Britain."Like another "useful category of historical analysis," "Greater Britain" reveals seemingly fixed and determinate terms to be "at once empty and overflowing ... Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning.Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions."86"Britain" and "America" are both empty and overflowing in parallel ways: "empty" because not defined by anything other than the precisely localized, contextual impulses of distinctly earthbound nationalisms; "overflowing" because of the multiplicity of competing, repressed, or ignored histories each contains within it.
The New British History and Atlantic History are each, in their own ways, transnational historiographies.In their stress on geographical and political pluralism, their escape from the boundaries of nation-states, and their insistence on the contingency and fluidity of historical processes, each offers liberation from the categories of national history.However, if they remain in isolation from one another, they risk perpetuating merely ampler species of parochialism, within which the New British History can become a cloak for the "cloven hoof" of Anglocentrism,87 or Atlantic History simply the kinder, gentler form of American exceptionalism.Just as Atlantic History needed to be freed from some of the distorting influences of Cold War, NATO historiography, so the New British History must avoid the lingering taint of anti-Europeanism bred into its bones in the early 1970s.The alliance between the New British History and Atlantic History could therefore become the first step toward novel integrative histories of "Greater Britain," as well as new comparative histories of "Atlantic America" and "Atlantic Europe."88By that means, it might be possible to show that "British" history did not always happen in Britain, or only to Britons, just as "American" history was not always the creation of Americans, nor did it take place solely in the Americas.8989 For the benefits of both integration and comparison in the history of the Americas in the early modern period, see J. H. Elliott, Do the Americas Have a Common Histoty?An Address (Providence, R.I., 1 9 98).
coalesced, colluded, and collided within what, in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, we are now encouraged to call the "Islands of the North Atlantic" (IONA).23The theological complexities of incorporating four (or more) nations into Three (or fewer) Kingdoms bedeviled politicians throughout the early modern period; the solution to such dilemmas eluded those politicians as long as they clung to essentially English notions of unitary parliamentary sovereignty; historians equipped with hindsight have been more open to alternatives, even if some (like J. C. D. Clark) have preferred to assume the hegemony of the English Anglican-Parliamentary Leviathan since the Reformation, both within Britain and Ireland and outward into the Atlantic world.24Yet one important result of the New British History might have been comparative rather than integrative.The Three Kingdoms present an ideal opportunity for internal comparisons within geographically circumscribed conditions.25As yet, this possibility has been mostly exploited by economic historians, even though England has rarely been considered as one of the objects of comparison.26The disunity that preceded, accompanied, and later succeeded the brief parliamentary union of Britain and Ireland between 1801 and 1922 offers less evidence of an obstinate teleology of integration than of a persistent history of interaction.It therefore rebukes English exceptionalism even as it palliates Anglo-British self-congratulation.The opportunity for comparative histories of the Three Kingdoms has nevertheless rarely been taken, largely because of the statist assumptions that underlie most of the New British History of the early modern period.As Jane Ohlmeyer notes in this Forum, "[t]o date, the New British and Irish Histories have focused on political developments, such as state formation and the impact of the Protestant reformation in Ireland."27They have therefore reproduced the categories of nineteenth-century historiography without actually transcending them and have retained the form even as they have challenged the substance of the preceding historiography.The abundance of scholarship on the mid-seventeenth-century crisis owes a particular debt to the European model of "composite monarchy" derived from the work of J. H. Elliott and H. G. Koenigsberger, which has been found more broadly applicable to state formation throughout early modern Europe.28This model has greatly illuminated the instabilities within the state system ruled, lost, and then ruled again by the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century, although critics among Scottish and Irish historians have complained that it has not yet provided the multicentered perspective necessary to explode Anglocentric exceptionalism.29Perhaps because they have a stake in avoiding the state-centered narrative that for so long informed English history, historians of Ireland have been at the forefront of attempts to take Ireland out of "British" history in order to restore it in common patterns of European history.This goal, however, has been achieved partly at the expense of the Atlantic model of Irish history associated with the work of David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny.30This model has itself been criticized for stranding Ireland in the Atlantic as that "famous island set in a Virginian Sea," thereby involving it in a framework of colonial dependency on England, like New England or New Spain, rather than making it comparable to the outlying territories of other European composite monarchies such as Naples or Bohemia.31Raymond Gillespie's suggestion that early modern Ireland be treated "as a mid-Atlantic polity having some of the features of both the Old World and the New," yet fully part of neither, aptly captures the ambiguity of Ireland's position without ruling its peculiarities out of consideration or rendering it utterly exceptional and hence strictly incomparable to other patterns of early modern social and political development.32Historians of Ireland aside, practitioners of the New British History have been hesitant to make the turn toward the Atlantic and the other oceans recommended by Pocock.33This is all the more remarkable in that historians of Colonial British America (to use Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole's term) have increasingly relied on "Atlanticist" models for their historiography in the last two decades.34There is, of course, nothing new in this.The admiring constitutionalism of Jeremy Bentham and Lord Bryce, or the navalist obeisance of Alfred Thayer Mahan, helped to forge channels of intellectual influence and interaction across the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.35Yet, as Bernard Bailyn has recently noted, one major species of "Atlanticism" originated in American anti-isolationism during two world wars, particularly in the journalistic internationalism of Walter Lippmann and Forrest Davis and the anticommunist, Catholic universalism of historians like Ross J. Hoffman and Carlton Hayes.36They forged their conception of an Atlantic community as a bulwark of Western civilization against Fascist and Communist barbarism, though also very much as an antidote to European integration, which history suggested could only be achieved by the force of a Napoleon or a Hitler: "To escape such a fate the British during the last four centuries have repeatedly fought world wars."37The very tradition that these Atlanticists sought to uphold was being reconfigured by Christian supersessionists as "Judeo-Christian" at the same time, in some of the same circles, in response to the same threats, and in search of a similar consensus.38When Hayes asked rhetorically, "The American Frontier-Frontier of What?" in his 1945 presidential address before the American Historical Association, the answer was unambiguous: "the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition."39Both Atlantic History and the Judeo-Christian tradition were shaped by similar conditions at their birth in the United States in the 1940s and have carried some vestigial features of their origins ever since.The peculiar origins of this strain of Atlantic History in the United States may account for the initial reluctance of British historians to take the Atlantic model seriously, despite some scattered postwar attempts to teach the history of the United States not as "a separate national story to be laid arbitrarily alongside the national history of Great Britain, but an integral and vital part of the history of all 33 For example, none of the major collections of essays on the New British History covers any British territories, populations, or influences outside Britain and Ireland: Asch, Three Nations-A Common History?; Grant and Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom?; Ellis and Barber, Conquest and Union; Bradshaw and Morrill, British Problem; Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: Thle Britishl Isles c. 1750-c.1850 (Manchester, 1997); Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707 (Cambridge, 1998); S. J. Connolly, ed., Kingdoms United?Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1998); except for Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, eds., Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650-c.1850 (Cambridge, 1998). 34Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md., 1984). 35H. L. A. Hart, "The United States of America," in Hart, Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory (Oxford, 1982), 53-78; Edmund S. Ions, James Biyce and American Democracy 1870-1922 (London, 1968); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York, 1995), 84-87; Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York, 1990), chaps.4-6. 36Bernard Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," Itinerario 20 (1996): 19-44. 37Ross Hoffman, "Europe and the Atlantic Community," Thouight 20 (1945): 29. 38Mark Silk, "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America," American Quarterly 36 (1984): 66-70, 83-85. 39Carlton J. H. Hayes, "The American Frontier-Frontier of What?" AHR 51 (January 1946): 215.those areas, European and American alike, which border upon the North Atlantic."40However, it cannot account for the continuing resistance among British historians to Atlantic History, when American historians have become so obviously indebted to British historiography.The work of Bernard Bailyn, Jack Greene, Ned Landsman, Susan O'Brien, David Cressy, David Hackett Fischer, Stephen Foster, Joyce Chaplin, James Horn, David Hancock, and Eliga Gould, among others, has amply revealed the necessity for historians of British America to attend to the economic, social, constitutional, intellectual, religious, and political history of Britain and Ireland in their studies of the polities of the northwestern Atlantic basin, especially in the period before 1783.41Early modern British history has become indispensable for historians of colonial America: why, then, have British historians almost completely failed to join hands across the ocean with colonial Americanists?42Historians' categories have their costs.The very terms "early modern" to describe a period of British (and, more broadly, European) history and "colonial" to denominate a parallel period of American history indicate the incompatible master-narratives within which British and American historiography have existed for much of the twentieth century.Despite Greene and Pole's argument that America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be seen as part of the wider "Early Modern Era," this periodization has found little favor with Americanists.43The narrative of modernity implicit in Europeanists' use of the designation "early modern" does not usually include empire among its defining features.44Its central terms have been the rise of capitalism, individualism, and the middle class; the creation of the nation-state, controlled by centralized regimes with armies and bureaucracies at their disposal but limited by representative bodies and the rule 40 H. Hale Bellot, "Atlantic History," History 31 (1946): 62. 41 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 2d edn.(Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York, 1987); Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers within the Realm.;Greene, Peripheries and Center; Jack P. Greene, Pursuiits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1765 (Princeton, N.J., 1985); Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thouight and Cultlure, 1680-1760 (New York, 1997); Susan O'Brien, "A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755," AHR 91 (October 1986): 811-32; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Commulnication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Foulr British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989); Stephen Foster, The Long Aigulment: English Piuritanism and the Shaping of New England Cuiltutre, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxiouls Pulrsutit: Agricutltural Innovation in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993); James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Commmunity, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1999).For a recent overview of the possibilities presented by this historiography, see Alison Games, "History without Borders: Teaching American History in an Atlantic Context," Indiana Magazine of Histo#also true of grand narratives like those of Michael Mann, The Soulrces of Social Power, 2 vols.(Cambridge, 1986); and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and Eutropean States, AD 990-1992, rev.edn.(Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
48 It has been left to self-consciouslypost-modern counter-narratives to rediscover globalization, the "disembedding" of individuals effected by transnational capitalism (especially the slave trade), and the diasporic histories of pre-national peoples as aspects of modernity that could usefully describe features of the Atlantic world before the mid-nineteenth century.49In this context, the work of Paul Gilroy on the formation of a "Black Atlantic" between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's ongoing study of the creation of an "Atlantic working class" together offer a dynamic, circulatory, and interracial (albeit still somewhat provisional) model of the Atlantic world as a matrix of 45On which, see Dean C. Tipps, "Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective," Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 199-226.Keith Thomas, "The United Kingdom," in Raymond Grew, ed., Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 41-99, provides a version of the modernization thesis as applied to Britain; for an outstanding account of such narratives and the historiography that has succeeded them in English (though specifically not British) history, see Peter Lake, "Retrospective: Wentworth's Political World in Revisionist and Post-Revisionist Perspective," in J. F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621-1641 (Cambridge, 1996), 252-83. 46Though for a pioneering attempt to apply modernization theory to early American history, see Richard D. Brown, "Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600-1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1972): 201-28; compare also Joyce Appleby, "Value and Society," in Greene and Pole, Colonial British America, 290-316; Appleby, "Modernization Theory and Anglo-American Social Theories," in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 90-123; Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), chaps.21996): 3-34; Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996); Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London, 1997).Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997), provides the most explicit account of how these processes contributed to the formation of "modernity" itself.modernity itself.50This work also offers an alternative genealogy for Atlantic history that reaches back through Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and W. E. B. Du Bois to William Blake and beyond, and thereby escapes the distorting compulsions behind the conception of a Euro-Atlantic community inherited from the beginnings of the Cold War.As Ned C. Landsman's essay in this Forum shows, the use of such "diasporic" models offers an illuminating alternative to narratives built around the concept of "ethnicity," especially when considering the outgrowth of the peoples of Britain and Ireland within the wider Atlantic world.51 Armitage is an associate professor of history at Columbia University, where he has taught British history and the history of social and political thought since 1993.He was previously a research fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD with Quentin Skinner.Armitage has edited Bolingbroke: Political Writings (1997) and Theories of Emnpire, 1450-1800 (1998), and co-edited Milton and Republicanism (1995).His study The Ideological Origins of the British Enmpire will be published next year by Cambridge University Press.