J. G. A. Pocock - The Discovery of Islands - Essays in British History-Cambridge University Press (2005) PDF

THE DISCOVERY OF ISLANDS
The Discovery of Islands consists of a series of linked essays in British

history, written by one of the world’s leading historians of ideas and
published at intervals over the past generation. The purpose of the
essays is to present British history as the history of several nations
interacting with – and sometimes seceding from – association with an
imperial state. The American colonies seceded in the eighteenth
century; most of Ireland seceded in the twentieth century; in the
later part of that century Britain itself secedes from the association
of nations it has built up across the globe.
John Pocock presents this history as that of an archipelago, situated
in oceans and expanding across them to the Antipodes. Both New
Zealand history and ways of seeing history formed in New Zealand
enter into the overall vision, and the aim is to present British history
as oceanic and global, complementing (and occasionally criticizing)
the presentation of that history as European. Professor Pocock’s
interpretation of British history has been hugely influential in recent
years, making The Discovery of Islands a resource of immense value
for historians of Britain, of the British Empire, and indeed of the
world. The title itself is derived from the poetry of Allen Curnow
(1911–2001).
J . G . A . P O C O C K is Harry C. Black Professor Emeritus at the Johns

Hopkins University.
THE DISCOVERY OF ISLANDS
Essays in British History
J. G. A. POCOCK
cambridge university press
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How shall I compare the discovery of islands?
History had many instinctive processes,
Past reason’s range, green innocence of nerves,
Now all destroyed by self-analysis . . .
Compare, compare, now horrible untruth
Rings true in our obliterating season:
Our islands lost again, all earth one island,
And all our travel circumnavigation.
From Discovery (c. 1941) by Allen Curnow (1911–2001).
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements page ix

Note on bibliographies xiii
PART I: THE FIELD PROPOSED
1 The antipodean perception (2003) 3

2 British history: a plea for a new subject (1973/1974) 24
PART II: THE THREE KINGDOMS AND THE ENGLISH PROBLEM
3 The field enlarged: an introduction (2004) 47

4 Two kingdoms and three histories? Political thought
in British contexts (1994) 58
5 The Atlantic archipelago and the War of the Three
Kingdoms (1996) 77
6 The Third Kingdom in its history (2000) 94
PART III: EMPIRE AND REBELLION IN THE FIRST AGE

OF UNION
7 Archipelago, Europe and Atlantic after 1688 (2003) 107

8 The significance of 1688: some reflections on Whig
history (1991) 114
9 Empire, state and confederation: the War of American
Independence as a crisis in multiple monarchy (1995) 134
10 The Union in British history (2000) 164
vii
viii Contents
PART IV: NEW ZEALAND IN THE STRANGE MULTIPLICITY
11 The neo-Britains and the three empires (2003) 181

12 Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology (1992) 199
13 Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture: the case of
New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi (1992/1998) 226
PART V: BRITAIN, EUROPE AND POST-MODERN HISTORY
14 Sovereignty and history in the late twentieth century (2003) 259

15 Deconstructing Europe (1991) 269
16 The politics of the new British history (2001) 289
17 Conclusion: history, sovereignty, identity (2003) 301
Bibliographies 311
Index 329
Preface and acknowledgements
This volume presents a selection from the essays on its subject which I
have published since 1974, when the first of them – Chapter 2 in this
series – appeared in New Zealand. That essay has been credited with a
role in initiating a project known as ‘the new British history’, but since
the project is now quite widely practised and understood, I have not used
the word ‘new’ in the title of this book. My intention is to present a
reading of British history, and an understanding of what those words may
mean, which can stand alongside other readings. There is no history
which is not many-sided, and no reading to which there are not
alternatives.
The essays selected are later in date than the proposal of 1974, belonging
to the 1990s and the opening years of this millennium. Among the reasons
for this selection, one is that this has been the decade in which the ‘British
history’, then known as new, began to be written by a number of hands and
to be examined, sometimes critically, in a number of collections and
monographs. I have selected my own writings in order to present them as
part of this literature and its problems. They deal for the most part with the
period c. 1500–1800, regarding which I practise historiography; the medi-
eval and modern periods appear marginally, but are by no means unnoticed.
The essays are divided into sections suggesting a periodization, each
preceded by an introductory chapter written for this volume.
There are two respects, however, in which these essays reflect concerns
of my own, and include among other intentions that of furthering them.
The first in order of time was delivered as a lecture in New Zealand in
1973, and was occasioned in part by the British decision to seek entry into
what is now the European Union. I was, and remain, concerned with the
impact of this decision on New Zealand and on the history to which we – the
reader is desired to note this currently unfashionable pronoun – knew
ourselves as belonging. In presenting ‘British history’ as archipelagic rather
than English, I was seeking to present it as a product of many makers – and
ix
x Preface and acknowledgements
some unmakers – in which ‘we’ had voice and which could not be simply
unmade by anyone. As well as reminding the British peoples that they
inhabited a history more complex than they could readily terminate, this
involved continuing that history past the point where New Zealand history
had first appeared as one of its components. At that point it became a history
perceived from New Zealand and in part made by that perception. I have
included essays on ways in which New Zealand continues the ‘British
history’ I have been recommending, and have added others explaining this
history as the product of an antipodean perception that can be presented to
readers generally. The title of this volume, and the verse accompanying it,
drawn from New Zealand poetry,1 conveys this perception. There are points
at which I have also conveyed it by resorting to autobiography, and I trust the
reader to accept that I am presenting myself as a piece of historical evidence.
The second aspect of this volume I should mention is that it contains
essays and other passages critical of the idea of ‘Europe’. British history of
course belongs to the history of that globally expansive civilization,
originally formed in the western provinces of the European, or
Eurasian, sub-continent, to which its own complex of islands may rightly
be seen as belonging. I am critical only – but for many reasons – of the
proposition that British, in particular English, interactions with the
cultures of the adjacent sub-continent in some way diminish, or even
eliminate, the history of interactions and processes within the archi-
pelago, moving outward into the Atlantic and the global oceans, the
Americas and the Antipodes. I hold that English and British history can
and should be written in both a sub-continental and an oceanic perspec-
tive, and I am critical of the proposition that either subverts the other.
I am sceptical of the idea of ‘Europe’ when it appears to advance this
proposition; when I suspect it of a design to eliminate distinctive histories
and sovereignties; and when I find it incapable of distinguishing between
scepticism and hostility. All of these conditions arise too often for
comfort.
The ‘British history’ here presented continues to face the problem of
how far it can escape the Anglocentricity it was intended to replace; the
problem being that it is inescapably, though partially, the history of an
English dominance, which the English saw and conducted as a product of
their internal politics, while other peoples responded to it, sought to share
it, or in some cases resolved to secede from it altogether. All these reactions –
the American and Irish secessions not excluded – form part of ‘British
1
Curnow, 1943; 1997, p. 217.
Preface and acknowledgements xi
history’ as I would like it to be understood; for even a secession is part of
the history from which it secedes. I understand an Irish desire to see
their history in a context outside the obsessive relation with England
and Britain to which it has been so much confined; and such a history
might well be written on any terms which do not pretend that this
relation and obsession have not existed. While there is a ‘British history’
to be written around a central Anglo-Scottish polarity, one written
around a British-Irish polarity would perhaps penetrate more deeply
into the histories of two profoundly different cultures which have been
historically inseparable. Methodologically, I am interested in the relation
between ‘national’ and ‘extra-national’ historiographies; ideologically,
I am making the claim that both probably will, and should, continue
to exist.
A volume such as this is necessarily indebted to many helpers. The footnote

references and Bibliography B extend the record of this indebtedness. I
must begin by naming Richard Fisher of Cambridge University Press, who
proposed the collection and has endured its successive mutations with good
humour and sound advice; and the anonymous readers for that Press who
have counselled me on successive drafts. On English history I have learned
in special ways from John Morrill and Jonathan Clark; on Scottish from
Arthur Williamson, Roger Mason and Colin Kidd; on Irish from Jane
Ohlmeyer, Ian McBride and Brendan Bradshaw; on American and the
history of empire from Jack P. Greene, Eliga H. Gould and David Armitage;
and on the history of political thought, as ever, from my colleagues and
friends at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In the New Zealand field,
I record a special debt to Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh; one of another
kind to James Belich, Judith Binney and (though this may surprise him)
Te Maire Tau; while my contemporary Peter Munz will understand,
though he may not approve. This is also the point at which to thank
Caleb McDaniel for preparing the original typescript and Katherine Hijar
for its revision. Felicity Pocock read it aloud at the proofreading stage.
My grateful thanks also go to the editors and publishers of the volumes
and periodicals in which most of these essays have already appeared. They
are listed in the Bibliography and I take this opportunity of thanking them
all. Lastly, my debt to the poems and friendship of the late Allen Curnow
runs from beginning to end of this volume and holds it together.
In preparing these essays for republication, I have revised them lightly and
sparingly in order to improve clarity, lessen repetition and eliminate
xii Preface and acknowledgements
material now obsolete. I have not attempted to preserve the footnotes in
their original form, but have reduced all to author and date with reference
to the two bibliographies, indicating in some cases where reference is made
to works appearing since the original essay’s publication. A very few obiter
dicta are contained in the footnotes within square brackets.
Baltimore, Maryland, 2004

Note on bibliographies
I have ventured on a complete listing of my publications in the field in

which this volume enters; it appears as Bibliography A. Others I have had
occasion to mention are listed in Bibliography B, and are accordingly
marked (B) in the footnotes.
xiii
PART I
The Field Proposed

CHAPTER 1
The antipodean perception*
(I)
This introductory essay must be initially autobiographical; to explain what
it is to write history from New Zealand I need to explain how I came to do
it, and place myself in context as a transitory figure in the history
of historiography. It is relevant to what I have to say in these essays that
I am of settler descent in the fourth generation, and relevant also that
though I write as a New Zealander, I write as that not uncommon
phenomenon, a New Zealand expatriate. It would take a long time to
explain why this is one way of being a New Zealander.
My great-grandfather, Lewis Greville Pocock (1823–88), joined his
brother John Thomas (1814–76)1 in the Cape Colony of South Africa
in the year 1842, and my father, also Lewis Greville (1890–1975), after
wartime service in the Royal Field Artillery, took a degree in classics at
University College, London, and was appointed professor at what was
then Canterbury University College in New Zealand, to which country we
moved at the end of 1927, when I was three years old. I am reciting what
Maori term a whakapapa, a record of one’s ancestors and the voyages by
which they arrived, and it is part of this statement that his sister, Mary
Agard Pocock (1886–1977), became professor of botany in what was then
Rhodes University College in Grahamstown, Cape Province, so that the
move from middle-class business to middle-class professional life was
made by both genders in the generation before my own. If I am a fourth-
generation colonist, I am a second-generation academic.
I studied the classics, my father’s subject, since I was of the last generation
to learn Latin because that was the way to become educated and had been
*[Written for this volume in 2003.]

1
For him see Ashworth, 1974; Holder and Gee, 1980; and Pocock (Tom), 1996.
3
4 The Field Proposed
for a thousand years;2 but of history, which was to be my main subject,
I learned more than any school was able to teach me from my mother, born
Antoinette Le Gros (1889–1976), who continued as a teacher after she
moved to New Zealand. It is relevant to the theme of these essays that
she was by birth a Channel Islander, the daughter of a French-speaking
Methodist minister; how there came to be such people is an episode in
‘British history’ as I suggest it should be studied. Of settler descent on my
father’s side, I am on hers descended from an island people on the seas
between the Atlantic archipelago and the peninsula of Europe; a fragment
of the ancient duchy of Normandy which conquered England in 1066,
never fully incorporated in the United Kingdom which it now serves as
a tax shelter. I recall visiting St Heliers with my mother and sister in 1950,
and seeing engraved on the wall of some public building – perhaps that of
the States of Jersey? – a couplet by the Norman chronicler Wace:
Jeo di et dirai ki jeo sui,
Wace de l’isle de Gersui.
By that time I knew about islands and the need to proclaim oneself from
them. It was a lesson I had learned in the Antipodes.
(II)
The New Zealand in which I grew up, during the 1930s and 1940s, no
longer exists, though a little digging will reveal many of its virtues and
limitations still operating. Though it has disappeared, it is entitled to the
respect and understanding due to the phenomena of history, and I describe
it here because it shaped a view of history which I still find valid. It
consisted of a small and fairly recent human population and their cultures,
occupying an archipelago of two major and many lesser islands situated on
the globe at a point nearly but not quite the antipodes of the Atlantic
archipelago with which most of these essays deal. The New Zealand
archipelago is one of a chain of sharply distinct ecosystems running from
Indonesia through Papua-Melanesia and Australia, but oceanic distance,
currents and weather systems have meant that it has had very limited
contact with any of these. It was colonized from the central Pacific; that is,
the first terrestrial mammals, who were members of the human species,
2
I attended Medbury School, a private institution in Christchurch, and recollect arriving there at the
age of eight to find the first declension of the Latin noun already written on the blackboard. I was
neither astonished nor oppressed by this experience, and found ways of profiting by it.
The antipodean perception 5
arrived from that quarter a thousand years ago or less,3 in ocean-going
galleys called waka,4 and found the islands populated by large birds, of
whom many species had become flightless in the absence of predators. The
humans rapidly exterminated most of these, imposing on themselves
changes in economy and culture which archaeology does more than tradition
to recapture.5 These occurred in the course of settlement and colonization,
in an environment radically unlike that of the central Pacific’s island
systems; the major islands contained alpine ranges as well as volcanic
peaks, and presented sizeable interior spaces of grassland, forest, and
rock, snow and ice above the treeline. With all of these environments the
Polynesian settlers had to establish a relationship, imagining and constructing
systems of animism and ancestry which permitted them to call themselves
tangata whenua,6 or peoples of the land. In this imagery it is noteworthy
that te whenua – the placenta, the birthplace, the land of the ancestors – is
more prominent than te moana, the great ocean across which the ancestors
came, without as far as we know establishing two-way systems of travel or
commerce. Whakapapa commonly end by naming the waka in which the
ancestors arrived, but the tangata whenua, though descended from great
navigators, seem not to think of themselves as a people of seafarers whose
culture is shaped by recurrent voyaging. The migration has happened once,
and ended at the whenua.7
In this – if described correctly – the tangata whenua differ from the
pakeha: a word in their language used to denote the European settlers who
began arriving in the early nineteenth century and now greatly outnumber
them. In the New Zealand of which I write these were overwhelmingly
British and Irish in both birth and conscious identity, though subsequent
immigration, European, Asian and Polynesian, has changed that and made
the cities multicultural as the rural areas are not, while helping to treble
the population of one and a half million that I remember. This population
3
The most recent findings suggest a date between AD 1200 and 1300; Howe, 2003. All such datings
depend upon archaeological techniques which change and develop rapidly.
4
These craft were driven by sail and paddle, and have often been called ‘canoes’. This word seems
unacceptably primitivist to some, and ‘galleys’ is offered here as an alternative. The crews were not of
course slaves or convicts.
5
Howe, 2003, pp. 179–82; Belich, 1996, chs. 2 and 3. For further bibliography, see Howe, p. 208, n. 51;
Walker, 1990, ch. 2.
6
In New Zealand typography, Maori words are no longer italicized, in order to avoid making Maori
culture seem exotic or inferior. In this volume, italicization is practised, in order to ease acceptance of
the terms by readers who will find them unfamiliar. For a glossary, see below, p. 226.
7
For a modern statement of the Maori world view, see Walker, 1990, ch. 1. For poetic comment on the
role of the ocean in Maori imagination, see Williams, n.d., p. 10 (‘Stride’); Sullivan, 1999. For
whakapapa in the city where I grew up, see Tau, 2000 and 2003.
has been arriving since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and
has always been composed of peoples whose sense of history and identity
is modern and European, more secular than religious. They know they
have arrived as carriers of a history in which they are already involved, and
which they must both continue and change. What has been and remains at
issue is their capacity, and power, to engage in this process as autonomous
agents.
The voyages that brought them to their archipelago committed them,
before the voyages were made, to a global system of commerce moving in
many directions. Every voyage, therefore, was remembered, repeatable,
and might in other circumstances not have been made; identity was
optional and in that sense fragile. It has yet to appear whether the voyagers
in the waka knew that feeling. The pakeha were not merely capable of the
two-way voyage: they were in New Zealand to engage in a two-way
commerce, which did, has done and does much to make them what they
are. They have remained the people of a dependent economy, exporting
products in exchange for the capital they do not generate themselves; and
the markets on which they depend are situated at global distances, and have
until very recently indeed been the homelands of a particular culture which
the pakeha have inherited and imported, while wondering how far they can
generate culture of their own. This in brief is the antipodean condition.
It has been the product of oceanic and global distance, and the proposition
that the world-wide web has abolished distance has yet to be tested against
the counter-proposition that a culture formed by distance may be willing
to change only at its own speeds.
The pakeha are a people of European, mainly British, colonists. There
has occurred a remarkable shift in vocabulary, whereby the word ‘imperial-
ism’, denoting among other things the subjugation of non-Europeans to
European empire and culture, has been replaced by the word ‘colonialism’;
peoples formerly so subjected use this word to denote that state, and the
word ‘post-colonialism’ to denote the state in which they find themselves
after the empires have been liquidated. It is probably too late to alter this set
of usages, and the case for doing so is not specially strong; but it is worth
pointing out that colonists colonize, and are not ‘colonized’ in the sense
appropriate to the vocabulary of (post-)colonialism. The imperial culture
they brought with them was not imposed on them by alien rulers; they
regarded it as theirs by inheritance, and if they come to wish neither to
inherit nor to go on producing it, it is to themselves that they must explain
that it is no longer their inheritance – to selves, therefore, who did think
themselves native to this culture, with the result that its replacement will
probably not be a revolution, certainly not a liberation, but a complex and
never complete historical process. They may share with non-Europeans in
the post-colonial condition a sense that they have not had a share in power
sufficient to make them autonomous actors in this process; but almost
certainly, they will have had enough power to make the term ‘post-
colonial’ both metaphoric and questionable. Colonies have a way of
becoming politically autonomous while remaining economically dependent
and culturally ‘colonial’; their history becomes one of tension between
these conditions.8
Colonists, meaning settlers, are involved in what is now called colonialism
to the extent to which they are settled among previous or indigenous
populations whom they reduce to political and cultural subjection. The
South African English-speakers who are among my forebears settled
among both Africans and Afrikaners (a settler people of a very different
type) by whom they were outnumbered, and it can be said that they never
attained political or perhaps cultural autonomy. British policy in South
Africa was made in London, or on the Rand, and not by them. In Australia
and New Zealand, colonies were established among, and expropriated,
Aboriginals and Maori. These peoples, their responses to colonization, and
what it did to them, differed so greatly as to give Australian and New
Zealand history radically different characters; but in neither case were
relations between settlers and indigenous peoples so dominant or obsessive
as to be central to the self-formation of the former. Having seized the land
of the tangata whenua, they did not need their labour, or think about them
very much, but set about the importation of a white working class, relations
with whom dominated their subsequent politics and history. The New
Zealand in which I grew up was able to construct a historical narrative in
which Maori played no independent part after about 1870; that people has
spent the last fifty years asserting itself in politics and compelling a new
historiography.9
The history constructed and written by a settler people under these
conditions will therefore be a history of itself: of the foundation of a self out
of the relationships and conflicts among its component parts. The history
of any political community whose awareness of a collective self requires
establishment, is increasing, or has been conventionalized, is liable to be
8
In this paragraph I begin to take issue with a currently dominant paradigm which presents New
Zealand history since 1945 as a history of ‘decolonization’. For a modified and subtle statement of
this thesis, see Belich, 2001. A bibliography of recent New Zealand historical writing is not
attempted here; it would be rich, complex and lengthy.
9
Sharp, 1990, 1997; Sharp and McHugh, 2001. These titles stand for a large bibliography.
a history of self, intended for its members, of limited interest to other
communities, and not requiring much attention to their histories.
A rigorously critical historian will be inclined to say that this is myth, not
history, since narratives intended to build up a self will be resistant to
critical investigation. (Is the self also a myth?) I desire to present a more
complex picture, in which the myths that form the self are always accom-
panied – not necessarily happily – by critical scrutiny, because the self
being constructed becomes aware of its own contingency, insecurity and
(in this case) antipodean remoteness. If this should appear at first sight an
over-simple account of the conditions under which a critical history of self
may appear, the reply is that under these conditions it is not easy to decide
on a narrative in the first place.10
There were several narratives of settler history partaking of the character
of myth: a Whig narrative of the growth of parliamentary sovereignty,
relating how the crown in New Zealand had come to accept embodiment
in a representative parliament; a social-democrat narrative, focussed on the
growth of social welfare, an economy in which government intervened, and
a politics of capital and labour; an imperial narrative, proposing that the
formation of nationhood was pursued and achieved through participation
in the wars – though not the wars alone – of a global British presence,
culture and power. All three of these have lost much of their mythic power
with the disappearances of both empire and democratic socialism and the
growing alienation of the electorate from its representatives (in New
Zealand, the last has led to some interesting constitutional experiments);
but none has ceased to be the narrative of a process which did take place
in history. They have lost mythic power because it is felt that they have
ceased to supply identity; the processes they relate do not provide an
imaginatively adequate account of who we are or where we have come
from. The question becomes that of what narrative is to take their place,
and one immediate danger – on the whole, quite successfully avoided – is
that of imprisonment within a facetiously patronizing deconstructive
account of these myths and any which offer to take their place. Any
narrative of autonomy must instantly be rewritten from the point of
view of those it fails to include; it is right to do this, but wrong to suppose
that the alienation of the excluded automatically deprives the history of
10
For further theoretical enquiry, see Pocock, 1997d and 1998a. I was concerned in the latter essay with
the role of those imperfectly included in, or actively excluded from, the politics of making history,
which nevertheless they deeply affect. This is another criticism to which the makers of history must
reply, but must retain the capacity to do so.
the included of its substance. By far the most interesting development in
New Zealand historiography has been the growth of Maori-centred narra-
tives which relate the history of conflict and interchange between two
identities; but as we have already seen, the history of the pakeha is not
reducible to its repression of the tangata whenua. They have done other
things beside that; whether Maori have been able to do other things beside
responding to the presence of the pakeha is a question that takes us closer to
the themes of post-colonialism.
A historiography which undermines the traditional narratives providing
identity may carry the pseudo-radical implication that identity may be
found simply in the rejection of the undermined tradition. But those who
are forever emancipating themselves will never be free, and the perpetually
reiterated rejection of imperial myths serves to perpetuate them – or rather,
to perpetuate the fear of a former identity, and the inability to manage
oneself within it, which is at the heart of the culture of resentment.11 Too
much fear of a former colonial identity inhibits one from replacing it, and
one of the objects of these essays has been to prompt New Zealanders
to rethink, not merely to reject, British history and their role within it as it
was (and may perhaps continue being). To manage one’s history is to study
it, not simply to subvert it, and the post-modern suspicion of all identities
is dangerous to former colonial societies, as perpetuating their sense of
dependence upon a history they are not making (as perhaps nobody is).
I have begun using the word ‘colonial’ in the special sense proper to a
society of colonists who formerly thought of themselves as ‘colonials’,
meaning that they lived in a culture and history which they had brought
with them, not yet one which they were making for themselves, and were
uneasily aware of a certain contempt in which they were held by metro-
politans. At this point I must revert to the study of history as it was when
I was a schoolboy and undergraduate in the 1930s and 1940s. I do not think
of the view of history it implied as ‘colonial’, but others do and it is
desirable to see why; part of the story may be that as a fourth-generation
colonist but first-generation New Zealander, I was less troubled by the
thought of being ‘colonial’ than those whose fathers and grandfathers were
New Zealand born often were. I valued the voyage as well as the land.
It is certainly the case that, in those decades, we studied Western,
European and especially British history more than we did that of
11
I develop this term from ‘the culture of complaint’ (Hughes, 1993). By it I mean the culture of those
who cannot live without seeing themselves as insurgents and insist upon others whom they may see as
dominators; a world view which is often true, but must not become a necessity.
New Zealand. That is scarcely the issue; there was a good deal more of the
former to be studied. The problem was – and was known to be – that we
had not yet found ways of rendering New Zealand history interesting
to ourselves, or central to our self-formation. The three myths I have
mentioned were in place and not without historical substance; but they
did not avert a feeling that the formation of a New Zealand society and
culture was rather dull as a subject of study; colonial (of course) rather than
provincial, and lacking in intellectual excitement. As far as I remember,
such were my own feelings at the time; history that excited the intellect and
imagination had happened elsewhere. But it is important to stress that this
did not prevent – it rather stimulated – a lively concern, often frustrated
but now and then satisfied, with finding a home for the imagination in
New Zealand and imagining that country in new, challenging and if
possible enriching ways. In this process the re-imagination of tradition –
of what had come in and with the ships – might stand beside the imagina-
tion of place and distance; but the relation between the two would not be
an easy one.
(III)
In the early 1940s – as I was beginning my undergraduate studies – a group
of poets began publishing their work at the Caxton Press in Christchurch.
Charles Brasch (1909–73), Allen Curnow (1911–2001) and Denis Glover
(1912–80), who was printer as well as poet, were South Islanders, inhabiting
a landscape where mountains and forests immediately confronted farm-
land and cities, there was an ocean eastward of one’s back, and it was
known that another sea lay not far west of the formidable ranges.12 Samuel
Butler, nearly a century before, had looked at the Southern Alps and longed
for the partly humanized landscape of alpine Switzerland;13 he was obliged
to imagine the descent into the anti-utopia of Erewhon instead.14 It was the
first statement of the problem with which a landscape so recently inhabited
by humans confronted an imagination that must hesitate even to conquer
it; the high country does not lend itself to the facile pantheism of the
environmentalists. The Caxton poets, as they were sometimes known, had
12
Their poems were published in many forms over many years, and the process of collecting them may
not yet be completed. There is a valuable bibliography, not limited to its immediate subject, in
Ogilvie, 1999. See also Sturm, 1991, and most recently, Jones, 2003.
13
Butler, 1923, vols. 1 (A First Year in the Canterbury Settlement), II (Erewhon).
14
For an account of the curious route by which Butler’s imagination came to affect the narrative in
these pages, see Pocock, 1991c.
much to say about the encounter between the human and a land which
resisted all attempts to imagine it, and made it their business to present
this encounter as itself imaginatively exciting; it is this paradox which we
have yet to locate in the imagination of the tangata whenua.15 The pakeha,
as I have said, remember a voyage before they imagine a land, and the
tension between the two is very strong. The poets situated the unimagined
land – an essayist of the time called it ‘the waiting hills’ – in what he
also called ‘the encircling seas’;16 an island or archipelago, ‘not in narrow
seas’17 but in the vastness of the planetary ocean. But the ocean had been
traversed, and what came out of it – ‘always to islanders’, wrote Curnow,
‘danger is what comes over the sea’18 – was not the unknown, but history;
a history we already knew, which might overwhelm and smother
our attempt to make a history out of the encounter with the land and
ourselves, and might present us with problems – there was a world war in
progress – that we had not made and might not be able to solve.
It was through the poetry of Allen Curnow that this conjunction of
images and problems became in my mind a way of looking at history and
living in it, when both had to be done a long sea voyage from anywhere
else. He presented an imagination which could never be fully at home
where it was, could never fully return to where it might have come from,
and had travelled too far to fly off and live anywhere else. The poems
written in the first half of his long life developed this theme – ‘Whole-
hearted he can’t move from where he is, nor love whole-hearted that
place’19 – with a crispness and energy of language that made it clear
that this was not an unhappy or impotent condition, but one intensely
stimulating to the imagination it challenged; and this was Curnow’s
contribution, in the 1940s and afterwards, to a project it remains inadequate
and misleading to call nationalist. It was about nationality, not nationalism.
To his readers in that decade it was anything but news that nations were
imagined communities; we were saying that ours would not be a nation or
a community until it learned to imagine itself; but we were saying also that
the antipodean imagination could not create itself out of any unifying
myth – if we had known anything about our Maori fellow islanders we
might have said to them that there was no whenua – but out of knowledge
15
See, however, a summary of the tradition of waka settlement in both islands in Walker, 1990, ch. 3.
16
Holcroft, 1940, 1943, 1946.
17
Curnow, 1939. It is a theme of this volume that neither England, Britain nor the Atlantic Archipelago
is encircled by the narrow seas east and south of them.
18
Curnow, ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’ (Curnow, 1943; 1997, pp. 226–9).
19
Curnow, ‘The Eye is More or Less Satisfied with Seeing’ (Curnow, 1962; 1997, p. 184).
of its own historicity and fragility. Since the voyage to Erewhon had carried
us beyond the islands of myth, there was no Tı́r na n’Óg, no being born
again, at the end of it; we must learn to live in more places than one and
more histories than one. It was not a bad lesson to spend the rest of the
twentieth century learning.
This phase of Curnow’s poetry came under vehement attack, later in the
1950s, from younger poets, often living in the northern cities: Wellington
the political capital and Auckland the commercial, both aspiring – as
Christchurch did not – to be the cultural capital as well. Members of
urban élites that could believe themselves self-sufficient, these writers took
exception to an easily misunderstood line in which Curnow had
mentioned ‘that great gloom which stands in a land of settlers, with
never a soul at home’.20 I read him as aiming to dispel that gloom and
make the condition of never being quite at home a spring to the imagination.
The younger poets, however, insisted that they were at home and the
voyage was no longer a problem; though a cynic might observe that having
proclaimed themselves at home, they lost no time in telling us how
satisfactorily alienated, modern and in due course post-modern they were
in that condition. Curnow, after a period of silence, moved into a poetic
mode sharply different from, though not discontinuous with, his earlier
verse, and went on writing poems of great clarity and authority until
he died at the age of 90, having outlived nearly all his enemies and not a few
of his friends. I am proud to have been one of the latter, but unlike many
New Zealand historians, I am not a poet.
I am, however, concerned to show how the poetry of the 1940s interacted
with the growth of a New Zealand historiography. The latter encountered
a double problem, whose two faces affected one another: how to write a
history of the people – perhaps the nation – we were making of ourselves,
and how to rewrite the history from which we had come, but which we had
brought with us and had not left behind. Given that the latter history was
economically, politically, militarily, culturally and historiographically
powerful in ways that we were not, it was natural that the effort to create
the former should appear a contest for power, a struggle against hegemony;
New Zealanders trying not to be ‘colonials’, in the sense of cultural
dependants, might be tempted to accuse the metropolitans of the empire
of cultural hegemony and repression, and the discovery that the metro-
politans were hardly aware that they existed, still less that they had a history,
might appear one more instrument of that repression. A culture of
20
Curnow, ‘House and Land’ (Curnow, 1941; 1997, p. 234). See Murray, 1998.
resentment – perhaps already built into the modern mindset – might take
over; but the question would arise whether resentment was enough.
Incessantly to stigmatize a culture as hegemonic may have the effect of
perpetuating that hegemony; a culture of resentment needs the objects of
resentment so badly that it may never be free of them. If, then, the presence
of ‘British history’ was impeding the growth of ‘New Zealand history’, the
question must arise of what we were to do about the former. There might
be ways of re-imagining it and making it our own, so that we were equals in
its practice.
The creation of a historiography of New Zealand was necessarily the
work of many hands, but no scholar did more to make it a distinctive
academic discipline, even an academic industry, than Keith Sinclair
(1922–93) of the University of Auckland.21 As a poet, he was among
Curnow’s critics; as a historian, he was a leading spirit. Together with his
colleagues, his pupils and his peers, he created or anticipated most of the
lines of enquiry into New Zealand history which have been pursued since,
and was a founding father of the historical culture which continues to
pursue them. I emphasize this the more because, during one period
(1959–66) when Sinclair’s activity was at its peak, I was associated
with the history department of the University of Canterbury, where other
things were going on. N. C. Phillips, J. B. Owen, and later Marie Peters and
J. E. Cookson, were following a post-Namierite path into the history of
eighteenth-century England,22 and my own work had already led me into the
history of English (and British) political (and historical) thought. Auckland
and Canterbury worked together in several ways, and there was a legend
that Keith Sinclair had declared that the latter was the only department
beside his own for whose work he felt respect. If not true, the tale is ben
trovato, for it was more widely believed that he regarded with suspicion the
study of any history but New Zealand’s, on the grounds that to study it was
to submit to it. There was a report that at Auckland ‘British history’ was
defined as ‘imperial history’, as if that were the only relationship that
mattered. Certainly, the New Zealand Journal of History, which carries on
Sinclair’s legacy at Auckland, is really a journal of New Zealand history and
publishes very little else.23 This is highly defensible, but it would be well if
the country had room for a second and complementary journal.
21
A bibliography of his writings to 1987 may be found in Binney and Sorrenson, 1987.
22
Phillips, 1961; Owen, 1957; Peters, 1980; Cookson, 1982, 1997.
23
I am happy to report an essay on fitting New Zealand into the discipline of world history (Gibbons,
2003).
On the one occasion when Keith Sinclair invited me to comment on a
work of his,24 I was moved to make two suggestions. One was that New
Zealand should be thought to possess two totemic birds: the kiwi, flight-
less, nocturnal and inhabiting the forest floor, and the godwit, a migratory
species whose flocks traverse the Pacific between New Zealand and Siberia
or Alaska. ‘The godwits vanish towards another summer’ was one of
Charles Brasch’s images of the New Zealand condition.25 It was implicit
that they were capable of the two-way voyage, though Robin Hyde
(1906–39)26 had written a novel, The Godwits Fly (1938), on the theme
that they could never make it back, and had later died in London by her
own hand. The godwit stands for both the travellers who return and the
expatriates who do not, but live in the pattern. I wished to say that if the
kiwi knew what was happening at the fernroots, the godwit knew what was
happening in the upper winds of the world, and that, even if each was
tempted by its own kind of arrogance, there was little it would be worth
their while for them to quarrel about. I suggested also, however, that there
were in Sinclair’s writings traces of the confusion – its origins fairly evident –
between independence of mind and resentment of English upper-class
practices. These often deserved resentment, but there was the danger of
obsession; those who cannot cease attacking the ‘cultural cringe’ or the
‘colonial cringe’ are not free from it and may be perpetuating it. I was also
troubled, in Sinclair’s last writings, when he seemed to find signs of
national independence when working-class New Zealanders expressed
dislike or contempt for working-class British;27 this was no time, I thought,
to perpetuate the premiss that the Self can only exist through its enmity for
an Other. Here were the faults of the kiwi, which might be corrected by the
world view of the godwit. When Sinclair entitled his autobiography
Halfway Round the Harbour,28 in allusion to his residence on the
Waitemata harbour which urban Auckland now surrounds, I was aware
of a preference for situating myself halfway round the planet. I was by then
an expatriate, but had not ceased to be a godwit; it is part of the pattern that
this can be so.
24
Pocock, 1983b.
25
Brasch, ‘In These Islands’, 1948; partly reprinted in Bornholdt, O’Brien and Williams, 1997, p. 372.
A line from this poem gave its title to Sinclair, 1961.
26
There is a considerable recent literature concerning her (for a recent assessment see Jones, 2003,
passim) in which she is accorded an importance I don’t recall she had for me. She has, and may then
have had, it for others.
27
Sinclair, 1986, pp. 104–8, 159–62, 245–6. 28 Sinclair, 1993.
The imagery of voyage, distance and historic ambivalence was already
apparent in the historiography. J. C. Beaglehole (1901–71), the premier
historian of the age-group preceding mine, had published several works –
including a history of the University of New Zealand29 – written through-
out on a high level of derisive and indignant eloquence; but though the
author of a memorable lecture on The New Zealand Scholar,30 he never
wrote the detailed history of the country that might have come from him.
Instead, he became a world authority on the exploration of the Pacific, and
ended his life of James Cook with the following:
Such things; Geography and Navigation; if we wish for more, an ocean is enough,
where the waves fall on innumerable reefs, and a great wind blows from the south-
east with the revolving world.31
This is not romantic language; it states that oceanic and planetary space
must be part of a way of seeing the world, and may be all that lies at the end
of certain lines of enquiry. There remains the question of the history which
is carried across such space and is the product of crossing it, and here it is
proper to quote the very recent language of W. H. Oliver, a contemporary
of Sinclair’s and mine, probably the premier historian of New Zealand now
living. His pre-eminence has more to do with biography than with narra-
tive, and in a recent autobiography, after considering the life of his father,
a working-class emigrant from Cornwall, he has this to say:
The two worlds we inhabited were, however, rich enough. We were untroubled,
too, by any thought of disjunction between the inherited world across the seas and
the acquired world near at hand. It was simply a matter of looking at the
immediate world through the eyes of the encompassing world and at that world
through the eyes of the one close to hand. I still cannot believe that absorbing some
of the great inheritance our origins offered us was in any way servile, colonialist or
a distraction from the local ‘reality’. Nor can I avoid the conclusion that it is better
not to feel too wholeheartedly at home wherever you might be . . .
Surely people from the warmer and more abundant islands of the Pacific felt the
shock of an alien land as keenly as other immigrants? I have come to think of that
trauma as an integral element in the ancestral heritage of all the peoples who live in
this country, and one which we forget or ignore to our loss and at our peril. For to
eliminate the experience of being a stranger is also to preclude a sense of belonging
that stretches across oceans to places both as distant as the other hemisphere and as
close as breathing. That sense is, for me, the source of the looking about and
setting down which ends as history in the many forms of the written word.32
29
Beaglehole, 1937. 30 Beaglehole, 1954. 31
Beaglehole, 1974, p. 714.
32
Oliver, 2002, pp. 54–5.
Oliver says here what I want to say; it should be remembered, however,
that we are both the sons of immigrants, and that pakeha in the third or
fourth generation may feel differently. I might also raise a notch or two
higher the possibility that the two worlds may challenge and discomfort
one another. I should want historical intelligence to begin on the far side of
some lines of Allen Curnow’s, already quoted in part:
Whole-hearted he can’t move
From where he is, nor love
Whole-hearted that place . . .
Does true or false sun rise?
Do both half eyes tell lies?
Cradle or grave, which view’s
The actual of the two? . . .
Snap open! He’s all eyes, wary,
Darting both ways one query . . . 33
I turn at last towards the birth of these essays at a time when the two
histories came into sharp and complex opposition.
(IV)
The New Zealand of the 1940s had been involved in the Second World
War and had suffered considerable loss of men, though not on the scale of
the First. The era of New Zealand participation in wars elsewhere coin-
cided (Vietnam excepted) with that of its location on what a recent
historian has termed the ‘protein bridge’,34 the sea routes along which its
pastoral produce – wool, mutton and butter – passed to feed and clothe the
urban populations of the United Kingdom, its principal market. The
bridge actually consisted of three routes: Panama, Suez and Cape Town;
and it was along all three, in the era before air travel, that New Zealanders
travelled by steamship, in the endeavour of many of them to discover and
explore the history they belonged to. In the wars of the twentieth century
New Zealanders fought at points along the sea routes, or at their European
abutments: the Transvaal, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, Alamein and
Cassino; and it is helpful to visualize the ‘protein bridge’ as defining that
area of the oceanic world and its politics to which the New Zealand I am
33
Curnow, ‘The Eye is More or Less Satisfied with Seeing’, 1962; 1997, pp. 184–5.
34
Belich, 2001, makes extensive use of this concept. Butter is not of course a protein.
describing belonged. Of the three routes, that through Suez and the
Mediterranean was doubly significant: it was the theatre of wars, and the
theatre of empire – though the deep commitment New Zealanders used to
have to the image of British empire had more to do with their own relation
with Britain than with rule over Egyptians, Africans and Indians; with the
empire of colonization than with that of ‘colonialism’. The wars in which
New Zealanders died had to do with maintaining both a global system and
a certain idea of themselves, though it is true that by 1939–45 the latter had
undergone change. I recall a testy exchange with a brisk young intellectual
in the 1990s, who wanted me to agree that the Second World War had been
another war for King and Country; I reminded him that ours had been a
social-democratic culture, and that the war against Hitler could not have
been fought without the widely accepted myth of democratic socialism that
survived even the Nazi–Soviet pact. This was as much part of the New
Zealand ethos as it was of that of the British, and the changes in historical
outlook I shall be describing had to do with the death of socialism as well as
the death of empire.
After the American and British naval disasters of December 1941, John
Curtin, the Australian prime minister, issued a stirring New Year’s Eve
broadcast to his people, summoning them to what would soon be a very
serious war in New Guinea and the seas around it. The Australian infantry
divisions were recalled from the Middle East – replacing the division lost at
Singapore – and committed to the campaigns in the islands between
Australia and Indonesia, in which they served for the remainder of the
global conflict. New Zealand did not follow this strategy; after garrisoning
Fiji for a while, reinforcements continued to go to the division then
fighting in Egypt and Libya, and New Zealand remained committed to
the war in Europe, not the Pacific. I find it valuable to reflect on this
difference between the two national histories. It might be argued that the
New Zealand I knew was not yet ideologically situated in the Pacific
Ocean, but rather in the world-girdling Southern Ocean into which the
Pacific opens out, or – for material and ideological reasons of greater
solidity – on the tracts of ocean defined by the ‘protein bridge’, which, it
could be argued, we were still fighting to maintain. Unlike the Australians –
who had very pressing reasons for acting as they did – we sustained in arms
a relationship with both Britain and Europe; and the New Zealand military
decision belongs with the American and Allied decision to give priority to
the defeat of Germany over that of Japan.
There is now a conventional wisdom which seems to hold that New
Zealand ought to have followed the Australian decision of 1941–2, largely
on the grounds that it would have been less ‘colonial’ to do so.35 This makes
little sense to my historical memory. Curtin’s New Year’s Eve broadcast
informed the Australians that they were no longer protected by the British
navy, but by that of the United States instead; a courageous thing to say
three weeks after Pearl Harbor, but an odd way of proclaiming national
self-reliance. In the event, one might argue, the United States did not much
want allies in the Pacific war, and the formidable Australian infantry ended
it conducting subsidiary operations in Sulawesi while Douglas MacArthur
went on to the Philippines. The New Zealand Division, in comparison,
after heavy losses at Cassino, ended the war helping to keep the city of
Trieste Italian when Jugoslav partisans hoped to take it over; an interven-
tion in history of a certain significance. And it is always to be remembered
that the Third Reich (and later the Soviet Union) were acting in ways we
understood, in terms of a history and philosophy European, American and
global. However mind-defyingly appalling their actions (and ours), we
knew them as inhabitants of our world; that was the depth of our quarrel
with them; whereas the Japanese, in the understandings available to us
then, might as well have been Martians from outer space. This should be,
and is being, changed; but it is not yet clear that an Asian, or a post-
colonial, understanding of history has replaced an Anglo-European or
Anglo-American scheme as a means of making sense of the history of the
South Pacific or the Southern Ocean. It is much easier to quarrel with the
Americans than with the Indonesians or Chinese.
Between the end of the Second World War and the delivery of the
lecture printed next in this volume, more than a quarter-century went by,
and it would be absurd to attribute the mentality of 1945 to audiences in
1973. It might be tedious, on the other hand, and perhaps it is still not
possible, to offer a detailed history of the changing circumstances and
mentalities of both New Zealand and Britain during that period.36 It is
the case, however, that the relationship between the two, in the era of the
‘protein bridge’ and the British Commonwealth of Nations, was intimate
and dynamic as well as stable, and that a history of ideologies since 1945 is
largely concerned with the dissolution of that relationship and its causes.
It is surely a commonplace that what befell the British in the second half
of the twentieth century was the failure of empire, the failure of socialism
and the failure of industrialism, occurring concurrently rather than
35
Belich, 2001, pp. 284–7, concludes that this decision was the product of a ‘recolonial’ mentality. The
use of this adjective serves more to relegate than to illuminate.
36
Belich, 2001, pp. 325–45 and 391–465, should be read on this period.
successively; and that it remains a question – I do not say one that cannot
be answered – whether a coherent or autonomous history of the British
peoples can be written in consequence of these catastrophes. There have
been negative answers of which I wish to speak negatively. One is the claim
that ‘Britain’ and ‘the British’ existed only in consequence of the attain-
ment of empire, and have now ceased to exist in consequence of empire’s
disappearance. Another – superficially at variance with the first – is the
claim that the same history has never been that of an imperial, oceanic or
global people (or peoples) and has existed only within a ‘European’ history
which is the past of a future relationship. The New Zealand equivalent of
these has been the claim that its history cannot be written – and since it has
been, must now be forgotten – in terms of a ‘British’ identity or relation-
ship, and must now be rewritten in terms more populist, Pacific and post-
modern. There is much to be said for this – it is Keith Sinclair’s reading of
history carried on by a succeeding generation – but the danger is that it may
fail to understand, and may dismiss as ‘colonial’, the history of a New
Zealand when things were otherwise.
My own career in these decades – it will be recalled that this essay must
be in part autobiographical – continued to be a story of voyagings between
histories. I spent several years in England (I use that word advisedly)
beginning a study – later completed in New Zealand – of how the
English had once constructed their history in terms verging on the autoch-
thonous, and had then challenged it with an alternative that made it a
consequence of the European invasion of 1066.37 I subsequently moved
more than once between England and New Zealand, but in 1966 departed
from that pattern by accepting an offer from Washington University in
St Louis – thus moving from the distance between antipodean archipelagos
to the junction of two rivers in the heartland of a continent. Since then,
I have continued to live in the forty-eight contiguous states, but still regard
the world as an archipelago of histories rather than a tectonic of continents.
I see histories as both transplanted by voyagings and generated by settle-
ments and contacts, and consequently as never quite at home. In this
I claim to have anticipated and accommodated some part at least of the
post-modern stress on fictiveness and momentariness (just as the ‘linguistic
turn’ was not altogether astonishing to one who had studied texts and their
contexts with Butterfield and Laslett in Cambridge before and after 1950).
37
Pocock, 1957 and 1987 (B).
(V)
The first lecture here reprinted was delivered in Christchurch in 1973 (the
centennial year of the University of Canterbury) as the first in a series
honouring the memory of J. C. Beaglehole, who had died two years earlier.
It may be thought of as continuing that Canterbury counterpoint to history
as studied at Auckland, described earlier in this introduction; but it is also,
and more widely, a proposal to refigure the history of Britain, put forward in
the context of the ongoing British negotiation for entry into ‘Europe’,
successively defined as market, community and union. That negotiation
lasted for many years; indeed, it is not over yet; and the same may be said of
New Zealand’s responses to it, including the revaluation of our own history
and identity it necessitated. I recall some moments in this historical process
more vividly than others; for example, the grim amusement, appropriate to a
family quarrel, with which we received the news of President de Gaulle’s
temporary veto of British entry in 1963. As our own vernacular might have
put it, the old man’s mistress had thrown him out of the pub, and it served
the bastard right; at the same time, we knew that de Gaulle’s hostility – it was
mixed with respect – was aimed in part at Britain’s association with nations
like ours, and that he was our enemy just as he was Canada’s. At issue was the
continued existence of a global Britishness, an association within which –
I differ here from younger historians who can see it only as involving a
dependency – we held ourselves entitled to certain kinds of equality. To this
the French might be indifferent, if they knew of it at all; but it was the British
of the United Kingdom who seemed bent on dissolving it, on the grounds
that they had no longer the power to sustain it and it was inconvenient to
them to pay any further attention to us. There were moments, in the British
debate with themselves over ‘Europe’, which revealed all too clearly a
perception of New Zealanders as faithful servants no longer needed, who
might now be pensioned off and forgotten; an insult deeper than any
de Gaulle could have intended, to which there must be reply.
Speaking at Auckland, there would have been no need to outline ways in
which New Zealand history might be re-assessed; these were already
in place and in practice. Speaking in Canterbury, I chose to consider
ways in which New Zealanders certainly, but at the same time anyone
else concerned, might re-assess British history as a shared possession. In the
Second Book of Samuel, it is written how:
the men of Israel answered the men of Judah, and said, ‘We have ten parts in the
king, and we have also more right in David than ye: why then did ye despise us,
that our advice should not be first had in bringing back our king?’38 And the words
of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the men of Israel.39
And there happened to be there a man of Belial . . . and he blew a trumpet and
said, ‘We have no part in David, neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse:
every man to his tents, O Israel’.40
‘David the king’ in this story might be the name not of a sovereign, but
of a taonga, a Maori term for a cultural inheritance; in this case a history we
had supposed ourselves to share. Maori know, however, that taonga bring
mana, a cultural power and self-respect which continues the being of the
ancestors. The ‘man of Belial’ – Keith Sinclair might have enjoyed the
ascription – being denied his inheritance, denies that he ever had one, and
goes out in search of mana of his own making; in the Hebrew narrative he
comes to a bad end.41 He need not do so; but in the analogy I am applying,
he sees himself as under David’s hegemony, and his inheritance a badge of
inferiority. The men of Israel (later to be the lost ten tribes) affirm that they
are the equals of the men of Judah, and in a real sense of David himself. The
New Zealand response to the British denial of community could therefore
be a denial of taonga, a denial that they were or had been part of a history
that could only be a means of hegemony, a reduction to colonial status. It
might on the other hand be an affirmation of equality, a declaration that
New Zealanders had their own part in British history, and their own right
to continue writing it and – unless we are all owls of Minerva to whom
history becomes intelligible only as it ends – to continue making it, by
interpretation as a form of action. This equality would have existed in the
past as well as in the deeply shadowed present and future.
The version of British history here put forward was proposed in the
antipodes and is pervaded by the antipodean sense of distance and ambiva-
lence. To claim equality, however, is to address oneself to one’s equals, and the
‘British history’ that now began taking shape was proposed to British histor-
ians, and any who might be interested in British history, as a narrative and
scenario that might make sense as a way of viewing it. Though distinctively
antipodean and designed to serve antipodean interests, it did not attempt the
absurdity of imposing an antipodean framework on the history of the British
kingdoms. It did, however, invite their inhabitants to see themselves as an
association of insular and emigrant peoples, who had set going a diversity of
histories in settings archipelagic, Atlantic and oceanic, might have to continue
38
This text was chosen by the minister appointed to preach before King Charles I when the latter
placed himself in the hands of the Scottish army in 1646.
39 40 41
II Samuel, 19, 43. II Samuel, 20, 1. II Samuel, 20, 22.
living in those histories, and must recognize that others were still living in them
in ways to which they must pay attention.
This is the point at which ‘British history’ comes into collision with the
ideology of ‘Europe’, and may perhaps be the product of that collision
(how far this was the case in 1973 I am not sure I remember). It is now
affirmed – loudly, dogmatically, and often without much corroborative
detail – that the British states and peoples must henceforth be and, as far as
this can be asserted, must always have been, part of a history exclusively
‘European’, perhaps better defined by what it excludes than by what it
narrates. ‘Europe’ is an association of former empires which claim to
exercise sovereignty better if they share it among themselves; latent in
this, however, is a strong impulse to assert the obsolescence of the sovereign
community without replacing it by any other community capable of
governing itself. It therefore negates the history of any former ‘nation
state’ such as Britain – the term ‘nation state’ is used dismissively or as
condemnation – but does not replace it by any other history in which
peoples can be defined and seen as governing themselves. It therefore
operates negatively, denying histories more energetically than it seeks to
rewrite them; and the impact of ‘Europe’ upon Britain is to deny it any past
of cultural autonomy, political sovereignty, empire beyond the European
peninsula, and – of course – any historical association with Anglophone
North America. The antipodean neo-Britains recognize that among the
aims of this exercise is the denial or marginalization of their own histories
but are tempted to take part in this marginalization by constructing
autochthonous narratives which know nothing of any history but that
they have made for themselves. There are, in consequence, two claims
that may be made for the ‘new history’ I began proposing in 1973. To
peoples like the New Zealanders – there are several – it offers a history in
which they have taken part, which may help explain them to themselves,
and to which they may lay claim, as equals, in the art of renarrating and
interpreting it. To the British peoples – I use the plural deliberately – it
offers a history which is not simply one of unity and empire, but a complex
enterprise in which they have been involved and have acted in various ways.
This history is not complacent or hegemonic, but deeply problematic; it
may not be over yet, in the sense that they are still in search of ways in
which it may be continued. It challenges the apparent alternative – that of
abandoning all history of their own, and repeating the word ‘Europe’ as a
mantra signifying that history is at an end and we have arrived at the world
of Nietzsche’s and Fukuyama’s Last Men – by suggesting that a narrative of
how they have interacted with one another, and spread into the oceans,
may exist and interact with one of how they have interacted with adjacent
peoples of the European peninsula. There is everything to be said for
writing a history of ‘Britain’ as ‘European’, until it becomes paradigmatic
and hegemonic. If it is proposed for no other purpose than to exclude other
histories, it will never have much to say for itself.
This history owes something to the antipodean perspective. It sees
peoples in motion, histories traversing distance, and ‘identities’ (the word
is overworked) as never quite at home. Formed partly in an archipelago of
the Southern Ocean, it presents the islands including Britain as another
archipelago (hence the title of this book), not the promontory of a con-
tinent; it presupposes histories ‘not in narrow seas’. It questions identities,
but waits to hear answers. In this, I believe, it is indebted to the culture, and
the moment in history, in which it was formed; but its test, needless to say,
must be its success in explaining, and enlarging, the histories to which it has
been applied. It is exposed to that test in the essays now to be reprinted.
CHAPTER 2
British history: a plea for a new subject
It seems all wrong to be delivering a memorial lecture for John Beaglehole.1

In the first place, he ought to be here himself; and in the second, though he
wrote a style entirely capable of building monuments more lasting than
bronze, it never disguised a Chaplinesque delight in whisking away the veil
before too white and glistening a perfection could conceal the veins in the
marble. He was not a marmoreal figure himself and one should not
attempt to make him one; he was a man one should not commemorate
so much as enjoy. In giving a lecture to his memory, then, one should seek
to do something which one enjoys oneself and which JCB might have
enjoyed too; and in this way, as he would certainly have pointed out, one
may give one’s colleagues about as much prospect of enjoying the occasion
as they can reasonably expect. Something exploratory, something reflective
and something not unduly reverent seems to be what is called for, and
I shall do my best to comply with those specifications.
A. J. P. Taylor’s volume of the Oxford History of England opens – in a
way which may or may not have escaped the attention of Scottish reviewers –
with a flat and express denial that the term ‘Britain’ has any meaning. It is,
he says, the name of a Roman province, which never included the whole of
modern Scotland, and was foisted upon the English by the inhabitants of
the northern kingdom as part of the parliamentary union of 1707.
Moreover, he continues, the term ‘Great Britain’ – which properly denotes
no more than the Anglo-Scottish union – is non-identical with the term
‘United Kingdom’, since the latter’s scope included the whole of Ireland
from 1801 and the dark and bloody rump of that island from 1922.2 There
could be a Plaid Cymru comment on all this, I suppose, and one might also
1
This paper was presented as the J. C. Beaglehole Memorial Lecture to the meeting of the
New Zealand Historical Association at the University of Canterbury in May 1973. It is printed
here as it appeared in the New Zealand Journal of History (Pocock, 1974). It was reprinted, with
commentaries by several hands, in the Journal of Modern History (Pocock, 1975).
2
Taylor, 1965, p. v and n.
24
British history: a plea for a new subject 25
like to hear the views of Orkney and Shetland regionalists who may
consider themselves a Norse fragment unsatisfactorily subject to an alien
Scots culture. But Taylor’s remarks conclude with an announcement that
when he has occasion to mention people and things emanating from
Scotland – which he clearly implies will be no more often than the
exigencies of a history of England compel – he intends to use the adjective
‘Scotch’, not ‘Scots’ or ‘Scottish’, on the grounds that the former is the
English word and the latter, though used by Scots to denote themselves, no
part of his native vocabulary. Now, as Taylor knows very well, there are
parts of the world in which men are killed for less; he is deliberately
dabbling in the politics of language and the politics of identity, which
are among the more murderous and aggressive pursuits of our murderous
and aggressive world, but he clearly expects to get away with it. One finds
the same insistence on using ‘Scotch’ instead of ‘Scottish’, on grounds
which are unmistakably arrogant rather than merely pedantic, in the pre-
face to C. S. Lewis’s volume of the Oxford History of English Literature,
though Lewis redeemed himself by devoting separate and serious chapters
to the history of sixteenth-century Scottish literature, which he saw to be
written in an autonomous if disappearing variant of the Inglis tongue.3
Lewis, after all, was an Ulsterman; but on this occasion he claimed the right
to call himself English and to speak of the Scots only in a language which
was English, not Scottish, and by a name which Scotsmen do not employ
in speaking of themselves. Again, this can easily be a killing matter; but – as
with the use of the macron vowel in Maori4 – things have not in fact gone
so far. But we all were – were we not? – brought up to understand that it
was polite to say ‘Scots’ and not ‘Scotch’, since Scotsmen so preferred; just
as it used to be polite to call Black Americans ‘Negroes’ – with a capital N –
until the rules of this game were somewhat suddenly changed.5 One hopes
that the word ‘Maori’ will continue to give satisfaction.
The politics of language, however, are less my theme than some interest-
ing implications that may be drawn, and lessons that I think may be learned,
from Taylor’s characteristic exercise in coat-trailing. It is informative to hear
an eminent English historian – once distinguished for his understanding of
the difference between kleindeutsch and grossdeutsch ideologies6 – declare
frankly that the term ‘Britain’ has no meaning to him, and none in history
3
Lewis, 1954, pp. v, 66–119.
4
There has been vehement debate as to whether long vowels should be spelt with a macron – e.g. Maori –
or doubled – e.g. Maaori. Both spellings remain in usage, but I have not ventured to determine between
them.
5
An episode of the late 1960s. 6 Taylor, 1946, passim.
either, and that he has no more than an obligatory sense of identity with any
of the peoples of his island group other than his own. Within the memory of
everyone here, the English have been increasingly willing to declare that
neither empire nor commonwealth ever meant much in their consciousness,
and that they were at heart Europeans all the time. The obvious absurdity of
the second part of the claim is no bar either to the partial truth of the
first part, or to the ideological assertion of the claim as a whole; and if it
has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the
Commonwealth – white as well as non-white – it is not altogether beyond
the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may
some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate
themselves, in their turn. With communal war resumed in Ireland and
a daily cost in lives being paid for the desire of one of the ‘British’ peoples
to remain ‘British’ as they understand the term, it is not inconceivable that
future historians may find themselves writing of a ‘Unionist’ or even
a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic
archipelago, and locating it between a date in the thirteenth, the seventeenth
or the nineteenth centuries and a date in the twentieth or the twenty-first.7
These are of course dismal imaginations; we all at least claim to dislike
balkanization, and I doubt if the most resolutely nationalist among us
could say that the disappearance of all meaning from the term ‘Britain’
would do nothing at all to his sense of identity. I am going to advance the
claim that there is a need for us to revive the term ‘British history’, and
re-invest it with meaning, for reasons relative to the maintenance of a number
of historically based identities. But in order to make this claim intelligible,
I must first establish the truth of a proposition which did not become fully
clear to me until I read and reflected on Taylor’s dictum that the term
‘Britain’ is without historical meaning. He was after all contributing to
a History of England, and there is at least this much truth in his claim: no
true history of Britain has ever been composed. Geoffrey of Monmouth in
the twelfth century, William Camden in the sixteenth, Robert Henry in the
eighteenth, made the attempt according to the standards of their times, and
even today there are some distinguished and even brilliant partial excep-
tions to the rule I am enunciating. But when one considers what ‘Britain’
means – that it is the name of a realm inhabited by two, and more than two,
nations, whose history has been expansive to the extent of planting settle-
ments and founding derivative cultures beyond the Four Seas – it is evident
that the history of this complex expression has never been seriously
7
[Whether these speculations were predictions or prophecies I cannot now tell.]
attempted. Francis Bacon, on the occasion of the union of the crowns in
1603, proposed to James VI and I the construction of a history which would
make that of England and that of Scotland as simultaneously visible as had
been the histories of Israel and Judah in the Books of Kings and Chronicles;
but one has only to walk through the relevant section of any library and
glance at the shelves to see that his advice has not been taken. Instead of
histories of Britain, we have, first of all, histories of England, in which
Welsh, Scots, Irish, and in the reign of George III Americans, appear as
peripheral peoples when, and only when, their doings assume power to
disturb the tenor of English politics; second, and read by limited and
fragmented publics, histories of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and so forth,
written as separate enterprises in the effort, sustained to various degrees, to
constitute separate historiographical traditions. Of this state of affairs it
may be said – if it may be said of any state of affairs – that A. J. P. Taylor is
its logical culmination.
I can best begin sketching what a history of Britain might be like by
describing one or two of the exceptions to my rule – works which have
done something to whet my appetite for more of the same. David
Mathew’s The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe,8 though marred by
the author’s extraordinary pointilliste technique in writing history, did at
least achieve a real imaginative sweep. Starting with the appearance of some
Anglo-Welsh dependants of the house of Devereux in the Earl of Essex’s
rebellion in 1600, Mathew worked his way out along the military route to
Ireland through South Wales and Milford Haven, and then made a tour
d’horizon of the whole Celtic frontier and trans-frontier world, from
Cornwall through Wales, and through Ireland, the Western Isles and the
Scottish Highlands, to the Gordon country and Aberdeen; at the end of
which the reader was left with the excited sensation of having been
introduced to a new realm of historical experience and convinced that it
was really there. Though Mathew wrote of the world of the Hebridean
gallowglasses – known also to Shakespeare – in terms which indicated that
they were so very Gaelic that even the Irish found them a little incompre-
hensible, and he himself was forced to write of them in Kiltartan English,
the effect of his book was strictly non-Ossianic. One found oneself con-
vinced of the existence of a world outside manorial Western Europe, on
which the settled societies of the English, Scotto-Anglians and Anglo-Irish
steadily encroached; and I found this impression reinforced when I read a
then little-known Jacobean work, Sir John Davies’s Discoverie of the True
8
Mathew, 1933.
Causes why Ireland was never thoroughly subdued until His Majesty’s Happy
Reign.9 Davies, James I’s Attorney-General for Ireland, one of whose aims
was the conversion of brehon conceptions of inheritance into common-law
land tenures, was moved by this experience to write an early classic of
colonial history and administrative literature, its theme being that only the
anglicization of tenure could bring settled conditions to Irish society, and
that earlier failures to do this had left Norman and Old English ruling
groups stranded in an Old Irish world with no alternative but to become
Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores. Davies, with imperialist intentions, wrote an
intercultural history, concerned with conflict and cross-breeding between
societies differently based, and it is my contention that this is, with other
intentions, how ‘British history’ will have to be written.10
Reverting to modern historiography, J. C. Beckett’s The Making of
Modern Ireland performs the service of recounting the whole period
which we know as that of the First Civil War, 1642 to 1646, from the
standpoint of the Marquis of Ormond, the greatest Anglo-Irishman of his
day and the greatest of the king’s servants in Ireland; and in order to do this
properly, Beckett was driven to rebaptize the whole conflict and call it by
the name of the War of the Three Kingdoms.11 As soon as one looks at it in
that way, a revolution in perspectives takes place; one sees that ‘the First
Civil War’ is a purely English term, appropriate only to English conditions –
since in Scotland there was never a civil war, even Montrose succeeding in
launching no more than a Highland raid of a desperately unusual character,
and since Ireland had not attained the degree of political integration
necessary if the term ‘civil war’ is to have any meaning. The War of the
Three Kingdoms was in fact three wars, originating independently if
interconnectedly, and differing in political character – a national rebellion
in Scotland south and east of the Highlands, a frontier rebellion (perhaps
aiming to be more) in the multicultural conflict-zone of Ireland, and a civil
war in the highly integrated political society of England – and flowing
together to form a single series but not a single phenomenon. Charles I
would not have summoned the English parliament but for the war in
Scotland, or been challenged by it for control of the militia but for the war
in Ireland; and though the outcome was such as to increase the ascendancy
9
Published in 1612. For further analysis, Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B), pp. 59–62.
10
[Irish historians assure us – no doubt rightly – that Davies was a nasty little man and his policies a
failure. This does not diminish the intellectual muscle of his book. See Pawlisch, 1985, Flanagan, 1999
and Canny, 2001.]
11
Beckett, 1966, ch. 4. [I did not enquire here whether Beckett originated the term I learned from him.]
of England over Scotland and of England and Scotland over Ireland, it is
evident that we are studying three, and in some ways more than three,
interacting histories.
I am using ‘British history’ – for lack, an Irishman might add, of a better
term – to denote the plural history of a group of cultures situated along an
Anglo-Celtic frontier and marked by an increasing English political and
cultural domination.12 The last work I should like to mention as offering
the kind of pluralist treatment I am advocating is J. R. Pole’s Political
Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic.13
Concerned with a highly specific historical problem – the American
Revolution and the birth of federalism that followed – Pole conducts a
survey of political structures and electoral systems which moves from
England through Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, with glances
at other sub-cultures on the way, and returns to the deliberations of the
Philadelphia Convention in 1789. The effect is to convince the reader that
there once existed, as a single system, a diversity of political cultures
grouped around the northern Atlantic – an English, two Scottish, three
Irish and an uncertain number of American – increasingly dominated by
the English language and by veneration for, if diverse modes of interpret-
ing, English political norms and institutions; and that these were disrupted
in the great civil war of the American Revolution, which can be interpreted
either in terms of one group of these cultures making a radical choice from
among the alternatives before it, or in terms of the geopolitically pre-
ordained emergence of an American nation qualitatively distinct from
the Anglo-Atlantic culture which gave it birth. To this the response was
the authoritarian consolidation of the eastern group of cultures at their
weakest point, in the Irish Union of 1801, so that one may look ahead from
the second to the third of the major civil wars which have convulsed British
history – the Irish Revolution of 1911–22, the first terrorist war of modern
times, a marginal campaign of which is still [1973] being fought.
The nature of the subject which might be designated ‘British history’
ought by this time to be emerging, though its complete outline cannot be
traced within the confines of a single lecture. We should start with what
I have called the Atlantic archipelago – since the term ‘British Isles’ is one
which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously. This
is a large – dare I say a sub-continental? – island group lying off the north-
west coasts of geographic Europe, partly within and partly without the
oceanic limits of the Roman empire and of what is usually called ‘Europe’
12 13
[A paragraph of the original is omitted here.] Pole, 1966.
in the sense of the latter’s successor states; in which respect it somewhat
resembles Scandinavia. Historical geographers supply us with accounts of
the configuration of the islands composing it, notably its divisions into
lowland and highland zones and the diversity of its littorals as these face
towards quasi-inland seas on the European side and an oceanic water-
region on the Atlantic; I could imagine analogies between the relation of
this archipelago to Roman-Germanic Europe and the relation of the
Japanese archipelago to China and East Asia – the main difference being
that the Atlantic contains only one archipelagic group14 instead of the
Eastern two or three. Historical geographers, prehistorians and archae-
ologists – the only specialists so far to have accepted the perspective I am
proposing as a norm – further supply us with keys to the ethnic and cultural
patterns of human settlement in the archipelago: the establishment in its
various geographical zones of different kinds of maritime, stock-rearing
and agricultural economies, and its linguistic divisions into communities
speaking different kinds of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse. The incorpora-
tion of a large part of the major island as a province of the Roman empire
raises the problem of the archipelago’s involvement in the history of
complex literate and political cultures organizing power on the adjacent
continent – in other words the problem of whether ‘Britain’ is part of
‘Europe’ – but the Roman empire, like Latin-German Christendom after
it, does not effectively penetrate to all the oceanic or Atlantic regions of the
archipelago, and the second-largest island is not directly affected by Roman
government. The period of provincial organization is succeeded by one of
resettlement, during which the techniques of the human geographer and
archaeologist – dominant in periods which have left little documentary
deposit – have once again most to tell us. For the first time we become
aware of the distinction between history as the recorded and perennially
re-evaluated memory of literate societies, and history as the past recovered,
by whatever means appropriate, where it has not been consciously remem-
bered and preserved, or at points where written and restated memory does
not yield whatever results we are looking for. This distinction presents us
with what will become the greatest single methodological difficulty in the
construction of British history – a difficulty largely co-terminous with the
problem of nationality.
‘English history’ certainly, and ‘Scottish history’ probably, begin with
the consolidation of kingdoms which later become states – loci of
14
[This might be challenged by mentioning the Canaries and the Faroes. It also sets the Caribbean Sea
apart from the ocean of which it is a branch.]
government, law enforcement and service to a king, which begin to pre-
serve archival deposits and concerning the doings of whose leaders chroni-
cles begin to be written. One of these loci – to be called ‘England’ – is
formed by the consolidation of the Wessex–Mercia kingdom, of which the
Norman Conquest of the eleventh century was a takeover; the other – to be
called ‘Scotland’ – is formed because a local kingdom in a northern low-
land zone is separated from the southern consolidation by the highland
area called ‘Northumbria’, which for a variety of reasons, including Danish
settlement, Norman devastation and the formation of marcher lordships, is
for a long time not fully absorbed by either kingdom. These two mon-
archies are differentiated from earlier petty kingdoms by the Anglo-
Norman capacity to maintain contact with the clerical and post-Roman
traditions of church, law and administration, and because they are loci of
centralized military and governmental power, they come to maintain
marches, or quasi-militarized border zones; first against one another, in
the debatable lands of the Northumbrian highland region, and second,
each against its unincorporated neighbouring Celtic area: Wales in the
south, the Gaelic Highlands and Islands in the north-west. The latter area
merges oceanically into that of the Irish peoples of the second great island,
but it is not here that the impact of Norman power upon Ireland – to use
that geographical expression – significantly takes place. The southern
kingdom is after the mid-eleventh century involved in a series of conti-
nental European power systems, and in Anglo-Romance cultural
exchanges; and in the twelfth century there takes place that momentous
occurrence in archipelagic history, the establishment of Anglo-Norman or
Norman-Welsh penetration into Ireland, which in due course takes on
some of the characteristics of a march. The governmental and cultural
focus to be called England now begins fully to straddle between a French
and continental world on the east, a Celtic, oceanic and extra-European
world to the west, and to engage in contacts upon both sides which
historiographical tradition will tend to minimize. The northern kingdom,
involved in a parallel duality but less self-contained in its culture because
less efficient in its government, develops a consciousness casting far greater
emphasis on the Highland Line on the one hand and the Auld Alliance on
the other.
With the beginnings of Anglo-Norman power in Ireland, the history of
the Three Kingdoms has in a sense begun; or at least we have the makings
of a set of themes common to the north and south of the largest island and
to both large islands together. ‘British history’ – if the term may be retained –
now becomes the history of contacts and penetrations between three loci
of Anglo-Norman power – one might use the term ‘Scotto-Anglian’
for distinction’s sake – a variety of predominantly Celtic societies based
on kinship rather than administration, and a diversity of marcher and
marginal societies brought into being by these interactions. Among the
latter are powers like the great Norman-Irish lordships, the western and
northern marcher lordships in relation to the English monarchy, the
Lordship of the Isles and the Earldom of Orkney on the periphery of
Scottish power; and, as happens in penumbral systems of authority, some
of these sometimes maximize their influence with respect to the settled and
administrative zones behind them. Welsh nationalists today like to point
out that had the conspiracy of Glendower, Percy and Douglas against the
English king Henry IV succeeded – which does not seem so absurd to them
as it did to the English poet Shakespeare15 – a belt of marcher principalities,
running from Wales through Northumbria to south-west Scotland,
might have fragmented the advance of both centralized kingdoms; and
the modern historian S. T. Bindoff dates the final absorption of the
Northumbrian marches into ‘England’ no earlier than the repression of
the Northern Rising of 1569.16 Our historical perspective, it is worth
remembering, is not merely Anglocentric: it takes as predetermined the
triumph of that Wessex–Mercian–East Anglian combination which has
been called ‘political England’.
It is not only the marcher lordships of the expanding governed societies
which create the political and cultural pluralism of the early and middle
phases of ‘British history’: there is also the creation of a diversity of
intermediate and counter-reactive societies all along the line which links,
rather than separates, the conflicting and interacting cultures. There are
Normanized Irish and Hibernicized Normans; there are bilingual Anglo-
Welsh, as well as monoglot Welsh and English; there are Lowland Scots
assimilated to the clan world of the Highlands, as well as clans which
expand at the expense of others by methods of litigation rather than war;
there are Celts who enter a Norse world and Norsemen assimilated to the
Celtic pattern. Culture conflicts, the language barriers, the phenomena of
the marches, the distinction between lowland and highland zones; these all
join to make ‘British history’ – the expansion of government at the expense
of kinship – a history of the constant creation, accompanied by the much
less constant absorption, of new sub-cultures and even sub-nations. The
locus classicus of this sort of process is of course Ireland, where by the end of
the seventeenth century one sub-nation, the Catholic Old English, has
15 16
Henry IV, Part I, Act III, scene 1, lines 69–90. Bindoff, 1950, pp. 107–8, 208–10.
been partly extinguished and there have emerged three sub-nations in a
single island: the Protestant Anglo-Irish or New English, a garrison land-
holding class who generate a high culture without becoming a nation; the
Scots-Irish, who survive into our own times as the classic example, along
with the Afrikaners of South Africa, of the settler nation which is at the
same time an anti-nation; and the Catholic and Gaelic ‘native’ Irish,
undergoing a social transformation as violent as any in the history of
colonization and for that reason evolving towards the presentation in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries of a revolutionary nationalism of an
East European or Third World type, situated however within the confines
of the history of the Atlantic archipelago.
The pluralist approach which I have been outlining has somehow to be
reconciled with the evident fact that the pattern of ‘British history’ entails
the steadily increasing dominance of England as a political and cultural
entity. Even the nationalisms of the twentieth century do not reverse
this generalization; it can be shown without much difficulty that Ireland
became more nationalist and more revolutionary as it was increasingly
assimilated to English-derived political and cultural norms, and that, in
this case as in many others, revolutionary nationalism is less a means of
resisting acculturation than a method of asserting one’s own power over the
process. But the Irish case is a partial exception – to be considered at a later
point – to the generalization I want to put forward. This is that the history
of an increasing English domination is remarkably difficult to write in
other than English terms. The conqueror, after all, sets the rules of the
game; he determines, in proportion to the extent to which his domination
becomes effective, what people shall do, how they shall think and what they
shall remember. And the conquering culture may be – and was in the case
we are considering – the culture which maintains rules, speaks a language
and preserves a history so powerfully effective that it obliges others to act in
the same way and submit to, if they do not acquire, its consciousness. This
was, by the way, pretty much Sir John Davies’s explanation of the
Hibernicization of Anglo-Norman settlers; but the problem it sets for the
modern historian is best exemplified by the history of Scottish participa-
tion in the English theatre of the War of the Three Kingdoms. English
politics, it is perfectly evident, took the Scots captive; they did not under-
stand the behaviour of their allies, who were – partly for this very reason –
stronger than they were; and consequently they were manipulated by
events which they had no means of controlling and to which they were
never admitted with the status of equal agents. Much against their will,
they played the role of the dog’s tail.
Now the relative weakness of the seventeenth-century Scots as political
and historical actors cannot be separated from the relative dearth of
Scottish means of expression. They were then, as they are now, a formid-
ably articulate people; the distant drone of their sermons can still be heard;
and we have at least two collections of personal papers, those of Robert
Baillie and Johnston of Wariston,17 in which an excruciating verbal sensi-
tivity to the political and religious scene is amply documented. But these
have to be set against the records of the Tower of London, the journals and
unofficial diaries of the House of Commons, the many thousand pam-
phlets of the Thomason Collection; English administrative, legal, religious
and political consciousness was already and long had been in mass produc-
tion, and this fact was both an index to, and a means of, England’s superior
power. The English monarchy, largest, wealthiest and most expansive of
the British political cultures, had for centuries been depositing official
records and had recently undergone an uncontrollable explosion of the
means of unofficial expression; and this was both cause and consequence of
its being the strongest power, as well as of its being currently in a state of
revolution. The English were both making and writing their history; it
was a cause as well as a consequence of the Scottish inability to make theirs
that they were ill-placed to write it either. And should it be objected that
Cromwell carried off many of the records of medieval Scotland and that a
ship bringing them back was wrecked on a sandbar in 1660, this misfortune –
like the loss of the Irish records in the Four Courts explosion of 1922 –
may be considered an illustration of the parable of the talents. The
guardianship of one’s past is power; the court of record is the kernel of
English government; and from the political culture which has not enough
self-determined and self-preserved history shall be taken away even that
which it hath.
What I am arguing can be put in this way. A highly governed society is a
highly literate society; in a multitude of forms from court records to history
books, it puts forth articulations, linguistic and mental structures, which
are – along a scale varying from official to unofficial, public to private,
conscious to unconscious – highly paradigmatic, in the sense that they
authoritatively determine the patterns in which men think and that the
authority they exercise can be replaced only when there are found alter-
natives to it. Among these paradigmatic structures will be found a style of
narrating, studying and criticizing history, with the result that a highly
governed and literate society’s consciousness of its own history will be of
17
Laing, 1841–2; Paul, 1896–1911.
a different order – both more authoritative and, quite possibly, more self-
critical – from that possessed by a society less centrally and bureaucratically
organized. When a society of the first kind expands at the expense of
societies of the second, the paradigmatic command of self which is one
source of its power becomes means by which it exerts power over others. In
obliging others to play the game according to its rules, it in some degree
obliges them to accept its structuring of history and the past, and from this
there will develop conflicts and problems both for the subordinated
societies and for historians like ourselves. In the first place, there will
appear the characteristic ambivalences of empire: the conquerors’ uncer-
tainty whether to impose their consciousness of the world upon the
conquered or exclude them altogether from it; the uncertainty of the
conquered whether to accept the dominant consciousness unequivocally,
to accept it in order to modify it, or to reject it altogether and construct a
new ordering of historical consciousness out of their awareness of the
dilemma in which they are involved. The problems of the conquered
produce a greater diversity of responses, but by no means all of these are
valid modes of historical criticism.
These are problems of men living in history, and given the assumption
that consciousness is paradigmatic, they are problems of the modes of
exercising power. When the historian like ourselves appears, having – let us
assume – no immediate commitment to the maintenance or reversal of any
particular exercise of power, he finds himself involved in a related series of
problems. The history he is trained to write consists in the inspection and
criticism, the restatement and replacement, of paradigms which must be
already existent, if for no other reason than that thinking starts with
making assumptions, and communication with sharing assumptions,
made by other people. But in a situation of cultural pluralism and partial
domination like that we are considering, the history which he is invited to
re-assess is not only history as seen by the dominant culture; it is actually
the history of the dominant culture itself, somewhat to the exclusion of
others, since the data, the traditions of scholarship and the currently
operative paradigms he is to criticize are all preponderantly the product
of that culture – which is one important reason it is dominant. As a major
obstacle to all that I have said about the need for British history, we have to
acknowledge that there are extremely powerful and valid professional and
historical reasons pressing us towards the continuation of the Anglocentric
perspective.
I practise English history a good deal, and I have no great anxiety to see
that subject radically transformed; but I am arguing that ‘British history’
needs to be re-invested with meaning, both because it contains areas of
human experience which it would be beneficial to study, and because I have
come to believe that we are doing harm to our understanding of ourselves
by not studying it. But I have called it a ‘new subject’, and it should be clear
from what I have said that I envisage it as existing alongside English history
as an old one. The point next to be explored is that we are now involved in
the problems which arise when we turn from the pursuit of one mode of
historical understanding to another, of a structurally different order. There
is a great difference between studying the history of a people who have
diligently studied it themselves – notably if you are yourself one of that
people, or if your understanding of history has the same sort of structure as
theirs – and studying the history of a people which has never been studied
by anybody at all. In the former case the conceptual field is already thickly
populated with paradigms – authoritative formulations which order the
understanding of history and form part of the history they order – and in
the latter case it is not. One is tempted to say that a historical tabula rasa
would have the charm of untrodden snow, but in practice we have all been
trained overwhelmingly in the reformulation of paradigms and the attrac-
tion of the thickly populated field usually proves irresistible. And a meth-
odology heavily reliant on the notion of paradigms18 impels one to say that
two such fields as I have described certainly cannot be studied simultan-
eously, as if doing so formed a single historiographical operation, because
the mental actions involved where paradigms are numerous and crowd
upon your attention are too far removed from those required where you
have constantly to be providing them for yourself.
The Irish historiographical tradition seems to have reached, in the works
of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Owen Dudley Edwards and a great many
others, a point of maturity where it may be emancipated from, by recog-
nizing, its own compulsions. Irish historiography has to deal with a theme
common in the annals of romantic and revolutionary nationalism: how
a collection of pre-modern cultures were violently transformed – I am
anxious to avoid the word ‘modernization’ wherever possible – by an alien
power acting on them from without, and how the emerging collectivity
discovered the conceptual, political and social means to take charge of the
process of its own transformation. That seems to comply with the modern
definition of ‘revolution’, and the fact that it issued in the foundation of
a stolid petty-bourgeois society need not deter us; many revolutions end
that way. The history of this process is now highly available, and Irish
18
[So it was then; I might not make the claim now.]
scholarship has passed, with characteristic delight, from the making of
myths to the study of the making of myths and (God help us) the men who
made them. But it remains true, of course, that Irish history is to an
inordinate degree the history of responses to England, while English
historians writing of Ireland maintain – as I suppose they always will –
the traditional tone of mild wonder that such things should be going on in
their otherwise orderly universe. The obvious first step, pedagogically
speaking, in passing from ‘English’ to ‘British’ history would be to make
sure that the student read as much of Irish as he did of English historio-
graphy, and read them concurrently. A twofold consciousness is part of the
equipment we all need; less in order to repent of the sins of our ethnic
ancestors than to recognize that things happen in different places at the
same time.
The Scottish mode of historical consciousness is of a less concentrated
complexity, but for that reason harder to describe. Scottish universities
usually maintain departments of Scottish history alongside departments of
history in some more general sense, and I understand that this has on the
whole proved counter-productive;19 the emphasis has fallen too much on
the prevention of poaching and too little on the development of one’s own
preserves. Behind this dichotomy, a sharp distinction between Unionism
and nationalism has also been at work; but what is of more concern to our
theme, behind this again can be discerned a Scottish opinion, visible at least
as far back as the beginnings of sixteenth-century Protestantism, that the
future of the northern kingdom lay less in independence and any closer
relation with the Celtic or the European world, than in a closer integration
with the Anglian chain of societies, for which the term ‘Britain’ even then
seemed appropriate. It is true, then, as English writers exasperatedly
maintain, that ‘Britain’ is a Scots invention, a piece of pluralist semantics
designed to assure that the integration of ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ should
be an Ausgleich and not an Anschluss. David Hume and other great men
of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, who insisted on describing themselves
as ‘North Britons’, meant by that term to assert that they were not
Englishmen, and that even Englishmen were now British. It is the case,
however, that Scottish culture, even at the peak it reached in their time, was
not fully able to maintain its autonomy.20
But to compare these instances is to realize that Scottish national and
historical consciousness remains one in which the choices of identity are
open, probably because they cannot be resolved. Irish history presents the
19 20
[These reproaches have long been obsolete.] Daiches, 1964. [See now Kidd, 1993.]
case of an agony, a classic identity crisis capable of solution only by the
death of the divided self and its rebirth in a new, exclusive and revolu-
tionary form. By comparison, Scottish history has been, and may remain,
a mere matter of choice, in which the acceptance of anglicization, the
insistence on the concept of Britain, Lowlands localism and Gaelic roman-
ticism, remain equally viable options, and the problem is to reconcile one’s
sense of identity with one’s awareness of so open-ended a structure of
choice. I offer this distinction less in order to predict that a revolutionary
nationalist solution is improbable – though one senses that there is some
deep level on which Yeats was not spurious and MacDiarmid is21 – than in
order to establish a hypothesis of some importance to my theme. This is
that there is an important difference – important certainly to ourselves –
between a romantic and a tangential identity. In the first of these the
subject’s crisis is so profound that he must resolve it by re-creating his
self; in the second, where irony suffices and need not become tragedy, the
subject moves eclectically between avenues of possible self-determination
and counts it his freedom that he can, since he must, continue to do so. He
is given several roles to play and sets out to play them; and he defines the
culture, even the nation, to which he belongs as possessing the same
tangential identity as himself, and as solving the same problems in the
same way. To say this, of course, is not to command success, but it is to
exert the freedom to set one’s own goals.
The second point we have reached is that one possible presentation of
‘British history’ would emphasize its consisting of the three modes of
historical consciousness I have defined. I will assume for simplicity’s
sake, what may not in fact be true, that there are no more than these
three, and that Welshmen, Orangemen and Orkneymen have not devel-
oped complex historiographical traditions of their own. One highly sensible
way of beginning to learn some ‘British history’ would be to familiarize
oneself with all three; by which is not meant that anyone can achieve an
equal degree of empathy with all of them, or that there might exist some
ideal synthesis of them all, through which ‘British history’ might be
perceived and experienced as a whole. To desire such a synthesis would
mean that one had become a ‘British’ nationalist, which I think no one ever
has, ever will or ever should. The fact is that these three traditions, if I have
described them correctly, make different demands, and arise out of the
making of different demands, on the subject’s sense of identity, so that no
21
[A claim which may still cause fury. Yet when I read MacDiarmid I am aware that I do not believe
him; when I read Yeats, that it does not matter whether I do.]
one individual can immediately share the experiences which have called all
three into being. English historiography down to the present – though we
may be at the beginnings of change here – rests upon a sense of identity so
secure as to be unreflective and almost unconscious; Irish historiography
affirms and records a romantic crisis of identity, and Scottish a tangential
identity consisting in a continuous movement between alternative roles.
Now this may be the reason why Scottish historiography is on the whole
[1973] the least developed of the three, and why Scottish scholars have
tended to remove themselves to English universities, leaving the study of
Scottish history to those who have happened to be interested.22 But it must
be clear that, in endeavouring to articulate the case for a pluralist and
multicultural perception of British history, I have been outlining an
attitude which one would virtually need a tangential sense of identity to
adopt, since both ethnocentrism and nationalism entail a high degree of
commitment to a single and unitary point of view. Where the Scots have
failed – after a glorious start in the eighteenth century – it may seem that
I am arguing that other tangential cultures must take up the challenge; and
though I would be suspicious of myself if I thought I were sounding any
kind of patriotic trumpet, the thought has something to do with the
location of today’s audience and today’s speakers within the context of
another phase of ‘British history’, about which I will say something in
conclusion.
The expansion of Anglo-Norman – now English – control to nearly all
parts of the Atlantic archipelago was completed by the first half of the
eighteenth century. Scottish Gaelic society was effectively subdued, though
it was not to be physically threatened until the Highland Clearances of
a hundred years later; and Ireland, ceasing to be a mere Anglo-Celtic
frontier zone, was in an early phase of that social transformation which
was to produce a revolutionary politics after two hundred years. The
dominant English society was now embarking on two related enterprises
beyond the confines of the archipelago, the successful combination of
which was to break up only in our own times. These two were the exertion
of a real, if limited, military dominance in the power relations of
the continent of Europe, and a related commercial expansion beyond the
oceans into North America and Southern Asia. The Union of the Kingdoms
in 1707 – the creation of ‘Britain’ as a political entity – came about, it was
and is generally agreed, because these were the only terms on which the
22
For the record of complaints on this point see Hanham, 1969. [This too may be dismissed as no
longer valid.]
Scottish kingdom could secure even a secondary role in the two enterprises,
and because the English were prepared to let the Scots inscribe ‘Britain’ at
the head of the deed of partnership if they really wanted to. The third of the
Three Kingdoms obtained no such partnership – to the discontent, be it
said, of that natural imperialist Arthur Griffith in the twentieth century.
Transatlantic expansion leads to the establishment of a number of
colonies of settlement. As a rule one thinks of these, as they appear to
have thought of themselves, as ‘English’, but there is a Scots-Irish emigra-
tion and a Highland Scottish emigration, and one may speculate on the
exact ethnic and cultural makeup of the eighteenth-century Americans and
wonder what both coasts of the North Atlantic world might have looked
like had African labour not been readily available for the American planta-
tions. But the predominance of English political and cultural forms creates
that loose circle of Anglo-Atlantic societies of which I spoke in connection
with the work of J. R. Pole. This we saw as disrupted by the civil war which
led to American independence, with the beginnings of Anglo-Canadian
history as a secondary consequence; while the history of other segments
reaches a linked series of culminations with the Scottish Enlightenment –
clearly a major event in the history of social consciousness – the upheavals
in Irish history from the Volunteer movement of 1780, through the
Rebellion of 1798 and the Union of 1801, and in England the beginnings
of a political transformation half-furthered and half-frustrated by the
resumption, on a really massive scale, of British involvement in the wars
of Europe and the pursuit of maritime power in Asia.
From about this time – perhaps the British decision to abandon claims
to the Ohio country in 1783 would do as a date23 – one has to begin ceasing
to regard the history of the United States as part of ‘British history’, to the
extent to which that culture passes out of the archipelagic and Atlantic
world into a continental orbit of its own. The imperial crown, one
remembers, did not like frontiers of settlement. Nevertheless, among the
diversity of peoples whose history makes up ‘British history’, a place must
be kept for the vanished people – those million or so Britons from the
larger island who emigrated to the United States rather than the British
colonies and were effortlessly absorbed, leaving scarcely a hyphen to mark
their passage.24 The complex of colonies known as Canada, however,
remained, to involve the crown in relationships with settler communities
and so to provide ‘British history’ with a continuing outremer in which the
23
For the Canadian perspective on this see McNaught, 1969, pp. 55–6, 68–9.
24
Berthoff, 1953; Thornton, 1966, pp. 157–9.
conflict of cultures and the creation of new sub-cultures went on as it had
been shaped in the archipelago proper. I have quite recent memories – too
recent, it might very well be said – of the intellectual excitement of reading
some Canadian history and realizing that, in addition to the major theme
of l’histoire québecoise, I was studying both a North American society which
had taken a turn of its own – having been settled partly by American
Loyalists excluded by the War of the Revolution, partly by immigrant
groups, some of whom cared little which side of the 49th parallel they
were on – and a British society in which the pluralisms of the archipelago
are still vividly reflected, so that even today [1973] it may be desirable in
parts of Ontario to know who is Loyalist, who is Orange, who is Catholic
and who is Highland.
From Canada one instinctively turns – though it is unclear how far this is
a natural transition – to those other nineteenth-century colonies of settle-
ment which were established outside the zone of archipelagic-Atlantic
expansion, for the most part in the Southern Hemisphere. Of these, two
have become established as viable national societies; a third and a fourth
seem doomed to absorption, one way or another, by the revolutionary
nationalisms of Africa – of which Afrikanerdom is one; and a fifth, that of
the Kenya highlands, seems to be disappearing altogether. ‘British history’
now takes on a global dimension, constituted by the establishment of the
societies I have mentioned, by the partial anglicization of non-European
societies in the Caribbean, Africa, Southern Asia and Oceania, and by a
third phenomenon which our projection must include: the catastrophic
Irish diaspora of the mid-nineteenth century, which changed the character
of the archipelago, the United States, most overseas British societies and,
last but not least, the Catholic Church in many of the areas of nineteenth-
century settlement. The Irish now became a people visible on a world stage,
and Arthur Griffith, employing the Central European distinction between
‘historical’ and ‘non-historical’ peoples, contended that they were entitled
to share empire with the British as the Hungarians shared it with the
Austro-Germans.25 His thought was less nonsensical than it was malignant.
On the global as on the archipelagic and Atlantic stages, then, we may
continue our projection of ‘British history’ as the conflict between, and
creation of, societies and cultures which it has been since the beginning.
I have just been speaking of societies most of which were episodically
linked by what has been called The Commonwealth Experience.26 This
remains one important determinant of their history; but we know that
25 26
Griffith, 1904. Mansergh, 1969.
this term denotes only a part of their shared inheritance, and does com-
paratively little to explain the internal development of each one of them.
That is to say, it is possible to write the history of New Zealand or
Australia, as it is that of England, with a minimum of reference to ‘the
Commonwealth experience’ and with none at all to the internal develop-
ment of any other ‘British’ society, as it is remembered and re-assessed by
the society whose history it is. These are societies which, by and large, do
not study one another’s history; each of them studies its own, after which it
studies English history, Western European history, American history and
the history of such other civilizations as it may be persuaded matter to it –
and the study of Irish history is a purely sectarian phenomenon. The same
pattern, I was once told by a Puerto Rican historian, obtains among the
Hispanic societies of the Caribbean and Central America; each studies its
own history and Spanish history, but not the history of its neighbours. It is
easy to see how a derivative society may fall into this highly insular mode of
treating its own derivation; I have heard it complained that there are those
at the University of Singapore who rely for an understanding of both
Chinese and Malay civilization on a somewhat excessive concentration
upon Singaporean history.27 We are back at the problem that history is
both a mode of understanding oneself and a mode of understanding others.
We can all agree that a society must constantly re-evaluate its own history,
as part of its own self-image, and that it must study the history of others,
partly as a means of understanding its own place in the world. The problem
is that of the best strategy for reversing the perspective.28
This presentation has room in it for the development of several types of
historical consciousness, and I have stressed this because I believe it to be
peculiarly suited to the historiographical needs of societies possessing what
I described as the tangential sense of identity. That is, it is not a task for
those concerned to continue the main traditions of English or Irish
historiography, but the rest of us – and I am thinking from the banks of
the Mississippi as well as those of the Waimakariri29 – are, I believe,
involved in the perspective I have been trying to focus. The British cultural
star-cluster is at present in a highly dispersed condition, various parts of it
feeling the attraction of adjacent galaxies; the central giant has cooled,
shrunk and moved away, and the inhabitants of its crust seem more than
27
[I do not recall where I heard this, or whether it was – still less, is – well founded.]
28
[A paragraph commenting adversely on Louis Hartz’s Founding of New Societies, 1964, is here
omitted.]
29
[I then held an appointment at Washington University in St Louis. The Waimakariri is that one of
the major rivers of Canterbury whose course lies closest to Christchurch.]
ever disposed to deny that the rest of us ever existed. Since it no longer
emits those radiations we felt bound to convert into paradigms, we are
free and indeed necessitated to construct cosmologies of our own. But the
presentation of history I have been advocating, while post-Commonwealth
and extra-European, is also highly anti-nationalist: I do not propose that
each star should consider itself the centre even of its own universe – though
this is within limits a legitimate perspective – so much as that it should seek
new and interesting ways of defining its tangential identity by remapping
the various systems within which it moves, of which I have tried to define
one. There are others. John Beaglehole was a historian of cartography,
which he knew as a singularly full human experience, and I have tried to
salute him by an exercise in mapping the historical consciousness.
PART II
The Three Kingdoms and the

English Problem
CHAPTER 3
The f ield enlarged: an introduction*
(I)
An essay pursuing the themes proposed in 1974 appeared eight years later.1 It
tentatively explored the relations between a kingdom and its marches, since
British history was to entail the expansion of medieval and early modern
states into lands where human society had been otherwise organized. It is not
reprinted here, since this volume aims to present essays written after the ‘new
British history’ had been taken up by other hands – a process belonging on
the whole to the 1990s and after. The previous decade appears in retrospect a
time of profound change in both Britain and New Zealand, as globalized
economies and their politics replaced industrial social democracy, accom-
panied by the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and David
Lange and Roger Douglas in New Zealand.2 In Britain, it produced a
literature of disorientation, in which both a known history and its implied
future were said to have been lost, and the turn towards Europe was enjoined
on terms which left it unclear whether this implied the acquisition of a new
history or the abandonment of any history distinctively British or English.
Among professional historians, however, it was a time of exciting revisions,
in which the pasts of state and church, nation and empire, were better
understood when seen as precarious and exposed to multiple contingencies.
This volume intends neither criticism nor apology for what has been going
on in the academy, whatever may be said of public intellectuals.
It is now possible to supply a selective and certainly not exhaustive
bibliography of works published in the last decade and a half, which
explicitly or implicitly pursue the objectives recommended in this
*
[Written for this volume in 2004.]
1
Originally printed as Pocock, 1982.
2
Pocock, 1992d, not reprinted here, was an attempt to view the historiographies of both cultures in this
setting.
47
48 The Three Kingdoms and the English Problem
volume.3 To this may be added one (edited by a New Zealand expatriate)
which specifically addresses the ‘new British history’ as both a programme
and a problematic4 – as indeed do most of those listed and others that may
have escaped my notice. The present volume aims no higher than at taking
its place among them, but some generalizations may assist in defining that
place. The works listed review history from medieval to modern, whereas the
essays presented here focus on the early modern period, c. 1500 – c. 1800. The
medieval literature isolates a set of crucial themes, which continue to govern
the history here reviewed. These include, first and predominantly, the
exceptional strength and durability of the pre-Conquest English kingdom,5
which may almost (but never incontestably) be said to have assimilated its
Norman and Angevin inheritors, so that they claimed to be its continuators –
thus founding the constitutional mythology of which English historiography
so long consisted.6 The Anglo-Norman kingdom, always aggressive, became
expansive in the thirteenth century, and attempted what we should term an
empire of the entire archipelago.7 By this time, however, there had come
to exist a differently structured but equally persistent monarchy defining
‘Scotland’, which successfully resisted absorption into the English kingdom –
thus leaving open the question whether the English myth is not one of
self-sufficiency even before empire, the Scottish myth one of independence
of England. We encounter here what these essays will term the ‘English
problem’, which is also the problem of how far ‘British history’ can negate
the Anglocentricity it is designed to combat.
Edward I’s kingdom carried out a successful conquest of Wales, which
however remained a land of marcher lordships not fully incorporated into
England until the sixteenth century. In the large island of Ireland, where
Anglo-Norman lordships had been established in the preceding century, the
organization of state was less successful, and the same may be said of the
Scottish kingdom’s dealings with the Gaelic and Scandinavian far north of
the long island of Britain and the lesser island groups beyond it. In Ireland
especially, we encounter the problem of ‘British history’ as it expands beyond
those islands it has succeeded in defining as ‘British’ – a problem which is
also that of ‘Europe’ and British history’s place within or without it. The
term ‘Europe’ can be defined in so many ways that one must always ask – but
3
Tompson, 1986; Robbins, 1988 and 1998; Kearny, 1989; Helgerson, 1992; Ellis and Barber, 1995; Grant
and Stringer, 1995; Bradshaw and Morrill, 1996; Brockliss and Eastwood, 1997; Claydon and
McBride, 1998; Murdoch, 1998; Bradshaw and Roberts, 1998; Connolly, 1999; Smyth, 2001;
Powell, 2002.
4
Burgess, 1999. 5 Campbell, 1995, with bibliography; Davies, R. R., 2000, pp. 54 –5.
6
Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B); Greenberg, 2001. 7 Davies, 2000.
The field enlarged: an introduction 49
not always hope to be told – in what sense it is being used at the moment.
One is that it defines a civilization taking shape in the far western, Latin-
speaking provinces of the former Roman empire, that of ‘Britain’ having
included most of the larger island of the Atlantic archipelago but not the
rest of that complex. In the high medieval period this civilization expanded
in three directions, redefining ‘Europe’ as it did so:8 east, by settlement
and conquest, through Germany into Slavonic and Lithuanian lands higher
up the peninsula between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas; north, through
adoption more than conquest, into the non-Roman peninsula of Scandinavia;
and west, through processes of Norman and English conquest, into the Celtic-
speaking parts of the Atlantic archipelago. In this sense, ‘British history’ –
defined as the establishment, the expansion, and the responses to the
expansion, of the post-Norman English and Scottish kingdoms – is rightly
defined as part of the history of ‘Europe’; and between 1066 and 1453 there
are many occasions on which French-speaking kings of England are deeply
involved in the warlike politics of Normandy, Aquitaine, Gascony and the
kingdom of France, which they try but ultimately fail to take over. A point
has unhappily been reached, however, at which the ideology of European
union demands, or commands, that this kingdom’s involvement in France
be recognized as more important, because more truly ‘European’, than its
involvement in the maritime frontier of the Atlantic archipelago. Whatever
may be meant by the proposition that one historical process is ‘more
important’ than another, we are clearly confronted by the further proposi-
tion that some ‘Europeans’ are more ‘European’ than others, and that the
history of the sub-continental peninsula is more ‘European’ than that of
the islands prolonging it. Of all the post-imperial states now joining to
constitute ‘Europe’, Great Britain is the only one to be assailed by these
confused dichotomies and their curiously bullying tone. The issue is less
that of whether Britain is or is not part of ‘Europe’ than of how the word
‘Europe’ is being used. The assumption throughout this volume is that the
history of interacting political formations in the archipelago is a story
worth telling in its own terms, as is that of the same structures interacting
with those of the sub-continent. Neither can be denied meaning.
(II)
Medieval British history therefore studies the history of the islands as
attentively, and in as much detail, as that of the interactions of France,
8
Bartlett, 1993.
Flanders and England. It notes, however, that in the former field the collisions
between organized states and cultures resistant to these structures reached a
point where the intellect of the former was tempted to define the latter as
‘barbarian’;9 a point where ‘Europe’ crosses a cultural frontier and begins to
expand into cultures marginal to or beyond it. The modern words ‘imperial-
ism’ and ‘colonialism’ are foreshadowed. The essays in this volume, however,
focus on an early modern period between 1500 and 1800, during most of which
the word ‘empire’ bore a different meaning. They take their departure from
after the year 1453, taken to mark the final expulsion of the English monarchy
from the kingdom of France; and it might be held that they make too little of
the significance of this in the history they seek to define. The emphasis now
falls on the history of states within the islands of Britain and Ireland, and on a
period of two and a half centuries during which the English monarchy played
a militarily limited role in the politics of sub-continental Europe.
The Lancastrian dynasty gives way to the marginally Welsh Tudors,10
and Henry VIII appears as a revolutionary if catastrophic actor in both
British history and English. The emphasis falls on a series of parliamentary
statutes11 by which Wales is incorporated within the English kingdom, the
English crown’s lordship in Ireland is converted into a kingship, and –
perhaps most momentously of all – England is declared to be and have
been an ‘empire’, a term denoting less its exercise of sovereignty over
subject realms than its exercise of unshared sovereignty over itself. This
‘empire’ is as much ecclesiastical as political; the king exercises a jurisdic-
tion over the church in England which he does not share with the pope; but
this statement transforms the character of state as well as church in the
kingdom now an empire. This empire is proclaimed in parliament, as the
most solemn and sovereign mode of declaring and exercising the authority
of the crown, and though its consequences are, over time, necessarily
Protestant, the Anglican Reformation has characteristics not shared with
the Lutheran or Calvinist. The problems of empire are now those of the
relation between crown, church and parliament; and since England exer-
cises ‘empire’ over subordinate realms as well as itself,12 the solution to
problems self-imposed upon England will have to be imposed upon those
realms if it cannot be shared with them.
9
Gillingham, 1995; Davies, 2000, ch. 5.
10
I have often wondered whether the audiences attending Shakespeare’s Henry V knew that after
Henry’s death Catherine of France married Owen Tudor. If they did, the King’s conversations with
Captain Fluellen would take on a special meaning.
11
Below, pp. 136–7, 164–5.
12
For a detailed study of the emergence of this duality, see Armitage, 2000.
Henry VIII’s policies then act within Latin Christendom in its dividing
crisis as well as within the history or histories of the Atlantic archipelago.
There is a dynastic marriage which opens up the prospect of an English
claim to the Scottish succession, and in the War of the Rough Wooing a
brutal, if inconclusive, attempt at annexing that kingdom by conquest. The
history is complicated first by the different ways in which papal authority
was extinguished in the two kingdoms, and second by the series of
accidents which flung both the Tudor and Stuart dynasties into crises
not only of succession but of gender. There are periods of female rule –
the ‘monstrous regiment of women’ – whose effects on both kingdoms are
durable and still being analysed.13 The ‘age of the monstrous regiment’, as it
is a temptation to call the second half of the sixteenth century, is finally
terminated in 1603, when James VI of Scotland becomes James I of
England. Here begin the periodizations of British history with which this
volume is chiefly concerned. An ‘Age of the Three Kingdoms’ leads to the
sequence of the First and Second British Empires. The meanings of these
terms, particularly of the last, will require elucidation.
King James was that rare if not unique phenomenon, a crowned king
who was also an articulate political theorist. This has rendered him of
peculiar interest to historians of discourse, notably to the Folger Institute
Center for the History of British Political Thought, under whose auspices
several of the ensuing chapters were first written. His thinking about
kingship and kingdoms has much to tell us about the kingdoms he ruled,
the problems they presented and the ways in which he and his various
subjects responded to these problems; not in the light of the old contro-
versy as to whether he was an ‘absolutist’ or a ‘constitutionalist’, but in that
of his widely accepted understanding of how a king was related to his
kingdom, as a head to its body or a husband to his wife – the political
theology, as it has been called, of the King’s Two Bodies.14 But James VI
and I was the head of a multiple monarchy of Three Kingdoms, and if he
was not to be emperor – a style he may briefly have considered – but a king,
he must either be three heads, which would be monstrous, or the head of a
single body. His third kingdom was so far anomalous that he (and we)
might be tempted to dismiss it; what he had in Ireland was kingship – for so
the law said – but hardly a kingdom, since there was no body politic to
which he stood as head. ‘I am the husband’, James once said, ‘and the
whole isle my wife’, but the use of the singular tells us he meant Ynys
Pridein but not Inis Fail. There was an Irish parliament and a Church of
13 14
Wormald, 1988; McLaren, 1999; Guy, 2004. Kantorowicz, 1957.
Ireland; it would be possible, though it is little documented, for his New
English Protestant subjects to hope for the status of a kingdom in the full
sense of two-bodies political theology; otherwise Ireland must be a sub-
ordinate kingdom annexed to the English crown by conquest, not a wife
but a captive concubine. It is significant that Irish Catholics – Old English,
perhaps, rather than Irish-speaking – offered a Stuart king the undivided
loyalty they could not offer a Tudor conqueror and heretic; but James
could never be head of a Catholic kingdom in the sense in which English
‘empire’ made him head of the Church of England (or Ireland).
Here we meet James as a European sovereign, pursuing ecumenical
policies which he hoped would reconcile him with Spain and promote
peace in Christendom.15 There is a strong presence in these schemes of a
‘Gallican’ theory of monarchy , in which a king might remain in commu-
nion or at least relation with Rome while exercising virtually all jurisdiction
over the church within his realm; and Irish Catholics must hope for
something of the kind if they wished to be James’s subjects in a Catholic
kingdom. But the possibility was seldom if ever mooted. In England the
Royal Supremacy was law in a sense that came close to defining the papal
supremacy as Antichrist, while in Scotland it was doubtful whether James
were head of the Kirk at all – a role reserved for Christ – and he was
working at a reinforcement of the powers of bishops as his sole means of
ecclesiastical authority. James knew very well what headship of the church
meant, and did not think he could govern without it. A Christian mon-
archy of the Three Kingdoms appeared an impossible triplicity; it was
imaginable only in Protestant terms,16 hence the cult of Constantine that
took shape around James; and even in Britain proper the reconciliation of
the two Protestant churches was no simple matter. If Stuart multiple
monarchy faced the problem of Church and Kirk, it inherited from the
Tudors the greatest of its failures, the inability to Anglicanize Irish
Catholicism (as it had Welsh) by any means other than Protestant coloniz-
ation.17 British history is so much the history of a Protestant monarchy that
there is an Irish Catholic history with which it finds hard to deal.
(III)
King James’s most conspicuous failure as head of a multiple British
monarchy – this does not mean that he was a failure as king of either
England or Scotland – was the frustration of his attempt to bring about
15 16 17
Patterson, 1997. Williamson, 1979. Bradshaw, 1998; Canny, 2001.
a union of his two kingdoms into one.18 As husband of two wives, he was
unable to reduce two wives to one wife, and the irreducible individualities
this metaphor implies can be explained in more than one way. A union of
England and Scotland would have been a union of two churches, and we
have begun to see reasons why this would have been difficult. It would also
have been a union of two laws, and the reasons why a majority pro-
nounced this impossible almost from the start tell us much about the
problems of writing a British history. The voices making this pronuncia-
tion were English. The legally educated gentry and professionals of that
nation were acquainted with Sir John Fortescue’s fifteenth-century
dictum19 that the customs of a people made them what they were, furnish-
ing them with a ‘second nature’ that could not be abandoned without
abandoning their distinctive existence – the medieval version of ‘identity’.
It was for this reason that Thomas Hedley told the House of Commons
that they might make changes in the common law, but could not abolish it
without abolishing themselves.20 The proposal for a union seemed to
entail this prospect, and may well have intensified, if not occasioned, the
English belief that they possessed an ‘ancient constitution’ produced by
their own immemorial self-creation. They could imagine the Scots accept-
ing English law as theirs – as they believed the Welsh were doing and as
might yet be done in Ireland – but if Scots might become English, the
English had no intention of becoming Scots. Did they think of Scotland as
possessing an alien law, or no law at all? What did the Scots themselves
think? We know more of the English response to union than we do of the
Scottish; but Scottish histories traditionally depict their thinking as
sophisticated, historicist, and able to accept their own historical contin-
gency, and this indeed was the response of Sir Thomas Craig when he
described English and Scottish law as two stems from a common feudal
origin.21
The English long resisted this thesis, and it is one of the points at which
we encounter, at the heart of ‘British history’, what may be termed ‘the
English problem’. British history must be, in large measure though never in
totality, a history of the encounter of peoples not (or no longer) English
with an expanding English state and (in more senses than one) empire; it
sets itself the objective of viewing this encounter in the setting provided by
18
Galloway, 1986; Levack, 1987; Mason, 1994; Wormald, 1996.
19
Chrimes, 1949, p. 17.
20
Pocock, 1957, 1987, pp. 270–1 (1987 text) (B); Burgess, 1992, pp. 25–6.
21
For Craig’s Jus Feudale (1603), Pocock, 1957, 1987, pp. 79–90 (B); for his De Unione (1604), Mason,
1994, pp. 185–6.
Scottish, Irish, American or indigenous histories as these have shaped
themselves. The story of the Jacobean union and its failure informs us
that the English already possessed, and deeply believed, a history of their
own self-formation, to which we do not yet know that Scots or Welsh
possessed an equivalent, and that they were interested in either extending,
or denying, this history to other peoples of the British monarchy, as a
means of refusing to admit those peoples to a share in making English
history. This, over the centuries, has not meant that the history the English
relate of themselves is serene, secure, or unproblematic; it has on the
contrary been replete with problems; but these problems have been seen
as self-generated, arising within English history and resolved, however
violently and disturbingly, within its continuity. The English have, in
short, claimed to make their own history, even when it has included – or
failed to include – the history of others; so that the history of empire,
meaning the expansion of the English state beyond England, has been
regarded as an aspect of the history of England’s ‘empire’ over itself.
‘British history’ is therefore obliged to revise, where it should not aspire
to abolish, a large part of the history the English have constructed of
themselves. It cannot do this by becoming a history with the English left
out, but a British history of the English will be difficult to achieve.
The debate over the Jacobean union introduces us to this problem, but it
first appears in its full complexity when we study the historiography of the
War, or Wars, of the Three Kingdoms.22 The history of that historiography
centres on the reduction of those wars to the English Civil War. This war was
no fiction; it was the central trauma of early modern English (and British)
history; but the English were so horrified at finding themselves at war with
one another that they assumed the causes of this disaster must lie within
English politics, and have written many works of genius to discover what
they were. We need not (though we may) assume this enterprise to have been
mistaken in order to point out that the wars broke out in Scotland and
Ireland, and that there are presumably Scottish and Irish histories within
which their genesis is to be found. It is a paradoxical consequence, however,
that while most histories of these wars are Anglocentric, we do possess
histories of the War of the Three Kingdoms written from an English point
of view, whereas it is easier to find histories of the Scottish or Irish role and
experience in this conflict than histories embracing the whole course of the
War of the Three Kingdoms written from a Scottish or Irish point of view
22
Chapter 5, below.
and presenting Three Kingdoms history as they see it.23 Nationalism is not a
complete response to imperialism.
(IV)
England is not an island, and the island of Britain is neither small nor
simple. In the twenty-first century, it is still possible to pursue ‘the
discovery of islands’ by travelling north, out of the arable lowlands of
southern England with the ‘narrow seas’ of the English Channel behind
one, into the pastoral and industrial North, historic Lowland Scotland,
Argyll and Skye, ending in a terrain as much Norse as Gaelic, with the
Hebrides to westward and Orkney and Shetland in an oceanic north. At the
end of such a journey I found the title of a volume of haiku by a seventeenth-
century Japanese poet, The Narrow Road to the Deep North,24 evocative of
the road I had been taking; and as a South Islander, I remembered
travelling, quite late in life, to a northern New Zealand where history
was more Maori than I had recognized: from the wide maquis of the
Urewera, where Tuhoe and Ringatu fought the crown and its
Ngatiporou allies,25 to the ultimate promontory of Cape Te Reinga,
where one may stand and feel both islands as giant waka at one’s back.
Both were historical as well as spatial experiences; journeys through many
histories and their landscapes, of which one knew some and others had
been left out of one’s reading; and an island is not small if one can live at
one end of it and know nothing of the history going on at the other.
(Ireland is the contrary example; it is not small because one knows only too
well what is happening at the other extremity.) Britain, I saw, is an
extraordinary island; and islands and archipelagos can contain more his-
tories than can be easily seen together, or explained away. It is a continental
snobbery to suppose that they are necessarily small.
Islands are in oceans, not in narrow seas; and from the English south-west,
the Gaelic west, and the Norse far north of the Stuart monarchies, the seas of
Europe open out into the Atlantic and the global or world-girdling ocean.
23
There are military histories (Gentles, 1992; Bennett, 1997; Kenyon and Ohlmeyer, 1998) of the
conflict as a whole that are necessarily political histories as well. For a proposed ‘holistic’ history of
the Three Kingdoms crisis, see Morrill, 1993, pp. 91–117, 245–72, and 1996. For a study of an
individual actor in a multiplicity of contexts, Ohlmeyer, 1993. None of these is quite the
Scottocentric or Hibernocentric history of the whole, which I identify as lacking above. See,
however, Ohlmeyer, 1995.
24
Basho, 1966. His ‘deep north’ was that of his own island of Honshu, not the culturally distinctive
Hokkaido, which he did not visit.
25
Binney, 1995.
The English, and less successful Scottish, footholds on the North American
continent and in the Caribbean, established during James I’s reign, begin the
creation of an Atlantic space and emporium – extended to the African coast
and the trade in slaves – into which English empire is extended and British
history acquires a new dimension. There is a certain continuity between
these colonizing activities and those in Ireland; but the latter are part of the
establishment – questionable though it always was – of a kingdom in, or of,
Ireland, whereas the colonies in America were not thought of, now or until it
was too late, as subordinate realms within an empire (the sense of that word
changes). They were not vice-regal kingdoms (the Spanish formula) or
counties palatine (the nearest there was to an English formula);26 they were
nearer to being trading posts than realms, commonwealths or civil societies.
As they evolved towards the latter condition, their legal definition lagged
behind; it was the first, momentous, and ultimately disastrous instance of
that Seeleyan ‘absence of mind’ by which the English acquired an empire
without engaging their intellect in its definition. How far this is true of
empire within the archipelago is another question.
(V)
Two of the following essays, and much more of the perspective of this
book, are shaped by the work of the Folger Institute Center for the History
of British Political Thought. At the conclusion of a series of seminars
between 1984 and 1987, surveying the field as we then knew it,27 we realized
that we had been operating almost wholly within the rich history of English
political thought, and set about further enquiries into the political dis-
course of Scotland, Ireland and pre-federal America.28 At this point our
history of ‘British political thought’ may be said to begin; it entails, of
course, an enquiry into the meaning – even the meaningfulness – of the
term itself. The Center is now investigating interactions and exchanges, in
the field of political discourse, between the kingdoms of the archipelago
and the states, churches, academies and presses of the adjacent parts of
Europe; there are shared histories here.
The focus of study is less on political theory and philosophy than on the
organization of thinking about what was happening in the politics and
26
Koebner, 1961; Greene, 1986, 1990; Palumbo, 2001. 27 Pocock, Schochet and Schwoerer 1993 (B).
28
Mason, 1994; Robertson, 1995; Morgan, 1999; Ohlmeyer, 2000; Connolly, 2000. Other volumes
arising from the Center’s activities are Peck, 1991; Burgess, 1996; Smith, 1998; Mendle, 2001.
history of the peoples concerned. There is a ‘British problem’ in the sense
that it must be asked, then and now, whether their experience could be
brought together in the framework imposed by a ‘British’ kingdom and
empires; it is here that the problem of an English hegemony is at its most
recalcitrant. The emphasis in such a history of discourse, however, must fall
upon the communities of discourse within which history went on; and the
following essays enquire in what ways it was possible for the consciously
literate among the Irish, the Scots, the Americans and – left to the last
because they placed themselves first – the English to identify themselves
and discuss their politics. The Age of the Three Kingdoms was upon them
and concerns us.
CHAPTER 4
Two kingdoms and three histories?

Political thought in British contexts
Dr Mason has edited, and powerfully helped in writing, a series of essays1

which in the first place examine the political discourse concerned with a
‘matter of Scotland’. The period is the sixteenth century and the medium
of discourse is print. We are therefore looking at an age in which historians
once conventionally located the emergence of ‘national monarchies’, and
indeed ‘nation’ and ‘monarchy’ are organizing concepts in the discourse
before us. In such an age it would be reasonable also to look for the
emergence of canons of authoritative literature, invented either by con-
temporaries or in retrospect by subsequent authors and authorities. Canons
are to be mistrusted, lest they come to control our minds as they may have
controlled those of others; nevertheless, in organizing a new field of study –
and we are still exploring ‘the unknown subject’2 – it can be of experi-
mental value to construct a canon and then enquire if it needs to be
deconstructed. Let it be suggested, then, that scholars are now in a position
to organize (should they decide to do so) a ‘history of Scottish political
thought’ around a canon or succession of prominent authors, minimally
consisting of John Mair, Hector Boece, John Knox, George Buchanan,
James VI (and I), Sir Thomas Craig and (if we reach as far as the
covenanting period) Samuel Rutherford. There are figures who might be
added – Arthur Williamson speaks strongly for David Hume of Godscroft,
Robert Pont and John Napier3 – and absences that may be felt: it is an
inconvenience that neither Andrew Melville nor any of his colleagues is
known to have expounded in full folio his view of kirk and kingship. But
we have a canon; it sets paradigms which endure until, and even after, they
are challenged – Craig’s statement of Scottish law’s historic distinctiveness
lasts into the age of Stair and the age of Kames, George Buchanan’s mythic
1
Mason, 1994, in which this essay – the opening paragraphs now abbreviated – originally appeared
(Pocock, 1994b).
2
Pocock, 1982. 3 Williamson, 1994 [also McGinnis and Williamson, 2002].
58
Two kingdoms and three histories? 59
history endures until it is deconstructed after 17074 – and it would be
possible to construct a history around these major figures and then to look
critically at our own construction. However organized, a history of Scottish
political thought would be a valuable addition to our resources, and
Dr Mason and his collaborators have taken long strides towards providing
us with one.
Faced with a canon, and in consequence a tradition, which we have
invented – that is, which we have both constructed and discovered – we ask
with what image of the political culture surrounding it we are now
furnished. There appears a ‘Scotland’ and a ‘kingdom’ – in Buchanan’s
phrase a jus regni apud Scotos – constituting a nation, a monarchy and a
‘European’ cultural province: one, that is to say (since ‘Europe’, too, is a
construct and not a given), built out of interacting Latin, Roman-British,
Gaelic, Norman, Norse and Anglian (since we had better not say English)
cultural components in an archipelagic province of the expanding Latin
West. The connotations of ‘province’ are cultural and not political; the
rex Scottorum is not a subregulus but wears a closed imperial crown, though
he has had to fight for it against the endeavours of his powerful southern
neighbour to reduce it and him to vassal or tributary status. He can be the
contested focus of loyalties and images of community capable of stating
themselves in national terms, and histories of kingdom and nation can be
written in ways which affirm their autonomy. At the same time, however,
our canon arrestingly begins with an affirmation that Scottish history can
only be written within the context of a Historia Maioris Britanniae.5
This is an Anglo-oriented if not an Anglocentric proposition, but at the
same time it is to be observed that ‘Scotland’, nearly if not quite alone
among the kingdoms of Latin ‘Europe’, believes itself to possess a cultural
and even a barbarian frontier. John Mair’s ‘wild Scots’, speaking a Gaelic or
Irish tongue from which the very name they share with their civilized
neighbours may be derived, form part of the cumulative European image
of ‘savage’ or feral man, and Lowlanders entertain an image of them as
ethnically ‘other’ no less vivid than that which the English entertain of
Scots in general. In this volume, aside from Edward Cowan’s brief explora-
tion of the possible Gaelic roots of the marquis of Argyll’s political ideas,6
we do not hear much of any political discourse which the Gaidhealtacht
may have practised or possessed, and it is a question whether any such
existed in scribal or typographic form. Gaeldom was not an illiterate
4
Kidd, 1993. 5 Constable, 1892, pp. 48–50.
6
Cowan, 1994 [also MacCraith, 1995; Macinnes, 1995; Dawson, 1998].
culture, and the idea that its discourse must have been oral and bardic in
character is part of an Anglo-Scottish stereotype which perhaps ought to be
challenged; but while there may be no reason in principle why an ecclesiastic
or humanist Latin-Gaelic discourse should not have existed, the reader of
this volume is left ignorant whether one in fact did. Is it an unfair assumption
that Gaelic units of government were not of a size or a sort to have been
held together by systems of practising law both written and unwritten, or
by courtly centres where lay as well as sacerdotal clerisies might form
themselves? Ecclesiastics, lawyers and humanists furnish the three profes-
sions which originate the literate and literary discourse helping to hold
together the monarchies and commonwealths of early modern Europe and
generating their ‘political thought’; in this respect Anglian-speaking
‘Scotland’ is not an exception, and we are left asking whether Gaelic-
speaking ‘Scotland’ is. Both ‘wild’ and ‘civilized’ Scots are ‘Scots’ to John Mair.
England – we enter here on the dangerous but useful course of defining
Scotland by the non-presence of English characteristics – was a highly if
imperfectly unified communitas regni or corpus misticum held together by
(inter alia) a common law or common custom of the realm, administered
by a hierarchy of courts in all of which the crown was mystically present
(coram rege), and by a polity of counsel which humanists were engaged in
partially transforming into a literary and rhetorical culture. A discourse of
common law, common lawyers and law students therefore entered into a
series of complex interactions with a discourse of courtly humanism,
proliferating in increasingly sophisticated poetical forms, and an increas-
ingly populous print culture with its centre at Paul’s Churchyard, to
develop and disseminate an image of the realm as mystical body with the
crown as its mystical head, the law as its nerves or ligaments and counsel as
its spirit or intelligence.7 The great discourse of ‘the king’s two bodies’ was
certainly not unknown in Edinburgh; James VI was its accomplished
exponent before he became James I; but it does seem possible to say that
it was not supported and disseminated by so thick and widespread an
integument of institutions and language as can be detected in England.
There was no Scottish institution closely resembling the English common
law or the political culture of the shires; the marriage of court and country
was not the intimate and ubiquitous love-hate relationship to be found in
England; there was less of a parliamentary or court-seeking gentry; and for
all these reasons Scottish humanism had less to lay hold on in its incessant
7
For all this see, among many monographs: Ferguson, 1965 and 1979; Pocock, 1987; Kantorowicz,
1957; Helgerson, 1992; Fideler, 1992.
struggle to convert baronial counsel into a counsel of rhetoric, and the
baron into God’s and the king’s good servant in a culture at once courtly
and civic. Consequently the practice and the discourse of Scottish politics
remained conspicuously baronial. The greatest of Scottish civic humanists,
George Buchanan,8 developed a historical myth in which noble rebellion
and regicide formed the ultimate check on royal misgovernment, and even
his sophisticated and scholarly pupil and enemy, James VI, liked to affect a
rough and genial informality when chatting with his nobles – though one
wonders how well he did it, and he lost no time in re-educating some of
them at the English court when he had the chance.
Behind the baron stood a more ancient figure, the chief of a clan or
kindred. Blood ties and the honour of the name formed part of the image
of the ‘wild Scot’ or Gaelic barbarian, but could not be excluded from even
the revered and legitimate values of the Lowland kingdom. The ‘kindly
Scot’ practised the ‘lovable’ (‘allowable’, ‘laudable’) customs of obligation
to his kindred, not exclusive of manrent and deadly feud; and it is possible
to see that French- or English-trained humanists and jurists were less than
happy about this. We must not be tempted – even though contemporaries
were sometimes tempted – into dismissing the kin culture as backward by
civilized standards. Jenny Wormald has argued strongly that manrent and
deadly feud formed a workable and self-moderating system,9 and it can also
be argued that if the level of private violence was high in Scotland, that of
public violence, dynastic and civil war was low. There were feuds and
forays, Rizzio murders and Gowrie conspiracies, but no Scottish Towson
Moor or Tewkesbury, Marston Moor or Naseby. But humanists pro-
pounding the religion of counsel found Scottish blood and name10 even
harder to deal with than English hunting and hawking, and some areas of
Scots political discourse are haunted by a sense of backwardness. Their
attitudes towards the Auld Enemy and the Auld Ally are marked by
ambivalence, and the union of kingdoms which came to be known as
‘Britain’ was more a Scottish invention and agendum than an English.
We have next to ask a question whose premisses are partly, but by no
means wholly, counterfactual. Blessed or cursed with hindsight, we know
that an autonomous Scottish discourse did not develop over the next
two centuries; there was not, that is to say, a continuum of publication
and debate concerned with the character of an autonomous Scottish polity.
8 9
[See further McGinnis and Williamson, 1995.] Wormald, 1980.
10
For studies of how far this ethos was overcome in English northern and highland regions, see James,
1974 and 1986.
The union of the crowns diverted Scottish self-fashioning into a British
context; it became engrossed with establishing the character of a ‘Britain’,
with maintaining Scottish autonomy as that of a province or partner in that
‘empire’, and with resisting the incapacity of an intensely self-centred
English discourse to conceive of ‘Britain’ as anything but an enlargement
of ‘England’. Yet throughout the reigns of Mary Stuart and James VI (until
his metamorphosis into James VI and I became a certainty) there was such
a discourse centred on ‘Scotland’, its character and its problems;11 and we
can ask, factually, what its character and parameters were, and counter-
factually, how they might have developed had they continued to do so in
autonomy (never, of course, in isolation).
We can isolate major figures as dominating the last phase of Scottish
historical discourse before it became part of the discourse of Britain. There
is George Buchanan, enemy of Mary and tutor of James; there is James
himself, developing a theoretical intelligence rare among kings in rebellion
against his detested preceptor; there is Andrew Melville, James’s second
and perhaps principal opponent, from whom unfortunately we have no
major text, so that we are obliged to reconstruct the Melvillian challenge of
kirk to crown from a variety of sources, including James’s by no means
always direct rebuttals. The king’s response to the challenge of Melvillian
Presbyterianism is of vast consequence in Scottish, English and British
history all three; but it is often subordinated or disguised. Catholics as
well as Calvinists employed populist arguments, and royalist attacks on
Genevan or Melvillian claims to the independence of Presbyterial authority
are often concealed within attacks on Catholic and Jesuit claims that the
pope may depose kings because the people has elected them. Rightly or
wrongly, we do not think these claims as great a practical danger to kings as
contemporaries did; our hindsight urges us to bring the danger from
Presbyterian claims to the foreground, reversing the monarchical strategy
of situating them within the paradigm formed by the popish menace. This
is not necessarily how James VI, or Thomas Hobbes, perceived matters.
In the second place, James’s response to what was assuredly a Melvillian
challenge was often directed against George Buchanan, both because he
lacked a Melvillian opponent text and because he was obsessed by
Buchanan’s role and personality; yet when we look at Buchanan we may
discern less a classic Genevan or Knoxian Calvinist than a Protestant-Stoic
humanist of the same stamp as François Hotman or Duplessis-Mornay –
with whom Buchanan was grouped by the circle of Sir Philip Sidney in
11
Burns, 1996; Mason, 1998.
England12 and of whom, it has recently been argued, Algernon Sidney may
have been a late and eccentric descendant.13 There was a west European
international of Protestant noblemen and theorists, and Buchanan is a figure
European enough to rank among them – just as his principal Scottish
opponents, other than James himself, were Catholics living abroad, in
France, Lorraine and Germany.14 To characterize Scottish debate as that
between Buchanan at one pole and James at the other may be to depict it as
one between monarchomachs and monarchists of a classic if confusing
European pattern; yet to do so may be to ignore problems about the specific
character of Scottish history which refuse to go away.
To our eyes it may seem evident that both the king and the baronial
nobility of Lowland Scotland were in large measure products of Norman
expansion; in search of a unifying model for ‘British history’ we may
orchestrate the diversities of Norman organizing power in England,
Wales, Ireland and, more independently, Scotland. However, neither
Buchanan nor James takes an exclusively Norman route; both focus on
the kingdom of Dalriada and the Irish origins of the ‘Scots’ themselves, and
the debate comes to turn on the question whether ‘Scotland’ is a monarchy
ruled by the descendants of Fergus the Conqueror, or an aristocracy ruled
by the noble and baronial heirs of his companions. For Buchanan it is the
one tempered by the other. Malcolm Canmore, his English queen and the
incoming Normans after him are brought in by various writers to mitigate
the unalterable Anglo-Scottish conviction that Gaelic forms of rule,
whether Irish, Hebridean or Highland, were less baronial than barbaric,
and the argument turns back towards the European themes of the associa-
tion between kingly power and the noble commonwealth – the jus regni apud
Scotos. A cultural frontier ran through the kingdoms of Britannia major and
the seas which linked and divided them; it inhibits us in reducing – but never
in relating – Scottish debate to the Franco-Burgundian model which is
meant by ‘Europe’ in this context.
The Scottish monarchy faced a turbulent, partly Protestant nobility, as
did other princely rulers from Languedoc to Transylvania; but if we state –
or stage – the opposition between the views of Buchanan and James on the
character of Fergusian kingship, we perceive them as debating a Scottish
prehistory in terms Gaelic and archipelagic enough to have included some
vision of Ireland. What effect the Dalriadic thesis had on Scottish percep-
tions of pre-Norman (or pre-Norse) Ireland may be a question worth
asking; the debate over the Irish origins of the Scoti re-emerged in the
12 13 14
See Phillips, 1948–9. Scott, 1989. Burns, 1993.
late eighteenth century.15 So much for the Gaelic and archipelagic – it
would be inappropriate to call them ‘British’ – aspects of the matter of
Scotland. As James VI moved towards – when did he begin? – perceiving
himself as James I, his thought and writings began to move into the
dominating (perhaps we should say domineering) contexts provided by
English self-fashioning, and his Scottish concerns began to incur the perils
(traduttore traditore) of translation into English. It used to be a common-
place that James I understood little of the people he had come to rule; it
needs to be added that he can hardly be blamed for that – the English were
an idiosyncratic people – and perhaps further, that he possessed his own
means of understanding them and they did not always like it.
We may make it a point of first instance that in England he did not
meet with a dangerous baronage claiming descent, and inheriting rusty
swords, from the companions of some conqueror. Historians are rightly
re-emphasizing the power of the peerage in English politics, and the extent
to which their notions of counsel were still as much baronial as humanist;16
but their actions were conducted within an intensely articulated corporate
unity or community of the realm as body with the crown as head, conducted
through the intimate associations of king with counsel and court with
country. This was not simply a union of king and nobility; when all is
said and done, there existed in England a parliament and a house of
commons, serving alongside the court to associate, in the mechanisms of
counsel, the king with the communities of shire gentry, as well placed to
assimilate the boroughs as to be assimilated to them. The Scottish realm
in council may or may not have consisted of the ‘thrie estaits’ of Sir
David Lindsay’s Satyre (1552); but two houses differ from three estates.
This parliament already possessed a discourse of its own, which was
increasingly becoming a discourse of the common law. We no longer
believe as unhesitatingly as we once did that to depict James as ignorant
of his new subjects means that in his bookish ignorance he did not know
that the English were inveterate ancient-constitutionalists and long had
been; the proposition that they were has not been falsified so much as
joined by others, providing a context in which it must be read.17 What was
perhaps new to him was that he was coming to rule a kingdom in which
head and body were so tightly bound in one by ties of law, counsel and
religion that the body had its own voice and could accuse the head of
breaking away from it. James understood the vocabulary of the Two Bodies
15
[Kidd, 1999, ch. 6.] 16 Guy, 1993.
17
See the revisionary material added to Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B).
very well, and could deal not unacceptably with the great ambivalences of a
prince both above the law and subject to it. His English subjects were in no
imaginable circumstances likely to tell him that his kingship was elective or
conditioned by the principle that all power originated in the people. What
could not be anticipated was that they would find themselves telling his son
that he was laying claim to his divinely sanctioned monarchy in ways that
were fatal to it, with the result that the unimaginable happened and they
were compelled to enunciate principles in which they fundamentally did
not believe. This was not the predicament of the Scots, who spoke other
languages to other ends.
It is now a commonplace that to understand this process we do better to
begin with church than with constitution. The proposition that James’s
English kingdom affirmed its unity of head and body with a more passion-
ate and dangerous intensity than did his Scottish, now rests less on its
supposedly ancient unification by a common law, and its more recent
unification by a discourse of counsel, than on an exegesis of the sovereignty
proclaimed in the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533). Here a
parliamentary statute declared and enacted, but denied that it was invent-
ing in the sense of creating, the crown’s imperial headship of a body both
political and ecclesiastical, so that its duality of person became a duality of
spiritual and temporal, and a king’s failure to accept counsel in his realm
might come to seem its betrayal as a church of Christ. Such – vastly
complicated by contingencies – was the fate of Charles I as king of
England, but not as king of Scotland. In the latter kingdom there was no
such statute, no such imperial duality-in-unity, and James VI’s perception
of his Two Bodies and his role as a vice-regent to God must have been
shaped less directly. Here we must look for the origins of his Scottish
conviction that Buchanan and Melville together threatened him with
a populist Presbyterianism, which grew into his more English (and
Anglican) conviction that his crown was menaced by Jesuits and puritans
in an unholy alliance.
If it is uncertain how far George Buchanan shaped his political thought
as a Calvinist, let alone as a Melvillian, it is less certain still that he
envisaged his baronial populism as conducive to the independence of
Christ’s people, under their presbyters, from ‘God’s sillie vassal’.
Similarly, it is uncertain how far Andrew Melville relied on Buchanan’s
histories of justified baronial rebellion; he may have shared the strong
convictions of Geneva and Sedan on the subject of civil order. What is clear
is that the two themes came powerfully together in the mind of James VI,
and doubtless in the minds of many others; a further question which may
be asked is how far this convergence contributed to shaping the mind of
James I, and on the contrary to shaping a Buchananite and covenanting
synthesis which would be the Scottish equivalent of English parliamentary
Protestantism. By the time he wrote the Trew lawe of free monarchies (1598),
King James was conscious of the difference between the English
Reformation as an act of state, king and parliament, and the Scottish as
unfortunately achieved by noble and popular rebellion.18 It seems safe to
infer that he was thinking about his succession to the crown of England,
directly challenged by Catholic assertions of the illegitimacy of both
Elizabeth’s rule and his own, and less directly, but more far-reachingly,
by Jesuit and Dominican theses of the popular origins of power. No
doubt his counter-theses of the indefeasible and absolute authority of kings,
proof by divine right against popes, presbyters and peoples all together,
could have taken shape around his fury at Melvillian impudences; but
once he found, or as soon as he imagined, himself king of England and
supreme governor or head of its church, he possessed a kingship, and a
sacred, royal and imperial self, which must be asserted by means of richer
and more potent discourse against dangers more universal and far reaching.
The Gowrie conspiracy might have threatened James VI, but the
Gunpowder Plot which threatened James I was of incomparably greater
symbolic significance. The better stabilized the polity, the more terrible
the threat to it.
The political thought of James VI therefore reached full flowering as the
political thought of James I, wearer of one sacred and two imperial crowns
and in every way but the papist, lawful inheritor of Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I. In a great many ways he understood his English subjects very
well and was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. If he lectured
them too much, and said things which made them uncomfortable, about
his relation to the privileges, customs and laws of parliament, we now see
these matters as capable of being handled and James himself as quite
capable of handling them. But this image of a not unsuccessful or uncon-
sensual reign applies least well to its closing years, overshadowed by a
mighty favourite and bedevilled by the calamitous wars touched off
by James’s son-in-law on the continent, and to its opening, if characterized
by the great abortive act of state with which so much of this book has
been concerned: his attempt to make the union of the crowns a union of
Great Britain.
18
Mason, 1994, ch. 5.
This enterprise placed the ‘matter of Britain’ on the agenda of both
kingdoms. Foreshadowed by John Mair and others, it used ‘Britain’ as a
term denoting a Scottish initiative aimed at a union of the poorer with the
richer kingdom, and in choosing the name of the Roman province for its
planned merger, it annexed Arthurian and Galfridian traditions to Scottish
uses, much to the indignation of the by now partly anglicized Welsh, who
declared that they and not the upstart descendants of Irish freebooters
were entitled to glory in the name of ‘Britons’. So saying, they enlisted on
the side of the English in the dispute over the priority of the title to the
imperial crown, and any full study of the discourse of ‘Britain’ must allow
the Welsh their voice. Since King James inaugurated the union debate,
however, it has normally been the Scots who have insisted on using and
clarifying the term, and the English who have refused to pay attention to it
beyond employing it as a simple extension of ‘England’. Such was James’s
achievement and the measure of his failure.
It helps in understanding the character – if not necessarily the causation –
of the union enterprise and its failure if we think of it as originating in the
king’s clear and vivid perception of the demands of his Two Bodies. He was
the husband, he said, and the whole island was his wife; he could not be the
husband of two wives, or the head of two bodies. (It was George III, a
century and two-thirds later, who found himself briefly faced with the
demand that he keep a harem of twenty or more independent legislatures;
this role as a British Solomon was rejected even before it was clearly
expressed.)19 But James was not to escape the beast with two backs; he
rightly understood that to wear a single crown he must make his two
kingdoms a single corporate body, but he underrated the challenge of the
few means then existing of uniting head and body to make a corporation. If
in England he wore a closed imperial crown, that of Scotland had been
closed and imperial since the reign of James III, though there was no Act in
Restraint of Appeals to give Scottish empire the terrible specificity the term
possessed in England. James united his crowns by a single proclamation,
but by so doing incurred the obligation of making two bodies one body,
two wives one wife; and it was not clear that there existed anywhere the
power to do that.
The Nimrodic or conquering king ruling regaliter tantum could give
his subjects laws, but this was not to form them into a single corporate
body; Fortescue’s king ruling politice owes his being as head of a mystical
body to an act of self-incorporation in which the populus appears to have
19
For this see Koebner, 1961; Greene, 1986, 1990; Robertson, 1995.
played some part.20 The aetiology of the body politic, however, matters less
than its ontology; when it exists, head and body are unified by a network of
law and counsel, and the laws are multiple in their origin so that it is
needless to decide which lawgiver came first. ‘Kings were the authors and
makers of the laws, and not the laws of the kings’, James had declared,
alluding not improperly to Fergus and William the conquerors; but to say
that the king made laws was not quite to say that his laws made his
kingdom (or in consequence that the laws he had made he could unmake
at will). To make the king author, begetter or creator of the body of which
he was head was to make him more divine even than godlike; to say that he
could abolish or unmake his own kingdom and merge it in another was to
make his patria potestas a potestas vitae et necis. James claimed no such
power; his proclamation did not abolish and unify his kingdoms, but
directed them to set about abolishing and unifying themselves by counsel
and consent. It did not, and James could not, furnish them with the means
of doing so.
The judgement in the case of the post-nati resolved that allegiance was
due the king in his natural, not his political person; a conclusion dangerous
in Fortescuean terms, since it ascribed an indefinite power to command
obedience to the Nimrodic ruler regaliter tantum, and might threaten to
separate the king as conqueror from the king as head of his people – the
charge to be brought against Roger Manwaring by Pym’s impeachment in
1628.21 The unsuccessful argument in the same case, however, pointed to
dreadful difficulties when it seemed to argue that allegiance being due to
the political person, Scotsmen and Englishmen could never be subjects of
one another’s crowns:
Scotland is of itself an absolute kingdom, an absolute government, and hath
absolute laws whereunto they are subjects, and are not subject to the crown,
government and laws of England . . . The politic body of a kingdom consisteth
of a head, which is the king, of a body, which are the subjects, of a life [? lief],
which is the laws, of a soul, which is the execution of them.22
The central assertion was that only laws united a head and body and
formed them into a corpus politicum; consequently two such bodies could
become one only if their laws were homogenized. Yet neither kingdom
contained the authority to annul the whole body of its laws, which would
be to abolish itself, and any such authority if it existed must be extra-legal
20
Chrimes, 1949, pp. 30–3.
21
Johnson et al., 1977–78, vol. III, pp. 261–2; Burgess, 1992, pp. 173–8.
22
Quoted in Wormald, 1992, p. 183, n. 16. Spelling and punctuation here modernized.
and extra-regnal. To effect his more perfect union, James must not only
rule both his kingdoms by an authority derived from conquest; he would
have to reconquer them both, and there was a sense in which his original
proclamation could be read as an attempt to do just that. But James
disclaimed any such authority, and sought to persuade his two political
persons to become one, in virtue of their union in his natural person. As
king of England and as king of Scotland, unhappily, he was not merely the
husband of two wives; he was two husbands.
The premiss that law was the essence of union between a political head
and body was insuperable, both because in England there existed a com-
mon law, or common custom of the realm, which defined the realm and
was held to be coeval with it, and because James’s long and successful reign
in Scotland had witnessed an expansion of the practice, the concept and the
profession of the law to the point where the expression ‘common law’ could
form part of Scottish discourse. Sir Thomas Craig, James’s active supporter
in promoting the union, figures in our canonical history of Scottish
political thought as the first great Scottish jurist. He was far removed
from what we used to miscall the ‘insularity’ of the English ‘common-
law mind’; he had studied the interactions of Roman law, droit coutumier
and feudal law, and emerged with a sophisticated grasp of their complex
history which he was as prepared to apply to English law as to Scottish.23
The opponents of the post-nati in England might observe that the more
‘absolutely’ Scotsmen possessed their own laws, government and kingdom,
the more ‘absolute’ became the authority of these over them, and the less
were they capable of escaping, renouncing or abolishing the second nature
and political personality which was now of their essence. But Craig’s
understanding of law and nationality was both Roman and feudal, imperial
and provincial; he saw Scotland as one province of a Roman and feudal
cosmopolis in which the interactions of the historical patterns of law had
worked out in one way as in other nations they had worked out in others.
He therefore saw Scottish political personality less as ‘absolute’ than as
historically contingent, and was unafraid of the task of adapting it to the
new contingencies of a ‘British’ history.
In Jus Feudale, he told the English that the same was true of them, but
could by no means get them to listen. We reach the point at which
historians customarily observe that Scottish culture was highly cosmopolitan,
but English provincial to the point of ‘insularity’. King James’s phrase ‘the
23
Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B), pp. 79–90. For this capacity re-emerging in eighteenth-century Scottish
jurisprudence, see Lieberman, 1990.
whole island’ should be enough to warn us that ‘insular’ is the wrong
adjective; his English subjects were engaged in denying that their part of the
island had anything in common with the part he had ruled, while Lowland
Scots were little less resolute in denying kinship with the Highlands and
Islands north of them in the archipelago. Even the term ‘provincial’ may
prove two-edged. Scots were more ‘cosmopolitan’, more willing to admit
that Roman and French (if not Gaelic and Irish) components had gone to
make them what they were, precisely because their kingdom was more
‘provincial’ in the sense of less autonomous. Englishmen were more
‘insular’, more ‘ethnocentric’, more ‘provincial’ in their refusal to admit
‘cosmopolitan’ components in their national life and history, because they
could and did assert that they possessed ‘sovereign’ and ‘absolute’ power
over themselves in the two vital respects of law and ecclesiastical structure.
It was this passionately – one could add desperately – preserved sense of
sovereign autonomy, traceable back to the Act in Restraint of Appeals
by one route, to Fortescue’s De laudibus legum Angliae by another, and to
time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary by a third,
which James VI and I’s proclamation of union had seemed to threaten; one
of the first in a long series of steps by which the Stuart monarchy came to be
perceived as a menace to the unity of its English realm; probably the first
which we may ascribe to the exigencies of ‘multiple monarchy’ and the
‘British problem’, and which ended in the imposition of English upon
‘British’ history.
The immediate problem was that there existed two political bodies
(and persons), defined by two apparently incommensurable systems of
royal and national law. Craig was prepared to set about the long task of
assimilating Scots and English law by means of precedent, judgements and
legal reason in Scottish courts, and in this foreshadows such figures as
Kames and Mansfield late in the next century. Among English jurists,
Francis Bacon could entertain philosophically exciting visions of a codifi-
cation which should reduce both systems to one, and in this (if in little else)
he resembles Jeremy Bentham two hundred years after him. But the mind
of Lord Ellesmere did not reach quite so far, and the alarmingly power-
ful intelligence of Sir Edward Coke was trained in quite other directions.
Dr Wormald provides reason to suppose that the effect of the union debate
was to intensify, not mitigate, the English sense of the autonomy and
uniqueness of both their law and their sovereignty.24 The Virgilian tag
divisos ab orbe Britannos, once used to enjoin the union of Scots and
24
Wormald, in Mason, 1994, pp. 17–40.
English under a common name, was by 1628 employed by Coke in declar-
ing that English law was autochthonous, self-sustaining and admitted no
law within the realm that it had not itself approved.25 Divisos ab orbe
Britannos ; divisos ab insulis Anglos. In a sense which could well be termed
anti-historical, English history was to be written in exclusively English
terms – ‘like a silkworm which formeth all her web out of her self only’26 –
and could acknowledge no ‘British history’ which was not its own. It was a
reaction as much defensive as expansive; a question of maintaining sover-
eignty over one’s own laws and customs, one’s own identity and history.
The union of head and body, which constituted a political kingdom, was
thus formed by laws which were nationally and culturally specific; the more
‘absolute’ (and less relative or contingent) each kingdom’s laws, the harder
it was to merge its personality with another’s. The same union could also be
conceptualized in religious and ecclesiological terms; the sovereign must be
head of his realm in its spiritual capacity, and the way in which he was so
was another determinant of its personality. In England this had been
written into law in 1533, to a point where it was definitive of the Two
Bodies and the political person. The king’s headship of his temporal realm
was inseparable from his headship of the church coextensive with it. In
Scotland, as James was uneasily aware, the separation of the realm from
Rome had not been effected by unalloyed royal authority, and those who
had effected it might claim ecclesiastical independence of him. Hence ‘no
bishop, no king’; once he found himself supreme head of the Church of
England, James would be far from unwilling to assimilate Scotland to the
English model. Even after his defeat and elimination of Melville, however,
James acted cautiously; but the English must decide how much responsi-
bility they wanted for the recalcitrant Presbyterians of the north. It was
hard enough work accustoming the Scots to the authority of bishops jure
humano ; the disasters of the next reign followed when a section of the
English clergy began insisting on them jure divino. Ecclesiology was less
salient than law in the debates which derailed James’s union policy, but the
two differences in structure have together ensured that Britain has never
been the single political culture which James desired, but lacked the means,
to make it. Brian Levack’s title, The Formation of the British State,27 there-
fore contains an ambiguity: is there a single state, or is ‘state’ distinct from
‘civil society’?
25 26
Johnson et al., 1977–78, vol. II, pp. 101, 550, 555. Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B) p. 34.
27
Levack, 1987.
It is, in the older language of historiography, instructive as well as
amusing to speculate on what might have happened had James carried
out two intentions which figure briefly in his inscribed and spoken dis-
course: those of taking the style of ‘Emperor of the whole island of Britain’,
which appears on a medal struck at his accession to the English throne, and
of setting up his seat at York, leaving both his Scottish and his English
subjects procul a numine, procul a fulmine 28 – to quote the witty and
menacing phrase he used to parliament in 1607.29 There was the well-
established, though rather Scottish than English, language of Constantinian
empire, which Arthur Williamson has memorably brought to light,30 and
York was a city of late-antique Constantinian associations. If James wished
to be the Protestant emperor of reformed apocalyptic, as his son-in-law
Frederick so disastrously attempted a decade later, he had the symbolic
means of assuming the role at York, more safely than at Prague. But as
Williamson has also shown, Constantine was a dangerously ambiguous
figure – the founder of the Christian empire, the author of fatal conces-
sions to the papal Antichrist – and apart from the effects on the English
hierarchy of such an exaltation of York at the expense of Canterbury, the
English already possessed their own image of the ‘godly prince’, defined in
the royal and parliamentary language of the Act in Restraint of Appeals,
which made the legend of King Lucius more native to their symbolism
than that of the Emperor Constantine.
The reasons why James retained the royal and did not adopt the imperial
style are complex, if evanescent, since in fact the move was never debated in
detail; but it is possible to render them of some significance. As Adam
Blackwood, one of Buchanan’s opponents, observed,31 an emperor was
something other (and perhaps less) than a king further magnified; he ruled
over many bodies politic and was not necessarily the incarnate head of any
one. James might have taken the style of emperor of Great Britain while
retaining those of king of Scots and king of England, France and Ireland;
but this would have entailed admitting the plurality of his empire and the
multiplicity of his political persons. He set out to make Britain a single
body politic and reign as its head and king; the style of emperor would have
entailed resignation of the duality-in-unity of the Two Bodies, which
appears to have been what rendered him kingly and godlike in his own
sight. We have already found two reasons why he failed to reach his goal:
law and ecclesiastical authority, two principal ligaments uniting the head
28
‘Far from the god, far from his thunderbolt’. 29 Wormald, 1992, p. 175.
30
Williamson, 1979. 31 Mason, 1994, pp. 149–50.
and body of the political person, differentiated England and Scotland to
the point where they resembled Judah and Israel – two kingdoms ruled by
the same divine law – less than Judaea and Samaria, between whom there
were no dealings, and who could not be reduced to one. The phrase procul
a numine, procul a fulmine provides us with a third, to which the clue may
be found in the word procul. What united head and body, in this third
perspective, was counsel; counsel depended on access, and access depended
upon court. When James proposed setting up his seat at York, or becoming
peripatetic between Holyrood, York and Westminster, he was making a
threat: he was warning his subjects north and south that they might find
themselves procul a numine, far from the focus of service and counsel, the
fount of office and honour (the seats of justice were already fixed). They
might be obliged to travel greater distances in search of access to their king,
or to take turns in having that access conveniently at hand. It all sounds
very reasonable, but in fact the threat was two-edged; kings everywhere,
and kings of multiple monarchies in particular, were having to decide
between rendering themselves accessible or remote, stationary or peripatetic –
the problem confronted by Deioces the Mede in the imaginary history by
Herodotus.32 The Escorial, and later Versailles, were palaces designed to
make the subject seek out the king, and hopefully to exploit distance to the
latter’s advantage. Would the court and palace of a British Constantine at
York have proved a British Escorial, a British Byzantium, a British Kyoto?
We cannot answer, because the experiment was never made. James in 1607
was threatening the English with something he knew they would not like,
but implicitly and surely unconsciously they called his bluff. He remained
stationary at Whitehall and went once (though more often than his
successors) to Holyrood; that is, he chose to situate himself in a body
larger and more richly textured than Scotland, united by a more complex
integument in all three modes of counsel, law and religion – though a price
to be paid was that the challenges with which the head-and-body union
faced a king of England in all three modes were greater in proportion as the
union was more intense. Meanwhile, it was a lesser price that Scots (and
Irish) notables would have to journey to Whitehall in search of their king,
and that the English would have to get used to seeing them there. James
kept his promise that he would not rule Scotland through a viceroy (like
Naples) or a deputy (like Ireland), though his reported words ‘Here I sit
and govern it by my pen’ indicate that this kingdom had not quite escaped
provincial status; and it was the judgement of William Robertson that the
32
Herodotus, History of the Persian War, I, pp. 96ff.
departure of a court culture in 1603 had condemned it to be a provincial
culture,33 until Union and Enlightenment had made possible a translatio
studii to Modern Athens.
With the abandonment of James VI and I’s vision of reducing two
imperial crowns and two bodies politic to one, the principle of multiple
monarchy triumphed; we enter the age of the ambiguities of ‘Britain’, and
at the same time the age of the Three Kingdoms. These consisted of the two
bodies politic of England and Scotland – the latter easily imagined as
possessing unincorporated barbarian marchlands to the north and west –
and the conquered kingdom of Ireland, whose ruler was not the head of a
mystical body and which resembled a captive concubine rather than a wife.
Wales, which had been conquered, was now incorporated; Ireland was
conquered but not incorporated until 1780 (in one sense) or 1801 (in
another). The American colonies which now began their existence were
neither conquered nor properly incorporated as bodies politic; to declare
themselves such, as ‘independent states’, was to be a revolutionary act in
1776.34 This political typology at once provides a framework for ‘British
history’ and raises the question whether, or in what sense, there can be said to
have been such a thing. Of the two bodies politic properly so called, one –
England – claimed to be so tightly and intensely incorporated that it
contained its own history (which was principally that of the ancient
constitution) and could recognize ‘British history’ only as contained
within, or a simple extension of, the history of England – a propensity
which has survived so stubbornly that it is not even yet eliminated. The
other – Scotland – contained authors capable of seeing its history as that of
a province of western European culture, whose autonomy consisted in the
recognition and management of its own marginality – a history of Scottish
interdependence with Roman and French jurisprudence, Norman and
English feudalism, Pictish and Gaelic kin systems, Scandinavian settlement
and Flemish commerce. In Craig we are entitled to see foreshadowed the
capacity of Scottish Enlightened historians to present both Scottish and
English – and therefore ‘British’ – history as that of provinces locally
manifesting the principles of a general ‘history of mankind’, convinced
that they were writing English history better than the English could write it
themselves.35
But there was another side to the medal. The Scottish capacity to
see their history as marginal and contingent was the product of their
33
Robertson, 1824, vol. XXII, pp. 245–8. 34 Pocock, 1995a (ch. 9, below).
35
Hume, 1754–62; Robertson, 1759; Henry, 1771–93; Millar, 1787–1803.
conviction that their body politic was not (as the English believed theirs
was) so intensely unified as to contain its own history; and consequently
what George Buchanan supplied was the history, not of an ‘ancient con-
stitution’ in the English sense,36 but of a turbulent baronial polity in which
monarchical misgovernment was tempered by noble rebellion. It took
major collapses of government, such as those occurring on either side of
the year 1649, to force the English to admit that their history had once been
baronial in this sense; and even this they contained within the paradigm of
an ‘ancient constitution’ in every way they could imagine. Buchanan
depicted a primeval politics in sophisticated language; perhaps there is
room for regarding him as a Gaelic-Latin humanist after all;37 and his
image of the Scottish past had to be overthrown before the philosophical
history of the Scottish Enlightenment could be developed.38 Scottish
sophistication and a Scottish sense of backwardness went together, as
they had for John Mair himself. Scots might write English history better
than the English wrote it, but when the English wrote history they seldom
admitted the Scots to it.
It follows that there was, and still is, no ‘British history’ in the sense of
the self-authenticated history of a self-perpetuating polity or culture. The
term must be used to denote a multiplicity of histories, written by or (more
probably) written about a multiplicity of kingdoms and other provinces,
which have interacted to produce intelligible narratives, or the need and
capacity to write intelligible narratives, of their interactions to produce
‘Britain’ and ‘British history’. In more recent work, such as Linda
Colley’s,39 the possibility has re-emerged that there may have been pro-
duced a ‘British’ culture, politics and nationality more durable than it has
been fashionable to suppose; but it does not seem likely that this culture
will provide itself, as the English once did, with a unified and monostruc-
tural history. More probably there will continue to be written a multiple
history of what was once (and perhaps still is) a multiple monarchy, whose
unity is contingent upon its multiplicity and may not persist, though
equally it may.
This should be good news for historians, since it enables them to write
‘British history’ with the sophisticated attention to the shifting balance
between provincial and universal perspectives that characterized their great
Scottish and English predecessors. In the history of political discourse,
however, it is particularly evident that ‘British history’ can be written only
36 37 38
Trevor-Roper, 1966. Buchanan, 1827, vol. I, p. 9. Kidd, 1993.
39
Colley, 1992.
when there is dialogue between the several national discourses, when there
can be found a perspective in which they can be viewed as coexisting, or
when there is a history of a discourse ‘of Britain’ – one concerning the
possibility that such an entity can be created, invented, said to exist or to
have existed. In such a history Anglo-Irish, Old English and Old Irish
discourses must play their part, and one might look beyond it to a history
which would reconstitute the patterns of Irish political discourse as the
present work has reconstituted those of Scottish. This history would move
both in and out of British history, finding its turning point in the fateful
third union of 1801.
CHAPTER 5
The Atlantic archipelago and the War

of the Three Kingdoms
This paper1 will seek to develop a position on the history of the Atlantic
archipelago in early modern times, originally stated in articles published
up to eighteen years ago. Since those times a good deal has happened, and
we have all gone on thinking about what is no longer ‘the unknown
subject’2 – though it would not be true to say that we have a governing
paradigm for treating it. In developing these earlier positions, I wish to
select, however tendentiously, a few positions away from which I think
there has been some movement, and see if I can employ that pattern in an
attempt to define where we are now.
In the first place, there is the phrase ‘Atlantic archipelago’ itself. One
book has been published with that title, by an American scholar, Richard
S. Tompson of Utah;3 on the other hand, Hugh Kearney’s book is entitled
The British Isles: a History of Four Nations.4 I offer the term in an attempt to
get away from inappropriate pan-national language. The problem lies less
with the term ‘British Isles’ than with the term ‘British history’, a concept
to which there are or might be objections on various nationalist grounds,
but which we have been employing speculatively and aggressively in the
attempt to overcome a writing of history so Anglocentric that ‘British
history’ itself has in the past denoted nothing much more than ‘English
history’ with occasional transitory additions. I will cautiously defend the
new use of ‘British history’ to denote archipelagic history in general on
the following grounds. This history in the early modern and modern
periods has been dominated by the attempt to construct a ‘British’ king-
dom, state and nation embracing the archipelago as a whole, and even the
great antithesis furnished by the largely successful secession of the Irish
Republic is part of ‘British history’ to the extent (real if not absolute) that
Irish history is dominated by the struggle to escape from British. That
1 2 3
Originally printed as Pocock, 1996 b. Pocock, 1982. Tompson, 1986.
4
Kearney, 1989.
77
struggle, in turn, is not the whole of ‘Irish history’, which must be and is
being written within parameters of its own, but means that ‘Irish history’
can be viewed as part of ‘British history’ in the larger sense: the fortunes and
vicissitudes of the attempt, and the reactions against the attempt, to create a
multinational ‘Britain’ which has a past and may have a future. Similarly –
extending the term ‘Atlantic archipelago’ to include piedmont and tide-
water North America – one can include ‘American’ within ‘British history’
through the War of Independence, until the formation of the federal
republic, when it becomes ‘United States history’, and a field of study
self-affirmed in its own terms.
‘British history’, then, is located within ‘the Atlantic archipelago’, an
expression partly geographically and partly politically defined, so that it
includes the Shetland but not the Faroe Islands, the Channel Islands but
not the adjacent coasts of Normandy and Britanny. An archipelago is a
group or collection of islands, and the effect aimed at in using this term is to
remind ourselves and our readers that we are writing a history pelagic,
maritime and oceanic, into which an extraordinary diversity of cultural
and other movements has penetrated deeply after making their way from
the adjacent extremities of the Eurasian landmass. Here we reach the point of
employing the tendentious and aggressive term ‘Europe’, an expression once
again both geographic and cultural; it denotes in the first place a peninsula
(or strictly speaking two, one Europe proper and the other Scandinavia)
extending from the landmass into the inland seas and the ocean, and in the
second place a civilization, Latin in its origins and exceptional in its expan-
siveness, which made its way into the Scandinavian peninsula, the Atlantic
archipelago and many other parts of the planet. This combination of mean-
ings renders ‘Europe’ a term dynamic, indeterminable and hegemonic; it can
be used to include human societies or to exclude them, depending on how it
is employed by those who have appropriated the power to define it, and as I
have found myself both included and excluded by those who use it to
instruct me as to who I am, I look on its employment with a certain critical
concern. In using the term ‘Atlantic archipelago’, therefore, we encounter
the term ‘Europe’: and we affirm that the history of ‘Europe’ can either be
confined to that of a continental peninsula, or include a history of islands
and mountains and a waste of seas, in which case it is a different history from
that which it would be if it did not.
The notion of an archipelago invites us to let our mental vision travel out
into a diffusion of pelagic cultures lying beyond the frontiers of ‘Europe’
and ‘civilization’ as conventionally imagined. This is of course a way of
thinking full of dangers, which have to be resisted if they cannot be evaded,
The Atlantic archipelago and the War of the Three Kingdoms 79
and one has to challenge it as soon as one has embarked upon it. But there
are senses in which one cannot avoid embarking on it; a real sense, for
instance, in which the archipelago takes us beyond the territories of the
Roman empire and the papal, feudal and royal monarchies which suc-
ceeded it. The expansion of this barbaro-Latin civilization is what creates
‘Europe’ as we know the term, and it expanded west as well as east, into the
further islands of the archipelago and Scandinavia, as well as into the
Saxon, Lithuanian and Slavonic lands at the heart of the European penin-
sula. This expansion was still going on in early modern times, when it took
the form of the consolidation of the English and British monarchies in
control of the Atlantic archipelago; and very complex and intricate inter-
actions developed over centuries between governments based on the con-
trol of land tenure defined as ‘property’ through written redactions of
customary, statute and punitive law, and cultures where similar ends were
attained through the obligations of kinship backed by various forms of
partly ritualized violence. This is one of the more important frontiers in
Atlantic, European and indeed world history, because mutual incompre-
hension between the two systems reached a height where each regarded the
other as altogether alien and barbaric, and the writ-governed culture set out
to establish its control of the kin-governed culture by means of conquest.
We are expected to deplore this state of affairs, but we have to study it; and
it is a circumstance to which we must constantly return that the English
and Scottish monarchies in the archipelago were distinguished among
those in the west of Europe by their conviction that they existed on a
barbarian frontier, and by the existence of a frontier on either side of which
peoples did regard one another as barbaric.
It was this chain of considerations that led me, in those articles that
I mentioned earlier, to make much of the distinction between kingdom
and march, between the zone of government, in which the written law
operates normally and minimizes its resorts to violence, and the zone of
war, in which the writ has to impose its authority on the kindred by a more
frequently visible employment of the sword. A good deal has been written
about the extent to which these two zones penetrate one another and are
hard to tell apart, and this has been a theme of Anglo-Irish historiography,
for instance, since there began to be such a thing. There is Hiram Morgan’s
monograph on the outbreak of Tyrone’s rebellion,5 in which the queen’s
men and the chiefs, the men of law and the men of the sword, behave in
ways between which there is singularly little to choose; but let me recall
5
Morgan, 1993.
Sir John Davies’s Jacobean apologia for conquest, in which the point is
repeatedly made that this is precisely the problem which the rule of the
kingdom needs to overcome – even though the problem might not exist if
the kingdom were not there. We should also consider the point made by
several Scottish historians, Jenny Wormald among them,6 that in blood-
feud societies the level of private violence is high but containable, whereas
in societies governed by king and law the level of public violence is
occasionally explosive and devastating. It is in the latter that we find armies
fighting pitched battles in pursuit of dynastic and civil war; and the
Problematik of what constitutes civil war should now receive the attention
of historians.
Nevertheless, it may still be useful for some purposes to retain the model
of kingdom and march, and keep in mind the extent to which Mountjoy,
Cromwell and Ginkel, and Wade and Cumberland far into the eighteenth
century, were engaged in the ancient imperial pursuit of reducing prov-
inces to obedience. Eliga Gould has written a most persuasive doctoral
dissertation,7 in which 1745 and 1759 emerge as significant moments in the
re-organization of Anglo-Hanoverian empire between the Elbe and the
Ohio, not without bearing on the American Revolution. But to say this is
to pass from the model of kingdom and march to the model of multiple
monarchy, and perhaps the ascent of the latter model to its present
authority is the most important change in the construction of ‘British
history’ since the time when I began proposing the latter subject in those
early articles.
It was J. C. Beckett who seems first to have used the phrase ‘the War of
the Three Kingdoms’ – or was it ‘the Wars’? – but the phrase has gone on
growing since it first became known, and we are now in a position where
we must borrow a term from our Chinese peers and speak of an ‘Age of the
Three Kingdoms’ in British history and the history of the Atlantic archi-
pelago, lasting from 1534 or 1603 to 1707 or 1801. Within it might be located
a sub-period of the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’, datable from 1637 to
1691, in which the concepts of wars of conquest, social wars and civil wars
skirmish to command our attention. The ‘Age of the Three Kingdoms’, in
the larger sense, is that in which sovereign or imperial kingdoms in
England and Scotland, and a subject kingdom established by conquest
and legislation in Ireland, come first under a single dynasty, constituting a
multiple monarchy, and then under a common parliamentary sovereignty,
constituting or never quite constituting a unified parliamentary state.
6 7
Wormald, 1980. Gould, 1992. [See now Gould, 2000.]
It is succeeded by an ‘Age of Union’ lasting from 1801 to 1921, and beyond
that the enterprise of periodization by nomenclature had perhaps better
not go. The attention of scholars has been focussed predominantly on the
problems of multiple monarchy, and perhaps on the Wars of the Three
Kingdoms in particular; but it is possible to carry on beyond the seven-
teenth century, and in conjunction with Scottish, American, and now and
then English colleagues, I have found myself discussing the American
Revolution as growing out of the problems of multiple monarchy,8 while
J. C. D. Clark is prepared to go further and examine it as the last (or not the
last?) of the British wars of religion.9
The model of kingdom and march presents an image of sovereignty and
its spatial limitations, but that of multiple monarchy presents that of the
relations between modes of sovereignty when several are exercised by the
same crown or person. But this is tricky language; James VI and I once
complained that he could not be the husband of two wives, and the head of
a plural monarchy has several mystical or political persons met together in
one natural body. And if the king of Scots who became king of England
could not merge his three bodies in that of an emperor of Great Britain,
what person had he as king of Ireland, where his sovereignty was acquired
by conquest and Ireland was perhaps not a body politic incorporate at all?
From these abstract and symbolic, but not for that reason insignificant
considerations, we move to consider the problems of plural majesty: that is
to say of The Causes of the English Civil War and The Fall of the British
Monarchies.10
There is a historiographical, linguistic and political problem here. Are
we substituting the War, or Wars, of the Three Kingdoms for the English
Civil War, in spite of Russell’s choice of a title for his Ford Lectures? If so,
why and with what effect? Let me generalize his argument by saying that its
thrust is to deny that there was anything wrong enough with the English
kingdom as a whole to break its structure apart, to divide its ruling élites
into opposing camps, to furnish them with opposed and irreconcilable
patterns of religion and political belief, or to need explanation in terms of
the long-range operations of social change. What happened was rather that
the strains imposed on the monarchy by the need to govern three kingdoms
led to its breakdown, and that the English, like the other, ruling élites fell
apart in consequence of this failure of leadership. The British problem
caused the dissolution of government, and – to quote James Harrington –
the dissolution of government caused the war.
8 9 10
Below, ch. 9. Clark, 1993. Russell, 1990, 1991a and b.
This is a simplistic account of Russell’s complex narrative, but I have no
difficulty in accepting his argument in this simplified form. I accept all that
is said about the need to escape from Whig constitutionalist or Marxist
socialist explanations, though when we have escaped from them I want to
go back and look at both, and see what may be left of them. What does
trouble me is a current conviction that we live in a time of the breaking of
nations and the unmaking of states, which impels many opinion-makers
and not a few academics to deny that English history makes any kind of
sense, or contains within itself any of the motors of its own dynamic or the
causes of its own crises. With these intentions some of our contemporaries
inject the Civil War of 1642 into a British context or the Revolution of 1688
into a European context; not because we learn more about English history
when we realize that it was not the whole of the story, or because there are
other stories needing to be told, but because they want to deny that the
English were ever the makers of their own history in any degree whatever. It
was not with intentions like these that I broached the idea of a ‘British
history’ in a lecture to the New Zealand Historical Association in 1973.
I hasten to add that the revisionist debate, of which the British reading of
seventeenth-century history has been part, has not had these insanitary
effects; rather, it has rendered the national sovereignty and the national
history tougher because more fragile, because more exposed to external and
internal contingencies than we used to realize.11 But in this perspective, the
result of absorbing the English Civil War into the War of the Three
Kingdoms should be to illuminate the former, not to make it disappear.
Let me ask two questions: was there an English Civil War, and was there
a War of the Three Kingdoms? I have already suggested my answer to the
second question, and I want now to put forward for consideration the still
rather abstract proposition that there was a confluence of several wars,
which arose separately but had to be fought together for the reason that
they could not be pursued, much less brought to a conclusion, separately.
This proposition opens up a problem. Can we construct a holistic explana-
tion of the War of the Three Kingdoms, or must we concede that a
multiple monarchy cannot have a single or holistic history?12 The issue
turns on the extent to which the single dynasty ruling several realms had
created a single polity, or a complex of polities centred on itself, which had
its own life and within which a series of things could go wrong; an entity
which engendered or suffered its own crisis, in short, and – above all –
which had its own history. There is, as we have seen, a sense in which
11 12
Pocock, 1992d. Morrill, 1993, 1996.
Conrad Russell is denying that English history engendered the English Civil
War, and John Morrill can be seen accepting this, but asserting that Russell’s
explanation is still insufficiently ‘British’ or ‘Britannic’ in the sense that
Scottish and Irish history figure in it only as the external forces which impelled
the unwilling but still central English into a civil war they did not want.
Russell has characterized the English role in this crisis as that of ‘the pig in the
middle’; the victim of external forces, but still in the middle. It is a temptation
to see in this a reflection of the British self-image in the 1980s and 1990s.
If a ‘holistic’ account of the crisis could be put forward, it would be
because the multiple monarchy had created a unity of structure some-
where, within which a crisis could develop and a breakdown could take
place. This unity would have a history of its own, and we should have
found a ‘British’ or ‘Britannic’ history within which we could situate a War
of the Three Kingdoms. But what would be the architecture of the structure
of which this was the history? Of what institutions or conventions or
relationships would it consist? In one projection intelligible to seventeenth-
century minds, it would consist solely in the natural person of the king who
was head of all Three Kingdoms, and there is much latitude for explaining
the crisis as the effect of the natural personality of Charles I – even when,
with Russell, one thinks he did not do badly all the time. But it was equally
well understood that a king’s natural person could not be finally separated
from his political person, which he enjoyed or endured as the head of a
body politic; and it was of the essence of multiple monarchy that one
natural person might find himself, or herself, endued with two or three
political persons – the predicament so accurately expounded by James VI
and I. In the historicist language I am deliberately, and I hope not blindly,
employing, this might mean that such a king found himself acting in two
or three histories at once – each political body having its own history, the
effect of whatever social or cultural forces it had mobilized by existing as
a political structure – and he might find his government, his court and his
person the focal point at which all these histories converged, whether in
confluence or in collision.
But to say only this leaves open the question of whether or not such a
king, and any predecessors he might have as head of a multiple monarchy,
had about him some set of institutions or conventions or usages for dealing
with this convergence, or whether it was dealt with only by the king’s
natural person dealing with problems as they came along; was there a
jurisdictio or was there only a gubernaculum? In the former case there would
be a locus of politics complex, stable and unstable enough to have a history
of its own; there would be a ‘Britannic’ history along with the English,
Scottish and Irish histories, one in which the latter converged so as to form a
whole, which must exist if a ‘holistic’ explanation is to be offered. But we
shall not find ourselves pursuing this hypothesis to the point where the whole
has absorbed the parts; it is simply ex hypothesi that there did not exist a
‘Britannic’ state or empire, or consequently a ‘Britannic’ history, in which
the Three Kingdoms and their several histories were absorbed and swallowed
up. We need not go so far as to say that there never has existed such an entity,
and that consequently the search for a ‘British history’ is a search in vain.
There is a British history in so far as its several components have converged in
a shared political culture, and in so far as the attempt to make them do so has
a continuous history. In that ‘matter of Britain’ which is the problem of the
War or Wars of the Three Kingdoms, we appear to be faced with an
opposition of extremes which are not absolutes. At one – let us call it
Russellian – extreme, the central locus or focus is simply the place where
the accidents go to happen, where the decisions of gubernaculum (the ‘high
politics’) are made, wrongly made or not made at all. At the other – let us call
it Morrillian – the central place has a structure and a history of its own, and
may in some measure have reshaped the Three Kingdoms by drawing them
to itself. There is clearly plenty of room – the more so as we are dealing with a
breakdown of government, both central and local – for both readings to be
right and to exist together; we do not even have to synthesize them.
I am moving towards the re-opening of the first of the two questions
I proposed earlier, by setting up the implication that in a history of the
Three Kingdoms each kingdom has its own history, no matter how much it
converges, or interacts by refusing to converge and instead colliding, with
the histories of others; particular histories do not cease to exist when it is
seen that they cannot be written in isolation. Before I turn to the particular
case of the English, however, I ought to emphasize that one did not have to
be a kingdom in order to have a history, and that we must avoid falling into
some Central European error of distinguishing between peoples that have
histories and peoples that have none; though it seems not unreasonable to
add that for an entity to have a place in political history, it needs a political
structure of some kind with which to receive and respond to the actions of
others. There is the case of Wales, which was never a kingdom and was no
longer a principality or a collection of marcher lordships but had been
shired and incorporated within the kingdom of England, while retaining a
cultural and social distinctiveness with a capacity for response;13 there is
13
Thomas, 1988, suggests that Wales divided in the Civil War along lines not unlike those dividing
England.
even the case of Cornwall, for a long time no more than an English county
but possessing a certain cultural personality of its own.
There would not have been an English civil war – I show my hand by
saying this – if the King had not found an army willing to fight for him,
and it is my understanding that initially he found it at Shrewsbury rather
than at Nottingham, and that it consisted in significant measure of men
from Wales and the Welsh Marches. At a somewhat later date there were
the Cornish regiments, who for a while fought with a determination that
suggests they may have had something on their minds. This is a war in
which it is possible to know something about the common soldier’s point
of view, and one could wish to know more about what these Welsh and
Cornish regiments thought they were doing and who they thought they
were.14 I am not over-impressed by the tendency of historians of the left to
ascribe a merely ‘traditional’ consciousness – whatever that is – to the
royalist rank and file, as opposed to the enhanced religious and political
awareness of godly Londoners and East Anglians; any more than I am
overwhelmed by the perfectly true contention that most soldiers in most
wars are too much preoccupied by thoughts of pay, food, loot, sanitation
and survival to have much time for significant discourse. The remarkable
thing about this among the early modern wars is that some of the soldiers
did develop their own political awareness, and one would like to know
more about how far it went and what forms it took.
If the King had found no Englishmen willing to fight for him in 1642,
the pig in the middle would never have fought a civil war; but he did, and
we are no longer pursuing the suggestion – fruitful though it was – that
England was a collocation of county communities, who acted out of their
own local considerations and not as members of an English realm at all.15
The reason it cannot be pressed further is that the county communities did
not wish to fight one another, still less to fight within themselves, but
nevertheless did because they found they had to; from which one may
conclude that the English realm possessed such unity that even in its
breakdown it could oblige its subjects to engage in the public quarrel
against their wills and against their strenuous opposition, and that this
was not a relapse into some Hobbesian anarchy – though often it looked
very like that – but a public quarrel or civil war. The bitter unwillingness of
the English to fight one another – which of course increased the bitterness
with which they did so – is used, as we all know, to demonstrate that it was
14
Stoyle, 1994, 1996, 1998, has written interestingly on the Cornish experience.
15
For the rise and perhaps the fall of this interpretation, see Morrill, 1993, chs. 8–11.
a civil war they found themselves engaged in. It is not exactly news, after all,
that the war in England was a conflict between people who had thought
themselves, and to that extent had been, in a condition of profound
consensus. Harrington and Clarendon both premised this in the seven-
teenth century, and David Hume thought so in the eighteenth. Harrington
and Hume both went in search of profound changes, occurring in the
historical world, which had converted consensus into conflict. At present
we do not want to follow that line of enquiry – it may be revealing to ask
why not – but we do not have to follow it in order to perceive that the
English war was fought between people who supposed themselves to
belong to the same political culture, and that this may be the definition
of what a civil war is. To say this may be to turn Russell’s interpretation on
its head, and at the same time to endorse Harrington’s dictum that the
dissolution of the government caused the war, not the war the dissolution
of the government.16
That famous dictum, however, can always be turned around once more:
Russell’s British war causes the dissolution of the English as well as the
British government, Harrington’s dissolution of the government causes the
English Civil War. I am revealing my answer to both the questions I posed.
There was a War of the Three Kingdoms but it was several wars going on
together. There was an English Civil War, but where Harrington and
nearly all his successors thought its origins lay deep in English history,
Russell invites us to consider it a product of the War of the Three
Kingdoms; that is to say, of a rebellion in Scotland followed by a rebellion
in Ireland, with which Charles I’s headship of a multiple monarchy was so
far unable to cope that it broke down as a government of each of the Three
Kingdoms, so that war followed both among the three of them and within
each of them severally.
Russell further invites us to suppose that there was nothing going on in
English history which necessitated this process, so that it should not be
considered as an English-generated civil war, but as something else. Be it so;
but I have two further questions. Does it follow that there was nothing going
on in Scottish or in Irish history either, so that the origins of the conflict
must be located in the history of another entity, which might be called
‘Britain’, ‘the British monarchies’, ‘the Three Kingdoms’, or whatever? I
have already considered this possibility, and I am fairly certain that Russell
is not proposing it; in which case it must follow, I think, that under any one
16
[Pocock, 1999e, studies ‘dissolution’ as a governing notion in Thomas May’s underrated history of
the Civil War.]
of these names we are looking at a field of action in which at least three
histories – there may have been more – impinged upon one another, and
the task in which Stuart government failed was that of managing their
interactions. The Three Kingdoms acted in one another’s history, we begin
to say; from which it follows that each had a history which others could act
in, but which could also react against those interventions.
I am beginning to ask – this is still an extension of the first of my two
questions – how the word ‘history’ is being used in the discourse before us;
and one implication my question rather disturbingly bears is that history
may still be, among other things, the memory of the state. A body politic
conducting its own affairs will have institutions, discourse and memory; it
may discover for itself, or leave for historians to discover, complex pro-
cesses defined by its structure and modifying it. This is what we mean by
speaking of ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ or ‘Irish’ history – terminology which is
certainly contingent and contestable; but if we abandon this way of putting
it altogether, we will end by abandoning the concept of Three Kingdoms in
its turn, and the problem is that these entities, and their capacity to act and
suffer, may have existed as verità effettuali in early modern history, and may
refuse to disappear when we try to exorcize them. There may therefore have
been an English history, a Scottish history, an Irish history, at other levels a
Welsh or a Cornish, an Argyll or an Ulster history, a history of England
divided into cities, counties and regions, in all of which the War of the
Three Kingdoms happened and became different wars, or from which it
arose as well as arising from the interactions between them; it depends on
where people have history and what sorts of history they have. My second
question bears on the problem of how many of these verità effettuali we are
compelled to discover.
I have been insisting that the English experience in the Wars of the Three
Kingdoms was an experience of civil war. I do so from the standpoint of a
historian of discourse, who studies what people said was happening around
them and how they tried to affect what was happening by what they said.
The English of the period we are debating possessed an enormously
articulate print culture, in which an enormously complex discussion
occurred; and what this tells us is indeed that they did not wish to fight
one another – they insisted with one voice that the war in which they were
engaged was ‘unnatural’ – and that it was a new idea to them, though one
which they were compelled to explore, that there might be deep-seated
fissures and processes within their culture which had got them where they
were. We might say, as they might, that these issues had not obliged them
to fight each other, but once they were so obliged they had to give them
their attention; the great debate over political and religious issues had not
caused the dissolution of government or the war, but once dissolution and
war had happened the great debate had to occur, because the war could not
be comprehended or resolved without it. We may say that the crisis was
not resolved in 1660 because the issues had been resolved, but because 1660
was an imperfect resolution the debate had to continue; and what I am
seeking to say is that these are the characteristics of an intensely integrated
and articulate society, in which violence when it occurred did not mean the
disappearance of these characteristics, but would be conducted between
people who had a great deal, including a capacity for complex discussion,
in common. This is the profile of conflict within consensus, which is to say
of civil war.
I propose therefore that the impact on England of the War of the Three
Kingdoms was such as to produce the English Civil War, which was as it
was because England was the culture it was. By the civil war I mean that the
English found themselves fighting each other over the nature of the English
polity. Their disagreements about its nature may have been the effect rather
than the cause of their civil war; I suspect that this is the case; but this may
be a problem of chicken and egg. The breakdown in their government may
have been thrust upon them by actions originating among Scots and Irish;
but once they realized that this was so, they went out and eliminated these
interferences at source by such actions as Drogheda and Dunbar; some pig,
we might say with Winston Churchill, and some middle. War within
England could not be other than civil war, because of the intensity of
English ecclesiastical and governmental integration; and the difficult ques-
tion which I shall now raise is that of whether civil war, in this sense, can be
said to have occurred in the other kingdoms of the Atlantic archipelago,
and if not, what other kinds of war can be said to have been going on within
the concept of the War of the Three Kingdoms.
The Scots, it appears to me, did not fight each other very much, and if
this is correct the concept of a Scottish civil war is out of place. The most
obvious exception, perhaps, is Montrose’s war of 1644–6, in which
Montrose could contend that he and Argyll were fighting out a conflict
over the meaning of a Covenant both had subscribed to, and were therefore
engaged in a civil war within the Scottish polity. But in so far as his
following consisted not of dissident Covenanters but of men of the house
of Gordon, these were fighting out the politics (partly religious) of the
north-east Highlands, while the men of clan Donald – some of whom came
from Antrim – were fighting out those of an archipelagic marchland
extending from Argyll to Antrim, on the maritime borders of two of the
Three Kingdoms.17 Did Montrose perhaps not succeed in converting his
war of the frontiers into the civil war within the Scottish polity he desired to
make it? There were armed clashes between Engagers and non-Engagers at
the time of the Second English Civil War; but were they enough to
constitute a Scottish Civil War?
The crucial war in which that polity was engaged was not a war with
itself, but an attempt to maintain the British character of the War of the
Three Kingdoms by containing the English Civil War within it and
ensuring that the latter could have only a British solution. In this the
Scots failed; the English, engrossed in their civil war, regarded the Scottish
intervention as essentially an interference, and ended by conquering
Scotland itself, less to annex it than to eliminate it as an actor in events.
But what character shall we assign to the Scottish war in England? It was
only at moments in 1648 a civil war among Scotsmen, and in so far as the
English made it marginal to a civil war among Englishmen they repudiated
the thesis that it was a civil war among inhabitants of any single polity. It
was a war among (not between) the kingdoms composing a multiple
monarchy, and to find an appropriate label we should turn, I suggest, to
the ancient Roman distinction between bellum civile and bellum sociale;
I retain the Latin because the English term ‘social war’ suggests a war
between members of the same social system, which is not the relevant issue.
A bellum civile was a war between cives, citizens of the same polity; a bellum
sociale was a war between socii, polities associated in a system comprising a
multiplicity of states. The great bellum sociale of antiquity turned on the
eligibility of Italian socii to be treated as cives Romani; it has a formal
similarity with the Scottish endeavour to establish by military means that
English and Scots should be members of a uniform ecclesiastical polity.
Something converse yet similar may be said of the next great war between
polities subject to a British monarchy, the War of the American
Revolution; the concept of a bellum sociale appears to have its uses to
historians of multiple monarchies and confederations. At the risk of inad-
vertently hoisting a Confederate flag, I will say that a War between the
States is not the same thing as a Civil War, and that a war may be fought to
determine what kind of war it is. Are we trying to reverse a military decision
which subjected the War of the Three Kingdoms to the English Civil War?
There remains the third kingdom of Ireland, of which I know least and
am therefore at greatest risk of speaking imperceptively. There is a
17
[I did not consider here the possibility – for which I am indebted to Jane Ohlmeyer – that
Montrose’s Irish contingent were pursuing objectives of the Confederation of Kilkenny.]
suggestive essay by Hiram Morgan,18 in which he challenges what he calls a
‘colonialist’ model of Irish history. In this model Ireland is treated as extra-
European, as an alien and what would be called (as Ireland was called) a
barbarous culture, on which history is inflicted by way of conquest and
colonization and which does not share a history with its invaders.
Repudiation of this model can, of course, take place in situations till
recently more unqualifiedly termed colonial: Amerindians, Africans and
Polynesians are learning to mobilize a history of their own, out of which
they acted and reacted before and after colonization took place. But the
argument in the case of Ireland goes further: non-Roman Ireland became
Christian just as soon as did the ex-Roman provinces which were its
neighbours, and can be said to have shared their Christian or European
history – though there is the recent work by Robert Bartlett,19 in which
‘Europe’ is shown as an explosion of Latin and Frankish aggression against
Christians in the archipelagic west, Muslims in the Mediterranean south,
Slavs and pagans in the continental east. Is the model I have begun to
elaborate to be applied to the third of the Three Kingdoms?
Readers will have observed that my taxonomy of wars so far has made no
use of the conceptual category of ‘wars of religion’, so energetically devel-
oped by John Morrill.20 This is not because I reject or even modify it; on
the contrary, I take it as self-evident that all of the wars with which we have
to do were wars of religion, and that these continued in the archipelago
after the year 1648, when they are conventionally held to have ended in
the Franco-Netherlandish-German region. I tend therefore to suspect that
the archipelagic Wars of Religion differed somewhat in character from the
continental. I adopt, however, a perspective on all such wars extremely
common among participants and observers in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries – though adopting it does hold out the temptation to
exaggerate the secularity of their thought. According to such commenta-
tors, the predominant character of a war of religion was its appalling
capacity to disrupt government and civil order, so that humans found
themselves fighting for religious reasons within a structure of government
it was their first desire to maintain. We are in the world depicted in the
frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan – though as that work remains Anglican
to the extent that it is directed against Catholicism and Calvinism with
equal vigour, it reinforces the belief that it was the ‘dissolution of govern-
ment’, the disruption of the Tudor unity of church and kingdom, which
was at the centre of the stories we are re-telling. ‘War of religion’, in short,
18 19 20
Morgan, 1991, pp. 50–5. Bartlett, 1993. Most recently in Morrill, 1993, Part One.
is a category which interacts with others that have been used in attempting
to establish a taxonomy of those wars which together made up the War of
the Three Kingdoms. The English Civil War was fought within the
Church of England, within the unitary monarchy or ‘empire’ in church
and state established by the Tudors. The Scottish bellum sociale was fought
within the multiple monarchy over several churches and kingdoms estab-
lished since 1603, which the Scots were trying to bring to greater homo-
geneity if not unity. How may this complex taxonomy best be applied in
the history of Ireland, or of three kingdoms of which Ireland was one?
That there was an Irish bellum sociale seems established beyond much
doubt. The Old English and Old Irish aristocrats involved in the rebellion of
1641, the leaders of the Confederation which some of them became, pos-
sessed a clear image of their role in the structure of a multiple monarchy, and
of Ireland as one of the kingdoms constituting that monarchy; and they
resorted to the sword as a means of re-asserting and re-defining that role.
Even if there were those who reached the point of demanding an independent
Catholic monarchy in Ireland – and this one understands to be doubtful –
they would not compel us to abandon the notions of multiple monarchy
and bellum sociale, since it would be from that system that they desired to
secede; and there appears no anticipation of the startling success enjoyed by
the American rebels of 1776 in transforming a bellum sociale into a war
between unconnected states. The programme of placing the Irish kingdom
under Spanish or French protection aimed no higher than involving
foreign kingdoms in the affairs of the Stuart monarchy, and I am not
quite able to accept Jane Ohlmeyer’s contention that French and Spanish
subventions, aimed largely at the recruitment of Gaelic mercenaries, trans-
formed a War of Three Kingdoms into a War of Five.21 Ormonde and his
Old and New English following, Inchiquin (that Protestant Gael) and his
New English, were engaged in the Irish bellum sociale as champions of the
authority of the English king and parliament respectively, over what was to
remain a subject kingdom; though one might at the same time regard both,
and Monro’s Scottish army as well, as establishing an Irish theatre for the
English Civil War and the Scots attempt to Britannicize it, at which point
the concept of a War of the Three Kingdoms approaches completeness of
meaning. Montrose’s campaign now begins to appear a re-exportation of
the War of the Three Kingdoms to Scotland, but not to England.
We are not yet forced out of the paradigm of bellum sociale in accounting
for the wars in Ireland, but phenomena may be found which will produce
21
Ohlmeyer, 1993, ch. 7.
that effect. The paradigm in question depends upon that of multiple
monarchy, and to a large degree on the concept of Ireland as a kingdom
subject to that of England. If there were Irish who resorted to war to make
Ireland a sovereign kingdom under the Stuart or any other crown, and Irish
or English or Scots who fought to keep it subject, still that would be bellum
sociale as the term is being used here. Bellum civile – an Irish civil war
categorically identified with the civil war going on among the English –
could exist only if there were Irish who agreed that Ireland was or should be
a sovereign civil polity, but fought each other to determine what kind of
laws and polity there should be. The present writer confines himself to
asking whether such a war among Irishmen can be found.
An alternative model – which need not exclude the foregoing but might
exist side by side with it – would be stated by supposing Ireland at this
period to have been not only a kingdom subjected by conquest, but a zone
of settlement and resistance in which wars of conquest were still going on;
and a war of conquest is generically distinct from a bellum either sociale or
civile. This is to re-institute the ‘colonial model’ to which Hiram Morgan
takes exception; but it may be one thing to deny that Irish history as a
whole should be subjected to this model, another to deny that the model
has some place in the interpretation of Irish history. If we think of
Ormonde as a royalist leader of (mainly) the Old English, Inchiquin or
Jones or in the end Cromwell as parliamentary leaders of the New, we can
go on to credit the latter with an agenda of conquest and settlement of
which Cromwell made use in pursuing the English objective of eliminating
Ireland, along with the rest of Britain, as an actor in the English Civil Wars;
while the English and Scottish adventurers in Ireland retained their agenda
of conquest.
There remains, not unrelated to this question but at a distance from its
main theatre, the war carried on by Clan Donald in Ulster, the islands and
Kintyre, of which Montrose’s war was in some ways an extension; and there
remain the recent studies of the Marquis of Antrim by Jane Ohlmeyer and
of Alasdair MacColla, the most famous of his captains, by David
Stevenson.22 The latter’s Alasdair is exactly what the writers of empire
meant by a barbarian; he appears out of the world of another culture and
momentarily imposes its military superiority. The ‘Highland charge’
intrudes the antique tactics of sword and buckler on those of pike and
musket, with startling if occasional success until both are superseded by
those of the ring bayonet. I have observed Ohlmeyer’s assertion that many
22
Stevenson, 1980.
of Antrim’s men were veterans of pike and musket, schooled by mercenary
service in the armies of Spain; and I do not know if the Highland charge
figured in the battles in Leinster and Cork, where MacColla and most of
his men ultimately perished. Yet I am not ready to give up the image of
them as actors in a war along the borders of empire, which was among
other things a clash between cultures alien to one another. This image,
though it may smack of colonialism, is reinforced rather than weakened by
Jane Ohlmeyer’s portrait of Antrim as a genuinely hybrid figure, who had
real reason for uncertainty whether he was a lord of the isles or a great
Caroline courtier, and was consequently none too successful in either role.
There were others like him in Anglian-Gaelic history; and if I am focussing
my attention on Clan Donald, where I could and perhaps should be
focussing it on the Catholic Confederation which Antrim briefly led, it is
because I want to keep open, alongside the image of multiple monarchy
and war among three kingdoms, that of empire and march in the Atlantic
archipelago.
At the centre of my argument there remains the War of the Three
Kingdoms as a great bellum sociale; but at one wing stands the English
Civil War, so engrossing and agonizing an experience that it was all that the
English knew was going on, and at the other those aspects of war in Ireland –
though not at this time in the Scottish Highlands – which were wars of
empire and its frontiers, of conquest and colonization, not without the
accompanying phenomena of ethnic war and ethnic cleansing; though it is
to be remembered that ethnic groups and their wars are not the simple
product of cultural diversity, but arise out of the pressures of conquest on
populations which find themselves on its frontiers.23 In the year of Bosnia,
it is important to get this right. The war by which Cromwell terminated the
First War of the Three Kingdoms (1637–51) was, in Ireland, as it was not in
Scotland, a war of conquest and colonization; and there was to be one more
such conquest as part of the Second War of the Three Kingdoms (1688–91),
which was both the opening of a major war within the European states-
system24 and, in a strange invisible way, the last of the English Civil Wars
brought about by disjunction within the headship of the Tudor Church
and state.25 There is no circumscribing these wars within a single dominant
paradigm.
23
[Here attention might be directed to the reading of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s as including
wars between Maori iwi and religious movements differing as to ways of accommodating themselves
to pakeha pressure. See Head, 2001, and Pocock, 1997e.]
24
Israel, 1991. 25 Pocock, 1988b, 1991a, 1996a.
CHAPTER 6
The Third Kingdom in its history
The essays in this volume1 were delivered to a seminar sponsored by the

Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, and
to that extent belong in the context currently termed ‘the new British
history’. This is a problematic term, since it denotes a problematic history,
and among its problems is the question whether it does so misleadingly.
On the one hand, Scottish and Irish historians rightly query whether the
term subjects their national histories to a paradigmatic structure still
centred upon England;2 though it is still unclear whether they look to
the autonomy of those histories or their partial submergence in a region-
alist Europe, which will either generate a history of its own or insist on the
irrelevance of history to its enterprise. Their mistrust of ‘British history’ is
partly based on a mistrust of the geopolitical term ‘British Isles’, which has
been shared by those responsible for mounting the former programme
to the point where they have proposed replacing the latter term by ‘the
Atlantic archipelago’.3 From another wing of this debate, however, has come
a sternly English denunciation of this term of art, as entailing a defeatist
willingness to abandon the familiar ‘British Isles’;4 a reaction on the whole to
be welcomed, as a reminder that ‘British history’ cannot be merely a history
of those not English, and that a ‘British history’ of England and the English
must recognize both their recurrently dominant role and the fact that this
role is not the whole of their history.
‘British history’ is multinational: a history of nations forming and
deforming one another and themselves. It implies the proposition that no
1
Ohlmeyer, 2000. This essay appeared as an Afterword, pp. 271–80 (Pocock, 2000a).
2
See Brown, 1993; Asch, 1993.
3
I may have been the first to propose this term in my article of 1974–5. See also Tompson, 1986,
p. 1, n. 1.
4
Nicholls, 1999, p. 321. Dr Nicholls appears to write on the Eltonian premise that the history of the
state is what matters and explains itself; Ireland is therefore a ‘shadow kingdom’, and its history
marginal to that of Scotland and England.
94
The Third Kingdom in its history 95
nation’s history can be understood without that of its interaction with other
histories; that national histories have been shaped in the process of shaping
other histories and in interaction with the self-shaping of others; and that the
identities thus shaped have been so far interactive that there is a high degree
of indeterminacy about them and their shaping in a process which never
attains finality. We are all left wondering about the identities – in this case
national – that have been shaped for us; and this is as it should be. But
‘British history’ does not lead to the fashionable if under-examined proposi-
tion that national history has no meaning and is now to be written out of
existence, replaced by a history that recognizes only transgressive experiences
annihilating the frontiers between identities which they cross. The very
concept of transgression implies that there are frontiers to be crossed, and
that crossing them both affirms, and subjects to scrutiny, the identities they
demarcate. That every identity is contestable, interactive and negotiable
means neither that it does not exist nor that it has not a history. If it is not
the whole of the story, it has been part of the shaping of the story.
It follows that any political, national or other community which has
generated an image of its own identity as existing over time requires two
kinds of history: the one autocentric, a record of how its inhabitants have
dealt with one another over time, and the experiences they have undergone
in establishing the bases of their existing community; the other hetero-
centric, a record of how encounters with others, some of whom they have
ruled or been ruled by, have contributed to the shaping and present
character of both the ‘self ’ community and the ‘others’, autonomous or
not, now contiguous with it. These two histories can never be separated,
but can never be identical; their dramatis personae and their plots must
overlap, but are organized into distinct narratives. As historians we need the
double tongue able to tell both concurrently, but we cannot afford to
believe that either annuls the other. In the present case, it is evident that
Irish history is not part of British history, because Irish people read it, quite
correctly, as resisting inclusion in a British community and ending in
independence of it; but that it is part of British history for essentially the
same reason, namely that neither Irish nor British history – and the same
may be said of English and Scottish – is intelligible without the constant
presence of all these peoples to one another.5 In the same way, though
within a different pattern of pressures, the history of England – that is, of
5
This is the point at which one is regularly instructed – often in peremptory tones – that English
history is to be studied in its ‘European’ context; that is, in the setting of its relations with its
peninsular rather than its insular neighbours. There seems little point in bowing down to this idol.
how ‘England’ came to be and continued being – is formed both by the
dealings those now accounted English have had with one another, and by
the dealings they have had with other peoples, some of them included
within the narratives constituting ‘British history’. This last can be con-
sidered, first the history of a series of encounters between Janus-headed
beings, each regardant of both self and other; secondly, the history of a
problematic, that of whether the encounter between these beings shall
assume or retain the form of a lasting association. By calling this a problem-
atic, we provide that any answer to the question may be kept in view, since
the end is not yet. ‘British history’ is neither a concealed imperial enter-
prise, nor the blueprint of a new confederation, nor the prelude to a
‘breakup’ or ‘unravelling’ of Britain;6 it is the history of how all these
possibilities have from time to time come to exist.
In the present volume, the image of an Ireland altogether outside the
structures of authority existing in the larger archipelago is present but
evanescent, existing in the writings of Conor O’Mahony in Portugal or
the visions of the ‘Gaelic Maccabees’ in the Spanish service.7 The dominant
theme is the obstinate loyalism of the Catholic ‘Old English’ towards the
Stuart but not the Tudor occupants of the English throne, and it is here
that we are entitled to make, and at the same time to question, the claim
that in this part of the story ‘Irish history’ was part of ‘British history’8 – the
term ‘British’ being at all points contestable and self-contestatory. The
central assertion of the Old English was that Ireland was organically
connected with the English crown but that the management of this
connection lay with Irish counsellors and councils of that crown. The
English crown could be thought of as ‘British’ from the moment of its
dynastic but not juridical union with the crown of Scotland, and James VI’s
Scottishness seems to have made it easier for his Irish subjects to accept
him. Nevertheless, the crown of Scone played no part in the Irish rhetoric
reported here, and what they accepted was the crown of England, remain-
ing so even after it had become the crown of ‘Great Britain’ – an early case
of that practice of saying ‘Britain’ and meaning ‘England’ with which we
are so persistently concerned. Scots settled in Ireland and behaved as Scots
after doing so, but brought no flowers of the Scottish crown with them.
The ‘British problem’ was archipelagic in character; Spanish, French and Dutch actors intervened in
it for good reasons, but it was not produced by their reason of state. The archipelago is neither more
nor less ‘European’ than the sub-continent known by that name.
6
Nairn, 1977; Samuel, 1998. These two publicists were not pursuing the same objectives.
7
Ohlmeyer, 2000, chs. 7 and 8. 8 [See now Canny, 2001.]
How far the older English populations of Ireland referred to themselves
as ‘British’ or ‘Britons’ is not very clear. This is not surprising, given the
rapid changes which ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ were undergoing; from being
words used by Welsh authors to assert their autochthony within the
English kingdom in which they had been incorporated in 1536, these
terms were being switched towards denoting the new and limited unity
between England and Scotland, forming that Magna Britannia to which
John Major had punningly alluded in his Historia Majoris Britanniae two
generations before.9 The Irish claim was that their polity constituted a
third kingdom, autonomous though subject to the crown of England now
linked with that of Scotland to form the metaphorical rather than juristic
entity known by the name of ‘Great Britain’. Rather than allow the
contestable validity of the term ‘British history’ to dominate our thinking,
it may be better to concede that the Irish claim and the manner of English
response to it situate Irish history in the period we have come to term that
of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ – a term as applicable and contestable when
applied to Hiram Morgan’s volume as to Jane Ohlmeyer’s.
The term is contestable, as we learn from the sub-titles of the first two
volumes of a new History of the Modern British Isles, respectively ‘The Two
Kingdoms’, ending in 1603, and ‘The Double Crown’, ending in 1707.10
The language is correct; this was what existed in law, since there was no
crown of Ireland. Yet on the presumption that ‘British history’ is a history
of contestation rather than decision, the contention that Ireland was a
kingdom was often enough made, recognized and resisted, to give heuristic
value to the concept of an ‘Age of the Three Kingdoms’, beginning either
in 1534, when the Lordship of Ireland was erected into a kingdom, or in
1603, when the dynastic union faced a single monarch with the problems of
exercising kingship in both major islands of the archipelago. This ‘Age’,
including the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ from 1637 to 1652 and from
1688 to 1691, may be held to last until 1707, when a ‘First Age of Union’
begins, followed by a ‘Second’ lasting from 1800 to 1921. What name to give
the succeeding age it would be premature to determine, since once again
the end is not yet; but a working periodization of ‘British history’ is
emerging. To accept ‘Three Kingdoms’ rather than ‘Double Crown’ has
the advantage of conceding that there is an Irish history made in part by
Irish actors; but it enters on the question, energetically contested among
Irish historians, whether Stuart Ireland is to be thought of as a distinct
kingdom or an English colony. The answer may be that both readings had
9 10
Constable, 1892. Nicholls, 1999; Smith, 1998.
validity in the seventeenth century, and therefore for us today; and that
there was a complex interplay between them, so that neither excludes
the other.
The persistent loyalism of the Old English appears to have two faces and
is not merely quixotic (indeed, its windmills were often real giants whose
fierceness could not be denied). On its religious face, Irish loyalism was
Catholic and made the king an offer he must find it necessary to resist. It
invited him to act as the protector of the Catholic majority in his third
kingdom, but did so in the knowledge that as king of England he was
supreme head and governor of the church in that kingdom, and was
committed to the support of a Protestant and episcopal Church of
Ireland of which he was head in the same way. There could be no question,
therefore, that James or Charles might become a monster of ecclesiastical
triplicity: an Anglican head of state and church in England, a Presbyterian
head of state if not church in Scotland (where he was the only king of a
Calvinist kingdom in Europe) and a Catholic head in Ireland. Not even
Leviathan might be equal to this triplicity, and the giant of English political
philosophy was English enough to pay little attention to the nature of
multiple monarchy. Irish loyalism offered allegiance in return for protec-
tion; but could the kingdom so defined be more than a protectorate?
Leviathan was a figure born of civil war. Four decades previously,
James VI and I might have found his third and Catholic kingdom easier to
rule had his ecumenical ambitions for a reconciliation of Christendom
borne any fruit at all; we have recently been reminded of what these were
and on what presuppositions they must rest.11 They entailed the vision that
every Catholic kingdom might approximate the Gallican position in
which the pope received spiritual obedience but exercised no civil
authority, and the authority of a general council outweighed his. There is
a counter-Tridentine vision of the early seventeenth century, helping
account for the reception accorded in England to Paolo Sarpi; and to
understand James’s overtures we have to think ourselves back into a
world in which lay Catholics and regally minded clergy might be prepared
to downplay the papal power in every way possible. Not only, however, was
there the claim to a deposing power; there was the resilient ultramontanism
whose triumph at Trent Sarpi had recounted; and it is easy for the British
historian to tell the story in terms of two immovable objects – papal
supremacy and English royal supremacy – brought, however unwillingly,
into collision, in such a way that any offer to mitigate the latter produced
11
Patterson, 1997.
the paradox of rebellion against it by those so bent on maintaining it that
they saw mitigation as a surrender to the former. On their side of the
looking-glass world of British politics, the Irish Confederates went into
rebellion against the crown because they feared it was about to lose
authority, and found their chief enemies to be those determined to restore
the crown’s authority by parliamentary action independent of it. The logic
of rebellion was always more complicated than even Hobbes understood.
Once we introduce the Supremacy, however, the story becomes ines-
capably English-dominated. The War of the Three Kingdoms was long
known as ‘the English Civil War’ for the reason that there was an English
civil war, which the English were resolved to settle among themselves,
admitting no interference from the associated kingdoms; a war over the
location and definition of sovereignty in church and state. They were less
determined to maintain English sovereignty over Scotland or even Ireland
than to deny Scots and Irish any role in determining the future of the
English kingdom. Allan MacInnes12 traces the history of the Scottish
Covenanting attempt to impose a settlement ‘British’ in the sense of a
Presbyterianism of both church-states in the larger island. Though it failed,
it was not unthinkable, since the Church of England could be thought of in
Protestant Calvinist terms; and its intellectual symbol was James Ussher,
Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh.13 The Irish Confederacy, being
Catholic, had no ‘British’ or ‘Three Kingdoms’ solution open to it. Short
of an ecclesia hibernica Catholic without being papal, it must be either an
independent kingdom guaranteed by a foreign prince – it is here that
Conor O’Mahony appears the realist who demands the impossible – or a
protectorate and subordinate kingdom in which Catholics enjoyed the
protection of an Anglican sovereign.
To pursue a re-defined subordination by the means of armed rebellion
appears in hindsight obviously foredoomed, the measure of a colonial
status in which even the Catholic Old English found themselves. The
formula helps us, however, to pursue the complexities and even confusions
of the Confederacy’s war as one of the Wars – the plural re-asserts itself – of
the Three Kingdoms: a war both social, in the sense of one fought among a
group of kingdoms in disagreement over the terms of their association, and
perhaps civil, in the sense of one fought within the Irish kingdom to
determine the relations among its inhabitants. The Irish war, furthermore,
became entangled in both the English and the Scottish wars it had helped
precipitate. Alasdair MacColla’s campaigns in Argyll and east of the North
12 13
MacInnes, 2000. Ford, 1998, 1999.
Channel can be seen in three ways: as part of Montrose’s Anglo-Scottish
strategy of creating civil war in Scotland, as pursuing in that kingdom the
strategic aims (whatever they were) of the Confederacy, and as conducting
a strictly ethnic war of Clan Donald against Clan Campbell. MacColla
cannot be relegated to a clan world exterior to the state, but there was a clan
dimension to what he did.
Within the multiple perspectives of British history, there is an Irish
history in which the Confederacy is, or is not, a blind alley, part of the
larger failure of the Old English to secure a status for a Catholic Ireland
within the multiple monarchy of an otherwise Protestant Stuart dynasty:
an enterprise repeatedly wrecked by the English, not only necessitated
to maintain control over Ireland but bound to fear any multi-state or
multi-church solution as threatening the unity in sovereignty of king and
parliament which they had fought civil wars among themselves to main-
tain. Given Ireland, and given the union of the crowns, the empire of the
English over themselves was inseparable from their empire in the archipel-
ago and beyond it in the Atlantic and the American seaboard. The Second
War of the Three Kingdoms – which Dr Ohlmeyer prefers to call the War
of the Three Kings – was not a Fall of the British Monarchies, a dissolution
of government, or a general collapse into wars of religion, but the archi-
pelagic face of a European conflict, in which England, Scotland and Ireland
became involved in William III’s struggle against Louis XIV for supremacy
in the Low Countries and lower Germany. At the same time, however, it
transformed that conflict, by bringing about the construction of the British
fiscal, military and parliamentary state capable of acting as a power in
Europe and at the same time exercising empire in Britain, the archipelago
and beyond Europe in America, India and the global oceans.14 The
problems of empire in the Tudor sense persisted, but their context was
enlarged. We enter the First Age of Union, with its climaxes and crises in
1776, 1798 and 1801.
In the cycle of wars from 1688 to 1691 – bloodless in England, civil rather
than ethnic in Scotland, wars of renewed conquest in Ireland – the
distinctively Catholic enterprise of the Old English is held to have ended
at Limerick and in its aftermath. It might seem, then, that the history of
Catholic loyalism to a Protestant dynasty had met the giant behind the
windmill; but Irish history is more complex even than that. In the history
of word and discourse, to which volumes originating with a Center for the
History of Political Thought are necessarily committed, the Old English
14
Pocock, 1991a, 1996a.
and the Confederates are seen as leaving something behind them, to be
used by others than themselves in history, Irish, British and American: the
claim, originating in the circumstances of the Kingdom of Ireland set up in
1534, that this kingdom and its parliament were subject to the crown but
not the parliament of England, so that the crown’s authority in Ireland was
to be exercised with Irish consent in an Irish parliament. One head and
many bodies, or as many heads as there were bodies? Could Leviathan be a
hydra, or was this a Pufendorfian monstrum informe, ingens, horrendum?15
King James had not needed a Hobbes to give him his answer; but the claim
was to be pressed again, even while the increasing incorporation of English
crown in English parliament – as much a remedy as a cause of civil war –
made it seem increasingly monstrous to English understandings. The
practical impact of William Molyneux may well have been small, but in
retrospect his symbolic importance must appear great; in 1698, a year when
Andrew Fletcher was active in Scotland and the English parliament was
reacting against the demands of the state being created by King William’s
wars, he shows us a claim originally Old English passing into the hands and
pens of Protestant settlers discontented with the status of a kingdom now
their own. In 1707 the Scots were to surrender the opportunity to make
such a claim, failing to insist that their union with England should be
‘federative’ rather than ‘incorporating’; and when the claim resurfaced in
Ireland about 1780, it was to be in a context where American colonial
assemblies had claimed that they too were connected with the crown but
not the parliament of England, throwing off the crown only when it would
not separate itself from that parliament16 and inaugurating a third cycle of
wars, and this time secessions, within the empire – an empire, be it noted,
far more than colonial.
The Irish and American crises are not to be separated in the ‘British
history’ of the late eighteenth century; but that era brings to an end the
‘First Age of Union’, and it has not been the business of Ohlmeyer’s
volume to travel beyond 1707 and the beginnings of that age, which in
Irish history is also the Age of the Ascendancy. A further volume17 is to
carry us through that age, towards the maelstrom of 1776–1801; but the
purpose of this one has been to effect a transition from the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms to the War of the Three Kings and the brink of the age
succeeding it. To make it a fully ‘British’ history, there might perhaps have
been a sequel to Allan MacInnes’s chapter, exploring in depth the politics
of post-Covenanting Scotland from the Cromwellian occupation to the
15 16 17
[See now Armitage, 2000.] The thesis of ch. 9, below. Connolly, 2000.
Williamite Revolution and the Union which followed; and this might
have been in part an Irish history, if the Scots in Ulster were shown
responding to what they saw happening in their kingdom of origin. In
the next age, again, there can be seen a Dublin Enlightenment visibly
English and Whig, an Ulster Enlightenment visibly Scottish but not
Moderate, both with their affiliations in America.18 The focus of this
volume, however, has been on Irish history in so far as it was in British
history; that is to say, on the history of the Third Kingdom.
Each of the peoples, or nations, of whom ‘British history’ is made up
exists, it is here argued, in two overlapping but distinguishable histories. One
is the history of its ‘self ’, as that self has been fashioned both in the relations
between those who have come to be its component members and, concur-
rently, in relations with ‘others’ who have not. The second is a history of
the relations between selves and others of which its self-fashioning may be
seen as a part, but which is not to be written from the standpoint of any ‘self ’
at all, whether individual or comprehensive. In the period with which this
volume has been concerned, it might be said that the Third Kingdom – a.k.a.
‘Ireland’ – had not fashioned a coherent self or yet come to exist in a history
of its own; both because of the presence of distinct and bitterly contending
cultures – this has been a history of Gaelic, Latin and English language, and
of Catholic and both forms of British Protestant religion – and because of
powerful exterior forces, represented by the English, which was increasingly
a British, crown, insisting that the Kingdom of Ireland was a dependent,
even a conquered, kingdom and to that extent not the author of its own
history. From Captain MacMorris to Stephen Dedalus, there are voices in
the literature of Ireland expressing the uncertainties of colonial and post-
colonial identity. Yet there is a kingdom and the opportunity to fashion it,
and this volume contains evidence of vigorous and lasting efforts in that
direction.
Leaving aside – perhaps unwisely – the problems of defining a
Catholicism which could be neither royal nor fully papal, there has been
a history of settler nationalisms able to claim that what indigenous nation-
alism there was could be comprehended within them. A fully Gaelic
nationalism drawing on pre-Norman memories being elusive and little
encouraged by the structure of the Kingdom of 1534, we have been left with
the claim of the Old English to be the true ‘Irish nation’, founded on the
acceptance of the crown by both Norman and Irish consentients as far
18
Molyneux and Viscount Molesworth might be held to stand for the former, Francis Hutcheson for
the latter.
back as the twelfth century. Whatever the O’Neills, O’Donnells and
O’Mahonys may have thought of it, this was a settler nationalism, though
the Old English had been in Ireland long enough to be thought, and think
themselves, Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores. It issued in the most characteristic
of settler nationalist claims, that to the independence of their own parlia-
ment in conducting their relations with a multinational Crown of the
Three Kingdoms. Here it collided with the central Anglocentricity of
British history: the Royal Supremacy and the Civil War producing a
compulsive unity and incorporation of English crown with English parlia-
ment, meaning that no Irish, Scottish or American legislature could claim a
separate relationship with the crown without seeming to threaten the
integrity of the English, as well as the United, Kingdom. This is a problem
from which in the year 2000 the British have by no means escaped, though
they are seeking to redraw it.
By the year 1698 the theses of settler nationalism were beginning to
pass – not without vigorous counter-moves – into the discourse of a
‘Protestant nation’ claiming to be at the point of absorbing what remained
of its Old Irish and Old English predecessors, so that all Irish could be said
to be English. This was no less a nationalism than a colonialism; colonists
as well as colonized have their quarrels with the authority that sent them
out and seeks to pursue them, and may base claims to autonomy on their
wars and treaties with the indigenous peoples preceding them. Thus
Peruvian creoles claimed to be the heirs of the Inca, and an Irish
Protestant nationalism sought to base itself in a Catholic, Norman and
Milesian past. This, however, was a phenomenon little seen before 1780 or
thereabouts.19 Molyneux may hint to us how it came to be achieved, but
if we take the theme of Dr Ohlmeyer’s volume to be the assertion and
defeat of the Catholic Old English attempt to speak in the name of the
Kingdom of Ireland, it must be the task of Dr Connolly’s volume20 to
pursue Protestant, including Presbyterian, settler nationalisms towards the
American and Irish crisis of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In
the second half of the seventeenth century and the First Age of Union, we
listen to a diversity of voices fashioning a diversity of selves; a clamour, not
a consensus or even a debate.
19
[It might be argued that the re-modelling of New Zealand history around the Treaty of Waitangi is
yet another instance.]
20
See n. 17.
PART III
Empire and Rebellion in the

First Age of Union
CHAPTER 7
Archipelago, Europe and Atlantic after 1688*
(I)
The period of the Three Kingdoms is broken but not ended by the archi-
pelagic war-cycle of 1637–51 and the interregnum of 1649–60: as we have
seen, a sequence of crises and restorations in the relations of state, church and
civil society in the multiple monarchy and the several histories of the Three
Kingdoms. This sequence is connected with the European war-cycle of
1618–48, but the connection is rendered indirect by the peculiar structure
of the English monarchy and its church – so much in the War of the Three
Kingdoms having been occasioned by the crisis in that system as it inter-
sected with the other British kingdoms. To study that war in its connections
with the Thirty Years War is legitimate and valuable,1 but the former cannot
be reduced to an aspect of the latter. The Three Kingdoms period is brought
to an end by a second war-cycle, that of 1688–91 in British history, where it
might be known as the Second War of the Three Kingdoms; but this
sequence bears a different relation to the history of Europe, being the
opening phase and in some ways the product of the war-cycle of
1688–1714, directed against the predominance of the French monarchy and,
later, the danger that it might absorb the monarchy of Spain. This crisis may
be said to have begun with the French invasion of Holland in 1672; that, and
William of Orange’s expedition in the Irish war of 1690–1 which concluded it,
were undertaken for Dutch and Orangist reasons and form episodes in Dutch
history2 as well as in that of the European states system.
It is proper to emphasize this, in modification of an English historio-
graphy which has sometimes treated the ‘Revolution of 1688’ excessively or
exclusively in the context of English parliamentary and constitutional
history. That context does not disappear, however, when English history
1 2
Scott, 2000. Israel, 1991 and 1995, chs. 32 and 36.
107
108 Empire and Rebellion in the First Age of Union
is viewed in the context of British, nor do English and British history
disappear when viewed in the context of European.3 William III came to
England, and made himself king of England, Scotland and Ireland, for
Dutch and European reasons; but he was invited to come by a group of
English magnates for reasons inherent in the complex history of church,
crown and parliament in England.4 That history developed in two direc-
tions. In one, the consolidation of crown with parliament was bought at the
price of a continuing uncertainty in both dynastic and ecclesiastical history
which left the Revolution and the Hanoverian regime imperfectly legiti-
mized far into the eighteenth century. In another, the continual if never
actualized danger of civil war this entailed became an aspect of the wars of
Europe down to perhaps 1760, so that the British kingdoms were obliged to
take part in those wars for their own dynastic, religious and constitutional
reasons, among others. The events of 1688–9 are important in British
history as drawing it more closely into the states-system of Europe, and
as compelling the Anglo-British state to re-organize itself so as to partici-
pate in European wars. This was noted, if more often resented than
welcomed, by contemporary observers.
If this revolution entailed a potential civil war and foreign invasion upon
England – for reasons including the dissatisfaction of the Church of
England5 – the drastic eviction of the episcopal clergy by Scottish Presby-
terians was more ‘revolutionary’ than anything that happened in England,
and entailed a potential civil war that became actual in 1715 and 1745. This
conflict had its bearings on the politics of Lowland and Highland, and
culminated after 1745 in something like a colonial policy of repressing,
transforming and sometimes expelling Gaelic society in the far north of
Britain and its islands. In the relations between the two historic British
kingdoms, however, the crucial transformation occurred in 1707, when the
reconstruction of England as a fiscal-military state based on commerce –
undertaken as a necessary consequence of the Revolutionary involvement
of England in European wars – was seen as having set processes in motion
with which the Scottish state and society could not cope as independent
entities.6 The Union of 1707 was a union of parliaments as well as crowns –
though not of churches or of laws – and this, undertaken for reasons
European as well as commercial, was to have drastic consequences in the
3
Israel, 1991; Hoak and Feingold, 1996.
4
Beddard, 1991; also Jones, 1972; Speck, 1988; and for the continuing validity of English constitutional
history, Schwoerer, 1981 and 1992.
5
Clark, 1985 and 2000. 6 Robertson, 1995.
Archipelago, Europe and Atlantic after 1688 109
history of Britain, Europe and empire. The creation of a kingdom of Great
Britain led directly to the question whether there was to be a British nation
or a history of that nation: the question to which this book is aimed at
providing answers.
In Irish history, the revolutionary end of the Three Kingdoms period has
consequences perhaps more strictly archipelagic than those it has in the
history of the British kingdoms proper. In order to consolidate his hold
upon England as a resource in the wars of Europe, King William was
obliged to complete the conquest of Ireland; which by that time meant the
victory of New English and Scottish Protestant settlers over the Catholic
Old English and Gaelic Irish – the last playing a role not utterly unlike that
of a tangata whenua. The Treaty of Limerick symbolically marks the
beginning of the period of Irish history known as the Ascendancy:7 the
hegemony of an Anglo-Protestant landlord and middle class over a
Catholic majority, with Scottish Presbyterians – known by the English
name of ‘Dissenters’ – as a third force. This Ascendancy was secure
enough to permit Irish, or Irish-settled, Protestants, to develop their own
discontents and their own kind of nationalism, which was to play a
complex part in the cycle of wars and rebellions that terminates the First
Age of Union, whose origins we trace before 1707, to the Williamite wars
that ended the Age of the Three Kingdoms.
(II)
The Kingdom of Great Britain, established by the Union of 1707, that
emerged from the war-cycle ending in 1714, was an imperfect multiple
monarchy, with a single parliamentary sovereignty but a diversity of
national churches and legal systems; the subordinate kingdom of Ireland
was not united with it. Perhaps more significantly, it was a powerful
military-fiscal state,8 equipped to take part in constructing a Europe of
sovereign states, capable of wars and treaties, linked by a shared commerce
and (it was thought) a shared culture of manners and civility. This Europe
was engaged in oceanic expansion beyond its geographic limits; it was not
based on a common retreat from empire. Before the end of the European
war-cycle – indeed helping to end it – there was reason to fear that the
British kingdom was excessively engaged in re-drawing the map of Europe,
and a Tory government engineered a withdrawal from wars and alliances of
which the greatest of Whig historians seems to have approved.9 There
7 8 9
Connolly, 1992; Claydon and McBride, 1998. Brewer, 1989. Pocock, 1985, p. 303.
ensued a rhetoric which contrasted European engagement, bringing about
increases in national debt, standing armies and ‘the influence of the crown’,
with a blue-water strategy of commerce and colonies that enabled Britain
to influence European politics without being drawn into them.
The Europe including Britain that emerged by the time of the Treaty of
Utrecht (1713) aimed at the termination of wars of religion as well as the
threat of French universal monarchy. It therefore enables us to define
Enlightenment – while remembering that other definitions are possible
and useful – as a programme for bringing both war and religion into a
system of civil society, based on sovereign government and international
commerce.10 The British kingdoms now united took part in this pro-
gramme, and encountered the problem of reconciling it with the spiritual
autonomy and ecclesiastical government of Christian churches. In both
Anglican England and Moderate Scotland it became a question how far a
church of Christ could be drawn into the empire of civil society without
provoking either a loss of faith or a variety of responses ranging from
intolerant theology through evangelical revival to outright disbelief. In this
problematic, dissenters from established religion played their part, and it
became evident that Tudor ‘empire’ in church and state had not been
extended from England to Britain. Queen Anne was not head of the church
in Scotland as she was in England. In Ireland the Protestant communities,
English and Scottish, encountered the problems of Enlightenment against
the background of a silent majority disabled by the lack of sovereignty from
dealing with those problems when Enlightenment was Catholic.
In the second half of the First Age of Union (1707–1801) the great
figures of Scottish Enlightenment were expanding the moral philosophy,
political economy and civil history appropriate to a universe of commerce –
an enterprise in which no major English thinker was comparably engaged –
but were doing so in a context of radical criticism and incipient rebellion
in the outer provinces of the Hanoverian system. ‘Europe’ and oceanic
‘empire’ were as we have seen so closely linked that choices between them
were questions of priority; Britain’s European role was largely based on
supremacy in the maritime empire of trade, slavery and American produce.
The system set up or imagined by the Treaty of Utrecht was ended, in part,
by the increasing rivalry between Britain and France for control of North
America, the Caribbean and India, which in the war of 1756–63 increased
the debt of both states to a point which was to have revolutionary con-
sequences. This ‘first crisis of the ancien régime,’ as it has been challengingly
10
Pocock, 1999 (B), I, pp. 109–14.
called,11 culminated in the War of the American Revolution, which now
demands its place in the patterns of British history.
Commercial ‘empire’ – it is well to remember that this use of the word is
a metaphor – led to the increase of population in the English (and Iberian)
colonies in America to the point where these become civil societies with
politics, histories and cultures of their own. ‘British history’ thus acquired a
further dimension – for simplicity’s sake we say a fourth – which became a
problem of ‘empire’ in the Tudor sense of the term. The problem of
‘America’ became the question of whether these new, vital and expansive
societies could be included in the system whereby the crown in parliament
governed the English state which had expanded to include Scotland and
Ireland. There was a religious dimension to this, since the colonies tended
to be multi-church congregational polities, and established churches where
they existed were not immediately supported by the crown;12 but the
narrative of American revolution is commonly related as a process whereby
these colonies claimed to be autonomous societies, demanding first a voice
in the decisions of government, then to govern themselves under the
crown, and finally to be independent states with no allegiance to it. This
revolution may be traced to an original failure to define colonies as king-
doms, vice-royalties, palatinates or any other species of political society
within the ‘empire’ of the crown. It was a consequence of global import-
ance that the independent states of Anglophone America defined their new
relationship in a political language which placed them outside the terms in
which British history had been and continued being conducted.
The Declaration of Independence severed the American states from the
British with such finality as to lessen its impact on the internal politics of
the latter. In England, the politics of George III had produced a state of
dissatisfaction whose language had much in common with that of the
colonists, but this must be seen as a process whereby England moved
away from the actual and potential civil wars of the seventeenth century,
and what had been a language of division became no more than a rhetoric
of principle. In the post-Revolutionary era of ‘the rage of party’13 English
politics had been a continuation of civil war by other means – a second
‘dissolution of government’ was at all costs to be avoided – but in the
‘present discontents’ of George III’s reign the language of revolution
11
Venturi, 1979 and 1984; Litchfield, 1989 and 1991.
12
For a challenging statement of the case for viewing the Revolution as a war of religion, see
Clark, 1993.
13
Holmes, 1967; Gunn, 1971.
became theatrical, a means of taking stands, close to the striking of
attitudes.14 The claim that the king and his ministers had achieved a
complete corruption of government was made more often than it was
acted on – other than by Thomas Paine, who went to America to engage
in revolution against the English régime, and found there the reality of civil
war, which he helped to promote.15
This is an English story. In Scotland, an oligarchy that came close to a
vice-royalty encountered violent anti-popery rather than political radical-
ism, and something similar may indeed be said of England and the Gordon
riots.16 In Scottish Ulster – which may be thought of as Scotland without
the Moderate Enlightenment17 – it was another matter; but we enter here
upon the Irish dimension of the crisis which ended the First Age of Union.
Here we return to the politics of empire, still in a Tudor sense of the term.
Protestant settlers – who now called themselves Irish – shared the discon-
tents of American colonists to the point of making demands like theirs for
parliamentary sovereignty under the crown; demands less radical to the
extent to which Ireland was a kingdom rather than a colony, as no North
American state had been. The mixed success and failure of the Patriots and
Volunteers led to the formation of the United Irishmen, in which
Protestant settler nationalists close to Americans in their politics looked
for support from Presbyterians in the North and Catholics both urban and
peasant, thus raising the question of what Irish nationality was to become.
If we carry this narrative into the 1790s, we may think of the American
Revolution as the first of a chain of crises and rebellions which terminate
the First Age of Union as the war-cycle of 1688–91 terminated the Age of
the Three Kingdoms. The union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800–1
ends the First Age of Union and inaugurates the Second.
These processes, however, occur within the history of empire in the
Tudor sense: the problem of how the self-government of the English state
is to be reconciled with its incorporation of other realms. That history does
not end with the independence of the United States, an event whose huge
importance is rather global than structural; America did not liquidate
‘empire’ by departing from it. In a later chapter it will be argued that
even Irish independence – the second revolutionary secession from British
history – does not terminate the problem of empire within the Atlantic
14
Sainsbury, 1987. 15 Claeys, 1989; Fruchtman, 1994.
16
The Edinburgh riots of 1779 are held to have ended the political career of William Robertson
(Brown, 1997, p. 31). For the Gordon riots still see Butterfield, 1949.
17
McBride, 1998.
archipelago; and if this is accepted, it will follow that the so-called ‘First
British Empire’ is not liquidated by either the independence of America or
the acquisition in India of ‘empire’ in the new and modern sense in which
we use the word. Meanwhile, the chain of crises that terminates the First
Age of Union is to be seen, like its predecessors in 1637 and 1688, in the
context of a European war-cycle: that of 1793–1815, in which British
maritime and extra-European supremacy was deployed in a European
struggle against universal monarchy in a new, because revolutionary, form.
CHAPTER 8
The signif icance of 1688: some ref lections

on Whig history
(I)
‘Well, doctor,’ William of Orange is said to have remarked to Gilbert
Burnet, as they stood on Brixham beach on 5 November 1688, ‘what do you
think of predestination now?’ The jest, if it was one, might be taken as
referring to the extraordinary series of physical events which had brought
them where they were – to the multiple changes of the Protestant wind,
blowing them east, west and east again; or it might refer to the no less
extraordinary series of contingencies in church, state and dynasty which
had led to William’s being invited to England and had made it worth his
while to set out thither; or finally, it might be taken as indicating that
neither William nor Burnet at that moment could have had the least idea
what was about to happen. With the benefit of hindsight, we know; and we
know also that William had done his best to ensure that some things should
happen which did in fact happen. We are therefore tempted to see the
outcome of William’s expedition as a foregone conclusion, which is to
know more about predestination than William or Burnet did. A warning
against ‘Whig history’ in a very crude sense may therefore be uttered at the
outset of this essay.1 William was a careful planner, but careful planners in
military and political affairs are at the same time very daring gamblers, and
he was engaged on a gamble of a quite breathtaking nature.
He was in Tor Bay at the head of a powerful military expedition,
involving a number of the regiments which he commanded as captain-
general of the United Provinces. He was there because a group of powerful
English magnates had asked him to come;2 he was there in pursuit of his
wife’s dynastic interests and his own; and he was there in pursuit of reason
1
Originally printed as Pocock, 1991a.
2
[It is possible that they would not have asked him if he had not asked them to ask him (Hoak and
Feingold, 1996, p. 24). This does not mean that they did not have reasons of their own for asking him.]
114
The significance of 1688 115
of state, as this declared the interests of the House of Orange and the
Republic of the Netherlands – which might be, but were not necessarily
regarded as, identical. In this last respect, the descent upon England was, or
turned out to be, an enormously dangerous but successful fling in the
political and military struggle against the king of France: the Sicilian
expedition of the wars of the Grand Alliance, which transformed their
nature by extending their scope and succeeded where its analogue had
failed. But the first and second sets of reasons for William’s presence in Tor
Bay might well have moved a French statesman, on hearing that the Prince
of Orange intended to set out for England, to the thought that if the prince
meant to involve himself in the affairs of the wild and unmanageable
kingdoms beyond the Channel and the North Sea, he should by no
means be prevented from doing so. These reasons were such as to create
a strong probability that William would involve himself in an English civil
war, swelling into another war of the three kingdoms of Britain and
Ireland, which would absorb and destroy his resources and from which
he might never return.
England in 1688 had not emerged from the conditions which had
produced one such series of civil wars between forty and fifty years
previously, and had nearly renewed them on two occasions in the most
recent decade. These conditions arose from instabilities within the ruling
structure of the Established Church, which compromised the role of the
monarchy and the lay and clerical governing élites. Some of these problems
were constitutional in character, recognized as problems in the location
of sovereignty, and had come to pass in the grim realities of civil war in 1642
and temporary dissolution of the historical structure of government in
1649 – two memories which did more than anything else to determine the
political consciousness of the governing classes (to look no further) in 1688.
All knew that there had been a civil war which nobody had desired; all were
determined that it should not happen again, but were at the same time
aware that such a determination might not be enough to prevent it
recurring; and in 1688 matters were in such a state that civil war was
being risked again.
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had been followed by a
restoration of the royal and episcopal church in 1662, but the relation
between the two had not been stabilized. As well as a small Catholic
minority in England, a rather larger one in the Highlands of Scotland,
and a partly subjugated Catholic majority in Ireland, there was in England
a significant group of semi-organized Dissent; and though this last was far
from militant in its politics, the sons of Charles the Martyr – who were not
reliable witnesses to the church for which their father was said to have
died – were tempted to exploit the opportunities which they saw in this
degree of ecclesiastical fragmentation. Alliances between clergy and parlia-
mentary gentry had on occasion been formed to pull the monarchy back
into its necessary alliance with the church; but these had forced groups
active in politics to choose between their visceral Anglicanism, which
presented church and king as the sole guarantors of the ruling order, and
the equally visceral Erastianism which impelled them to reject the clergy as
arbiters in matters of state.3 Some had carried mistrust of both monarchy
and clergy so far as to attack the alliance between the two, and this tension
had been vastly exacerbated by the prospect that the successor to the crown
and its headship of the church might himself be a Catholic. Though the
attempt to force the crown to review its relationship with the church was
known to be a recipe for civil war, the prospect of a popish successor had
carried England within recognizable distance of such a war in 1679–81 and
had led to an actual attempt to renew it in 1685. Each time, however, the
prospect of civil war had brought about renewed support of church and
king even under a popish successor, and this had been reinforced by the
assurance that the succession to James II was guaranteed to his Protestant
daughters and their consorts. Threatening as the actions of James appeared,
therefore, they were endurable until a major breach between the king and
the bishops coincided with the birth of a male heir to the throne. The
public causes professed in the invitation to William to present himself in
England, and in his printed Declarations on doing so, were therefore
dynastic, in the sense that the heir (being intolerable) was supposed to be
spurious and the interest of William’s wife in the succession at risk;
ecclesiastical, in the sense that the monarchy was seen to be engaged in
an attack on the church of which it was head; and political, in the sense that
William was calling for the meeting of a free parliament to settle these and
other issues, including James’s attempts to pack parliaments so that they
would obey him.4 Any one of these problems might have to be resolved by
the sword in civil war, and here were sufficient reasons why William should
bring an army with him; but his mind was engaged, so far as we know it, by
thoughts of European, not English, war, and the exact calculations of his
reason of state are a fascinating enigma. Perhaps he was placing his reliance
on predestination; which would be to say, in other words current at the
time, that he was making an appeal to heaven.
3
I draw near here to the arguments of both Scott, 2000, and Clark, 1985 and 2000.
4
For these see Jones, 1972 and 1978.
John Locke had written the scenario of such an appeal a few years before,
and it had been a scenario of civil war. The concluding chapters of his
Treatises of Government, written when desperate associates of Shaftesbury
were turning to thoughts of violence after their defeat in parliament,
envisage a people determining that their government is in a state of war
against them, decreeing that government to be dissolved, making their
appeal to heaven, and resuming the power to place the government in new
hands or continue it in old, as they see fit. Every one of these phrases –
dissolution of government, appeal to heaven, reversion of power to the
people – carried as its normal connotation the kind of thing that had
happened in 1642, when the subjects had been obliged to draw swords
against one another, and in 1649, when they had been obliged by the
collapse of the main structures of government to face the dreadful necessity
of constituting a new régime by deciding where to yield their submission
and give their allegiance. Locke was exposing himself like Sidney to the
penalties of treason, by imagining and compassing a civil war that had not
happened yet; and this aside, he was inhabiting the world of Thomas
Hobbes – of the frontispiece to Leviathan, in which dissent over the
location of authority in church and state can plunge a kingdom into civil
war, and this condition can be ended only by replacing the appeal to
heaven by the yielding up of the subject’s sword to a sovereign who can
exercise it for him. But it took more than the free gift of the sword to
constitute a sovereign who could keep it in his hands. The English had
attempted the Hobbesian solution in 1660, when they solemnly declared
that power over the militia was forever vested in the king; Charles I had
posthumously triumphed in one of the things he had chiefly fought for in
1642; but a Leviathan who fumbled with the crozier he held in his left hand
might press back upon his unwilling subjects the sword he should have
retained in his right. That was the menace of a popish successor, and it was
nearer happening in 1688 than when Locke was writing in the early 1680s.
And Hobbes’s readers in 1651, when Leviathan was presented to Charles II
after the defeat of his army at Worcester, may have seen that Hobbes
offered no advice on what was to be done when two rivals for the role of
Leviathan were claiming the subject’s allegiance with their swords drawn.
That too was the condition of England from 5 November 1688, when
William of Orange landed his army, to the second flight of James II at the
end of December.
The success of William’s expedition must be measured by the proposi-
tion either that what happened between those dates was not an English civil
war; or that if it was one, as Edmund Burke contended a hundred and one
years later, it ended without battle on English soil and without the disin-
tegration of the ruling élites into groups compelled to draw sword against
one another, as had happened in the well-remembered catastrophe of 1642.
I have tried in another place to emphasize how very narrowly we must see
civil war as having been averted;5 how very easily James II, by fighting one
inconclusive battle, might have rendered the military issue uncertain and
compelled his subjects to take decisions about an armed contest for
sovereignty. When his father left London and Westminster for York in
1642, when he exposed his person in battle at Edgehill, when he left Oxford
for Newcastle in 1646, when he left Hampton Court for Carisbrooke in
1647, he was on every occasion dramatizing the fact of civil war; he was
dramatizing his own indispensability to legitimate government and finding
men willing to hazard war in his support. The tactic had proved disastrous
but in the end effective; the monarchy had won the civil wars. But when
James abandoned his capital in 1688, he did not throw himself into the
heart of his own kingdoms or yield himself with conscious dignity into the
hands of his adversaries. He took refuge at the court of the king of France,
thus going far towards converting a civil war into a foreign one; and by such
actions as the jettisoning of the Great Seal, he did much to declare that he
had tried but failed to dissolve a government capable, since he compelled it
to the necessity, of functioning without him and replacing him.
What may be Whiggishly asserted about these events is that they
expelled the reality, though not by any means the threat, of civil war
from English experience, and in so doing went far to constitutionalize
English perceptions of drastic political change. Civil wars are fought
among those who know what civil sovereignty is, but are in conflict over
where it is located and how it is to be exercised; they may find that they
have destroyed it and are in disagreement over how it is to be restored. The
English of the 1640s had faced themselves with these terrible questions, and
John Locke was envisaging that they might confront them again. When
James II fled to France he kept the location of sovereignty an open
question; he retained a very good case for claiming that he was lawful
king and his son his lawful heir, and that the dispossession of both was
deeply fraudulent.
We used to hold that his case was so good that it could be answered only
by a revolutionary restatement of the nature of kingship, though the great
Whig writers Burke and Macaulay were at pains to point out that no
such restatement was ever promulgated. But James abandoned, or never
5
Pocock, 1988b.
exercised, the weapon of civil war; by not waging war within the kingdom
he lost the power to oblige his subjects to choose between two claimants to
sovereignty, each with his own definition of what it was and each at the
subject’s door to demand his allegiance. In consequence the English of 1688
did not re-enter, and as things turned out they had forever left, the world of
politics as Hobbes and Locke had known it.
In 1642 the powerful sovereignty built up by the Tudors had split apart
but retained the strength to force subjects into civil war against their wills.
In the new year of 1689 the English found the edifice of sovereignty
deserted by its king, but themselves possessed of most of the resources for
continuing it in existence. There had been a desertion but not a dissolution;
the people had neither declared nor discovered the government to be
dissolved, and if they had done anything it had been to frustrate the
king’s ineffective attempts to dissolve it. ‘Government’ could therefore be
defined less as ‘sovereignty’ than as ‘constitution’, and those few who took
immediate notice of the Treatises of Government which Locke now anony-
mously published could respond that there had been no dissolution of
government because the constitution retained its ancient form and force, so
that all which had been done was authorized by the necessity of preserving
it. This view of the significance of 1688 was that retained by aristocratic
Whigs and Revolution Tories thereafter; the only question contested by a
few was whether the constitution reserved to the people or their represen-
tatives a power, not to dissolve the government, but to divest of power
those guilty of seeking to dissolve it.
We have reached a point where it is necessary to walk carefully; paths
lead from it in a number of directions, and we may construct either
Whiggish or narrowly revisionist histories if we follow one of them to
the exclusion of the rest, or presume that one of them is the main road and
the others mere by-paths. The flight of James reinforced constitutionalism,
in the sense that it left the parliamentary and legal fabric in a position to
remedy its own predicament; and for this reason it came to be held that the
Revolution of 1688, precisely because it was not a dissolution, was a victory
for the ancient constitution, that James’s misdeeds could be defined as
transgressions against it; and English history before and after 1688 could be
written in terms of the constitution’s persistence in the teeth of Stuart and
Cromwellian attempts to overthrow it. The Whig need to distance 1688
from 1649 produced a historiography of the civil wars which vindicated the
parliamentary cause while condemning the regicide; and republican, and
much of what we call ‘Whig’, history came to be written in these terms
from Rapin de Thoyras to Macaulay, with some notable dissents from
David Hume and Catharine Macaulay. But though there came, rather
momentously, to be a reading of English politics which was both consti-
tutionalist and consensualist, to say this is not to say that there came to be a
consensus about either the workings of the constitution or the claim that
the problems of the kingdom had been solved in constitutionalist terms.
There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, and all I am claiming here is
that the non-recurrence of civil war and armed conflict over sovereignty
made it massively more possible than it had been before to interpret
English politics and history in these terms.
There continued to be a radical Whig reading of the events of 1688,
though if we are to say so we shall have to decide what significance to
attribute to its survival. Few (though a few) argued that the Revolution had
constituted a Lockean dissolution of government and reversion of power to
the people; this scenario of revolution, though invented in England, has
never been practised there – except in the deeply counter-revolutionary
cases of 1649,6 or perhaps 1659 – and this is one reason it is difficult to put
forward a populist theory of British as opposed to American democracy.
But we can find those – and Locke may have been one of them – who
thought that such a dissolution ought to have occurred in 1688 or 1689, and
regretted the lost opportunity to conduct one. There were the originals of
the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen, who thought the opportunity
should have been seized to institute frequently summoned parliaments and
lessen the patronage powers of the crown. Locke does not seem to have
been among these, but he did publish the Treatises to promote the view that
William III (he does not here mention Mary) owed his crown to the choice
of the people, the only foundation of all lawful government. This may or
may not make the monarchy as elective or conditional as it sounds; it need
not entail a dissolution by the people of the entire fabric of government
(which is what the text of the Second Treatise necessarily envisages) but
merely a power reserved to the people to ‘cashier’ (as Richard Price was to
put it) a monarch guilty of misgovernment and choose another in his place;
so that any monarch ruling with the support of his people may be said
to rule with their consent and by their approbation and election. What
is paradoxical about this assertion – voiced recurrently by a minority
6
[A challenging statement: regicide and abolition of the monarchy were revolutionary acts, but led
only to the establishment of a de facto régime over a polity unable to dissolve itself and hold a
constitutional convention. Sovereignty remained lodged in the surviving hands of those who had
held it. Dissolution resulted in the decision that there should be no dissolution; in 1659 it led to a
restoration. The statement in the text is paradoxical to the point of being self-annihilating; this is why
it was put forward.]
throughout the century beginning with the publication of Locke’s Treatises –
is that it rests on an implicit denial that there had been civil war in 1688.
The flight of James had irretrievably constitutionalized the English percep-
tion of revolution itself; the deposition of a king and the substitution of his
successors, the dissolution of a régime if not of a constituted form of
government, could now be seen as taking place bloodlessly, within the
fabric of an ancient constitution, and without imposing on the people the
savage choices about allegiance and sovereignty, violence and submission,
under which they had suffered in 1642 and 1649. It now became by degrees
open to the English to believe that they could have revolution but have it
painlessly; a belief so remote from their experience in the seventeenth
century that it took another hundred years to form it after 1689.
There is a posturing theatricality about Wilkes and even Paine remind-
ing George III of the fate of his predecessors, and Burke poured out his
wrath on Richard Price because he could see that revolution had become, as
it has remained, a spectator sport for middle-class intellectuals, tempted to
believe that they can proclaim governments illegitimate without anyone
getting hurt in the process. It took a long time for this sort of left to take
shape in British political culture, but 1688 is among its preconditions.
From the existence of a commonwealth left, populist and quasi-republican,
operating on the flank of a rather complacent constitutionalism, we now
move right, into areas where there was nothing to be complacent about,
because the legitimacy of the régime traceable to 1688 was far from being
clearly accepted. Much emphasis is now very rightly given by historians to
two persistent instabilities in post-Revolution England: the inability of a
great many churchmen to accept that the secular power could change the
supreme governor of the Church of England even when that governor was
an aggressively popish successor; and the consequent survival of a
Jacobitism which held at the least (and it sometimes held a good deal
more) that the Williamite and Hanoverian régimes were a government
de facto and that authority de jure resided with the exiled family, against the
day when it should please that family to return to the church of which they
were lawfully the head.
Let us accept, then, that the tensions and cleavages left behind by the
Revolution were extraordinarily deep; that they included a succession of
rulers insecure on their throne and a church unsure about its establishment;
that what has been called ‘the rage of party’, persisting through the
Hanoverian accession and beyond it, can quite rightly be described as
the continuation of civil war by other means. Civil war did not break out
again, in the sense that Englishmen did not again draw swords against one
another in a dissolution of effectively sovereign government; to use Roman
language in an Anglocentric perspective, the wars in Ireland and Scotland
down to 1745 were not civil but social wars, taking place in associated but
inferior provinces of the English imperium. It is of course true, as Thomas
Hobbes pointed out, that the state of war is not identical with the day of
battle, but consists in ‘a known disposition thereto’, present all the time ‘in
the nature of weather’;7 and in that sense a disposition to civil war existed in
England as long as there was a potentially active Jacobitism, which we now
know was longer than we used to think. But Hobbes’s formula does not go
to the heart of the seventeenth-century experience of civil war, which was
that men fight each other not merely because there is no sovereign to stop
them, but because an existing sovereignty has disintegrated and they must
fight each other in the effort to reconstruct it. Englishmen had fought each
other in this setting in 1642 and 1648; they had not had to do so in 1688.
One reason widely recognized why they had not had to do so was the rise
of what was known as the standing army, consisting of permanently
embodied regiments financed and controlled by a state. The first English
civil war had been fought the way it was because no such army then existed
in England, and the relations between king and parliament had reached a
point where each set out to mobilize the county militias against the other;
Leviathan could not draw the sword without returning it into the hands of
the subject. But in 1688 William landed at the head of a force of profes-
sional regiments and James advanced to meet him at the head of another.
Because they did not come to battle, the warlike activity of the southern
élites was limited to giving political support to one army rather than the
other. In the Midlands and the North the earls of Devonshire and Danby
were in rebellion, but there too the sword was not drawn in civil war. In the
frontier kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland the sword was drawn and battles
were fought; but with our eye on the structure of the English state – which
held together in 1688 as it had not done in 1642, and so determined much of
what happened elsewhere – we may be tempted to suppose that the advent
of the professional army had rendered impossible a recrudescence of the
initially amateur civil war the militias had fought in 1642. The matter was
not put to the test. What actually happened is that because James fled
without fighting there was no civil war in England, and William was called
to exercise the sword of Leviathan. What he did with it was to proceed,
once the campaigns in Ireland were over, to re-organize a force of English
and Scottish regiments capable of assisting him in his wars in the
7
Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13.
Netherlands. Perhaps it was with this aim and no other that he had come to
England, though how he thought he was going to achieve it when he went
on board ship in 1688 defies our imagining.
There followed during the Nine Years War – or War of the League of
Augsburg, or War of the English Succession – that re-organization of the
fiscal and military structures of the English state which would transform it
into Britain and render it capable of a major role in the wars in Europe and
the European presence in America and India. If there is a revolutionary
change in the course of early modern British history it is to be found here;
at least, this was the point at which observant contemporary intelligences
became capable of saying that such a transformation was going on. They
identified the re-organization of politics as consisting of two innovations:
the institution of a standing army, and the institution of a system of public
credit capable of maintaining such an army, both during long campaigns in
the field and during periods of peace – which was what made it a standing
army – without beggaring the state in the process. A few years later,
Marlborough could march from Flanders to Bavaria and back again,
fighting a major battle on the way, without seeing his army dissolve into
plundering hordes, because he paid his way with letters of credit on Dutch
and English bankers, a feat which would have been beyond the capacity of
Wallenstein or Turenne. England was leaving the world of civil and social
war and entering that of European reason of state; was passing out of the
age of Wars of Religion and entering that of Enlightenment, in which
states were capable of controlling their armies and their own fissiparous
tendencies towards religious and civil war. It was the end of Hobbesian
politics; or rather, it was the victory of Leviathan.8
Because there was no more civil war in England, England became
capable of imperial power; of fighting major wars in Europe and beyond.
Figurative language such as I have just been using is the necessary conse-
quence of our speaking of long-term processes in structural history; but it
comes to be justified when we think there are such processes to describe, or
when we are dealing with the emergence of a discourse in which they are
supposed and depicted. Within a decade of 1688, observing intelligences –
whose existence and activity are a part of history if they are not the key to
it – thought that they were in a process of long-term yet rapid structural
change. They held it to be one involving the rise of the standing army and
the preconditions of its existence, and they were aware of it precisely
because the conditions making civil war a possibility had by no means
8
Pocock, 1996a.
disappeared. The standing army and public credit had been instituted in
England both to confirm the Revolution régime and to make it capable of
defending itself by extending its power abroad; and whenever in the next
half-century country politicians and republican ideologues sought to
reduce the standing army and lessen the public dependence on credit,
they were suspected – sometimes with reason – of a design to weaken the
régime and facilitate a restoration of the exiled family. One such moment
occurred in 1698, when the wars in Europe had ended and the English
parliament set about compelling William to reduce his armies. In the
printed discourse of the time, we find an interesting debate between
the Scot Andrew Fletcher, the Anglo-Irishman John Trenchard and the
Londoner Daniel Defoe about the history of standing armies.9 All three are
writing Whig history in one of the accepted senses of the term; that is, they
agree on the existence of a process of change in the structure of society, to
which the political structure cannot refuse to respond; they differ on the
extent and character of the response required. It is common ground
between them that a growth in commerce and culture has made it possible,
desirable and perhaps unavoidable that the subject shall cease to be the
proprietor of the sword, letting it pass out of his hands into those of a
professional paid by a state in which the subject is active, and controls the
sword, only through his representatives. Fletcher (writing from a point of
view both Scottish and British) wants the militia preserved as a remedial
device, in order to institutionalize and preserve the subject’s control of his
own sword and his own liberty. Defoe (whose stance is English, but at the
same time British) thinks it pays the subject to let the process go all the way,
retaining only parliamentary control over the taxes which pay the soldiers.
Here are the makings of a Whig interpretation of history, in the sense of
a perceived long-term process which was to make sense to both Hume and
Macaulay in providing the civil wars with a history; but it was not the
product of any sudden slide into complacent ancient-constitutionalist
consensus. The debate over the role of arms in history was to continue
down to the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and it
was formed by a period during which the continued existence of the
Jacobite possibility determined the character of the militia debate which
lay at its core. The turning point I have detected in 1688 continued to hold
significance.
The debaters of 1698 had been supplying a social-change explanation
of the conditions under which a final transfer of the sword from the
9
Pocock, 1975, 2003 (B), ch. 12; Robertson, 1986.
individual’s hands into those of Leviathan had become possible. As long as
he retained the property of his sword, the individual could not yield it up to
Leviathan without the risk that Leviathan would thrust it back into his
hands; no mere act of will would get him out of the state of nature. But
once he ceased to be merely the proprietor of his own land, his own sword,
and his own right and duty to use it, and became instead the generator of
wealth and credit which could be used to pay soldiers and to multiply
culture, the sword might be borne by an agent other than himself, whom he
could pay Leviathan to pay for him. There was resistance to this process;
the classical rhetoric of the militia as necessary to the security of a free state
is found in Jacobite mouths as well as republican, and there were many
Whigs who feared for the consequences to the individual; but by the time
of the Seven Years War, the Hanoverian line felt strong enough to mobilize
a national militia, and to keep it under canvas for two years as a standing
army for home defence, to guard against a landing of French troops and
any pretender (if there still was one) they might have brought with them.
It was service in this militia, wrote the historian Edward Gibbon, com-
bined with ‘the accession of a British prince’ brought up in the Church
of England, which finally reconciled Jacobite families like his own to
the Hanoverian Succession and the Septennial Act.10 Opposition to
that prince’s policies, expressed in a medley of commonwealth and
Scottophobic language, began in a very few years; but Leviathan retained
his grip on the crozier as well as the sword, and it became apparent that the
urban factions and the great men who might promote them were no longer
parties capable of pushing the realm into civil war. The Sacheverell riots
had threatened a régime; the Gordon riots threatened only the public
peace.
A process of structural change, in the character of property, the tech-
nology of warfare, and the production of wealth – it was now possible for
those interested in the history of justice, police, revenue and arms to say –
had done in history what Hobbesian man could not do for himself in the
emergence from the state of nature. The perceived macro-process was an
enlargement of a micro-process by which civil war was becoming less
probable in England. Hobbesian politics, and the Hobbesian solution
from which Locke had not much departed in his writings before 1688,
had been rendered less immediate by the events of that year and the next;
and the rapid-seeming transition from the state perpetually lapsing into
civil war to a state capable by its new military and financial structure of
10
Bonnard, 1969, pp. 109–11.
evading civil war and exercising imperial power, could be and was envis-
aged in terms of an historical process. Neither Hobbes nor even Locke had
done much to describe the process, and there is no need to invoke it in
order to explain the events of 1688 – or indeed the actions of those in high
politics at any moment thereafter. Long-term processes, it is worth remark-
ing, seldom explain what political actors do; they only explain what they
turn out to have done. The significance of 1688 which we are here
considering was not immediately operative, but took time to become
apparent. That is a statement in Whig history; it exercises hindsight and
renders the event significant in terms of its consequences. It is also a
statement about Whig historiography; it begins to show how the event
generated its own history, and became significant in terms of both con-
stitutional persistence and structural change. We can choose for ourselves
whether to accept such historiographies as providing explanations of the
event or as rendering it significant; we cannot deny the historical fact that
they were generated by the event and by those reflecting on its conse-
quences, or that the event was an agent in producing its own significance.
Whig historiography, to that extent, is a product of Whig history.
(II)
There is a sense in which the processes just described can be characterized as
belonging to what we call Enlightenment. That is, it is useful to say that
Enlightenment denotes a series of occurrences whereby England, Scotland
and other states of western Europe passed out of a period of religious and
civil war, in which sovereigns could not adequately control their churches
or their armed men and were consequently threatened with dissolution,
and entered a period of more settled government and interactions between
states, which lasted until the French Revolution and was partially renewed
after it. There are historians who prefer to call this the period of the ancien
régime, but there seems no reason why the two terms should not be used
interchangeably. The process involved a certain dissociation of the individ-
ual from activity in political and religious conflicts, which he was encour-
aged to allow the sovereign to manage for him; he was encouraged to think
these conflicts less urgently important than he had, and to think that he had
other ends and values to pursue. The individual described by both Fletcher
and Defoe, interested in commerce and culture to the point where he is
content to let the sword which protects his liberties be managed for him, is
a type of what I am here calling the individual of Enlightenment; and we
have seen that he was encouraged to see himself as produced by a process of
historical change, which rendered him modern as distinct from his pre-
decessors. His ‘modern’ characteristics, both cause and effect of his transfer
of the sword into the hand of Leviathan, were defined by theorists follow-
ing Defoe as ‘manners’, ‘politeness’, ‘taste’ and other terms denoting an
increased capacity for civilized intercourse in a society increasingly com-
mercial, urban and reliant on the exchange of goods, ideas and cultural
traits. This was to be a major theme of Enlightenment historiography.
A not dissimilar development can be detected in the religious field.
Leviathan, we know, wielded a crozier as well as a sword, and his left hand
might impair the strength of his right. The most delicate area we have to
treat, in assessing the significances of 1688, is the Revolution’s impact on
the church; even today [1988] when Anglicans probe the foundations of
authority in their communion, terrible things can still happen. Since the
Restoration and even before it, the Anglican clergy had been propounding
a doctrine in which the Word and the Spirit acted in the world without
departing from the forms of civil society, of which the authority of the
magistrate was necessarily one. This made it difficult – though for many it
also made it necessary – to submit to the replacement of the church’s
supreme governor by a civil process which the clergy found understandably
questionable. We may emphasize both the continuing restiveness and
Jacobitism to which this gave rise, and the thoroughness with which the
majority of clergy who took the oaths to William and Mary succeeded in
transferring their doctrines of divine and apostolic authority into the new
framework of allegiance; though to emphasize both with equal rigour
points towards a revisionist posture of affirming that authority persisted
without consensus.
But it is also important that the church’s problem of allegiance be seen as
part of an enterprise in which the clergy had been engaged ever since the
disintegration of the Commonwealth’s godly rule: that of exorcizing
rebellious enthusiasm and antinomianism by insisting that the Spirit
never rebelled against the Law and teaching a civil piety which was by no
means the same as a civil religion. If the Spirit was to be mediated to
humanity through the forms of civil order, with which the church was to be
congruent, it was necessary to dismiss all claims that the Spirit’s presence
might be recognized by those acting outside those forms – whether a
priesthood claiming the authority of Christ really present in the sacra-
ments, or an anarchy of sects claiming the authority of the Spirit immedi-
ately present in the congregation or the prophetically illuminated
individual. Ecclesiastics inclined to this way of thinking might not be ill-
disposed towards John Locke’s argument that the mind knew not things
but the ideas which it had of things, not God but the reasons which it had
for believing in his existence. As a polemic against enthusiasm, the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding is part of an enterprise in which the
church had been long engaged, and it may have been by publishing this
work (and owning it as his) in 1690 that Locke began moving away from
the subversiveness of the writings which he published anonymously in the
same year.
It was the aim of much that we call Enlightenment to increase the
powers of reason by limiting its range; by redirecting it from metaphysics
towards experiment. This enterprise was highly congruent with the en-
deavours of both states and established churches to reduce the danger of
religious civil war by combating the various forms of fanaticism which had
claimed authority from the certainty of spiritual knowledge.
There arose – I am compressing the story here – an Anglican probabil-
ism which tended to replace theology by the history of theology; by the
discussion of beliefs which had been held and of the grounds there had
been for holding them. It was both an Anglican and an Enlightenment
belief that the human mind did what it was capable of doing; this could be
used to suppress doctrinal challenges to the authority of the magistrate as
well as to deter the magistrate from imposing restraints on the freedom of
enquiry.
There could thus be a history of religion written as a history of opinions
held, or (by more sceptical and scientific intellects) as a history of the belief
systems which the human mind was capable of generating. It could coexist
with a history of social and governmental systems written as a history of
manners, by which was meant not only codes of behaviour but the
intellectual, aesthetic and ethical systems generated by human minds in
interaction with one another, often on the foundation of property systems
increasingly geared to exchange. Both historiographies depicted humans as
moving from ancient to modern: from ancient metaphysics to modern
experimentality, from ancient virtue to modern politeness, from ancient
autonomy to modern sociability; and each was explicitly connected with
the emergence of sovereign government over settled societies free from the
dangers of religious civil war. Enlightenment grew under the sword and
crozier of Leviathan.11 The first history of England written entirely in the
enlightened mode is that completed by David Hume between 1754 and
1762; it ends in 1688 because Hume considered the Revolution to have
ended the civil wars of the seventeenth century and did not wish to enter on
11
See further, Pocock, 1985, 1995 (both B).
the turbulent history of the régime which had succeeded them. His history
is in our eyes deeply revisionist in its refusal to see constitutional rights and
wrongs at issue in the civil wars, and at the same time deeply Whig in its
willingness to see both political and religious fanaticism as the products of a
process of social change – a ‘revolution in manners’ at work in both
England and Europe with changes in the character of property as its
infrastructure.
Hume can be seen as taking English historiography in an altogether new
direction, but it is as well to remember that he was a Scot, and that his
History was a companion to his friend William Robertson’s History of
Scotland, published as he began work, and was in some sense a precursor
of the great conjectural histories of the progress of society which the
Edinburgh literati began producing during the 1760s and 1770s.12 The
Scots were writing enlightened history: their works were histories of
manners and modernity, in which the redistribution of arms and the
changing nature of property played a large part, and the supposed progress
of mankind from fanaticism to politeness allied the Moderate Robertson
with the irreligious Hume – though the latter’s deeper pessimism foresaw
the replacement of religious fanaticism by political. They were writing in
this way because, though their strong emphasis on military virtue is a
response to the Highland incursion of 1745,13 they believed that Scotland –
merged with England in the extensive monarchy of Britain – was now
living under strong and settled government and free from religious civil
war. The modernity of Leviathan was upon both nations.
Belatedly in this essay, I have reached a point where we may consider the
significance of 1688 for British realms and dominions other than England.
I have a better than ethnocentric reason for postponing it so long. Between
1638 and 1642, rebellions in Scotland and Ireland imposed strains upon the
English polity it was in no condition to bear, and precipitated its disin-
tegration in civil war. In 1688 – though we might do well to ask how far the
invitation to William of Orange was a product of what was happening in
Ireland – there was no civil war in England, the English polity did not
disintegrate, and as re-organized by William for his wars was able to impose
solutions immediately on Ireland and after twenty years on Scotland. The
wars fought in both associated kingdoms as a result of 1688 were not civil
wars in the English sense. The Highland war from Killiecrankie to Glencoe
was momentous in the history of British intercommunal conflict, but was
not a civil war to those many Scotsmen who did not consider Highlanders
12 13
See further Pocock, 1999, vol. II (B), chs. 11–19. Robertson, 1986; Sher, 1985.
members of a shared civil polity, but in Roman terms rebellious barbar-
ian federati who might be subjugated or exterminated if the means were
at hand.
Nevertheless, Leviathan, that very English figure, is at his least imposing
in his outer realms and marches, where he must wield his sword over those
who are not incorporated in his body and may have little respect for his
crozier. Even in Scotland, where incorporation was carried out and has
endured, it was no light matter to create a unified realm with two national
churches; and outside the island of Britain there were two frontiers of
conquest where it is reasonable to ask whether Leviathan obtained the
victory or wrote a new history. If in England 1688 was the year of the civil
war that did not happen and the end of a cycle of such wars, in Ireland it
marked the last of a series of wars which were less civil wars than wars of
conquest: a series that had begun in the reign of Elizabeth I and consisted in
collisions between older Irish and English communities and new patterns
of English and Scottish settlement and sovereignty. William’s Irish war
ended at Limerick, and the harshness of its settlement marked the begin-
ning of the longest period of peace in modern Irish history. During this
hundred and more years various forms of settler nationalism took shape;
these are ideologies in which settler communities appropriate to themselves
the authority by which settlement has been carried out, and seek to use it in
governing themselves and determining their own identity. In Ireland this
move was prematurely made by William Molyneux in 1698, claiming that
the right to rule Ireland by conquest belonged not to the English Crown
and parliament, but to the Anglo-Irish settlers as a community of con-
querors.14 The claim, made in Lockean language, was repudiated by Locke
and little heard of again until the Volunteer movement of 1780; but the
events of the Irish war following 1688 also provided heroic myths which
were to be used in furnishing the Protestants of Ulster with their own
militant identity. That formidable people, however, remained for a century
radical, emigrant and rebellious, and did not till after 1798 become the
loyalist sub-nation which, to the discomfiture of British and Irish alike,
they remain. But where Leviathan was thus imperfectly corporate, it was
understandable that there should not develop a Whig history of Ireland.
From the Scottish parallel we know that one could have been written; it
would have traced a passage from pastoral, warrior and monastic antiquity
to commercial and Protestant modernity. It may very well be that histories
pointing in this direction were attempted, and the phrase ‘an Irish
14
Simms, 1982.
Enlightenment’ has been applied to intellectual developments in Dublin and
Belfast; but there did not take shape, as there did in Edinburgh and Glasgow,
an authoritative élite promoting Whig history in furtherance of their image
of national identity and the British state. Scottish enlightened history con-
tributed powerfully to form the Whig historiography of Macaulay.
The colonies established by the English crown and its grants to propri-
etors beyond the Atlantic constituted a further border area: a frontier of
conquest and settlement, which was described as an ‘empire’, but only in
part juridically organized as one. Leviathan, being English and invented in
the struggle to avert civil war, knew better how to be king than Caesar; his
sword and crozier did not extend readily to the creation of provinces
beyond his realm. Ireland was defined as a subordinate kingdom, con-
quered and ruled by the crown of England in its parliament, but this
concept was not systematically extended to the settlements in America. It
is tempting to suggest that the significance of 1688 in American history lies
in the abandonment of whatever attempts James II had been making to
re-organize Virginia and New England into dominions ruled directly by the
crown.15 This enterprise was imperial; had the colonies become subordinate
states within an empire, they would not have found it necessary to begin a
revolution by declaring themselves states, which is what they did in 1776.
The American secession of that year may be considered as a response to the
incoherence of empire, which had left room for the growth, in the course of
human events, of a settler nationalism in which the colonists took the
authority of empire to themselves and claimed the right to wage war, to
conquer others and to conduct their own government. What is remarkable
is that they drew in doing so upon arguments which had put forward an
alternative interpretation of 1688 and criticisms of the régime founded
upon it: a Lockean doctrine of emigration and dissolution, which they
employed first to declare the relations between crown and colonies a
confederation between states and then to declare that confederation
dissolved;16 a republican doctrine of the relations between the powers
composing a government and between the state and the arms borne by
its citizens; and a sectarian, and increasingly Unitarian, doctrine of the
separation of the state from the church. They were about the creation of a
congregational polity in which the crozier would have little place, though
before Leviathan could lay it down the authority of his sword must be
established.17 They made no attempt to promote a British revolution or
15
I have ventured to do so: Pocock, 1987 (A) and 1988 (B).
16
Ohmori, 1988. 17 Pocock, 1988 (B).
dissolve the authority of George III over his kingdoms; they separated
themselves from the state of Great Britain by declaring their ties with it
dissolved; but their perception of themselves and the governments they
would have was shaped in the first instance by the radical Whig critique of
the Revolution, which was as old as the Revolution itself and was now
being revitalized by the English enemies of George III and the aristocratic
and Anglican régime.
On both sides of the Atlantic an anti-Georgian Whig historiography
took shape, which tended towards both a radical reading of 1688 as
a deposition – the better to threaten George III with the fate of his
predecessor – and a radical critique of 1689 as an insufficient remedy for
political abuses. The commonwealth and republican rhetoric on which
it drew offered means of criticizing the enlightened moves towards
modernity which I have considered in this essay; but at the same time it
appropriated many elements of that progressive programme, presenting
both aristocracy and established clergy as medieval and archaic, instead
of the powerful modernizing forces which the English and Scottish
Enlightenments had shown them to be. The Enlightenment of the ancien
régime had been a direction of modernizing processes by the established
élites; the democratization which followed was both an annexation and a
criticism of progress. It is against a secularizing and democratizing pro-
gressivism, still very much part of our thinking, that the contemporary
polemic against Whig history is for the most part directed; with the effect
that a democratized and secularized society, which certainly exists today, is
being commanded to do without a history that guarantees it.
Starting with a deliberately non-Whiggish reading of the events of 1688,
I have tried to show how they can be situated in the context of continuing
historical processes which can still be used to invest them with significance,
and at the same time to show that they acquired the kind of significance
which goes with the construction of Whig interpretations of history. That
is, it has been my aim to show how Whig histories – I use the plural because
there have been several – have been themselves the product of English,
British and American history, ways of investing it with significances which
it has itself generated.
It is therefore a problem that the demolition of Whig history is a
programme for asking the present to live without a past that justifies it.
To do so vastly enriches our understanding of both the past and the
present; but we need to know whether this is other than a programme
for the owl of Minerva, for mood being the more as our might lessens.
Historiography has been so much a matter of the construction of usable
pasts that it is desirable for the historian engaged in denying the past
usability to ask himself what demands he is making on the present.
Given the world-wide failures of revolutionary dialectic, it should seem
that the deconstruction of history as a process for justifying the present is a
programme for emphasizing irony and contingency, for inviting the inhabit-
ants of the present to conduct their affairs in the knowledge of how very
easily things might have been otherwise, and of how complex and contra-
dictory were the processes that have made them what they are. David Hume,
the first truly great historian of England, clearly thought it good for people
to learn to live in the ironies of history; but he also thought the English
too self-centred, philistine and faction-ridden a mob to sustain such an
awareness very long, and he was not sanguine about their political future.
Two hundred and more years later, here we are. ‘Well, doctor,’ a modern
William might say, ‘what do you think of demystification now?’
CHAPTER 9
Empire, state and confederation: the War

of American Independence as a crisis
in multiple monarchy
(I)
There is taking shape a pattern for the writing of British history,1 of
particular utility to those historians whose attention is focussed on the
history of political discourse. Those of the societies component of what
we call ‘Britain’, ‘the Three Kingdoms’ or ‘the Atlantic archipelago’, whose
political cohesion reached the point of generating several self-centred
political discourses,2 can be studied in both an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’
perspective. In the former case, we examine the political discourse con-
cerned with the structure of the polity and the problems to which it gave
rise; and we examine events and crises in the history of each polity as
taking place in the history depicted by discourse concerning that structure.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we note, the kingdom of
England acquired characteristic patterns of discourse which shaped its
history: the papal aggression, the ancient constitution, the balance of
government, the balance of property; and these constructs retained para-
digmatic status in English historiography so far into the modern period
that, now they no longer possess that status, they have to be considered
factors in shaping English history. During the same period, the kingdom of
Scotland acquired similar patterns of historic self-shaping, but among the
effects of the Union studied in John Robertson’s volume, these had in large
1
Robertson, 1995. This volume arose from a seminar, conducted for the Folger Institute Centre for the
History of British Political Thought, designed to illuminate the history of Scottish political thought
within that setting. The three concluding essays, of which this is one (Pocock, 1995a), and those
contributed by Jacqueline Hill and Ned Landsman the others, pointed towards subsequent seminars
on the Irish and American dimensions of the same history.
2
The stress on the shaping of a political self owes much to recent critical and historical writing, and in
particular to Helgerson, 1992. The assumption behind the present essay is that a public, political and
national ‘self ’ may be created by many actors and authors, and legitimated by their and others’
consent.
134
Empire, state and confederation 135
part to be given up and replaced by others. This process too had long-term
consequences in the history of Scottish historiography.
In the second or ‘external’ perspective, we examine the history of each
polity as shaped by its interactions with neighbouring entities, which may
or may not have been polities or states shaped like itself. We enquire how
these interactions figured in, and helped shape, the discourse of each polity
about itself, and further, whether they generated a discourse of their own,
inventing and shaping the construct of a society of states. In the particular
case of ‘British history’, we note that from at latest the early sixteenth
century, there existed a discourse which spoke of ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’
as together composing an entity named ‘Britain’, which might possess a
history of its own (the historia majoris Britanniae) and might be organized
into a larger polity or association between polities.3 We enquire whether
there existed a discourse concerned with this ‘matter of Britain’, to which
the term ‘British political thought’ might be applied with precision, instead
of being employed loosely to denote the aggregate of political discourses
arising in England, Scotland and elsewhere. It is now clear that we have
found that such a ‘discourse of Britain’ did indeed take shape, but had to
compete on terms often unequal with an English political discourse so
intensely centred on the English political structure and its troubles that it
could do no more (or less) than annex Scotland to itself and consider it part
of English history, and with a Scottish discourse shaped in large measure by
the need to respond to this English self-centredness. We are therefore faced
with a treble structure: there is an English discourse, there is a Scottish, and
there is a discourse of Britain which sometimes posits ‘Britain’ as a political
entity, and sometimes treats it merely as a field in which political (the term
includes confessional and ecclesiastical) entities interact. We deal with
this problem by proposing that the history of ‘Britain’, or ‘the Three
Kingdoms’, is that of a ‘multiple monarchy’, whose political structure is
indeterminate for the reason that it is multiplex; with the consequence that
such terms as ‘empire’ and ‘confederation’ have both been found applicable
in discoursing of its character, and that from time to time choices have had
to be made between implications arising from these terms.
It has further to be kept in mind that the ‘external’ perspective does not
stop with the field of relationships constituting ‘Britain’. The kingdoms
and other entities constituting archipelagic ‘Europe’ interact with the
kingdoms, confederations and empires constituting adjacent continental
‘Europe’; they affect one another’s history and create a history which they
3
Mason, 1994.
have in common. In the case we are considering, the kingdom and empire
of ‘Great Britain’ are shaped largely by the intervention of, and by inter-
action with, the imperial and maritime wars of continental ‘Europe’; but
they respond vigorously enough to impose themselves on the history of this
entity (or society) and help to shape it. We are also concerned with a period
in which these multiple histories, ‘British’ and ‘European’, extend them-
selves across the Atlantic4 and play a part in involving the English and
French colonies on the American seaboard in an imperial struggle for
control of the interior of that continent. The relations between archipelagic
and continental ‘Europe’ do much to remodel those between maritime,
piedmont, Laurentian and Mississippian ‘America’. Only in the period of
the American Revolution is it determined that certain colonies will become
‘states’ and organize themselves as an ‘empire’ – which is at the same time a
‘republic’ and a new species of ‘confederation’ – and that an entity named
‘America’ will henceforth create a history (United States and Canadian) of
its own making.5
(II)
The obstacle which had prevented the Union of the Crowns being more
than a personal union – neither a confederation nor an incorporation of the
two kingdoms – was in the first place the intensity of the internal union of
the kingdom of England. The Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) had
proclaimed and enacted that this kingdom was an ‘empire’ in the sense
that it contained within itself absolute sovereignty over itself, so that its
king (in parliament or out of it) was absolute and sovereign head of all
jurisdiction both spiritual and temporal, and therefore head of the English
Church as inseparable from the English body politic. ‘Empire’ in this sense
could not be shared with another prince, at peril of mitigating the absolute
separation from Rome on which Englishmen’s hopes of salvation were seen
to depend; and if the king of England could not conceivably share his
imperium with the pope, he could not share it with himself as king of Scots.
The two crowns, the two realms and the two churches should therefore
become one; but the English showed themselves incapable of imagining
this union as other than an annexation of the Scottish dimension, in each
case, to the English. As we shall see, they were responding as much out of
4
The Annual Register in the years of the American revolution regularly treated events in the colonies in
a section headed ‘History of Europe’.
5
See Pocock, 1957, 1987 (B), 1988a.
insecurity as out of arrogance; but they were able to claim that head and
body were bound together in the English body politic by municipal laws
and an ecclesiastical structure generated by that body itself, which could
not be given up without terminating that body’s existence. The Scots were
necessitated to reply that their king wore a crown as imperial as the English
one, and that they had created laws and a church polity as much their own
as were those of the English. If they were on the whole more willing than
were the English to contemplate assimilation of these structures to those of
their neighbours, they drew the line at being annexed and swallowed up,
and at being assimilated in the sense of digested by the unmodified church-
state of the English monarchy. The Stuart dynasty therefore found itself
ruling a multiple monarchy, or more precisely a multiplicity of kingdoms,
wearing at the same time the imperial crown of Scotland, the imperial
crown of England and the presumptive crown of Ireland created by
conquest alone and inseparably annexed to the second but not the first
person of this far from perfect trinity. The age of the Three Kingdoms had
begun, and it is a key problem in ‘British history’ to determine its character
and duration.
It is possible to speak of the Three Kingdoms as constituting ‘a monarchy’,
as we speak of the Spanish or the Austrian ‘Monarchy’ as a co-incidence
of many crowns upon one head.6 Since ‘empire’ in the Roman sense
denoted a ‘universal monarchy’, it is also possible to describe any one of
these monarchies as an ‘empire’, and James VI and I toyed briefly (as did
the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell after him) with the thought of
assuming the title of ‘Emperor of Great Britain’. But there was the
difficulty that as king of England, France and Ireland (to give that title in
its partly fictional fullness) he possessed a sovereignty more ‘imperial’, in
the sense given it by the Act in Restraint of Appeals, than any he could
possess as ‘emperor’, and by no means capable of being shared with the
latter sovereignty, had that ever come to be invented (which is why it was
not). We may see that the entity called ‘England’ was obliged to assume
‘empire’ in the sense of hegemony over two other kingdoms, precisely for
the reason that it possessed an ‘empire’ in the sense of sovereignty over itself
which it could not afford to share with them in a union of equals. Whether
anything similar may be said of Castile in the case of the Spanish
‘Monarchy’ or of the Hapsburg lands in the case of the Austrian, is not a
question to be considered here.
6
Pagden, 1990.
The sovereignty or ‘empire’ claimed for the English crown by the Act in
Restraint of Appeals is therefore the key to English history in the age of the
Three Kingdoms,7 and in the longer period of early modern history now
extended through the ‘long eighteenth century’ to 1832. It was a sovereignty
as well ecclesiastical as civil; and to make it a ‘key’ to history does not mean
that it was a rock-solid and unshakable consolidation of national power
which of itself rendered England capable of ‘empire’ over the other king-
doms. On the contrary, from a date within the reign of Charles I to the end
of the seventeenth century, it was shaken and very nearly shattered by a
series of violent internal and external crises which became known by the
name of ‘dissolutions of government’. These did not weaken it, so much as
render the exercise of its formidable power deeply unstable; and it was this
instability, coupled with the need to restore and consolidate it by any
means necessary – regicide, restoration and revolution among them –
which rendered impossible any sharing of English sovereignty within a
wider system of multiple monarchy. The English were at times obliged to
exercise ‘empire’ over others because they were unsure of their ‘empire’
over themselves.
It does not diminish the force of these statements if we suppose that the
English civil wars and their long aftermath came about, not through deep-
seated weaknesses in the English structure, but through the strains imposed
by the task of ruling a number of monarchies.8 However the disasters of
1642 originated, once they had come about they were cleavages between
crown and parliament, between the king as head of the church and that
church as many subjects perceived it; and the desperate need to restore
these unities at all costs was a main cause of the revolutionary changes
attempted in their nature. For this reason the English dimension of the
War of the Three Kingdoms (1637–52) had the character of a civil war, in
which Englishmen fought each other, bitterly because unwillingly,9 to
determine the structure of a civil and ecclesiastical polity which they had
thought they shared in common; whereas Scotsmen did not fight each
other very much, and never to determine the character of such a polity, and
the diverse religious and ethnic groups inhabiting (but not yet constituting)
Ireland fought each other in the absence of any shared polity at all. What
we misname the Third Civil War of 1650–2 was in part a war of England
against an invading king of Scots whose title the English did not challenge,
7
In proposing the concept of this age, I find convenient the limiting dates of 1533 and 1707. Others
could be proposed, and preferred; none can be cast in bronze.
8
Russell, 1991a. 9 Best displayed in Fletcher, 1981.
even when they conquered Scotland in order to dethrone him; in part a war
of religion between the saints of a British Israel and Judah, fought over the
reading of a Covenant which had bound them together.
Any analysis of the great mass of printed discourse produced by the
experience and memory of civil war, regicide and interregnum must lead to
the conclusion that the crucial English experience in the War(s) of the
Three Kingdoms was that of ‘the dissolution of government’, and that it
was remembered as the worst political experience through which England
had ever passed. To say this is to pass over the brief but intense revolu-
tionary moment of 1647–50, when there were those who saw dissolution as
opening a window of opportunity to make all things new; it is to pass over
the no less intense and short-lived visions of rule by liberated soldiers,
visionary parliamentarians, saints in arms or out of them, and a newly
imagined republican citizenry, which were offered as forms of ‘govern-
ment’ alternative to that of the historic institutions of sovereignty.10 The
discourse we have, it could be said, is that of governing élites deeply shaken
but ultimately restored. But the loss it agonizedly describes is not that of
the opportunity to govern so much as the security of being governed
according to law. The ‘government dissolved’ is primarily the Tudor
sovereignty of ‘empire’ in church and state, exercised by king and parlia-
ment in a relationship variously described; secondly, the ‘ancient constitu-
tion’ held to underpin it and provide it with a history; thirdly, the
condition of civil government itself, which delivers humans from the
appalling responsibility to choose between forms of legitimate rule, or to
choose a form of government where none exists and legitimate it out of no
resources other than their own unaided natures.11 ‘The dissolution of
government’ was recalled as so dreadful an experience that it remains
amazing that John Locke, a powerful and cautious thinker, should, even
in a moment of radical aberration, have recommended it in print as a right
and prerogative vested in a people who might exercise it of their own
choice. The printed discourse of 1689 loses no time in denying that it has
occurred.12
The failure even to attempt revolutionary experiment in England during
the 1650s – which includes the failure to attempt creating a ‘Britain’ out of the
conquests of Ireland and Scotland – led to the successive restorations of
the English and Tudor institutions of government between 1659 and 1662.13
10
See Lamont, ‘The Puritan revolution’, and Pocock and Schochet, ‘The Interregnum’, in Pocock,
1993 (B).
11
Zagorin, 1954; Wallace, 1968; Judson, 1980. 12 Kenyon, 1977. 13 See Hutton, 1985.
In English terms, we can see that these amounted to a programme of
restoring unity between crown and parliament, and (as a precondition
rather than a consequence) between crown and national church; and we
have a wealth of literature on the complex reasons why this programme
failed and had to be re-attempted in 1688–9. There is not so much
literature, either contemporary or modern, on Restoration and its failure
in Scotland, and we are uncertain how far to regard it as a provincial
variation on an otherwise English theme. It seems to have consisted largely
of an experiment in episcopacy, with some support from a nobility weary
of clerical and Covenanter rule.14
Viewed in English terms, the Revolution of 1688–9 takes on the char-
acter of a ‘second Restoration’; a reconstruction, but at the same time
re-stabilization, of the conditions under which crown, parliament and
national church could co-exist.15 There were some significant concessions
on points of prerogative,16 and of parliamentary authority in determining
the succession to the crown; the Anglican clergy and squirearchy made
significant changes in their position on both authority and dissent.17 But
the crown defined by the Act of Succession was stronger in its relations with
parliament than the crown before 1688, and the Act of Toleration did so
much to confirm as well as to mitigate the Anglican monopoly of office
that it came to stand beside the Test and Corporation Acts as pillars of the
Hanoverian régime.18 So far we can go in maintaining an ‘English’ and
‘internal’ perspective, in considering the Revolution as produced by and
giving answers to the problems of a peculiarly English history. How it
might appear in the context of a Scottish, or an Irish, history ‘internally’
viewed is another story, or more correctly two stories. But recent historio-
graphy has forcefully reminded us that no ‘internal’ perspective is suffi-
cient. The event could not have happened at all if it had not happened in a
‘European’ context, and it was very largely its character as an event in that
context which obliged its enlargement into an event occurring in a ‘British’
context, which (in turn) it deeply changed and helped create.
(III)
The problems of English politics can be made to explain the invitation to
William of Orange in 1688, but do not explain his motives for accepting it,
or for having a powerful armada already in readiness. These must be
14 15
[See now Jackson, 2003.] This is vigorously argued by Scott, 1988. 16 Schwoerer, 1981.
17 18
Spurr, 1992; Rupp, 1986. This perspective seems to emerge forcibly from Clark, 1985.
explained in terms of continental power politics, not excluding William’s
ambitions dynastic and otherwise; though we must avoid making the inane
assumption that because English history cannot fully explain these events,
it has therefore no autonomous existence or internal logic of its own.
Nevertheless, its problems in this period were external and dynastic as
well as internal and structural; the multiple monarchy of the restored Stuart
brothers was so weak in the face of French power – perceived as aiming at a
‘universal monarchy’ – that French intervention in court and parliamen-
tary politics was omnipresent, easier to resent than to evade. William set
sail with his armada intending to bring the Three Kingdoms into his anti-
French alliance, and not unmindful of his wife’s expectations as heir to
their crowns. But it is among the many extraordinary ironies of the series of
events he unchained that the Three Kingdoms were weak and distracted at
the time he annexed them to his ambitions, so much so that they seemed
doomed to satellite status under French or Dutch hegemony; yet he
mobilized in them a military, fiscal and political power which changed
them profoundly and proved formidable, not only in furthering his object-
ives in continental politics, but in making possible, but at the same time
problematic, an English and British involvement in the pursuit of those
same objectives.
There is an English history driven by the need to maintain the system of
sovereignty laid down by the Act in Restraint of Appeals, and to avoid at all
costs the disaster of renewed civil war and dissolution of government. In
this context the Revolution of 1688–9 looks like a ‘second Restoration’, a
consolidation of that sovereignty by the removal of a king who was
subjecting it to too much strain. Yet the removal of a king was a desperate
action, entailing the worst risks in the English historical memory, and the
English were moved to run these risks only by a dynastic occurrence.
William could never have sailed but for the birth of the infant prince
James Francis Edward, and the chance to safeguard his wife’s inheritance
by proclaiming that birth spurious; and it was in the hope of maintaining
the infant’s rights that James II fled from his rebellious daughter, his
rebellious or uncooperative subjects and the overwhelming power of the
prince who had appeared in their support, and placed himself and his son
under French protection. By so doing he ensured that civil war in England
would not be an aspect of the second war of the Three Kingdoms, which
lasted until Glencoe and Limerick; but he left England exposed to a threat,
which lasted for six decades and longer, of foreign invasion in exploitation
of a contested dynastic succession. Not William alone, but his subjects and
his successors, were obliged to engage the British kingdoms in European
war to protect the Revolution Settlements; the European conflict of
1688–97 includes among its names that of ‘the War of the English
Succession’. War abroad to protect the Protestant Succession at home
was necessary in order to impose stability upon the recurrent problems of
English government; but James achieved a further measure of destabiliza-
tion since, by withdrawing his son and himself to France, he left the church
of England a further reminder of the paradox that the Protestant
Succession was being maintained by means the church could not whole-
heartedly accept. It was a recurrent problem of English history that the
church could not quite trust its own supreme head, and the problem was
not yet solved.
In Scotland, a Presbyterian seizure of ecclesiastical power set up prob-
lems in the history of that church and state.19 In Ireland, the last war of
Protestant conquest occurred in a multi-ethnic history shaped along other
lines. We return to the Revolution in Anglo-British and British-European
history. If the Revolution looks like a second Restoration in the enduring
context, the moyenne durée, of Tudor political and ecclesiastical structures,
there are other contexts in which it looks like a revolution in several
meanings of the term: like a peripeteia in the last months of 1688, like a
ridurre ai principi in the first months of 1689, and like a novus ordo
seculorum in a perception taking shape over the decade of the 1690s. Of
these terms in the vocabulary of revolution, the two first are ancient and
early modern, while the third draws closer to the modern meaning of the
term (perhaps growing obsolete under post-modern conditions). The
needs of war on the continent obliged William and his commanders to
complete the reconquest of the archipelago – Dutch and French generals
campaigned in Ireland in a shared distaste for their surroundings – and
then to that massive reconstruction of the English capacity to make and
finance war which became known by the linked terms of ‘standing army’
and ‘public credit’, and was perceived as altering the political structure of
the community and the historical conditions which connected men with
their political societies. By 1698, English, Scottish and Anglo-Irish pub-
licists were embarked upon a debate which explicitly premised that war and
politics had become modern and commercial,20 and that the European
societies conducting them were structurally unlike what they had been
19
For 1688 in Scottish history, and Scotland in the history of 1688, see among other treatments Cowan,
1991; Lenman, 1992; and for its setting in British history, Harris, 1997; Murdoch, 1998, ch. 3,
pp. 33–47.
20
Pocock, 1975, ch. 13; Hont, 1990.
under ancient (Greek and Roman) or medieval (Gothic and feudal) con-
ditions. These writers further debated how far this great historical change
was to be welcomed and how far dreaded, or what mixture of the two
responses was appropriate and prudent.
The government of England was being transformed by the same pro-
cesses that obliged it to assume a newly powerful role in the British
archipelago, the European continent, the oceans beyond and the
American, Indian and African regions then becoming provinces of
the world system. There were many, in city as well as country, who resented
the ways in which these British and particularly European involvements
were incrementally altering the character of political life, and turned their
resentment against the Revolution of 1688–9, which they correctly saw as
the take-off point of all these developments. The war against French
universal monarchy, whose necessity they need not deny, was being con-
ducted in such a way as involved England both in the creation of an
‘enormous’ or ‘extensive’ monarchy21 in the archipelago, and in member-
ship of a European confederacy, swayed by Dutch, Hapsburg and later
Hanoverian interests, little less dangerous than Bourbon universal mon-
archy itself. These involvements were subjecting Englishmen to a new
oligarchy made up of patronage-mongers, dissenters, stockjobbers and a
military machine and national debt which fed upon one another. This
polemic was shared by Old Whigs who thought the Revolution had not
gone far enough, and Tories who resented the fact that it had occurred at
all. Defenders of the régime, to 1789 and beyond, noted this overlap
between ‘commonwealth’, ‘patriot’ and ‘Jacobite’ rhetoric, and drew the
conclusion that republicans and absolutists were united against parliamen-
tary monarchy, just as puritans and papists (they said) had been united in
the seventeenth century. This was the point at which tensions arising from
the newness and modernity of the British and European power structure
which England was now obliged to maintain joined and interacted with the
older tensions existing within the edifice of Tudor sovereignty in church
and state; tensions which dynastic uncertainty and unhealed fissures
between crown, clergy and dissent kept alive into the reign of George III.
(IV)
These tensions underlay the union of parliaments which created the
Kingdom of Great Britain, and helped determine the character of both.
21
The former adjective is more than once employed by David Hume, the latter by Edward Gibbon.
Just as in 1603, ‘Britain’ was a policy objective which Scots desired on the
whole more than Englishmen did, but, for that reason among others, could
achieve only on such terms as the English were prepared to concede; it
therefore reflected the preponderance of English power over Scottish. The
Scots thrust the Union on the English; the English imposed the Union on
the Scots, dictating its character for the paradoxical reason that they did not
really want it. Ireland remained at a distance, treated as the recently
reconquered kingdom it really was; though we note the beginnings of a
settler nationalism in which the Anglo-Irish claim equality with the English
on the grounds that they are the conquering, not the conquered people.22
The more utopian schemes put forward by Andrew Fletcher – who has
emerged as a major figure in the canon of Scottish political thinkers23–
reflect the ambivalence of the Anglo-Scottish relationship. In political
practice, Fletcher strove to make the Union a confederation of two king-
doms; in his theoretical discourse, he imagined a Britain, and a Europe,
which should have adopted a ‘Swiss solution’ and become a confederation
of cantons. Implicitly, therefore, he challenged the growing presumption
that Europe, archipelagic and continental, should emerge from the era of
wars of religion – we may count the War of the Three Kingdoms as one
such – and the threat of Hapsburg or Bourbon universal monarchy, as a
‘confederation’ or ‘republic’ of powerful sovereign states, related to one
another by the ties of commerce and enlightenment by the treaties or
foedera 24 which should form the public law of the post-imperial confoeder-
atio. In Fletcher’s system the units were not to be sovereign states but cantons
ruled by their militias and their landesgemeinde. On the one hand, he joined
with those who believed that monarchies maintaining armies by mortgaging
their futures would prove too powerful and at the same time too unstable
to preserve the peace of Europe and the liberty of the individual; on the
other, the cantonal image was necessary to ensure that his confederation
appeared Swiss rather than Polish, a league of republics in which free men
governed one another rather than of turbulent nobles governing only their
serfs and themselves. David Hume, the next great thinker in the Scottish
canon, busied himself in showing that a stable and peaceable Europe could
consist of powerful and wealthy sovereign states, diverse in their political
structures;25 the advice which the Swiss Rousseau tendered to Poles and
22
Molyneux, 1698; Simms, 1982; Hill, 1995. 23 Mason, 1994; above, p. 58.
24
It seems no accident that the major archival achievement of Anne’s reign was Thomas Rymer’s
Foedera (1704–13), a collection of the external acts of the English Crown preserved among its records.
Douglas, 1943, pp. 285–301.
25
David Hume, ‘Of the balance of power’, Miller, 1985, pp. 332–41; Robertson, 1993.
Corsicans places him in the company of Andrew Fletcher, of whom he may
or may not have heard. It was this confrontation between an ideology of
state-building and its alternative in early modern discourse which lent a
contemporary poignancy to John Robertson’s seminar and its successor,26
conducted at the Folger Library in the years of debate over Maastricht and
ratification.
The English of 1707, it may be said, cared for none of these things, and it
was their indifference and introversion, rather than their vaulting ambi-
tion, which ensured that the Union would be one of incorporation rather
than confederation. They acquired empire, in this case at least, not in the
lapidary ‘fit of absence of mind’, but out of unwillingness to consider their
relations with others in any conceptual form, with the result that these
could take no other form than that of an extension of the system to which
they were accustomed. They had reasons, however – it may further be said –
for this extreme and now and then appalling self-centredness. They had
recently acquired an imperial capacity to act as a major power by sea and
land, and were divided as to whether they were happy with it; if some
saw the opportunities of empire and pursued them, others saw the same
opportunities and rejected them with fear and loathing; indeed, it is
uncommon to find a perceptive author in whom these responses are not
mixed. If we probe, and when they probed, the reasons for this powerful
ambivalence, it is not long before we come upon the roots of instability
within the Tudor system of sovereignty in church and state which had
caused so many dissolutions of government in the seventeenth century and
were not fully removed in the eighteenth.27 It took a long time to legitimate
the Revolution Settlement, and longer than we used to suppose to legit-
imate the Hanoverian Succession. If this has been one of the chief lessons
taught by recent historiography,28 a corollary must be that the English
response to instability old and new was immediate, instinctive and non-
negotiable. The unity of crown and parliament and of both with estab-
lished church must be maintained at all costs; the problem of ‘empire’ in
the modern sense merged with that of ‘empire’ in the Tudor and medieval.
The unified sovereign legislature which was all that stood between the
26
‘Empire, confederation and republic: from Atlantic dominion to American union’, conducted by
J. G. A. Pocock, January–April, 1992.
27
This would be the present writer’s way of defending the ‘ancien régime’ thesis of J. C. D. Clark. It is
not enough to point out that the Church of England’s hegemony was insecure and imperfectly
enforced; it was enforced, by means that included mitigation, because it was insecure.
28
The reference is to work emphasizing the persistence of English Jacobitism: Cruickshanks, 1982;
Colley, 1982; Monod, 1989.
English and the dissolution of government could not possibly be confed-
erated with any other without putting its unity at risk. This was the
arcanum imperii that determined the course of the Scottish Union; it can
be argued that it also determined the course of the American Revolution.
Defoe’s contention that the Act of Union was fundamental law, and that to
break its terms as a foedus would plunge both kingdoms into a dissolution
of civil society,29 was as fragile as Locke’s theory of revolution, of which it
was in part an elaboration. The English were well acquainted with the
dissolution of government, and would on no account be threatened with it
again. They were indifferent to the emotions of others because they had
been too deeply wounded by their own.
(V)
The British single kingdom – with its newly unified crown and parliament,
its dual structures of laws and churches, its conquered annex in Ireland, its
petty lordships in Man and the Channel Islands not fully incorporated
with either crown, its powerful trading corporations and its colonies in the
Caribbean and the coasts of continental America – had been created to
safeguard its own stability and act as a power in Europe (where it had in
Gibraltar its first continental footing since the loss of Calais). But its two
raisons d’être – internal sovereignty and external dominion – were not quite
reconciled and therefore not quite achieved; there were fears, tensions and
conflicting images. The great successes of Marlborough’s wars and the
defeats inflicted on Louis XIV’s ‘universal monarchy’ brought with them
the fear of entanglement in a confederacy of European powers no less
‘universal’ and permanent, and the fear of permanent subjection to a
régime of stockjobbers, war-mongers and borough-mongers; fears which
could be articulated by Jacobites, commonwealthmen, and Whig or Tory
opposition camarillas, with overtones threatening to the Revolution régime
and the Hanoverian succession, so that the language of corruption destab-
ilized the dynasty and drew attention to the instability of the churches. The
reserve power of the English parliament and the restive counties and
boroughs behind it took control, under Tory leadership, of the formidable
military and financial machine built by William III and the Junto Whigs,30
and withdrew it from its continental alliances in the manoeuvres leading to
29
Penovich, 1995, esp. p. 237.
30
The growth of this war-making and imperial machinery of state throughout the eighteenth century
has been studied by Brewer, 1989.
the Treaty of Utrecht, an assertion of the autonomy of the islands in the
politics of Europe so decisive that it won the approval of the historian Lord
Macaulay and could be praised as setting up a ‘balance of power’ which
stabilized the European ‘republic’.31 Yet the high costs of Utrecht were seen
in the succession crisis which accompanied the illness and death of Anne,
and brought the Hanoverian line to the throne by a party triumph which
was ruthlessly imposed on England and resisted by rebels in Scotland, and
which left behind it a weakness in legitimation that two reigns could not
live down.
There ensued a ‘patriot’ discourse – sometimes deist and sometimes
Anglican in England and Wales, sometimes radically covenanting in
Scotland – which defended the ‘country’ against the corrupting effects of
high finance, European diplomacy and Whig oligarchy, and responded in
its own way to the growing power of commerce and imperial aggression by
speaking out for a ‘blue-water’ policy which pursued maritime empire
without European alliances and standing armies. It scarcely concealed its
latent anti-Hanoverianism, and its persistent calls for reliance on the
county militias were not unjustly charged with weakening the régime’s
military power against the Stuart exiles and their French allies, fear of
whom kept the spectre of ‘universal monarchy’ stalking the English map of
Europe. It is being shown, particularly by Eliga H. Gould,32 how in the
middle decades of the eighteenth century the incursion and defeat of Prince
Charles Edward coincided with the reversal of alliances as between Austria
and Prussia – once so central an object of historical study under the name
of ‘the Diplomatic Revolution’ – and very importantly the re-organization
of the English33 militia as a home-defence army, to consolidate the
Hanoverian régime in Great Britain and distance it from the power-
conflicts of German-speaking Europe, where the anti-French cause was
fatefully left in the apparently Protestant and unentangling hands of the
king of Prussia.
In the opinion of Edward Gibbon, the re-organization of the militia
further coincided with the accession of George III – a ‘British prince’ born
within both the realm and the church of England – to deliver the Tory
gentry (to which the Gibbons belonged) from the burden of their lingering
Jacobitism and bring to the Hanoverians their support sometimes so
31
The classic statement of Utrecht’s historical importance by one of its chief British promoters is
Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study of History (London, 1752), letters VII and VIII. For Macaulay’s
verdict (his History did not reach 1713), see his review, ‘Lord Mahon’s War of the Succession in
Spain’, Macaulay, 1901, II, pp. 181–6.
32
Gould, 1991. 33 But not Scottish; see Robertson, 1986.
unwavering as to be an embarrassment to Whigs.34 In the opinion of David
Hume, however, it coincided with the disastrous policies of the elder Pitt,
that ‘wicked madman’35 who had doubled the national debt in pursuit of a
continental empire in America, brought down on Britain the reproach of
seeking ‘universal monarchy’ of a new kind and left it without friends in
Europe to support it against a vengeance-seeking France. The Hanoverian
régime in Britain had extricated itself from one European system to make
itself the centre of an Atlantic and American empire whose brief career
dominates the history of the quarter-century following George’s accession
in 1760.
In the rapid and deeply confusing developments of that period, a king
who had ‘gloried in the name of Britain’ – meaning that he was not a ‘wee
wee German lairdie’ pledged to his Electoral interests – found himself
excoriated as a puppet of villainous ‘North Britons’, both by aristocratic
Whigs infuriated because he had taken over the cause they considered their
own, and by urban demagogues whose antecedents were as Tory as they
were commonwealth. The rapidity of this transformation of discourse, as
well as of behaviour, indicates that the stability and even the legitimacy of
the dynasty and the régime were not complete even after the extinction of
Jacobitism. The early years of the reign witnessed the rallying of many
English Tories to a Whig régime, and of many Scots to a Union in which
what we call Enlightenment defined their place in philosophical terms;36 its
later years were to lay many seventeenth-century ghosts as the Church of
England moved into unreserved support of the Georgian monarchy and
the great principle of subordination. But its first quarter-century witnessed
an alienation of Revolution Whigs from the monarchy, an alienation of
urban crowds from monarchic and aristocratic patronage simultaneously,
and an alienation of newly vocal, largely anti-trinitarian dissent (some of it
originating within the church as well as outside it) from the compromise of
Test and Toleration which formed the ecclesiastical substance of the
Revolution Settlement.37 These were the ‘present discontents’ of
England; Scotland witnessed less alienation, as did Ireland until the mid-
point of the war of 1774–83; but in the larger field of ‘the empire’ – as the
various realms, dominions and dependencies of the imperial crown were
collectively known – there arose a new crisis in multiple monarchy, which
took a turn from which the epithet ‘revolutionary’ need not be withheld.
34
Above, p. 125.
35
Hume, letter to William Strahan, 26 October 1775, in Greig, 1932, vol. II, p. 301. See Hont, 1993.
36
Sher, 1985. 37 Clark, 1985, pp. 207–8, 276, 283.
(VI)
This crisis may be thought of as arising from a change in the character and
self-perception of the formerly and still consciously English colonies of the
crown on the American seaboard, excluding the Caribbean and the Gulf
of St Lawrence.38 Its crucial and revolutionary step was the declaration of
1776 that what had been termed ‘colonies’ were now to be considered, of
right were, and therefore in some sense always had been, independent
‘states’. From this it may be inferred, without too much simplification,
that ‘colonies’ had been defined as something less than ‘states’, and now
claimed that status as a step so radical that it entailed a concomitant claim
to ‘independence’. What then was the legal status of a ‘colony’, and had
that status been clarified in law? Here we may find ambiguity; a colony’s
charter, if it had one, might authorize it to act and exist as something in the
nature of a trading company, or a civil corporation akin to a borough, or
(to look to extremes) a body political, ecclesiastical as well as civil, subject
to a crown whose authority ruled it as the same authority ruled the realm of
England according to the Act in Restraint of Appeals. But there were no
colonial bishops appointed by royal letters, even in episcopalian Virginia;
and bishops as spiritual peers could function only within the historical
structure of the English realm. The multiplicity of churches and sects in the
American colonies viewed as a whole obliges us to think of Anglo-
American religious culture as in a loose sense congregational,39 and there
were sectors in which it was becoming increasingly unitarian. The structure
of Tudor sovereignty did not in this sense apply.
There was a very strong sense in which colonists felt themselves to be
Englishmen (whatever their ethnic origins), subjects of the crown of Great
Britain and entitled to the liberties and protection of English law. But once
the status of ‘colonies’ within the ‘empire’ was called in question, as it was
by the policy of which the Stamp Act (1765) was part, its indeterminacy
began to raise serious questions.40 Even under royal governors, the colonies
were not vice-royalties, subject kingdoms, realms or dominions, as were the
components of the Spanish Monarchy; even under vigorously assertive
colonial assemblies, they were not sovereign ‘estates’ or ‘states’ like those
composing the Dutch republic. If they had enjoyed any such status, the
British ‘empire’ might have acknowledged a jus publicum regulating
38
Greene’s (1986 and 1990) is the fullest and most illuminating study of this process.
39
The American Revolution as a war of religion is studied by Clark, 1993.
40
Greene, 1986, 1990, and Koebner, 1961, chs. 4 and 5.
relations between its component ‘states’ and the imperial crown which
ruled them; and that jus might have defined it as a ‘confederation’ and an
‘empire’ (though the Swiss and Dutch confederations could not be known
by the latter term). But if the colonies lacked any clear legal definition,
there could be no jus publicum, and George III enjoyed more ‘empire’
within the realm of Great Britain than he did in the full extent of his
dominions. It came indeed to be said that there existed, or had existed, a
code or consensus of informal understandings which governed the relations
between crown, parliament and colonial governors and assemblies; and
there were those – in fact there still are41 – who claimed that this code
enjoyed the immemorial and customary authority of an ‘ancient consti-
tution’. But Edmund Burke – who appealed eloquently for its perpetuation
in the face of rival theories of empire – seems to have presented it in terms
rather of the prudence of gubernaculum than of the binding precedents of
jurisdictio; and the apex of the ancient constitution had long been the
sovereignty of the king-in-parliament.
This ‘empire’, then, differed from other systems of that name in that it
was not composed of sovereign or quasi-sovereign ‘states’ and was not held
together by pacta, foedera or a jus publicum, but by the sovereignty of the
crown in parliament, coupled with the common law in which the rights of
Englishmen were held to be enshrined. It was one of those unwritten,
informal arrangements in which the English believe themselves to excel,
but sovereignty in this sense had memorably collapsed in the previous
century, and had had to be restored in the form of an unbreakable location
of the royal authority in parliament (so that, it was commonly said, the
crown’s ‘influence’ had increased as its ‘prerogative’ had been lessened).
The informal structure of ‘empire’ – meaning the relation of the crown to
those of its dominions which were colonies but not realms – disintegrated
through the 1760s and 1770s, and Edmund Burke was left appealing to the
principle that it was precisely its informality which should never have been
challenged, and so destroyed, by attempts at definition which he charac-
terized as empty ‘theory’ for the reason that existing law was incapable of
providing the answers. The reasons why a problem arose to which there was
no clear answer have next to be considered.
To the extent to which the individual colonist could be considered an
Englishman – a definition he might insist on carrying to the fullness of its
extent – he could be thought of as appealing to his rights at common law,
and making this appeal to the sovereign who protected and acknowledged
41
Greene, 1986, 1990, ch. 7, pp. 144–8; Reid, 1981. Cf. Tucker and Hendrickson, 1982.
these rights; as doing so even when, and because, the sovereign was
legislating in a way the colonist considered an infringement of them.
The locus of such appeals was in parliament, but not only was the colonist
unrepresented in that body, parliament was itself now part of the sover-
eign – the crown-in-parliament – against whose legislation he was appeal-
ing. There next arose a dimension of the problem in which the rights of the
colonist were no longer vested simply in his relation as subject to the law
and the sovereign, but were located in the new problematic of subordinate
legislatures. He was represented, or so he might claim, in the assembly of
his colony, and if his right not to be taxed without his own consent was
situated there, it followed that he should not, or in a language derived from
the law could not, be taxed without the consent of that assembly. But if
right and representation, with which the common law unequivocally
endowed him, were located in the colonial assembly, it should follow
that the same law provided and regulated a process by which taxation
was imposed by parliament with the consent of the colonial assemblies.
This it did not do, by any process less informal than that in which the issue
had become critical before 1763; and it followed that any appeal to rights
enshrined in the common law was enough to destroy that law’s informal
and customary character by asking it to provide guarantees more formal
than it possessed the means of formulating. The essence of common law
is the written (or formal) expression of unwritten (and informal)
understandings.
From this dilemma there flowed two consequences. In the first place, the
rights of Englishmen at common law came to be re-codified in American
colonial discourse as rights by a higher law of which common law could
always be described as a manifestation: a law of nations and/or of nature. It
was by this route that Americans came to believe that they enjoyed the
rights of Englishmen in a higher and more perfect sense than that in which
Englishmen enjoyed them, and were by nature that which Englishmen
were merely by history. But a higher and more ideal history was necessary
in order to explain how this had come about; and the second consequence
with which we have to deal was that the colonists began to provide
themselves with a history in which their rights as Englishmen were seen
as having been vested from the beginning in their capacity to represent
themselves by a law of nature. From the writings of Richard Bland of
Virginia, in the middle 1760s, there began to take shape a history which in
its completed form may be stated as follows.42 Colonists emigrating into
42
Greene, 1986, 1990, ch. 5, and Ohmori, 1988.
the wilderness had taken with them the rights of Englishmen, including the
rights to property, representation, and the protection of the crown, whose
sovereignty they had therefore been necessitated to carry with them. On
entering the wilderness, however, they had entered the state of nature,
whether as that term was used by theorists of jus civile, to denote a
condition antecedent to the establishment of civil society, or as it was
used by theorists of jus gentium, to denote the space in which sovereign
entities were related to one another. For if rights were sufficient to generate
civil sovereignty, the rights of Englishmen, transformed by the wilderness
into rights of nature, had re-generated the sovereignty of the crown of
England as that of a sovereign over subjects defined by the law of nature
alone.
If it were held – as by a civilian or a scholastic jurist it might not have
been – that the rights-bearers negotiated with the sovereign the terms on
which they would accept him as such, it followed – as for a line of colonial
theorists from Bland to Jefferson it came to follow – that each body of
colonists had negotiated with the king of England a pactum or foedus by
which he became their sovereign, but his sovereignty was exercised pri-
marily in the assembly which represented them and their rights. If it were
held – as by theorists of jus gentium like Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel it
was coming to be held – that between sovereigns in the state of nature there
could exist only foedera, and that it was a question how far a system of
foedera might develop into the jus publicum of a confederation like the
Swiss or the German, or of Europe ideally considered as a republic of states
held together by great treaties like those of Westphalia or Utrecht – then
the British ‘empire’ might be considered a series of pacta between diverse
civil societies and their sovereign the king of Great Britain, and a series of
foedera which permitted the crown-in-parliament at Westminster to exer-
cise certain powers for the good of the ‘empire’ as a society of civil societies,
all of them ‘English’ in the sense in which the rights of Englishmen were
the rights of nature.
To colonists, this line of argument – here abstracted and ideally
expressed – had the advantage that it gave each ‘colony’ a legal definition
and being, beyond any with which the common law had hitherto endowed
it, and at the same time demonstrated that rights at that law were rights by
the law of nature – a proposition which, in itself, nobody could very well
deny. It further supplied ‘empire’, as that term was used in British context,
a legal definition, a common sovereignty, and a jus publicum with which it
had not hitherto provided itself. But it did so at the price, which to
colonists was not a price but an enhancement of status, of re-defining the
‘empire’ as a confederation; and this was a price which Englishmen, and at
this period to all appearances most Scots, were not willing to pay at all.
John Robertson’s volume (1995) has been concerned with the Union of the
Parliaments as a great act of state which entailed the rejection of a ‘con-
federating’ in favour of an ‘incorporating’ union; and we have seen that the
primary reason for this decision was that the ‘empire’ exercised by the
English crown in the Westminster parliament could ‘incorporate’ other
bodies politic within itself, but could not ‘confederate’ or be confederated
with them. Therefore the English (and the Scottish Unionist) response to
the claims which Americans now began to put forward was, typically, that
they could imagine (though they might be unwilling to effect) ‘incorpor-
ating’ colonies within the realms (and its ‘empire’) by giving them repre-
sentation in the Westminster parliament, but could never accept, and
could hardly even understand, the proposal to reconstitute the ‘empire’
as a ‘confederation’. The American Revolution is not causally a conse-
quence of the Union of England and Scotland, but it is a consequence of a
political logic contained within it.
(VII)
This was the logic of ‘empire’ in the English sense of the term. This had in
1533 meant the sovereignty of the crown in church and state; it had not then
been necessary to determine in detail how far this sovereignty was exercised
in parliament and how far out of it. There had ensued a series of devastating
crises and ‘dissolutions of government’, which had led to the decision that
the unity of crown with parliament and with church must be maintained at
all costs, even the cost of concessions by crown to parliament and by
crown-in-parliament to English dissent and Scottish distinctiveness; at
the cost last named the Scots had been incorporated in ‘empire’ as the
English understood it. There had further been set up a powerful structure
of military, naval and civil power, capable of exercising imperial control
within the ‘extensive monarchy’ of the archipelago, in the reason of state of
the European ‘republic of states’, and on the oceans and in the American
and Asian continents constituting European ‘empire’ in the modern sense
of the term; but ‘empire’ in this sense was still perceived as guaranteeing the
unity of crown and parliament which constituted ‘empire’ in the oldest
sense, and guaranteed England against a recurrence of seventeenth-century
disorder. Dynastic and ecclesiastical instabilities had kept the régime at risk
down to a time still recent when the first American crisis began; and the
rapidity with which the Jacobite menace of the 1740s had been succeeded
by the ‘present discontents’ of the 1760s showed that the monarchy of
George III was even now not perfectly legitimated. The ‘growth of political
stability’43 in England (now Britain) since 1660 had been very real, but had
not reached finality.
These historical considerations were interestingly synthesized by
Thomas Pownall, the successive editions of whose treatise on The
Administration of the Colonies supply an acute commentary on the growth
of the imperial crisis in the years either side of 1770.44 Casting about for a
response to the increasing demand for a definition of the colonies as legal
entities within a political system, he examined (as did others) the solution
of proposing that they were (or had been) ‘palatinates’, in which the powers
of the crown had been deputed to be exercised by local authorities. Chester,
Durham and the Principality of Wales had been dominions of this order
until their incorporations within the realm; the Isle of Man and the
Channel Islands still were. Ireland as a kingdom by conquest occupied a
different category, and Pownall did not stir up the ancient controversy as to
whether the crown of Scotland had been subordinate to that of England
before the incorporating union. With regard to colonies, however, he
insisted that the status of palatinates was obsolete and no longer available.
It had existed only under feudal conditions, when the king’s personal
authority was not fully incorporated with that of his realm, and the
dualities of Fortescuean kingship and the King’s Two Bodies had been
actual and visible. About 1660, however, in a historical process which
Pownall significantly associated with the Navigation Acts, these conditions
had ceased; the king became incorporated with his realm in the conjoint
sovereignty of king, lords and commons, and subjection to his authority
had become subjection to his authority in parliament.45 As subjects to the
crown, therefore, colonists were subjects to the realm (so that, he might
have argued, when Englishmen infuriated Americans by speaking of ‘our
colonies’ they spoke within their rights). The flaw in this reality was that
colonists were unrepresented in parliament, in the exercise of the sover-
eignty to which they were subject. If they could not be granted such
representation, ad hoc agreements would have to be worked out with the
assemblies in which they were represented, recognizing the system’s neces-
sary imperfection and accommodating to it.
43
Plumb, 1967.
44
Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, wherein their Rights and Constitution are
Discussed and Stated (London, 1764; five editions by 1774). See Bibliography B, sub Pownall, 1971.
45
Pownall, 1971, pp. 138–40, 172–3.
Pownall supplies us with a model which may be set up in opposition to
that extractable from colonial argument as it developed between Bland and
Jefferson, to show that in the imperial crisis there actually were major issues
at stake. It may be doubted how many of the debaters and spectators
understood them; the history of the controversy can easily be written as
one of incomprehension on both sides. The absence – which Pownall was
trying to supply – of a clear legal concept of a colony as a subordinate
political society led to the controversy’s being conducted as a debate
between local varieties of Englishmen, possessing the same rights and
appealing to the same law and the same sovereign; and on this perspective
it was easy to arrive at the position, upheld by Edmund Burke, that there
were no debatable issues and the mistake lay in trying to debate them. This
is, rather strangely, the position of many American historians, who contend
that the issues could have been resolved and it was only the purblindness of
British ministers which prevented this happening. It is curious to see them
arguing that the foundation of their republic, and its new birth of freedom,
were not inevitable but could (and should?) have been avoided. The
advantage of the argument being advanced in this essay is that it provides
the American Revolution with a measure of historical logic. The develop-
ment of the colonies into self-conscious political societies, and the argu-
ments they adopted to declare themselves such, led them to propose, in
effect, the conversion of the ‘empire’ into a ‘confederation’. There was
nothing illogical about this, since it was possible for an association of states
to be both, and Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel were inscribed as names in
the American pantheon because they showed this to be possible. But in
addressing such proposals to the British crown-in-parliament, the colonists
were dealing with an entity to which the term ‘empire’ denoted its own
sovereignty and its own unity, which must be maintained at all costs as the
only guarantee against its own dissolution, as well as the only guarantee of
its continuing imperial power. They thus found themselves contending
with the ghost of history, with that terrifying ‘rhinoceros charging out of
the past’, of which Jonathan Scott has so wittily and eloquently written.46
The colonial argument came to set up the image of a series of quasi-
contractual foedera or relationships between each colony, considered as a
‘people’ seated in the state of nature, and the crown of England (later Great
Britain); relations with the crown which were not essentially, but at best
contingently, subordinate to the authority of parliament. They claimed in
short to be subject to the crown but not to the crown-in-parliament; and
46
Scott, 1991, pp. xiii–xiv, 26–49.
Pownall had much of the authority of English history on his side when he
sought to show them that this claim was historically obsolete, since the civil
wars, followed by the growth of commerce and modern ‘empire’, had
ensured that crown and parliament were so irrevocably incorporated in
one another that colonies were necessarily subordinate to their conjoint
sovereignty, and could only aspire (perhaps in vain) to be represented in its
exercise. But the unity of crown and parliament was recent: no older than
1660 in Pownall’s projection, and perhaps a century younger if we listen to
Edward Gibbon; and the extinction of the Jacobite threat did not mean
that it had ceased to be fragile. In appealing to the crown but not to
parliament, the colonists came to be seen as separating the two; they
were unwittingly raising the spectre of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King, sup-
posed to have guided, through sinister maternal and Scottish familiars, the
unwise steps of George III in separating himself from the natural leaders of
his parliament. The radical populism of much American language aligned
the colonists with those, in London and elsewhere,47 who thought the
solution lay in an appeal, from monarchy and aristocracy alike, to the
people as repository of all patriot virtue; but the Americans were not
appealing to the English or British people, so much as they were claiming
to be peoples in their own right. In pursuit of this claim, they set up a
confederal relation which they supposedly enjoyed with the crown; this was
to separate the king’s personal from his parliamentary authority, with the
result that those to whom it mattered above all to maintain the unity of
crown and parliament could, perhaps must, respond that the American
argument simultaneously did the work of Tories who would exalt the King
above the two houses and of republicans who would reduce him to a mere
‘duke of Venice’. It was already a staple of Whig argument that Jacobites
and republicans were allied against the sovereignty of crown and parlia-
ment, as had been the papists and puritans of old. In the first three decades
of George III’s reign, all these ghosts were gibbering in the streets (which is
not to say that new things in British politics were not appearing at the
same time).
(VIII)
This is to present the crisis leading to American independence as a crisis in
multiple monarchy: not indeed in the multiple monarchy of the Three
Kingdoms, but in the very specific and self-conscious structure of the
47
Sainsbury, 1987; Bonwick, 1977.
English monarchy and its realm and empire, occurring when colonies
which had not been legally defined as distinct political societies laid
claim to that status and began defining themselves, in their own terms, as
what they ended by terming ‘states’. If they had been ‘states’ within a legally
defined ‘empire’ with a jus publicum, there might still have been a crisis
leading to independence, but it would have been of a different character
from the one which in fact occurred. We have seen that they began, but did
not complete, shaping a concept of empire as confederation, in which each
component contained the seeds of its own sovereignty and enjoyed its own
relation with the crown as a sovereign shared by all. This was not so much
unacceptable as unintelligible to the politicians and publicists of the king-
dom of Great Britain, less because they had an alternative concept of their
‘empire’ over colonies than because they had none to speak of, and
employed the term ‘empire’ to mean their sovereignty over themselves,
of which they had assumed the colonists to form part. This sovereignty was
lodged in the king-in-parliament, and the confederal theory of empire
looked like a design to separate the two. James VI and I had strenuously
objected to finding himself the head of two bodies or the husband of two
wives,48 but the seraglio formed of twenty or more independent legislatures
was one from which George III had little need to escape, since he never
entered it and scarcely recognized that it was there. The Anglo-British
response to the semi-articulated trends in the colonial argument was less
rejection than incomprehension. So far was George from aiming at the
status of a Patriot King that he instinctively aligned his authority with that
of parliament, and resolutely upheld the conjoint sovereignty of both. This
increased the fears of those among his subjects, both colonial and metro-
politan, who saw him both as a prisoner of the corruption of parliament,
and as aiming through his sinister advisers at corrupting it himself. The
bogey of the Patriot King returned to haunt him, most of all when – for
once in the history of the British monarchy – he acted as a conqueror, and
in the Quebec Act49 used statute to enact a pactum concessionis with his
newly acquired francophone subjects, guaranteeing to them – to the horror
and dismay of Protestants in Britain, Ireland and America – the continued
exercise of priestly and feudal authority. The image of monarchical tyranny
thus both reinforced and partly concealed the image of absolute parlia-
mentary sovereignty which was the true target of American arguments.
The crown, nevertheless, anchored itself in parliament, and therefore in
a Tudor and parliamentary conception of ‘empire’; it rejected, perhaps
48 49
Mason, 1994 and Wormald, 1992. Lawson, 1989.
without ever comprehending, an American conception of ‘empire’ as
confederation, in which every legislative assembly should represent a dis-
tinct ‘people’ or civil society – or, as the term was coming to be used, a
‘state’ – enjoying its own relationship with the crown. All attempts to
negotiate without resolving this conflict having failed – this is not to say
that none could have succeeded – the revolutionary breaking-point was
reached in the Declaration of Independence, a document which enacts a
great many positions, easier for us to understand once we recognize that it
operates as much within a discourse of jus gentium as within one of jus
civile. Stating its objective initially as that of announcing the separation of
one ‘people’, the American, from another, the British, it employs a
Lockean language framed to ground government in the ‘people’ in order
to assert the equality of all ‘peoples’ with one another, and therefore the
right of any ‘people’ to withdraw from the ties linking it with another. The
implication can only be that there has existed a relationship between as
many ‘peoples’ as there are colonies with delegates at Philadelphia and the
‘people’ (evidently a single one) of Great Britain; that the ties existing
between them have been those provided by the authority of the crown, now
about to be declared dissolved; and that each ‘people’ has possessed and still
possesses the authority to generate its own government, and to enter if it
chooses into pacta and foedera with the crown as furnishing it both with
civil authority and with ties linking it with the other peoples of a confed-
erate empire; a choice, however, now rejected.
The Declaration proceeds to employ a Lockean language of dissolution
of government, with which it indicts the king for misgovernment, pro-
nounces him at war with those of his peoples who are party to the action the
Congress is now taking, and declares his government over them dissolved.
It is presumed, however, that they existed, and possessed both governments
and the capacity to generate them, antecedently of the royal government;
and the consequence must be that it is less the civil government of the
colonies which is being dissolved, than the authority of the crown as
providing a shared government, or ‘empire’, over a confederation of
many ‘peoples’. The British ‘empire’ is being proclaimed a confederation
by the same act as proclaims that confederation dissolved. In consequence,
the Declaration asserts, ‘these united colonies’ are now, and of right ought
to be, ‘independent states’. The phrase ‘of right’ strongly suggests that they
have always been ‘states’, or at least civil societies possessing the capacity to
enter into contracts of government, and into treaties with other societies
and peoples equal with themselves. It is the American solution to the
English failure to furnish colonies with a clearly defined legal and civil
status; very English, both in its use of the term ‘right’ to appeal to
immemorial antiquity and in its adaptation to American purposes of the
Act in Restraint of Appeals’s claim that the realm is an ‘empire, and so hath
been reputed in the world’, possessing an absolute and sovereign capacity
to govern itself.
But since what is being dissolved is not the civil government of a society
so much as the ties between a number of civil societies, it is primarily the
crown’s capacity to constitute and regulate these external relationships
which is being declared at an end; the language of Locke is being injected
into the language of Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel. The matter does not
quite end there, since through the governors it appoints the crown has been
claiming executive authority in the civil government of each colony. In
declaring this at an end and enjoining each colony to set about replacing it,
Congress is effecting in each colony a limited revolution on the scale of 1688:
a partial dissolution of government, or of one component thereof, which
does not amount to a dissolution of the authority composing civil society.
It goes further than 1688 in declaring the crown itself deposed, and
enjoining each colony to embark on the republican road of replacing it;
the republican component in American history is activated from this
moment; but what is being dissolved is a relation between a number of
civil societies, and if ‘dissolution of government’ leads to a ‘state of nature’,
the latter term denotes not the human condition that precedes civil
government, but the ‘state of nature’ in which civil governments exist
with respect to one another. Americans, the Declaration pronounces,
henceforth consider the British government and people ‘as we hold the
rest of mankind, enemies in war and in peace friends’. It is the language of
the jus belli ac pacis, and for the moment it is a declaration of war. The war
may be terminated by a peace treaty or foedus, but not by a confoederatio or
decision to share and obey a common imperium; for that is what has just
been declared dissolved.
Implicit in all this is an acknowledgement of the position articulated by
Pownall, that the crown, parliament and people of Great Britain are so far
incorporated with one another that they cannot be considered apart. There
is no indictment of George III’s government of his kingdom, no suggestion
that this is to be dissolved; those English radicals who threatened the king
with such language were grievously disappointed by the word reaching
them from Philadelphia.50 The Declaration of Independence set out to
separate one ‘people’ from another, with the result that all its Lockean
50
Sainsbury, 1987, pp. 127–31.
indictments of royal misgovernment necessarily implied the existence of a
royal government so far incorporated with the British ‘people’ that to cast
off one was to cast off the other. At this point the confederate theory of
empire collapsed, since it could not be maintained that the English, or by
now the Scottish, people recognized the crown only, or primarily, as the
link between them and other peoples. (The Irish might be another matter.)
The indictment of George III barely conceals an indictment of both
parliament and the people represented by it. Deep down in the language
of the Declaration may be uncovered an acceptance of both the
Fortescuean theory of English kingship and the ‘incorporating’ rather
than ‘confederating’ character of the Union of 1707. The American ‘people’
recognized the ‘British people’ even as it defined itself by defying them.
(IX)
This essay has traced the history of a crisis in multiple monarchy, arising
too late in British history to be solved in the terms – themselves very
imperfectly formulated – taking shape around that concept. Interestingly,
its language was English rather than British; the idioms in which colonial
writers from Bland to Jefferson put forward their concept of empire as
confederation owed little to Andrew Fletcher51 or any of the debates of
Union in 1603 or 1707, and it is something of a puzzle to tell where (other
than in the European classics of jus gentium) they laid hold of them. When
the concept was put to the English, and by this time to the Scots or North
Britons, it encountered quite insuperable obstacles, the reasons for which
lie so deep in English history as well as in that of Union that it is fair to
speak of the American crisis as one in which the English, to say nothing of
the still nascent British,52 were obliged to defend themselves as they
thought their history had shaped them. It was necessary to maintain at
all costs the conjoint sovereignty of the crown-in-parliament, the more so
as the American crisis came when, and perhaps because, the relations
between crown, parliament and people were for domestic reasons quite
sharply destabilized. To unite the colonies with parliament by representa-
tion was one means of achieving this overriding purpose; to subject the
colonies to parliament by imperial and military power was another; to rid
51
Awareness of his argument for a confederating union may be detected in the Scot John Witherspoon;
Greene, 1986, 1990, pp. 155, 172. For Witherspoon see further Sher and Smitten, 1990, section I, chs.
1–6; and Landsman, 1995, pp. 314–17.
52
Colley, 1992.
parliament of the colonies by recognizing their independence was a third,
and from the start there were imperial realists, like David Hume and Josiah
Tucker,53 who wanted to take this route. To compromise the unity of
crown and parliament by sharing the crown with other parliaments was an
alternative not considered, except in a further case which we ourselves have
yet to consider.
With the recognition of American independence in 1783, there began to
be an American history in which the ambiguities of the Declaration of 1776
had to be confronted. In what sense were the united colonies now united
states? Had the thirteen of them merely entered a state of nature in respect
to one another, in which what held them together were merely the foedera
which might constitute an alliance or a confederation, and might or might
not constitute a jus publicum?54 What could have been meant by the
Declaration’s constitution of an ‘American people’ forming a single entity,
and how was it possible for that people to have manifested itself in thirteen
distinct states? Was it conceivable that the unitary people enjoyed sover-
eignty, and that the multiple states existed only as its ‘empire’ defined
them? Out of these linguistic puzzles it was a practical, indeed an imperial,
necessity for James Madison to formulate a science of federal government,
inclusive of Alexander Hamilton’s pronouncement that the United States
formed ‘an empire perhaps the most interesting in the world’.55 It may have
been in large part Americans’ enduring perception of themselves as still
Englishmen, enjoying rights at common law which there must be a
sovereign to protect and enforce, which led to the blend of states’ rights
with national government characterizing the federalist synthesis. In this
process, however, the thesis that each colony was a state, whose political
autonomy was visible in its own separate and distinct history, disappeared
from the discourse of federalism as rapidly as it had been invented to form
part of the discourse of independence. Once Congress affirmed the author-
ity to create the territories which should become states, it exerted an
imperial power of telling each ‘people’ where and how it might create
itself; the empire of liberty was indeed an empire.56
As for the kingdoms and dominions which remained in the allegiance of
George III, the loss of thirteen colonies was a painful but not a revolu-
tionary experience; it diminished the territorial extent of empire without
compelling its relocation in the structure of political authority, and the
fashionable analogy with the decline and fall of Rome was false from the
53
Pocock, 1985, chs. 7, 9. 54 [See now Hendrickson, 2003.]
55 56
The second sentence of The Federalist, no. 1, in any edition. Onuf, 1983; Pocock, 1996c.
start. The American war can only be seen as producing a hardening, to the
point of ruthlessness, of the sovereign power of crown, parliament and all
that they stood for. If some perceived a potentially revolutionary situation
in 1780,57 this must be seen as leading to counter-revolution in 1783–4,
when the crown recovered control in parliament and never lost it again.
The aristocracy took on more of the character of an imperial military and
administrative élite;58 it faced the challenges of the French Revolution with
its mind made up and its dissenters marginalized. Slowly and painfully over
the next quarter-century, it recovered the European position it had lost in
1763–83; it took part in another grand alliance against another universal
monarchy, and mistrustfully entered into a restoration of the republic of
European states in and after the Congress of Vienna. It enlarged its
maritime and extra-European hegemonies in ways that gave rise to two
new imperial discourses: the Anglo-Indian, which debated whether empire
in South Asia was necessarily despotic because exercised over subjects
naturally or historically incapable of liberty;59 the Anglo-Canadian, in
which the French-speaking province of Lower Canada and the Loyalist
colonies of Upper Canada and the Maritimes entered upon the complex
discourses of sovereignty which constitute ‘Canadian political thought’.60
There as elsewhere on the planet, ‘crown colonies’ of British settlers began
exploring non-American routes towards ‘responsible’ and ‘representative’
government.61
There remained one zone in which the history of the Three Kingdoms
continued to shape ‘British history’. If the Union of the Parliaments
succeeded to the point where the American crisis produced no crisis in
Scotland, and something like a ‘British’ nationality can be seen taking
shape, we need to increase the attention we give to the series of develop-
ments in which the Anglo-Irish gentry formed themselves into a patriot
militia and claimed for their parliament something not unlike what some
Americans claimed for their own assemblies: union with an imperial crown
of its own, distinct from the crown and parliament of Great Britain.
Immediately there were those who declared that the only possible solution
was the opposite: the complete incorporation of Ireland within the parlia-
mentary monarchy of the United Kingdom.62 From this point the histor-
ian of ‘British political thought’ needs to begin tracing the complex history
57
Butterfield, 1949. 58 Gould, 1992, ch. 5, and 2000, part 6.
59
Minuti, 1978; Whelan, 1996; Muthu, 2003.
60
I know no exhaustive history of this body of discourse. For such understanding as I have of it, I cite
Tully, 1995, part 5; Webber, 1997; Romney, 2000.
61
Francis, 1992. 62 Tucker, 1781, pp. 96–101.
of the various Irish political discourses – patriot, Unionist and United
Irish; Protestant, Catholic and Presbyterian; Jacobin, Orange and
Nationalist – and to begin conducting them towards a third Union: the
fateful Act of 1801, without which the legislation of 1829–32, bringing an
end to the Revolution Settlement in Great Britain, could hardly have
occurred63 and the relations of the United Kingdom with Ireland could
not have assumed their modern form. Dr Robertson’s volume has studied
British history largely from a Scottish angle of approach; the present essay
has sought to exhibit it in an English and American perspective. Do we not
need to return to the archipelago and (following the lead given by
Jacqueline Hill)64 examine its Irish dimension?
63 64
Clark, 1985, pp. 383–420; 2000, pp. 501–64. Hill, 1995; Pocock, 2000b.
CHAPTER 10
The Union in British history
The emphasis of the ‘new British history’ has so far fallen on the early
modern period, preceding the formation of a unitary state and its disrup-
tion in the twentieth century. The Union of 1800–1 is of course cardinal to
the latter process, and may be placed on the hinge or Sattelzeit marking the
transition from early modern to modern ‘British history’. In this essay1
I attempt to review and re-periodize the earlier history as leading to the
formation of the Union, so as to suggest some ways in which the modern
phase of this history may be pursued. The ‘new history’ has now advanced
beyond the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, and is venturing into
the nineteenth; the history of the twentieth century awaits perspective. In
this sequence the Union must appear a pivotal event, though its claim to
that role cannot be exclusive of others.
The ‘Age’, ‘War’ or ‘Wars’ of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ are concepts that
dominate our understanding of the early modern period, in which dynastic
and parliamentary unions precede the formation of a comprehensive state.
Scotland and England were sovereign kingdoms; Ireland was not, and is in
danger of appearing in the narrative only as part of the ‘empire’ which the
English and their British state exerted over realms not included in its
structure. In this essay an attempt will be made to recognize a greater
autonomy of ‘Irish history’ within the ‘British’ pattern and contributing
to its shaping; and partly to that end, but also for larger reasons, there is
proposed a somewhat different conceptualization of the relations between
‘state’ and ‘empire’.
The two kingdoms may be seen entering on an early modern history if
we focus for the moment on the English kingdom and its marcher lord-
ships. There are three crucial statutes enacted at Westminster and Dublin
during the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. First must stand the Act
1
Originally printed as Pocock, 2000d; based on a lecture to a conference held by the Royal Historical
Society in Belfast, October 1999. The opening paragraphs have been abridged.
164
The Union in British history 165
in Restraint of Appeals (1533), which defines England as an ‘empire’, less in
the sense that it exercises dominion over others – as of course it does – than
in the sense that it exercises sovereignty over itself: that unshared sover-
eignty both ecclesiastical and civil, which the crown exercises both in
parliament and out of it, and which must from now on be agreed upon
and exercised if England is to be a sovereign kingdom and define itself as a
Christian community. ‘Empire’ is henceforth a precarious and deeply
contested term, to be exercised in dynasty, parliament and church all
together if ‘England’ is to be governed and have meaning. It is exercised
by England over England, as well as by England over subordinate realms;
but failures of ‘empire’ in the latter sense may entail failures of ‘empire’ in
the former, and for this reason no separation between internal ‘state’ and
external ‘empire’ is satisfactory.
The subordinate realms must now be brought into the picture and assert
their historic autonomy, if ‘British’ history is not be collapsed into ‘English’.
The Statute of Wales in 1536 liquidates the marcher lordships and completes
the incorporation of ‘Wales’ into ‘England’ – an assimilation of a society
still Celtic to an Anglo-Norman model so uniquely successful that Welsh
nationalist historiography consists largely in examining the costs of its
success. Since there had at no time been a functioning kingdom of Wales,
this union does not figure in the sequence of Unions punctuating the
history of the ‘Three Kingdoms’, and the statute of 1536 is therefore
antithetical with that enacted at Dublin in 1541, which erected the English
king’s ‘lordship of Ireland’ into a ‘kingdom’. This inaugurates a history of
the Three Kingdoms, and at the same time renders it problematic, for the
reason that ‘Ireland’ is at best a subordinate kingdom and may not be one at
all. The English monarch is king in Ireland, but this does not necessarily
mean that he has there a kingdom in the sense of a body politic of which he
is the head. There are, however, from an early date élite groups in Ireland
who desire that status for themselves – these are as likely to be settler as
indigenous, loyalist as rebellious – and there is a history, and a historio-
graphy, turning on the question whether Ireland is a colony undergoing
conquest or a body politic shaping itself within a multiple monarchy.2
It is crucial that, whereas the élites within Wales by and large accepted
the Anglican church-state brought into being by the Act in Restraint of
Appeals – and were in the next century divided by it along lines not unlike
those dividing the English – the élites and the governed classes of Ireland
did not. There exists a literature which enquires, with respect to both the
2
See, classically, Bradshaw, 1979, and the ensuing debate among Irish historians.
Gaelic Irish and the Old English, why it was that they remained Catholic
and what kinds of Catholic they remained.3 The persistence of a Catholic
majority deeply separates the history of the Irish from that of the two other
Kingdoms, and is of course inseparable from the continued status of
Ireland as a kingdom imperfectly conquered and still undergoing conquest.
A crucial process in the history of the ‘Two Kingdoms’ of the island
properly termed ‘Britain’ is the occurrence in Scotland of a Protestant
Reformation more sharply Calvinist and Presbyterian than was the
Anglican. This gives the relations of church and monarchy, and therefore
the structure of the Scottish kingdom, a distinct and ultimately unassimil-
able character; but for a hundred years it was not unreasonable to imagine a
convergence of the two monarchies along episcopalian-presbyterian lines.
This was imaginable to the Protestant churches in Ireland, but not to the
Catholic majority. The Old English who so resolutely proclaimed their
loyalty to James VI and I at the conclusion of the Nine Years War4 must
either imagine him as their secular protector, or imagine that the Catholic
aspects of his Anglican kingship might be extended to a point where they
came close to the Gallican formula of empire over the church coupled to
communion with Rome. James’s ecumenical interests held out hopes
which were to prove delusive.5
In 1603 a dynastic union replaces the ‘Two Kingdoms’ with the ‘Double
Crown’,6 leaving the status of the Third Kingdom more ambiguous than
before – but not (it is important to stress) to be excluded on those grounds
from ‘British history’. The fall of the Gaelic-Tudor earldoms leaves the Old
English exposed to competitors from the Protestant New English influx,
while promoting that momentous innovation, the colonization of Ulster
by Scottish and English Protestants. This is an event in the history of all
three kingdoms, and could not have come about but for King James’s
interest in consolidating his properly British realms. The history of early
modern Scotland is imported into that of Ireland, but is so by the authority
of the crown of Westminster rather than that of Scone. Taken in conjunc-
tion with events in Argyll and the Hebrides, it may properly appear that
the colonization of Ulster was part of an attempted Protestantization of the
3
The Welsh and Irish cases are compared by Bradshaw, 1996 and 1998.
4
The Nine Years War in Irish historiography, not that in Europe a century later (above, pp. 107, 123).
5
Patterson, 1997; Ohlmeyer, 2000. The nature of Irish Catholic royalism has been explored in a
number of studies. The proposition of Fitzpatrick, 1988, that Old English Catholicism was para-
Gallican, Gaelic Catholicism Franciscan and ultramontane is suggestive, though his understanding of
both Anglicanism and Calvinism is deeply flawed.
6
Nicholls, 1999; Smith, 1998.
north-west Gaidhealtacht which had always bridged the North Channel;
but it occurred in the further context of a kingdom of Ireland which was a
realm of the English crown, and the Scottish colony in Ulster was not a
colony of the Scottish kingdom. Simultaneously, the colonies of settlement
which were extending the empire of the crown to the North American
seaboard and the West Indian islands were deemed to be English and the
Scots had none of their own; it might have been otherwise.
We now enter upon the problems of church and state – of empire as
defined by the Act in Restraint of Appeals – in the multiple monarchy of a
single dynasty, and may look forward, at the usual risks of foreshortening
and telocentricity, to the Fall of the British Monarchies and the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms. The coupling of these terms is the most trenchant move
which has yet been made towards a ‘British history’ of the English them-
selves, since it entails the assertion that their internal dissensions would
never have led them to civil war, and that this was a consequence of a
breakdown of government and a failure to control the sword first in
Scotland and then in Ireland – in each case produced by attempts to
impose English modes of ‘empire’ in church and civil government.7
While it is intensely salutary that we have ceased using ‘the English Civil
War’ as a term comprising the wars in all three kingdoms, it should not be
forgotten that there was such a war, discussed in great intellectual depth
precisely because it had been undesired and unexpected and was desper-
ately hard to understand;8 or that the memory of this conflict, and the
operation of institutions designed to prevent its recurrence, governed
English history to the end of the eighteenth century. This is a fact of
‘British’ as well as ‘English’ history; we have arrived at a point where
‘empire’ in the sense of governance of realms beyond England is capable
of devastating ‘empire’ in the sense of England’s civil sovereignty over
itself. The Cromwellian union of 1651–60 was imposed on Scotland and
Ireland largely to ensure that these realms should have no power over the
settlement of a dispute the English were having with themselves.
No revolutionary settlement being available, the year 1660 sees a partial
return to empire in the government of all three kingdoms. In Ireland the
defeat of the Confederation underlines the hopeless position of the kind of
Catholicism represented by the Old English; to that extent, Protestant rule
is on the way. In Scotland, the willingness of the aristocracy to consider
episcopacy as a means of controlling the clergy opens a road to Erastianism
and Enlightenment. In England, a separate periodization is necessary; we
7 8
Russell, 1991; Morrill, 1993. Pocock, 1999e.
embark on ‘the long eighteenth century’, lasting till 1832 and marked by
parliamentary determination to maintain an established church.9 This is
the form in which Tudor ‘empire’ was maintained through the Hanoverian
era; but it took time and a revolution to bring the Stuart monarchy back to
support of the church of which it was the head. In 1688–9 a ‘glorious
revolution’ which was also a ‘second Restoration’10 achieved this end at the
high cost of expelling James VII and II from all three of his kingdoms. The
war-cycle that moved from Tor Bay through Killiecrankie to Limerick was
not a Second War of the Three Kingdoms of the same order as the First,
since it was not a breakdown or dissolution of government in all three
realms as much as a re-ordering of government in the face of a European
power struggle threatening to engulf the multiple monarchy. King William
landed in Tor Bay and crossed the Boyne in order to enlist the island
kingdoms in his war against Louis XIV in Flanders, and the War of the
English Succession was the archipelagic face of the War of the League of
Augsburg or Nine Years War. On the other hand, the enlistment of the
Three Kingdoms transformed British and European power politics by
consolidating that parliamentary and military-fiscal state, the Kingdom
of Great Britain, capable of exercising empire in the Atlantic archipelago,
intervening at times decisively in the power politics of the European
peninsula, and pursuing empire in the modern sense on the oceans and
in America and India. This was the true revolution achieved in the quarter-
century following the Dutch intervention of November 1688.
With the Kingdom of Great Britain we may begin to write ‘British
history’ in more than a conceptual sense, but there remains the difficulty
that the state of which it is the history is preponderantly English and
activated by English politics in a sense nearly exclusive of all others. The
Kingdom was formed by the parliamentary Union of 1707, largely the
result of a Scottish decision that their kingdom could no longer maintain a
separate political economy and that a merger with the English parliamen-
tary fiscal structure was the only recourse. On the English side, however,
there were reasons, some of them religious in character, why the main-
tenance of empire in the Tudor sense required a union of king and
parliament so close that there could be no thought of a federal relationship
in which the king would be responsible to more parliaments than one. For
the same reasons, however, what had to be an incorporating union of
parliaments had to be a federative union of church-states. The year 1689
had seen a presbyterian revolution in Scotland, where the extrusion of the
9 10
Clark, 1985, 2000. For 1688 as ‘second Restoration’, see Scott, 1988, 1991.
Episcopal Church kept the kingdom in a state of latent civil war till 1746;
and the Kingdom of Great Britain, in which theoretically the Kingdoms of
England and Scotland ceased to exist, remained one in which the sovereign
was head of the church in England and something other than that in
Scotland. Theoretically again, this entailed a drastic separation of civil
and ecclesiastical sovereignty; practically, it entailed no such thing, since
the maintenance of established religion continued to be vital in both
kingdoms.11
The ecclesiastical dimension can never be omitted from the study of
early modern history; nor can ‘Enlightenment’ – defined as the subordina-
tion of religion to civil society – be omitted from that section of it denoted
by the term ‘ancien régime’.12 In English history, ‘the long eighteenth
century’ is the period during which an established church, with an apparent
monopoly of civil office, must be maintained by king-in-parliament, but
the purpose of doing so is to ensure that neither orthodoxy nor dissent can
disturb the civil order. This is the late form taken by Tudor ‘empire’, the
national sovereignty in church and state, and its purpose within England is
to prevent any recurrence of the disorders of the seventeenth century. In the
larger fields of British, archipelagic and (as we shall see) Atlantic history,
this objective merges with that of maintaining empire in the sense of
sovereignty over the larger system (this is the commonest meaning of
‘empire’ in eighteenth-century anglophone discourse). It is with ‘empire’
in all these senses, including the ecclesiastical and Enlightened, that the
Scottish kingdom is merged by the Union of 1707, and this is the point at
which to introduce a periodization of British history moving from an Age
of the Three Kingdoms to a First Age of Union, lasting from 1707 to 1801.
The Anglo-Irish Union can be considered in the setting this provides as
inaugurating a Second Age of Union from 1801 to 1921; this will be
succeeded by an age or ages to which it would be premature to give a
name, since the end is not yet and it is not our business to foresee it.
All such periodizations are verbal devices intended to focus our attention
in selected ways, and it is not inappropriate to employ a diversity of them in
conjunction. In English history, ‘the long eighteenth century’ overlaps ‘the
First Age of Union’; in Irish history, an age of ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ has a
beginning and end of its own. There is also imperial history, in which it has
been customary to distinguish between a ‘First British Empire’ and a
‘Second’, the moment of transition occurring about 1783, when the recog-
nition of American independence coincides with the acquisition of massive
11 12
Robertson, 1995. Venturi, 1979, 1984; Clark, 1985, 2000; Pocock, 1999 (B), I.
state power in India. The various meanings assigned to the term ‘empire’ in
this essay may suggest some modifications in the last of these, but several
periodizations may be employed in interpreting the Union of 1800–1.
The ecclesiastical-Enlightened dimension sketched above is far from
explaining everything that happened, but provides a useful key that may
be employed in setting the events in order. In the English kingdom it
accounts for significant tensions within the Church of England; in so far as
the régime needed to rest upon a church universal, that church must be
apostolic and maintain the fullness of catholic tradition, but in so far as it was
a pillar of civil society it upheld rational and sociable concepts of the Christian
life which might move in directions Arian, Socinian or crypto-deist.13
A current of non-trinitarian thinking persisted within the Church of
England, and about 1772 emerged in alliance with a more radical unitar-
ianism of non-conformist origin, to form the peaceable yet subversive
movement which we know as Rational Dissent.14 In its extreme develop-
ment, conspicuous if not representative, this reduced all worship to
freedom of opinion; it called for an actual separation of church and state,
a goal attainable only under revolutionary and millennial conditions; and
in denying any ecclesiastical character to political authority, it encouraged
radically and even democratically Lockean views of the latter. Though it
had little revolutionary potential within the kingdom of Great Britain,
Rational Dissent was vocally and disturbingly active in its support of both
the American and French Revolutions, and joined with other currents of
discontent, Whig and Tory in origin, to act as progenitor of that British
Left whose language has always been more revolutionary than its practice.15
It plays this not insignificant role in a cycle of rebellions, revolutions and
reconstructions, datable from 1776 through 1801, which may be compared
with the War of the Three Kingdoms and the War of the English Succession
for the way in which it brought to a close both the First Age of Union and – if
we retain the term – the First British Empire. In this critical period the Irish
crisis of 1782–1800 is conspicuous and important, but we should approach it
by way of a detour through the other provinces of the Hanoverian multiple
monarchy and empire. In Scotland, the last war fought within the Kingdom
of Great Britain – the re-conquest of the north-west Gaidhealtacht following
the Anglo-Lowland victory of 1746 – is to be viewed alongside the relative
peace of the Protestant kingdom within the Union of 1707. There is some
potential for radical covenanting and perhaps proto-nationalist discontent
13
For the apostolic, see Clark, 1985, 2000; for the Enlightened, Young, 1998.
14
Haakonssen, 1996. 15 Bradley, 2001.
with the abandonment of the militancy of the seventeenth century, but this is
checked and pacified (or perhaps repressed) by that combination of lay
patronage, Moderate oligarchy and civil philosophy known as the Scottish
Enlightenment.16 The remarkable success of this experiment in containing
the ecclesiastical within the civil can be measured by comparing it with the
case of the Scottish colony in Ulster, where Moderate control did not take
shape and New Light anti-trinitarianism joined with Old Light Calvinism in
the rebellious societies of Belfast.17
Before turning to the Irish aspects of the story, we must take account of an
American dimension, in which the politics of the archipelago are enlarged
into those of the Atlantic and the cis-Appalachian seaboard,18 and there
appear new areas in which the problems of empire endanger the stability of
the kingdom in church and state. The colonies and conquests in North
America and the Caribbean had not been organized into vice-royalties or
subordinate kingdoms on either the Spanish or the Irish model. They were
largely, and considered themselves to be, English, though their populations
contained – additional to large numbers of enslaved Africans – sizeable
ethnic minorities including Scots-Irish (as presbyterian emigrants from
Ulster were beginning to be known in American historiography). These
colonies were of diverse and often ill-defined juridical and political status,
and from one point of view their history in the eighteenth century is that of
their search for a more clearly defined political character, entailing demands
for political autonomy greater than can be met within the existing structures
of empire, so that in the end they take the revolutionary step of proclaiming
themselves independent states.19 We may look on these events as phenomena
in the history of settler nationalism, if by that term – ‘settler’ is preferable to
‘colonial’, though ‘nationalism’ may not be preferable to ‘patriotism’ – we
denote the processes which occur when settler populations begin to make
claims against the state, and sometimes the people, that originally sent them
forth: claims to conduct their own relations with the sovereign, claims to be
enracinated in the land they have conquered from, or now share with,
indigenous cultures from whom they sometimes derive part of their legit-
imacy. Phenomena of this kind are ancient in Irish history, where Old
English, New English and Ulster Scots constitute three settler populations
and as many religions; it is a key to medieval history that the Old English and
Gaelic populations interacted, a key to early modern history that they
remained Catholic and did not fully accept Anglican empire.
16
Sher, 1985. 17 I am greatly indebted here to McBride, 1998.
18
Armitage, Ohlmeyer, Landsman, Gould and Pocock, 1999. 19 Greene, 1986, 1990.
Publicists writing on behalf, first of the Old and then of the New English,
had developed the argument that the Irish parliament was or should be
subject to the English crown but not the English parliament – a contention
increasingly unacceptable in England as the crown increasingly became a
crown-in-parliament. It was taken up, during the 1760s and 1770s, on behalf
of American colonial assemblies claiming a similar autonomy, and claiming
to be representative of bodies politic which they rendered autonomous by
representing them. It is a question whether this claim to autonomy and
sovereignty constitutes a ‘nationalism’ or not; but had it been systematically
developed, it would have had the effect of converting the empire into a
confederation of states held together by autonomy under a single crown. It is
one of the keys to ‘British history’ that English history rendered this
impossible.20 Not only was there an ancient tradition of regarding Ireland
as a conquered realm subordinate to the English king in parliament; in order
to govern themselves, and resolve the deep tensions inherent in their polity,
the English had effected so close a unity between crown and parliament that
it could scarcely be shared with any confederate equals. If the king were
responsible to any parliament but the English (British), his unity with that
parliament would be broken and the twin spectres of absolutism and
rebellion would rise again. That unity, furthermore, was never free from
threat. No sooner had George III been freed of the challenge from Jacobitism
than he had found both aristocratic politics and enemies of aristocratic
politics accusing him of delegitimizing his rule in new ways, so vehemently
as to challenge his own dynastic legitimacy. The American crisis grew as part
of what Edmund Burke called ‘the present discontents’. In these circum-
stances the King was no more likely to listen to American claims to auton-
omy early in his reign than to Catholic claims to emancipation towards the
end of it; he was insufficiently secure in his position at the apex of empire in
state and church.
The imperfect legitimacy of the Hanoverian dynasty may help explain
the ease with which figures as diverse as George Washington and Theobald
Wolfe Tone found themselves patriots in arms against a monarchy and
empire they might otherwise have served, though due weight must be
allowed to an ideology of universal right to rebellion which had conserva-
tive ideologues asking how any government could persist in face of ‘the
rights of man’. This, however, did not simplify all problems out of
existence. The Americans by 1776 were reduced to proclaiming the empire
a confederation in order to proclaim that confederation dissolved by reason
20
Pocock, 1988a, 1995a and 1996c .
of the crown’s refusal to recognize it. This entailed proclaiming the
absolute independence of thirteen states; at the same time, however, the
Declaration of Independence announced the purpose of dissolving the ties
which had bound ‘one people’ to ‘another’. In a certain sense, both ‘the
American people’ and ‘the British people’ are American inventions, though
it remains possible that processes more complex than invention were
bringing both into existence. The former, held to consist of thirteen states
and one people, was by the Declaration committed to entering upon a
discourse of federalism, precluded by the nature of parliamentary mon-
archy from forming part of a British discourse. At the same time, however,
the completeness of the separation pronounced between American and
British history meant that the Declaration had nothing further to say about
the latter and uttered no call to revolution within it. However great the
shock of American independence to British empire, the first great secession
from British history left the latter’s politics much as they had been before it.
The second great secession, that of the Irish in the twentieth century, is a
very different story.
The crisis of empire in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the
crisis of an empire in church as well as state. Since the American colonies
had not been organized as subordinate kingdoms, like Ireland in one sense
and post-Union Scotland in another, the crown had not been obliged to
consider an establishment of religion in them, and the Anglican and even
Catholic confessions – where these existed and were sometimes strong – had
something of the character of sects in a multicongregational ecclesiastical
polity. Though the crown had no sustained intention of erecting American
bishoprics, the fear that it might do was remarkably persistent, especially
after the Quebec Act of 1774 seemed to have established the Catholic church
in newly conquered French Canada. If religion cannot be considered a
major cause of the American Revolution, it did much to determine the
character of the society that emerged from it.21 The English-speaking
United States were a model of late-Enlightened Protestant culture, unitar-
ian, liberal and deist at one extreme, sectarian, evangelical and millennarian
at another;22 and the separation of church and state, achieved by these forces
in combination, seemed to Rational Dissenters in Birmingham and New
Light Presbyterians in Belfast the revolutionary fulfilment of a dream. Anti-
trinitarian enmity to all establishments is a recurrent if not a necessary
feature of the revolutionary ferment in the British ecumene.
21 22
Clark, 1993. [The duality persists (2004).]
If the wars of America were not wars of religion, those of Ireland
notoriously have been and are of that character. The ‘new British history’,
precisely because it views each particular history in the context afforded by
some other, leans away from regarding national identities as primordial,
while accepting that there are good reasons for their formation where this
has successfully occurred. The history of the Irish response to the imperial
crisis, the American Revolution and later the French, culminates with the
United Irishmen’s attempt to put together a national republicanism which,
after its failure and the imposition of the Union, became the foundation of
a republican nationalism; but the pluralist approach of the new British
history tends to treat this story in terms of the convergences and diver-
gences of three ethnic groups confessionally defined. The strongly
Whiggish leadership of the Church of Ireland Ascendancy reacted to the
ineffective government of the American war by seeking greater autonomy
for their own parliament, and by organizing a national Protestant militia
for the patriot purpose of demanding it; a programme natural to what we
are calling settler nationalism. In proportion as they came close to achiev-
ing a confederal status unattainable by the Americans with whom they
sympathized, they faced the problems generated by church ascendancy: the
denial of many and various rights to those not of the Church of Ireland,
first those significantly known by the English term ‘Dissenters’ (though
they were Scottish Presbyterians, ‘Covenanters’ and ‘Secessionists’ when
they dissented from their own kirk, as some but not all of them did),
secondly the Catholic majority no longer distinguishable into ‘Old
English’ and ‘Gaelic’, and beginning to enter into new forms of middle-
class and peasant organization. There was an underlying problem of
empire: was the government of Ireland by means including an established
church so narrowly based that it would lead to revolutionary resistance, or
could it be broadened and legitimized by measures of relief and emancipa-
tion? In England and Scotland, Enlightenment was a means of moderating
and confirming established religion, but there was also an Enlightenment
which attacked it at its root.
There appeared radicals within the Protestantism that was not
presbyterian who aimed to break with both established religion and the
executive’s control of the Dublin parliament – with ‘empire’, therefore, in
both Tudor senses of the term – and were attracted to American and later
French revolutionary models. They came to propound an Enlightened
republicanism which offered to include, but at the same time to assimilate,
all three confessions. The parallel developments within Belfast and Ulster
presbyterians appear of a special character once we begin seeing them as
produced by a history peculiar to that people – as the pluralism inherent in
‘British history’ encourages us to do. A history Scottish but not Moderate
turns first towards a revolutionary pursuit of religious and civil emancipation –
as ‘the Scots-Irish’ among others in America are doing already – but there
remains the alternative of a hard-core or Old Light Calvinism that either
rebels against the state or joins in supporting it.23 To see this as key to the
journey of Northern Protestants from rebellion towards loyalism is to say that
they have a history of their own, unshared with others; but it has become the
aim of republican nationalism to deny them such an autonomy.
The crucial encounter at all levels is that with a re-organized, largely lay,
Catholicism; and here we ourselves encounter a problem in historical
demarcation. There were levels, British and Canadian as well as Irish, at
which relief and recognition of Catholics could be discussed as matters of
public policy and the Catholic hierarchy and laity might negotiate with the
state. Here the state might be moved to reconsider its own history, as built
upon a repudiation of papal sovereignty so strong as to exclude Catholics
from civil society and history, condemning them as inherently disloyal to
both. Enlightenment very often inherited this condemnatory attitude from
Protestantism before it. The state was under strong pressures to continue a
rigorous exclusion of Catholics from both state and society, resting on an
established church. On the other hand, Enlightenment, the absorption of
religion by civil society, might mitigate the rigours of both establishment
and its opposites, Catholic and Dissenting; and in the last third of the
eighteenth century, that delusive interval between the fall of the Jesuits and
the Bonapartist captivity of the papacy, it was possible on both sides of the
divide to believe that civil society and Catholic authority could come to
terms. The Gallican strategy of separating civil sovereignty from sacra-
mental communion was one which Enlightenment continued and with
which the church might perhaps negotiate, and the Protestant empire of
the Hanoverians made offers of conciliation and concession to which the
hierarchy responded. There was, however, a Catholic history going on, in
which such offers were sometimes embraced and sometimes rejected, and
neither statesmen in the eighteenth century nor historians in the twentieth
have always known that history well enough to respond to it in the ways
demanded of them.
The revolutionary response to the same question, when it appeared, was
not other than a more radical version of Enlightenment. The offer to
divorce the state from all recognition of religion, granting equal civil rights
23
For all of this see McBride, 1998, and Bradley, 2001.
to those of all confessions, carried the implication that all were equally in
harmony with civil society; and Catholics, like other Christians, had to
decide whether they were content with the status of civil beings with a set of
beliefs peculiarly their own. It is notorious that neither hierarchy nor laity,
nor both in dialogue with each other, have been of one mind in this matter,
and the debate is continuing. In Irish history this meant that the pro-
grammes favoured by Wolfe Tone rested on the assumption that Irish like
French Catholics would accept the status offered them by the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy; it was the Enlightened, not the Catholic,
view of Catholicism. In the larger pattern of British history as the history
of empire, the debates leading to Union in 1801 and Emancipation in 1829
turned on how the Westminster if not the Dublin parliament was to handle
relations with a Catholic majority that must somehow be modified.
At other levels, a Catholic resurgence took the form of peasant organiza-
tion which was met by responses, escalating towards violence, of two kinds.
The first was Protestant counter-organization at the same social levels,
which in due course shaped the evolution of the Northern Presbyterians
towards a loyalism previously Orange, in which they had not shared; it is of
interest that the turn towards loyalism was connected with a great debate
resulting in the condemnation of Arianism, though that was many
years later.24 The presence of conditions intermittently anticipatory of
ethnic cleansing is a reminder that political development in Ireland had a
character of its own, imperfectly controlled by the state which might either
co-opt or be co-opted by it. This points to the second quasi-violent
response, that of the state, which at one level develops machinery of police
and espionage slower to develop in the island of Britain, where conspiracy
is less endemic; but at another helps bring about the rebellions of 1798
through responding to Catholic agitation by dragonnades, that is by
military repression supported by regular soldiers but carried out by sub-
regular forces, militia, yeomanry and fencibles. It recurrently occurs in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the state in Ireland is not perfectly
in command of its own military responses. This, however, is a phenomenon
of the Second Age of Union, when empire is no longer being exercised in
senses confined to the early modern.
If American independence – the first revolutionary outcome of the crisis
of the late eighteenth century – leaves the structures of empire in church
and state much as they had been before it, the Union with Ireland is
revolutionary in the sense that it deeply transforms them (as the
24
McBride, 1998, pp. 219–22.
Revolution of 1688–9 had begun doing a century before). The Union has
certainly to be seen in the context of other transformations, brought about
by war with revolutionary France and the growth of Indian and maritime
empire;25 but from the perspective adopted in this paper, it is desirable to
focus on the interval between Union and Emancipation. That the former
made little sense without the latter was known to Pitt and Cornwallis, but
it was delayed nearly thirty years – setting afoot processes which point to
the ultimate failure of the Union – due in some measure to the opposition
of George III. It is a useful exercise to take the King’s attitude seriously.
Would he have had so much difficulty granting Emancipation if it had
been unaccompanied by Union? Queen Anne had had fewer problems
with her coronation oath over the Union of 1707, but that had been a union
of parliaments, not of churches, which left the Church and Kingdom of
England intact (since no one believed for a moment that they had dis-
appeared). 1801 was a union of parliaments, not of administrations; but
Ireland was being united with the Kingdom of England, of which it had been
an appanage, and if the Church of Ireland was being more closely linked with
the Church of England, Emancipation meant, as it did in 1829, a major
modification of that special position of the church within the kingdom that
the king was sworn to uphold.26 In a real sense 1829 was the end of the Tudor
church-state established four centuries before, the ‘national apostacy’ of the
Oxford Tractarians; it is unhistorical to employ the language of
Enlightenment to suggest that this is without significance.
The Union, then, foretells what does not happen until 1829–32: the end
of ‘the long eighteenth century’, that ancien régime period in which the
crown governs through the historic parliament and church, and ‘empire’ in
the English sense of the Act in Restraint of Appeals is modified by the
exercise of ‘empire’ meaning sovereign dominion over realms other than
England. As an experiment speedily resolved and carefully planned by
practical politicians too busy, as usual, to consider the meaning of what
they were doing, the Union entailed Emancipation but not Reform; there
was no reason to anticipate the conjunction of repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts with reconstruction of the system of parliamentary
representation. Yet what came about in 1800–1 both was and was not a
powerful extension of parliamentary, if no longer of ecclesiastical, empire.
The Second Age of Union was one in which a post-revolutionary parlia-
mentary state confronted, and helped engender by way of reaction against
itself, a modern democratic nationalism (and, by way of reaction against
25 26
Bayly, 1989. Clark, 1985, pp. 383–408; 2000, pp. 514–64.
the latter, a counter-nationalist loyalism in the distinctive history of the
North). A romantic republicanism with its roots in 1798 maintained a
tradition of political violence, which it succeeded in legitimating after 1916;
while this was going on, however, the Union established in Ireland a
parliamentarism (the parliamentarism of Parnell) more effective and deeply
rooted than any achieved by the parliament of the pre-Union kingdom.
Republicanism, which had to contend with the Catholic Church, had also to
contend with a parliamentary style of politics; and this is one reason why the
revolution of 1916–22 did not result in a fascist revolution like its Italian
contemporary – as it might have done – but in a middle-class Catholic
democracy. The Union was an extension of parliamentary empire which
ended in revolution within that empire and independence from it (compli-
cated by the Protestant North); but there is a history in which we continue to
study ‘empire’ as the distribution of sovereignty shaped by forces operating
within the Atlantic archipelago. At the time of writing, there are two
sovereign states joining to contain the violent politics of a border province
which can no longer be allowed to destabilize either of them.
PART IV
New Zealand in the Strange Multiplicity

CHAPTER 11
The neo-Britains and the three empires*
(I)
The Second Age of Union (1801–1921) was the peak period of British
empire. This last phrase, however, is in need of deconstruction.
Certainly, it has for many reasons been conventional to date from c. 1783
the advent of a ‘Second British Empire’,1 exercised initially over Hindu and
Muslim Indians where the ‘First’ had been exercised over colonists in
America. India, however, was not a colony; its peoples lived under other
forms of subjection, and the British residents in India were not colonists in
the sense of settlers. In consequence, these two ‘empires’ differed in kind
and did not form a sequence. It was predominantly after the loss of the
American colonies that British statesmen began debating the altogether
new problem of governing larger populations outside the archipelagic-
Atlantic region, European in neither their geography nor their culture;
a problem never debated before – though there are moments in the
literature of empire in Ireland which in some ways anticipate it – raising
the philosophical problem of whether the relations of property to liberty in
western Europe were or were not unique and non-repeatable. Ireland,
however, is part of the history of empire in an older sense. The debate
over India, and the massive acquisitions of power in that region which
produced it, stand at mid-point in the history of empire in a new sense: that
is, of a process by which some European states and their economies
acquired seaborne power over a preponderance of the peoples of the
planet. This species of empire, which Europeans retained until late in the
twentieth century and whose after-effects are still with us, is that to which
the terms ‘imperialism’ and (more confusingly) ‘colonialism’ have been

1
Harlow, 1952, 1964; Bayly, 1989; Marshall, 1998; Winks, 1999.
181
182 New Zealand in the Strange Multiplicity
and are applied; and it is currently held that the loss of empire in this
sense has occasioned a ‘British problem’ and rendered ‘British history’
problematic.2 This volume is intended as an enquiry into this thesis and as
a series of attempts to provide it with a past.
Empire in this sense – the British role in the history of European world
domination – has become a thesis so central in the interpretation of
modern and post-modern British history that it is in need of the kind of
critical examination we term deconstruction. This has been set under way
by pointing out that the ‘first’ and ‘second’ British empires are discon-
tinuous, except in so far as a global British commercial and naval power served
to hold each together.3 The problem of the colonies on the North
American seaboard, it has been argued, is part of the problem of ‘empire’
in a Tudor and Stuart sense: the problem of how and whether the institu-
tions of English sovereign government could be extended to include other
realms, first in the Atlantic archipelago and then in the ocean contiguous
with it. The colonists first demanded a closer association with the British
crown, and then took the revolutionary step of independence when they
found they could not have it; they ceased being ‘British’ when they could
not be ‘British’ as they understood the term. This revolution took them out
of British ‘empire’ in the pre-modern sense, but did not terminate that
empire’s existence; no more did the acquisition in India of ‘empire’ in
another sense, which we choose to term ‘modern’. The American crisis, and
the advent in India of ‘empire’ over peoples not European, coincided and
interacted with a series of crises in Ireland, between 1780 and 1801, which
plainly belong in the history of ‘empire’ as we have so far been using the
word: the extension to the archipelago (but after 1783 no longer beyond it)
of the English state, such as to make it ‘British’. The question whether this
can be done is a principal, though not the only, key to ‘British history’ as
these essays are seeking to present it.4
The Union of 1801 inaugurates a period, lasting till 1921, which is that of
the most ambitious attempt in British history to include the archipelago in
a single state; there are reasons to say that this could only have coincided
with an age of ‘empire’ in other senses of the word. Nevertheless, we still
have to do with ‘empire’ in the sense that had existed since the English
Reformation, and the history of empire beyond Europe interacts with, but
cannot annex or be included in, it. There is a narrative that relates how the
2
Nairn, 1977; Kumar, 2003; and much ephemeral writing. 3 Bayly, 1989.
4
For an excellent brief introduction to the Second Union as continuous with the First, see Murdoch,
1998.
The neo-Britains and the three empires 183
Union ultimately failed, through generating in Ireland a species of mainly
Catholic nationalism which it could not contain or satisfy, so that the
narrative of the Irish secession differs in kind from that of the American (to
say nothing of the Indian or those which accompanied or followed it). But
the former narrative visibly continues that which had existed since Tudor
times at earliest: the narrative of how the Anglo-British state was created by,
and how far it proved compatible with, the exercise of governance in the
archipelago as a whole. The creation of a sovereign Irish republic in and
after 1921 did not terminate the problem of ‘empire’ in this sense; it merely
continued it, in the new form of how two sovereign states were to exercise
empire, particularly over a disputed and self-disputing border province in
the north of Ireland. Since that problem is still with us, and will at best take
some time to solve, it may be said that ‘empire’ in its oldest sense has
outlasted other ‘empires’ in the making of British history, and may con-
tinue it into the future. The Second Age of Union, and the age that follows
it – to which these essays decline to give a name – are therefore central and
not marginal to the narrative they do much to constitute.
(II)
There are two sides to the history of the Second Union. On the one hand, it
appears in retrospect a high-water mark in the achievement of ‘Britishness’–
that is, the willingness of the diverse peoples of Britain to come together
under that name and its adjectival form, as denoting a shared yet multiple
identity. On the other hand, there was a signal failure to extend that
commonality to Ireland, where Union – perhaps by its very success in
consolidating secular identity – provoked a modern nationalism that began
replacing the peasant revolts and religious warfare of the early modern era.
The enormous disaster of the Famine, to which the Union state and
economy had no answers, produced a powerful and global Irish diaspora
in North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and furthered the decline
of the over-populated peasant economy that had led to the forced emigra-
tions and evictions continuing after the Famine. Similar phenomena on a
lesser scale occurred in the highlands and islands of the north-west
Gaidhealtacht, with the Highland Clearances and a Gaelic emigration to
Canada; but the Liberal achievements of tenant rights in Ireland and in the
Hebrides had very different results. In the latter, the state asserted its
authority in an outlying region where landlords had come close to being
a law to themselves; in Ireland, the partial resolution of the agrarian
problem was precursor to a middle-class Catholic nationalism prepared
to adopt both parliamentary and revolutionary tactics. There is a history of
how parliamentary Home Rule was taken over by men and women who
preferred a violent solution; it is a British history and a history of empire,
since the proposal of Home Rule provoked a Unionist response that called
in question, by intending to maintain, the structure of the Anglo-British
state. Unionists in 1886 declared that Irish autonomy would mean a failure
of empire in both the archipelagic and the oceanic sense; Unionists in
1912–14 were prepared to imagine and compass the dissolution of govern-
ment, certainly in Ireland and perhaps in the state at large, in order to
frustrate that autonomy.
Under the changed conditions following the First World War, Irish
revolutionaries did much to invent and perfect the insurgency warfare, or
urban terrorism, that has distinguished the world of the twentieth century
and its successor; while counter-insurgency, including counter-terror, was
developed by the British in reply. Liberals and Unionists, however, joined
in deciding that it was better to grant autonomy than to resist it by these
means, and there was no repetition of the Unionist threat to parliamentary
authority so vocal in 1912–14. By an accompanying paradox, the Union had
done more to establish the structure of the parliamentary state in Ireland
than had been achieved when that kingdom had its own parliament; the
guerrilla war of 1919–21 had been largely a war for the control of local
authorities, and the civil war among revolutionaries of 1922 ended in the
establishment of an Irish parliamentary authority in the Free State, often by
the sternest of means. The Irish revolution was one of only two to occur in
western Europe in the wake of 1914–18, but it ended in the legitimation as
sovereign of a conservative Catholic democracy; while the parliamentary
state of Great Britain, severely threatened with civil war by the Home Rule
Bill of 1914, looked on the secession of 1921 as the departure of an alien and
incomprehensible element that left its own authority unimpaired. The
interactions of British and Irish history form a strange and deep-running
story, and it is possible that British history, as this volume seeks to
re-conceptualize it, should be built around a history of these two cultures,
deeply antagonistic and altogether inseparable. There are more than two
actors in this story, however, and the Protestants of Ulster, a people whose
Unionism is as much Irish as British but has not been much exported in
their diaspora,5 have to be seen as embarked on a history of their own, with
5
It is counterfactually fascinating to imagine the Ulster Covenant of 1912 being sent over to America
and receiving mass subscriptions along the Appalachian chain and into the Deep South. The
Protestant Scots-Irish would then have become a force in United States politics equal to those of
the Catholic diaspora.
which both the kingdom and the republic find themselves engaged but not
identified.
The Treaty of 1921 marked the end of Unionism, in the sense of a party,
powerful in British mass politics, professing the belief that the maintenance
of the union with Ireland was essential to the future of empire in both the
early modern sense (the unity of the kingdom) and the modern (empire in
the oceanic world). Though this belief may conceivably have been true – it
has its adherents today, most of whom welcome rather than deplore its
fulfilment – it ceased to be, if it ever had been, one of the creeds on which
British electoral politics were founded; a circumstance which casts doubts
on the thesis that British identity exists only in consequence of empire over
others. Like the Americans of 1776–83, the Irish of 1921 were – and when
had they not been? – looked upon as an alien people, who if they could not
be assimilated might be let go without altering the character of the realm to
which they did not belong. This returns us to the thesis that the period of
the Second Union was a peak period in the attainment of Britishness,
defined as the willingness of the peoples of the larger island to accept a
common identity without abandoning their several identities as English,
Scots or Welsh (a people of whom too little has been said in these essays).
The character of ‘Britishness’ is changing, and its future is much called in
doubt by those of whom some seem to welcome the thought of its end. It is
therefore important to consider what made it effective, though we must
avoid the historiographical fallacy that to study the origins of a phenom-
enon is to foretell its end.
We know already that Britishness was and is a complex phenomenon:
‘a union of multiple identities’.6 It clearly did not depend upon the Union
of 1801; the proposition that the English or the British could only exist in
their own eyes if they succeeded in governing the Irish was absurd in all
ages, and we face yet again the problem that the English did not trouble to
distinguish between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, thus denying themselves any
national ‘identity’ separable from the Anglo-British state that had emerged
from their history. The relative success of Britishness in the period we are
studying was therefore a matter of the willingness of Scots and Welsh to
consider themselves ‘British’ in an order shaped by the English, who did
not distinguish themselves from it; it is a question how far this impeded an
English willingness to consider Scots and Welsh their co-Britons rather
than their provincials. Two forces are commonly identified as causes for the
relative success of Britishness: industrialism and imperialism. The former
6
Brockliss and Eastwood, 1997.
created new population centres in all four nations: south Wales, north
England, south Scotland and north Ireland; these encouraged some inter-
nal migrations of working populations, and set up a ‘Britain-wide’ politics
of capital and labour, in which class counted for more than nationality
without abolishing it. Industrialism, while provoking fierce social antago-
nisms, endowed state and society with power, projected both into Europe
and into the structure of global domination we know as ‘empire’ and
‘imperialism’. Empire in this sense was a democratic phenomenon; it set
up images of identity and power to which peoples might commit them-
selves, and enterprises in which they might be engaged. That the British
empire in India was in significant measure a Scottish enterprise has become
a historical commonplace, even among those who depict it as a record of
crimes and follies.
It is therefore possible to say that the ‘British’ peoples were held together
in a common identity afforded them by a ‘British’ state and nationality,
only so long as they remained partners in an imperial enterprise capable of
projecting power upon Europe and the world. This enables theorists to pass
easily and rapidly from saying that the British – and as a consequence the
English – could exist and believe in themselves only so long as they had
Others to fear as enemies, to saying that this was possible only so long as
they had Others to rule as their subjects: a set of conclusions satisfactory to
a mindset emerging as the enemy of ‘identity’ in any form that can be
attributed to it. The enterprise of these essays and this volume is to enquire
whether more can be found in the histories of these peoples, several and
interactive, that may inform them who they are and what they have done
and suffered; history that may continue into a future which, whatever
its political form, may entail political decision and political being. The
coincident failures of imperialism, socialism and industrialism, which
befell the British peoples in the second half of the twentieth century,
were a major crisis in their complex and problematic histories; it is worth
enquiring what history preceded these failures and may continue after
them. There are those who do not wish these questions to be asked, or
think their answers already known.
In considering the Second Age of Union, we have so far been led to use
the term ‘empire’ in two senses: the one archipelagic and pre-modern in
its derivation, the other extra-European and constitutive of modernity.
There are two other dimensions to the history of this period. One, which
there is a strong case for considering paramount, is the history of Britain as
a European state and community; meaning, among other things, as a
European ‘Power’, engaged in the conflicts (and, it will also be said, sharing
the culture) of a number of other states increasingly industrial and imper-
ial. The wars of Europe, enlarged into world wars in the twentieth century,
end in the exhaustion by these states, including Britain, of their capacity for
independent power and empire, and their joining in a post-imperial and
post-sovereign association, to which the word ‘Europe’ becomes annexed,
in the hope of exercising new forms of power, possibly post-political and
even post-historical; so that to continue writing history may itself be a
challenge to the premisses of the ‘European’ order. The writing of these
essays, certainly, originated and has continued as a response, both British
and antipodean, to the processes in which this post-modern order took
shape and declared its premisses; and for this reason it is now necessary to
return to the Second Age of Union and consider the origins of the
antipodean perspective in the history of a third species of empire, which
is part of the title of this chapter.
(III)
In the late eighteenth century, continuing through the nineteenth, the rate of
emigration from (as well as within) Britain and Ireland began, for reasons of
demographic, agrarian and industrial change, to be massive. The Scots-Irish,
famine-Irish and Highland-clearances diasporas were part of this phenom-
enon, but a more prominent role was played by the emigration of labourers,
artisans and (not to be forgotten) middle-class shopkeepers, speculators and
professionals, from England, Scotland and (to a rather lesser degree) Wales.
Of these million or more people, most went to the United States, where
(Irish-Americans excepted) they were absorbed without becoming hyphen-
ated – a comment on the new nation’s cultural character in that century.
Others, however, founded colonies in the proper sense of the term, which the
discourse of ‘colonialism’ tends to obscure: that is, colonies of settlement,
capable like the American of becoming national states but spared the
necessity of revolution in doing so. They are here termed ‘neo-Britains’, a
word of recent New Zealand coinage, but rooted in a tradition of rhetoric as
old as they are, indicating not only that they were (and are) British (and Irish)
by heritage, but that some of them deliberately attempted the duplication of
British nationality, politics and social structure under conditions of settle-
ment. They consequently belong (or have belonged) in the context of
‘British history’, and will continue to do so even if they leave it. The
historiographic enterprise conveyed in this volume of essays was originally
proposed in one of them, the New Zealand of the 1970s, and it is worthwhile
sketching their history down to that moment.
The colonies of settlement belong in a context of nineteenth-century
empire, but were not situated in ‘empire’ in either of the senses developed
in these essays so far. That is to say, they were not situated, as the American
colonies had been until their association broke down, within the ‘empire’
of England over itself and its archipelagic and Atlantic extensions. Nor –
with South Africa as the exception – were they more than tangentially
concerned with the problem of ‘empire’ over non-European peoples. New
Zealand indeed raised, and caused British ministers to debate with con-
cern, the question of Maori sovereignty, which was never disregarded
however it was mishandled. In both this and the Australian colonies,
however, politics and history came to be a matter of relations within civil
societies of settlers. They were the product of the generations immediately
following the American secession, and they did not intend either an
American or an Irish trajectory. To escape such dilemmas, indeed, policy-
makers were prepared to accept the thought that these colonies would
soon, and might painlessly, become independent. To that extent, they were
not perceived as necessary to ‘empire’ in either the old or the new sense, and
in what ways they form part of the history of ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’
needs to be carefully stated; perhaps they do not belong under these
headings, or perhaps they change their meaning. Certainly, their found-
ation, even their conception, was possible only in consequence of the global
extension of British naval and commercial power; but in the southern
hemisphere – with Cape Town as a partial exception – they were not
strategically necessary to either; in particular, not to the control of India or
the China trade, from which the concept of ‘empire’ was deriving its new
meaning. It was always possible to think of the neo-Britains as superfluous
to empire, and their retention within it obliges us to give it a third set of
meanings; hence the title of this chapter.
There were classically four neo-Britains, later known as the ‘dominions’
forming the ‘Commonwealth’ (the latter either a sub-species of empire, or
not part of it, depending on the use of the noun). Of these ‘Canada’ is a
special case, since its European settlement originates in the early seven-
teenth century and its eastern structure is a product of the French and
American wars of the eighteenth. No less a product of the American
secession than is the United States, it is situated within the North
American history into which streams of British emigration flowed, and
to enclose it with other Dominions within ‘Commonwealth history’ is to
tell only a part of its story. That story may share in that of westward-
expanding settlement of the North American continent; though the found-
ers of Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia came by sea, like those
of New South Wales and New Zealand. The three remaining were and
are situated in the southern hemisphere, connected by the southern ocean
which linked the Capes before the Canals were dug. Of them one group
of British settlements in the Cape Colony and Natal belongs within the
complex history – British, Afrikaner, Xhosa, Zulu – of ‘South Africa’. It is
perhaps the only case where colonies of settlement, by the mere fact of
their existence, involved the imperial government in major wars – though
it was long feared that the Canadian colonies might do so – and perhaps
for this reason, the self-governing colonies of South Africa did not achieve
much autonomy in determining whether there should be war or not;
Cecil Rhodes was only an apparent exception. Confronted by an African
majority and an independent Afrikanerdom, the English South Africans
did not become a nation in their own right; and the presence of Bantu
and other labouring populations meant that they did not develop a settler
working class as the Pacific Dominions did. Since they were engaged in
the subjugation of a non-European population which outnumbered
them, they took part in the history we term that of ‘colonialism’; but
in the history of ‘colonization’ this circumstance sets them apart
from others.
The settlements in western Australia, eastern Australia and New
Zealand – situated at complex junctures of oceans which, especially in
the last case, did as much to separate as to connect – were met by
indigenous populations whose land they needed more than they did their
labour. They therefore engaged in expropriation rather than domination,
and were more inclined to ignore, even to forget and deny, the indigenous
presence than to become obsessed by it. The profound differences between
the Maori and Aboriginal societies and their responses to colonization gives
New Zealand history a character unlike Australian; in New Zealand there
are wars, but no genocide, in Australia no wars but micro-genocides in
some number. But the two are deeply alike, and at times hard to distin-
guish, in that they are from an early date marked by the presence of a
settler, ‘white’, working class, whose relations with other classes make both
Australian and New Zealand politics for a long time a politics of labour and
capital. They develop increasingly sovereign parliamentary governments
within which these conflicts are fought out, and it is this, among other
things, which makes them nations writing histories of their own. These are,
however, British histories in the sense that nearly all their determinants
(including the Irish presence) are the product of British expansion, and this
is why these national cultures must be considered part of ‘British history’
and empowered to engage in its interpretation.
During the classic period of their existence as Dominions – a term
invented in Canada to denote the status of a realm of the crown, very
close to ‘empire’ in the Tudor sense – the neo-Britains believed very deeply
in something called ‘the British Empire’. By this they did not primarily
mean – even if they should have – domination over large non-European
populations, in which they were more indirectly than directly involved. As
‘colonists’ they had little to do with ‘colonialism’, and indeed that term had
yet to be invented. When they thought of ‘the British Empire’, they had in
mind an association or partnership between Britain and the neo-Britains,
held together by a common culture and loyalties – here the Irish were to be
heard from, and Québecois and Afrikaner dissent was more vocal still – and
by the material ties symbolized in New Zealand retrospect by the image of
the ‘protein bridge’,7 the ocean shipping routes along which their agrarian
and pastoral produce was conveyed to British markets. This global system
was protected by British naval power, and Dominion expeditionary forces
took part in wars for its maintenance and protection. That these wars were
European as well as imperial was understood, perhaps insufficiently but
not in ways entailing any lack of self-awareness; the Dominions knew who
they were and how they fitted into the system. Until 1941 and in some ways
after, threats to this system were European and did not originate on the
other face of the planet.
It can be argued that historiography has not yet caught up with this state
of affairs. There is a field called ‘history of the British Empire’, in which the
neo-Britains appear parenthetically, as anomalous exceptions – and so they
are – to the generalizations governing British relations with its otherwise
non-European empire. There is another, at first sight closer to their
concerns, called ‘Commonwealth history’, situated within the history of
empire but not assimilated to it.8 This is the history of the formal and
political association between the neo-Britains and Britain, and it enters
upon questions which belong to the field of British history. Much of it is
Whig history, that of the growth of the neo-Britains towards parliamentary
self-government, reaching a point at which the crown is incorporate with
each of its parliaments severally (the solution impossible in the 1770s), and
the empire (in the sense appropriate to this association) is once more a
multiple monarchy, held together by consensus among its members and
the powerful material and cultural forces supporting that consensus. What
is usually lacking, however, in the literature of ‘Commonwealth history’ is
the national history which each neo-Britain has constructed and is living
7 8
Belich, 2001. Classically Mansergh, 1969; there is a vast bibliography.
and recounting for itself. This is not imperial history in the sense that it
is concerned with the rule of subject majorities – South Africa is the
exception – though it may deal with the presence of unassimilated peoples,
Québecois or Maori (Afrikaners were a more complex case). But the history
of a neo-Britain is by definition the history of relations among a people of
settlers, entitled to be concerned with themselves and their own divisions
and resolutions. Each is therefore a ‘national’ history, told to itself by a
people engaged in forming itself within the history it seeks to tell, and not
much communicated to others. Canadians, Australians and New
Zealanders do not know each other’s history,9 and the British do not
seek to know theirs; there are good (as well as bad) reasons why they need
to know the history of Britain, which the present enterprise seeks to enlarge
into British history.
There are, as a further consequence, a number of histories to be written –
forming a field larger than ‘Commonwealth history’ in the formal sense –
of how these several ‘national’ histories have interacted with the several
histories of empire. In these a central reality – especially in the first half of
the twentieth century – has been the myth of the Commonwealth; it was
what the neo-Britains had in mind when they spoke of ‘the British Empire’,
and it was the dissolution of this connection, revealing the extent to which
it had been a myth, that they experienced under the name of ‘Europe’. The
myth, and its reality, were founded on the idea of consensus, pressed to the
point where it was held to entail no need of a formal structure of decision,
federal or imperial; the parties were assumed to understand the nature of
their association, and this was fundamental to the idea of nationality as the
neo-Britains developed it. They were nations because they were equal
partners. The ‘empire’ they formed was therefore conceived as an ‘empire
of liberty’ – to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson – and belonged
within the interactions of imperium and libertas which offer a key to
Western political thought.
Two sets of considerations perturbed the neo-British roles in this asso-
ciation and its ideology. One was the continuing cultural dependence
which attended the relationship with historic Britain; it was easier to
imagine themselves as British than as formed by histories of their own.
This gave rise to a sense of being ‘colonial’, though they had done the
9
I have been told of a Canadian university press which declined a suggestion that it join in distributing
Sharp and McHugh, 2001, on the grounds that the book was not about Commonwealth history but
about New Zealand, and therefore of no interest to Canadians. It is a history of treaties between the
crown and an indigenous people, which could be fruitfully compared with the Canadian experience.
colonizing themselves and no authoritarian structure but their own was
imposing ‘colonialism’ upon them; a verbal confusion, which may be a
category mistake, is visible here. When a New Zealand poet, at the height
(or depth) of the Depression, wrote of his own culture as ‘white shoots
under the wet sack of Empire’,10 he was talking of its dominance by a
system of global capitalism then in crisis, which prevented it from imagin-
ing or making itself; but this did not equate the colonial experience with
that imposed upon non-European peoples. The culture that dominated
them was one they had brought themselves, and it was from themselves
that they needed emancipation.
It is here that one must seek the history of their consciousness: the
tensions between the self transplanted and the self generated, voyage and
settlement, waka and whenua. A neglected poet from Rangiora, in
Canterbury, writing a century ago, knew that this tension must become a
source of vitality and a kind of joy.
Here’s to the home that was never, never ours!
Toast it full and fair when the winter lowers.
Speak ye low, my merry men, sitting at your ease,
Hearken to the homeless drift in the roaring seas! . . .
. . . Here’s to the selves we shall never, never be!
We’re the drift of the world and the tangle of the sea.
It’s far beyond the Pleiad and out beyond the sun
That the rootless shall be rooted when the wander-year is done.11
(IV)
The second set of perturbations – so enormous in its human and material
costs that it is difficult to bracket it with those just mentioned – arose from
Dominion participation in the wars of the twentieth century. The empire
of consensus meant that this participation was more voluntary than obliga-
tory, and it enjoyed very massive emotional support because it was per-
ceived as a way of attaining nationality within a free association. The South
African war of 1899–1902 was perhaps the only war fought by Britain
and the neo-Britains as an independent partnership; it was fought for
10
A. R. D. Fairburn (1904–57), ‘Dominion’ (Fairburn, 1938, 1966; repr. Bornholdt, O’Brien and
Williams, 1997, p. 431).
11
First and last verses of ‘Song of the Drift’, by Jessie Mackay (1864–1938); see Mackay, 1909, p. 82.
My thanks to Bruce Harding for finding this reference.
reasons intelligible in ‘Commonwealth’ terms, and marked the momentary
height of belief that this partnership of nations might constitute an
‘Empire’ acting as a single world power. In the continuing presence of
Afrikaners and Africans, however, it was of limited success, and did not
result in the reconstitution of South Africa as a neo-Britain. The two
World Wars which followed were in this perspective, down to 1942,
European wars, in which the Dominions took part – Canada to maintain
empire in the North Atlantic, Australia and New Zealand to maintain the
empire of the ‘protein bridges’ – when the threat to the imperial system was
perceived as European. A Britain defeated by German power, expelled
from Europe or invaded and occupied by it, would be unable to maintain
this system; but the emotions driving the neo-Britains to sustain the very
heavy casualties of these wars were visceral and part of themselves. The
connection with crown and empire, Europe and North America, consti-
tuted the world as they understood it, and while such a system could still
maintain itself, there was nothing false about their consciousness of it.
This world and world-vision lasted at least until 1942–5, when Britain,
rapidly using up its resources in face of the German conquest of Europe,
was revealed capable of only a secondary role in face of a Japanese assault in
south-east Asia and the western Pacific, and suffered huge losses of empire
in consequence. It was to this that John Curtin referred when he told
Australians that they were now protected by the navy of the United States;12
why this is seen as a stirring call to national independence is less evident.
The New Zealand decision to remain committed to the war in the
Mediterranean was taken in the same context; the protection of New
Zealand and the war against Japan depended on the survival of the
American aircraft-carriers, but in the long run it was evident that the
United States was capable of a war in two hemispheres – as the British
Commonwealth and Empire was not – and the New Zealand decision was
consonant with the American decision to give priority to the defeat of the
Third Reich. And, as pointed out earlier, Nazism, and Communism
afterwards, were horrors arising within their own civilization and history;
whereas, even after the Japanese have ceased to be incomprehensible aliens,
nobody is likely to devise a history of Asia and the Pacific which will both
include the episode of Japanese military empire and instruct the southern
neo-Britains as to what they are and have been.
On the level of reflective generalization on which this essay is being
written, it is hard to account for the persistent implication that the
12
Above, pp. 17–18.
Australian decision to move from the European war to the defence of
Australia’s northern approaches – obviously necessary as it was – is to be
applauded as less ‘colonial’ than the contrasting decision by New Zealand.
James Belich, the brilliantly thoughtful New Zealand historian who has
developed the concept of a ‘neo-Britain’ to the level of an organizing
category, has described the era of the ‘protein bridge’ – also a term of his
coining – as one of ‘recolonization’, and the strategic decision of 1942 as the
product of a ‘recolonial’ mentality.13 But if it can be presented as a deliberate
decision it was not an instance of false consciousness, and this may lead to
some questioning of Belich’s concept of ‘recolonization’. He seems to imply
that the intensified relation between New Zealand pasturage and the United
Kingdom market – brought about by the invention of refrigerated shipping
and the British demand for a meat-and-butter diet – which certainly
involved New Zealand in an economy from which it was hard to break
away, was a relationship of prolonged, even renewed, dependence, psycho-
logical as well as economic and strategic; hence the ‘recolonial mentality’. To
the present writer, a survivor of the generation of 1942, it is a matter of
memory that the mentality of the period was ceasing to be ‘colonial’ – a word
we used as one of opprobrium – and that we were increasing our capacity to
inhabit our own history, British history and the history of the Second World
War – all of which we knew to be problematic – as adults and equals. The
myth of the Commonwealth and Empire was a myth of equality; it was
gravely flawed and has not endured; but it was not ineffective, and is not to
be read simply as masking a continued colonial dependency. When one
encounters – as one still does – the barely hidden assumption that any
relationship with the metropolis must be a relationship of subordination,
one is in the presence of the colonial mentality in continuing form; it is being
implied that this is a relationship New Zealanders cannot conduct for
themselves, but must escape and deny. The essays in this volume offer one
way of affirming this implication to be false.
(V)
To question the thesis of ‘recolonization’ is also to question that of
‘decolonization’, used (as it regularly is) to describe the ideological experi-
ence of New Zealanders since the end of the Second British Empire. Since
they were colonists, they were not colonized; since they brought British
culture and its history with them and imposed it on themselves, their need
13
Belich, 2001, pp. 283–87.
to modify and rewrite it is not to be identified with the experience of post-
colonial élites neither British nor European, on whom it was imposed by
the imperial policies to which the name of ‘colonialism’ has so imprecisely
been given. It is the argument of this and a preceding chapter that the
relationship between Britain and the neo-Britains was one which implied a
certain equality in sovereignty, allowing the latter to conceptualize and
continue British history in ways of their own. There is no escaping the need
to find ways of doing this after the partnership has been dissolved; but the
British withdrawal from the Commonwealth species of Empire has been a
withdrawal not from hegemony, but from equality. The British withdrew;
the Dominions did not escape; what was refused them was the practice of a
known relationship, and the ascent, where this was incomplete, towards the
capacity to practise it. Allen Curnow, writing comic verse under the
persona of ‘Whim Wham’, expressed this in a song for British entry into
the Common Market.14
When we were a little tiny colony of Britain,
With a heigh-ho, the winds and the waves,
Our feckless history began to be written,
And the waves break busily night and day.
When first we fought in an Empire’s cause,
It wasn’t for the loot, nor yet for the applause,
Then when we came to Dominion Status,
Nor slump nor squeeze could alienate us,
And the waves break busily night and day . . .
Sir, have you thought what it’s like to be,
All, all alone on a wide, wide sea?
Much can happen in a very short time,
A feckless history, a foolish rhyme!
14
‘Take Your Time, History!’ ([Curnow], 1967). Two verses omitted.
What these verses reflect is the thing foretold and not foretold in an earlier
poem of Curnow’s:
whatever islands may be,
Over and under the sea,
It is something different, something
Nobody counted on.15
Nobody had counted on the ideology of ‘Europe’, now requiring the

British to declare that the history they had inhabited was not the history
in which they had led the neo-British to believe, but one in which the latter
had no place; so that their history, if they had one, explained neither the
history of Britain nor that of Europe, and was more than questionable as an
explanation of their own. Nor was it at all clear that ‘Europe’ possessed a
history in the sense in which that word had hitherto been used; since it had
had a good deal to do – there was a case for saying that it had had too much
to do – with the history of states, made by states through the exercise of
their sovereignty; and now ‘Europe’ appeared to intend the abandonment
(in some measure) by states of their sovereignty, their separate identities,
and their ability to make histories for (and of ) themselves. On further
enquiry, it appeared to stand for globalization; that is, for a state of affairs
in which the conditions of human existence were manufactured only by
markets, and over which the conscious decisions of human beings in
political associations had neither power nor authority. This might mean
that the markets had no need of historical narratives sustained over time,
but only of constantly shifting images of commodification and obsoles-
cence. It was no accident – to use the old Marxist language – that there
should appear ideologies of the sort called post-modernist, in which there is
no reality, but only language, and nothing can happen because it is only
invented; an exaggeration, of course, but the kind of exaggeration we have
to live with.
Post-imperial (not to say post-political) history, both as lived and as
written, has an authentically post-modern flavour; it has been a time of the
breaking, making and re-assembling of sovereignties and the histories and
identities that accompany them, in combination with a globalization that
knows no frontiers and seems controlled by few or no agents, and an
information explosion that leaves it doubtful whether we are being
15
Curnow, ‘The Unhistoric Story’ (1941; 1997, p. 235). The last two lines form a refrain to each verse of
the poem.
informed of anything beyond information. In these circumstances, to write
history at all – and in particular, histories of relatively stable identities
changing and interacting over long periods of time – is a challenge to the
Zeitgeist, whose political claims must be frankly stated and evaluated. To
write British history, especially from a neo-British standpoint, is to claim
that it can be done: to claim to possess and act in it; to say that the men of
Israel have an inheritance in David the king, at a time when the men of
Belial are blowing their trumpets everywhere and Israel has dispersed to its
tents, or in search of them. It is to instruct those islanded in time that what
comes over the sea invariably brings something nobody counted on, and
that exposure to history as ironic narrative makes the self snap open, all eyes
wary and alert to what it may unconventionally be. It aims to inform the
British peoples that they have unusually complex histories to live in, that a
global culture may not deliver them from having to live in these histories,
and that they cannot use the word ‘Europe’ as a means of pretending that
these do not exist. It informs – or it should inform – Europeans (who ought
to know this already) that they too live in complex histories, and will have
to write even more complex histories of ‘Europe’ each time they wish to
include new peoples in their association. It is concerned with imagination
and judgement as means to action.
Some of these matters will be further explored in a concluding section.
New Zealand, where these essays began to be written, may be said – as in
the title of this section – to experience the post-imperial and post-modern
condition as the Strange Multiplicity chosen by the Canadian philosopher
and historian James Tully as the title – significantly – of his Seeley Lectures
at Cambridge in 1993.16 Tully was concerned with the bewildering variety
of cultures claiming sovereignty, in order to establish identity, in the post-
imperial world, and the corresponding diversity of meanings the word
‘sovereignty’ must consequently assume. It followed that it must be
increasingly difficult for individuals in that world to live under a single
sovereignty or assume a single identity; and he chose to illustrate his
published lectures the great sculpture of the Haida Gwaai, by the First
Nation Canadian Bill Reid. This consists of a waka or canoe, crewed
entirely by shape-changers and captained – if that is the word – by the
towering figure of a shaman, the kilstlaai.17 To the present writer’s eye, the
question arises whether this figure is that of Leviathan, making decisions
16
Tully, 1995.
17
Tully, 1995, p. xvii. Originals of this sculpture may be seen at the Canadian Embassy in Washington,
DC, and the Vancouver International Airport, Vancouver, BC.
that arrest or alter the flow of change, or whether he is simply the vehicle
through which changes flow and effect themselves. The question – no
doubt an answerable one – presented itself because Reid and Tully were
western Canadians, and Tully sees Canada as a texture of sovereignties,
British, French and First Nation, relations between which must remain
fluid and historical. The First Nations therefore negotiate a number of
treaties with a number of treaty partners. New Zealand, by comparison, a
unitary state rather than a federation, has redefined its sovereignty as
an ongoing debate over the treaty, between the tangata whenua and the
Crown, by which that sovereignty was established. The relations between
sovereignty and history are therefore different here, and give rise to his-
tories differently written from those to be found or expected in the
Canadian case, or perhaps in James Tully’s philosophy.
These are narratives of sovereignty, and I have chosen throughout these
essays to make sovereignty, imperium and ‘empire’ keys to the diversity of
British history, and history itself a product of the political associations
which have possessed sovereignty enough to make it. There are many ways
of conceiving history, and all should enjoy parity of esteem; I choose this
one because it is under threat and there are ways of being that are
threatened with it. In the essays making up this section, I try to show
how New Zealand history may be written into the context of the kinds of
history I know how to write. One shows how Enlightenment history could
be and was extended into the nineteenth-century Pacific; the other pursues
the politics of sovereignty in the setting indicated by Tully.
CHAPTER 12
Tangata whenua and

Enlightenment anthropology
In the ninth chapter of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the
volume published in 1776, Edward Gibbon wrote about the condition of
the German forest peoples as they had been described by Tacitus and as
they perhaps were two centuries later, when they began invading and
settling in the Roman provinces. He employed language and a concept
which are not what we mean when we use the term tangata whenua,1 but
nevertheless tells us something about a literal meaning which the phrase
could bear and the processes by which it has acquired the quite different
meanings which it has for us.
There is not anywhere upon the globe a large tract of country which we have
discovered destitute of inhabitants, or whose first population can be fixed with any
degree of historical certainty. And yet, as the most philosophic minds can seldom
refrain from investigating the infancy of great nations, our curiosity consumes
itself in toilsome and disappointed efforts. When Tacitus considered the purity of
the German blood, and the forbidding aspect of the country, he was disposed to
pronounce those barbarians Indigenae, or natives of the soil. We may allow with
safety, and perhaps with truth, that ancient Germany was not originally peopled
by any foreign colonies already formed into a political society; but that the name
and nation received their existence from the gradual union of some wandering
savages of the Hercynian woods. To assert those savages to have been the spontan-
eous production of the earth which they inhabited would be a rash inference,
condemned by religion and unwarranted by reason.2
In the last sentence Gibbon was of course dismissing the idea that any
human group could have been spontaneously generated by seeds of life
1
Pocock, 1992b, 2001a; originally delivered to the New Zealand Historical Association, Christchurch,
1991. [Some of its arguments have been valuably refined and developed by Hickford, 1999, and
Moloney, 2001. The reader is reminded that Maori words are not usually italicized in New Zealand
typography, and that ‘tangata whenua’ initially bears the meaning of ‘people of the land’, or ‘birth-
place’; above, p. 5, n. 6.]
2
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, ch. 9; Womersley,
1994, vol. I, p. 233.
199
latent in the earth of the area which they subsequently populated; that they
could have been indigenae, autochthonoi, earthborn, gigantes or giants.
Spontaneous generation was an ancient rather than a modern idea, and
Gibbon had modern reasons for repudiating it; these reasons were, how-
ever, complicated and problematic. Before I consider them, it is desirable
to make a philological point. To use the term tangata whenua does not
commit us to an affirmation of autochthony, which would indeed be
ridiculous in the context of an island group in the deep south-west of the
Pacific Ocean; but it does, as most sympathetic readers have believed,
affirm something important by way of the plurality of meanings conveyed
by the word whenua, which is understood to mean both land and placenta,
thus making the land a birthplace and a source of identity. By setting up
this verbal association of land and birth, we proceed to say that the term
tangata whenua does not entail the literal statement that the tangata are
autochthonoi or gigantes, but rests upon a metaphor: that is, a poetic,
rhetorical or dramatic statement that there exists a close and rich relation-
ship between the meanings of land and birth, and that there can exist
between a people and its land a similarly rich relationship, which can serve
as a basis for a claim of right. The richness and the relationship are
discovered by exploring the ways in which the metaphor operates in
language or discourse; but there exists also a politics of language, by
some of the norms prevalent in which we are entitled to say that a metaphor
is itself entitled to be respected but not to be privileged – that is, that there are
boundaries to its authority. The politics really begin once we attempt to
establish what these boundaries are, and who has authority to determine them.
This question cannot be absent from our minds while I explore the
language context in which Gibbon wrote the paragraph I have quoted,
language in which eighteenth-century Europeans discussed the relations
between the formation of human groups and the land which they occu-
pied. Why did Gibbon find it necessary to affirm that the German forest
dwellers were not indigenae, not tangata whenua in the literal sense, that
they were not physically or biologically generated out of the soil which they
were found occupying? The notion of autochthony was Greek or Roman, a
blend of mythology and Epicurean naturalism, and he did not need to
repudiate it as a belief widely held in his own time. He did need to consider
it, however, because, like other Greco-Roman ideas caught up in Peter
Gay’s ‘rebirth of modern paganism’, it had become prominent as a possible
but unacceptable alternative in the wake of repudiation of a Judeo-
Christian paradigm which had hitherto been used to explain the history
of the human race. The paradigm repudiated was of course that of the
Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology 201
Mosaic chronology and the Noachic genealogy; but it is important to
realize that though it had been repudiated, it had not yet been replaced,
so that the philosopher was in danger of adopting other hypotheses, such as
that of autochthony, which were equally unsound.
The repudiated paradigm affirmed the descent of the human race from a
single human pair; less Adam and Eve, in this case, than Noah and his wife,
who with their progeny had survived the universal deluge. In this part of
Gibbon’s chapter on the Germans he is engaged in deriding and dismissing
the mainly Renaissance genealogies which elaborately traced the ancestors
of existing people back to the sons of Noah and divided the human race
into a Hamitic, Semitic or Japhetic iwi (‘tribe’) and waka (literally ‘canoe’,
‘ship’; lineage tracing descent from a given canoe). It is possible to make
this paradigm sound ridiculous, and it is an interesting comment on our
culture that we still feel some conventional obligation to do so; needless to
say, the historian is not concerned to show that belief systems are ridicu-
lous, but to discover why they were not ridiculous once. The Noachic
paradigm had had certain characteristics. It had made the human race a
genetic unity, descended from an original human pair. It had precluded as
un-Christian the possibility of autochthony, the notion that separate
human groups might have been independently generated by the workings
of local biophysical conditions. With its repudiation such notions might
recur; but autochthony, said Gibbon, was a concept ‘condemned by
religion and unwarranted by reason’. Did it follow that the philosophes
were intent on maintaining the unity of the human race? Gibbon does not
enter upon the question, but on the one hand it is easy to see from his text
that he wished to adopt the perspective of Buffon – whom he greatly
admired – and consider the human race as one among the many animal
species populating the planet.3 How these species had originated and how
they had come to be distributed were questions to be asked. On the other
hand, Gibbon was certainly aware of the writings of Voltaire, who in the
Essai sur les Mœurs had effected a decisive repudiation of the Noachic
genealogies, and had proceeded instantly to suggest that the human species
was genetically differentiated into sub-species: that the Lapps were a
different kind of human animal from their Scandinavian neighbours,
that the sensory organs of Chinese were differently formed from those of
Europeans, and that their cultural and even intellectual capacities were
different in consequence. Gibbon was not immune from this kind of
thinking, predictably enough when writing about sub-Saharan Africans;
3
This is a starting point for some of the themes explored in Pocock, 2005 (B).
it was much easier in his and many previous generations to be anti-Hamitic
than anti-Semitic, though he continued to despise Jews even after aban-
doning Christian anti-Judaism. But he mistrusted Voltaire on nearly every
subject, and much admired Joseph de Guignes, whose great history of
Eurasian nomadism Voltaire had so incessantly derided. De Guignes had
seen his Histoire des Huns, Turcs et Mogols (1756–8) as uniting Roman,
Islamic and Chinese history in a single narrative and so as restoring human
history to the unity which Voltaire had sought to destroy. To this end, de
Guignes was prepared to uphold the Noachic paradigm and insist that the
Chinese were a Hamitic people, an offshoot of Egyptian civilization rather
than a stock emigrating direct from the plains of Shinar after the fall of the
Tower of Babel. The minor problem of autochthony was now caught up in
a larger subject: how to write human history on post-biblical assumptions.
It is clear by now, however, that if the history of the human race were to be
traced from a single point of origin, whether the Garden of Eden or the
Olduvai Gorge, it must be a history of diffusion and migration, in which
the concept of a tangata whenua must have the status of a metaphor. It is
the prehistory of that metaphor which next requires to be studied, and
doing so will enable us to understand it much better than will concentra-
tion on the rather barren concept of autochthony.
Biblical history supplied a moment from which the history of human

diffusion could begin: not so much the departure from the Ark as the
dispersion of the peoples from Shinar, following the confusion of tongues
at the fall of the tower erected by Nimrod grandson of Ham. This was a
third Fall of Man, preceded by the Deluge and the Expulsion from the
Garden. Dante depicted Nimrod as a Titan, one of the giants in the earth
in those days; and his progeny, divided less by pedigree than by language,
wandered away to begin the repeopling of the earth. It was to be their
vagrant and migratory history of which Enlightened anthropology (even
in its post-biblical form) chose to make most, but their function in the
Mosaic scheme was as background to the distinction between the seed of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom the Lord chose to make his people by
covenant, and the rest of mankind, the Gentiles, who lived by reason and
nature alone. Sacred and natural history were now clearly differentiated,
but it was the former which was authoritatively written; as the annals and
genealogies of Babylon, Chaldea, Greece and Rome became known –
those of Egypt remaining buried in hieroglyphic and hermetic – they
were integrated with the biblical narrative in the great Renaissance
science of chronology. Voltaire’s Essai is the major blow struck at this
system;4 he moved the Chinese chronology centre stage to displace that of
Moses, after which he had no further need of the Chinese and dismissed
them as a biologically alien race. There existed already an alternative
scheme for writing the natural history of the Gentiles, one not so much
incompatible with Mosaic history as structurally discontinuous with it:
that supplied by natural jurisprudence. We move now out of the biblical
paradigm into that in which the natural history of society is written as
part of the search for its natural law, and the history of any particular
society becomes the history of its jurisprudence, its land tenure and its
property.
Any nervous agnostics who may be lingering among us may be glad to
know that I am getting out of sacred history and the Book of Genesis, and
into the strictly secular, theoretical and eventless history of the state
of nature and the origins of civil government. Yet the two have some
important features in common. In the early seventeenth century, western
European theorists of natural law were turning towards theories of natural
right,5 and to that end were constructing the concept of a state of nature, a
primeval condition of human existence in which individuals were depicted
as without rights, without mechanisms of distributive justice, and without
civil government. This condition was individualist and anarchic; solitary
humans were imagined moving in an environment defined as the earth’s
surface as yet unappropriated – as the wanderers from Shinar might have
found it in the age following the universal flood – with the effect that the
individual preceded property, and any system of institutionalized values
must be the effect and consequence of appropriation. From appropriation
followed property, from property rights, and from rights government.
Appropriation could only be carried out by the solitary individuals (and
their nuclear families), imagined roaming in the state of nature; yet the
more carefully the individual was defined in terms of his property, his
rights and his appropriation, the more clearly it followed that the individ-
ual who had not yet appropriated was not yet fully an individual or fully
human. We reach the point of origin from which developed all the
ideologies which presented various tangata whenua as less than human,
because their manner of living in the earth did not conform to the
extremely individualistic west European model of appropriation from a
state of nature.
This is the paradigm of possessive individualism, which I suggest we
should not be too hasty to associate with early phases of the development
4 5
Pocock, 1999, vol. II, ch. 7 (B). Tuck, 1980; Tully, 1993.
of capitalism, though it is important to know when and how that asso-
ciation occurred. The late C. B. Macpherson6 caused unnecessary trouble,
I believe, by telescoping ‘possessive’ with ‘accumulative’ and ‘accumulative’
with ‘bourgeois’, by associating these ideas prematurely. If we look at the
paradigm of appropriation from the state of nature, the two things we
ought first to notice are that it was constructed by jurists and that the
technology it presupposes is that of the heavy plough. The latter turns up
baulks and headlands; it demarcates tenure in the act of cultivation; it is as
phallic as you like to make it; and it means that any primeval law must take
the form of social arrangements which cross from one man’s furrow into
his neighbour’s, a step of much magical significance in both primeval law
and primeval anthropology. We are concerned here with the myth of
the plough, and I will not pause to examine its reality. As for the first
half of the imagined paradigm – the image of the jurist seated on his bench
with the ploughmen or their exploiters standing before him – the point
I want to dwell on is Alan Macfarlane’s: that the courtroom was the theatre
in which possessive individualism was shaped long before the market was
imagined replacing it.7 Roman and feudal jurisprudence alike took it for
granted that the proprietors who came before it to adjust disputes would be
individuals, Gaius and Titius, seigneur and vassal, neighbour and neigh-
bour; not the communities or agnatic kin-groups who were imagined and
acknowledged by jurisconsults only in the nineteenth century. They
arranged these litigant individuals in adversarial relationships, plea and
counter-plea, challenge and response, conflict and resolution, on which
each and every image of the state of nature, the origins of jus meaning right
and jus meaning authority, and the transition to the state of civil govern-
ment has quite unmistakably been formed; and they established all these
images at the existential centre of the Western sense of what an individual is.
I recall thinking a few years ago, when debate about Maori sovereignty
was particularly active, that it might be important to remember that all
early modern pakeha (New Zealander of European descent) political philo-
sophy is about land rights and sovereignty, and that all early modern theory
of sovereignty originated in civil war. The debate then beginning with
representatives of the tangata whenua was a debate as between two modes
of occupying land and acquiring rights, and this paper is about the
acquisition of hegemony by one of them: about the growth of a pakeha
discourse and sense of individuality from which the tangata whenua were
all too easily excluded.
6 7
Macpherson, 1967. Macfarlane, 1979.
I have been arguing that this discourse of possessive individualism is a
great deal older than market relationships, and can be found implicit in
both feudal and Roman jurisprudence; law, I claim, is one of its principal
sources, and this could raise interesting questions about the relatively
higher salience of law in Roman-Western than in Confucian-East Asian
civilized discourse. But the next step is to trace the discourse of individu-
alism to times before Roman jurisprudence, and discover it in the thought
of both polis and epic. There is, after all, something anticipating the jurists’
state of nature in Aristotle himself; pre-polis and pre-Homeric humanity,
he tells us, was made up of Cyclopes, wandering giants like Polyphemus in
the Odyssey, ruling their nuclear families and knowing no law common to
themselves. It is the myth of primeval individualism once again, and raises
the problem of how these radically autochthonous savages can be imagined
into an association which will make them human and supply an origin for
the polis. But the polis did not invent this primeval-individualist myth of its
own origins; Polyphemus himself was invented in an epic world more
heroic than political, and I wish I knew the ideological history of the
Homeric imagination well enough to know why he was invented. If we
generalize our perception of epic and look at a set of archetypal myths on
which Aegean, Mesopotamian and European imagination is founded, we
find them in every case radically individualist. They start with the expul-
sion from a paradise, the confusion of a language, the fall of a city; and the
creative initiatives are taken, very often unwillingly, by exiles like Adam
and Nimrod, fugitives from justice like Cain and Orestes, seaborne wan-
derers like Noah, Odysseus and Aeneas. Even the great covenants with the
Lord, on which Israel is founded and ends by including us all, are entered
into by a warrior people nomadic on the margins of a river-valley empire
which entertains the false belief that heaven and earth are one. Hebraic and
Hellenic man sets out from a circle already broken, from a state of nature
rather than from any natural oneness with his whenua. And of course all
this is as masculine as the words I have just used: masculine, heroic,
patriarchal and barbaric; there is a ‘we’ who do not originate in the great
archaic civilizations founded on myths of cosmic unity. We have to
recognize that this masculine imagery is very deeply ingrained, and that
to modify it is not the same as to reverse it. The anti-patriarchalist and anti-
classical historian (and Canterbury graduate) Patricia Springborg is trying
to put Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Two Lands and the Two Rivers, back
at the centre of our historical consciousness;8 one wants to wish her much
8
Springborg, 1990.
success, but at the same time to ask whether it can – or even should – be
more than partial. It was at Canterbury, in 1944 or 1945, that I heard Karl
Popper’s lectures launch his indictment of Plato for aiming at regression
from the Open Society to the Tribe;9 and the Open Society has not done
badly since then (though greatly at New Zealand’s expense) in the civil wars
of humanity. Beginning at the end of the seventeenth century, the various
movements we group together under the name of Enlightenment continued
to operate the historical paradigm supplied by natural jurisprudence,
but under historical conditions which have been in need of redefinition.
There has been, and is still indignantly defended, a historical schema which
depicts the uninterrupted march of possessive individualism towards the
collision with a socialist antithesis; but – for reasons only loosely connected
with the planetary disasters befalling that antithesis – this schema has been
challenged by another, which depicts the Enlightened image of the pos-
sessive individual as distracted between two models, the one ancient and
the other modern. On the ancient or republican side of the diptych stood
the virtuous citizen of Greco-Roman antiquity, proprietor of his land and
his weapons, supported by the labour of his slaves and household, who
supplied him with the leisure in which he might engage in either con-
templation or action; acting in a politics of direct encounter with his peers
that engaged his personality directly in the practice of the res publica or
common good; contemplating in a philosophical activity that permitted
direct and immediate cognition of things as they were in their ideas or
substances. On the modern or commercial side stood the enlightened
individual of what was called polite society, proprietor of a fluid wealth
as well as of land, which permitted him to exchange money for services
which he did not perform himself; at leisure because he paid the state to
hire professional soldiers and need no longer bear arms himself, because
he might take part in the election of representatives who would do his self-
governing for him, and because, whatever his own activity as a producer
or more probably a consumer, he was engaged in a multitude of social
transactions permitting a multitude of goods to be produced and
exchanged by a multitude of specialized skills. Ancient man’s leisure gave
him the freedom to be himself; modern man’s leisure gave him the freedom
to diversify his existence. Ancient philosophy meant the contemplation of
the universe as essential substance; modern philosophy meant the contem-
plation of the human mind as its workings produced the infinite diversities
of human culture.10
9 10
Popper, 1945. Pocock, 1975, 1985 (A) and 2003 (B).
Antitheses of this kind led to the appearance of schemes of history in
which the progress of mankind was from simplicity and self-sufficiency
towards diversity and socialization. In these schemes the concept of self
came to be crucial and problematic. On the presumption that humans were
social beings it could be argued that the self was not sufficient, that an
individual concerned only to support himself could never be fully human
nor fully an individual. On the presumption that humans possessed and
ought to realize unique personalities, it could be perceived that the pro-
gressive diversification and specialization of separate human capacities
could lead to the disappearance of individuality, as the self became decon-
structed and absorbed by the sum of its social transactions. It did not take
the modern long to predict the post-modern; and the great anti-philosopher
of the age, Jean Jacques Rousseau, informed his fellow humans that they
were trapped between the extremes of savagery and corruption, with little
chance of realizing or maintaining a human capacity. The Enlightened
scheme of human progress contains ambivalence even when it looks most
complacent, and we have to bear this in mind when considering what it did
with the image of the tangata whenua, the original individual born on the
earth and living in it.
What they did with him – him, of course, though there was an increas-
ing volume of writings about the condition of women in the successive
worlds he, of course, had made – was to make him into the savage, the
selvaggio, the wild man of the woods, orang-utan or bushman. This figure
was arrived at by conflating the primeval individual of classical, biblical and
jurisprudential anthropology with the variety of food-gathering and hoe-
digging cultures – if we must lump them all together under a single
description – which Europeans had encountered since their oceanic per-
meation of the planet began around 1492. Here of course is the point at
which Western anthropology begins to commit injustices towards the
peoples we now think of when we hear or use the phrase tangata whenua.
The function of the term ‘savage’ was to establish the presupposition that
the inhabitants of cultures practising neither heavy-plough agriculture nor
monetarized exchange were living in the state of nature: that they were
solitary and feral individuals who had not yet reached the point of estab-
lishing civil government by consent, and so lived either under no govern-
ment at all or under that of despots, either primitive or oriental. Nimrod,
the mighty hunter before the Lord who had organized labour to build the
first ziggurat, neatly telescoped the two kinds of despot.
The function of the term ‘savage’, then, is to establish the premiss of
primeval individualism, and the function of the term tangata whenua is to
undo it. The concept of primeval, and of course possessive, individualism is
importantly double-edged; it proclaims that the origins of society lie in
individuality, but at the same time that individuality is underdeveloped
without society. The first humans, then, were not quite human yet; they
were missing links, such as we still search for in primate paleontology. The
essential step into humanity was taken with the acceptance of law and
government, and it was premissed that this step could not be taken without
the preceding or accompanying step of appropriation. Without abandon-
ing the doctrine in the least, Enlightened anthropology added the premiss
that the step into humanity was taken with the acquisition of capacity for
exchange, commerce, specialization and diversification, and that it was this
which appropriation through the heavy plough either preceded or accom-
panied. Theorists of this period were more likely to telescope agriculture
and commerce than to separate them. They even telescoped agriculture and
urbanization to form a semi-biblical equivalent of what we sometimes term
the neolithic revolution – where their still biblical chronology, by the way,
allowed them to date it. Archbishop Usher’s six thousand years are quite
enough for most of us, though a good deal less than we have had.
This is why Gibbon observes that the German tribes were formed ‘by the
gradual union of some wandering savages of the Hercynian woods’. He
wrote this in the context of an abandonment of the Noachic chronology
and an acceptance of Buffon’s hypothesis that humans were an animal
species, but these steps are not centrally important in shaping the sentence
quoted. Its essence lies in the affirmation that the originators of any human
culture must have been few, must have been savages, and must have been
wanderers; its equivalent in New Zealand prehistory would be an acci-
dental-voyage thesis; and means by this time existed of making these
affirmations within the biblical and Noachic chronology. The biblical
equivalent of the state of nature was, as we have seen, the confusion of
tongues, when the human race had suddenly found itself divided into
mutually incomprehensible linguistic sub-cultures, which had wandered
off in all directions to begin the repeopling of the planet. Since these
sub-cultures had been gentes, linearly descending groups whose genealogies
could be remembered and reconstructed, it was possible for Filmer or
Bossuet to argue that they had been households under patriarchal authority,
and that the divinely commanded chain of magistracy had not been broken
at the confusion of tongues; humans had never been reduced to the pure
atomism of the jurists’ state of nature. But the argument from patriarchy
could easily enough be bypassed. Aristotle’s Cyclopes are patriarchs in the
sense that each dominant male controls females and young, but they are
capable of engaging in thoroughly Hobbesian war between individuals for
control of these assets, just like Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees at Gombe.11 The
degeneration of Nimrodic man was, as we shall see, towards a Hobbesian
condition, but its starting point was a gentilic condition whose most
important significance is the premiss of human diffusion. The gentes dispers-
ing from Shinar were hapu (sub-tribes) and iwi re-groupable into waka: the
three lineages of Ham, Shem and Japhet, survivors of the great accidental
voyage which had preserved the human race. ‘Such things,’ wrote John
Beaglehole, ‘Geography and Navigation.’12 The creation of whenua might
come later.
The crucial premiss here is that of vagrancy: the premiss that a wander-
ing condition dehumanizes or must precede humanization. We learn
this best – at least I do – from a work of Enlightened jurisprudence and
anthropology, which Gibbon relied upon and used often, though it oper-
ates wholly within the Mosaic and Noachic chronology: Antoine-Yves
Goguet’s De l’Origine des Loix, des Arts et des Sciences 13 (the precedence of
law is important). As Goguet’s gentiles wander away from the confusion of
tongues, they forget the arts of tillage and pasture, and vagrancy is the
reason why they forget them. As they wander further, they forget the
natural laws of society and morality and regress to a miserable and
Hobbesian condition; they may forget language itself – it seemed possible
in the Enlightenment that orang-utans were degenerate hominids who had
lost the use of speech – and when they reach the condition of the apparently
impoverished Patagonians, Kalaharians and Tasmanians glimpsed by
voyagers at the extremities of the southern continents, they may even
reach the point where cannibalism is normal. The belief that cannibalism
was the ultimate departure from nature, evidence of the ultimate desocial-
ization and dehumanization, accounts for the shock undergone by the
Endeavour’s company at encountering it – whatever it was they did
encounter – in Queen Charlotte Sound. If the people practising it had
been miserable and inarticulate cave-dwellers, it would have been easier to
bear; but they were sociable, communicative and friendly – almost like the
Tahitians – and anthropophagy among them was a deeply disturbing
anomaly to the Enlightened mind, almost like the Lisbon earthquake. It
is interesting to read in the journals how Banks and Cook set about
inventing hypotheses of protein deficiency and sympathetic magic to
account for it.
11 12 13
Goodall, 1990. Above, p. 15. Goguet, 1758.
Goguet’s degenerate hominids finally turn around and set out on the
road back to humanity, recovering in its later stages the arts of pasture and
tillage in that order. The thesis that early humans had been herdsmen
before they were ploughmen, and ploughmen before they were merchants,
was in the first place a Greek and Roman speculation; its revival in
Enlightened anthropology is important to this story, precisely because
pastoral nomads, for whom the whole earth is one long paddock,14 do
not look very much like tangata whenua, and in fact serve to keep alive the
premisses of vagrancy and primeval individualism. Their Japhetic ancestors
in the old chronology, Gog and Magog, had been giants and hunters in the
earth like Nimrod. In the eighteenth century they had been restored from
myth to history by the Jesuit missions in China, whose translations from
the dynastic histories had revealed the global importance of Central Asian
nomadism. I have mentioned the role of Joseph de Guignes in shaping the
work of Gibbon. This is part of the background to the crucial role which
‘the shepherd stage of society’ plays for Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson,
but there is a problem here which caused much trouble for Ronald Meek in
writing his pioneer study Social Science and the Ignoble Savage.15 For
Goguet, and also for Gibbon, the shepherd stage is not a crucial break
with the hunter-gatherer condition, but rather a prolongation of its sav-
agery. The effect, or more properly the cause, is that for them there are not
four stages in the history of society but two: the one vagrant and the other
sedentary. Goguet, whose work is illustrated with handsome drawings of
heavy ploughs, insists that only as individuals became capable of intensive
cultivation and so of appropriating fixed points on the earth’s surface, did
vagrant savagery begin giving way to sedentary civilization. Once farming
began, there was a social space, defined by the points which humans had
made their own; and across the space which separated and therefore joined
these points, social messages and transactions began to pass back and forth,
with infinitely greater sophistication than had been possible between
migrant groups of hunters and herdsmen. It was the stationary life that
made civilization feasible, and there was no essential difference between the
farmland and the township. Interchange of both material goods and social
functions began to be possible, and as a result there could be interchange of
ideas and elaborations of language. Some of the most interesting passages
in Goguet, and others like him, are devoted to the relations between poetry
and law. The earliest songs, he thinks, were dooms, the chants of lawgivers
giving cadence, metre and assonance to law as a series of mnemonic
14 15
An Australian term for the grassy borders of motor highways. Meek, 1976.
devices; and from this it follows that, as Goguet’s title asserts, there must be
laws, verbalized rules for the regulation of social exchange, before there can
be arts and sciences, the expressions of the social relations which exchange
creates. It is the ploughlands which make all this possible, because they
create stationary and durable human groups between whom communica-
tion can be continuous and self-elaborating; and from this hypothesis
develops the argument which later fermented into the debate over the
poems ascribed to Ossian – could complex messages be preserved through
social time by oral transmission alone, or was it absolutely necessary that
there should exist some means of writing? Gibbon takes a strongly (and
I think consciously) anti-Ossianic line when he asserts that because the
ancient Germans lacked money and letters, the two essential media of
human communication, they could not be other than ‘a herd of savages’,16
deficient in both law and historic memory. His predecessor, the Jacobite
historian Thomas Carte, had, however, already studied Welsh bardic
poetry and reported that it contained a code of assonance and alliteration
so complex that it could serve as a mnemonic and transmit information
from one generation to another in stable and durable forms.17 The great
methodological debate between text and tradition had begun.
Money and letters. We are looking at a theory of society which tele-
scopes and equates agriculture and commerce, because arable exploitation
stabilizes and creates the social space across which relation, transaction and
exchange become possible. The invention of durable media of commu-
nication and exchange is the next step, and the advent of money, though of
far-reaching importance, is not a conceptual break with what has gone
before. Distribution and exchange are more distinctively human even than
production, and it will be linguistically proper to call this a bourgeois
theory of society, so long as we keep in mind that the term bourgeoisie
meant ‘citizenship’, the condition of having rights of membership in an
incorporated and law-governed human group, such as it was the function
of agriculture and the plough to create in schemes like Goguet’s. The
plough was essential to this process, because it alone could create stable and
durable families occupying the same acreage and replenishing the earth
with manure and the society with culture. To think of pre-arable horti-
culture was to think of slash-and-burn, of transient human groups making
clearings in the forest and scratching the ground with hoes for a while
before moving on. They had not escaped from the vagrant condition, and
16 17
Womersley, 1994, vol. I, pp. 234–7. Carte, 1747, vol. I, pp. 33–4.
were no further from savagery – the hunter-gatherer condition – than
transhumant swineherds or grassland nomads were. When Goguet and
Carte thought of Phoenicians and Romans landing in primitive Britain,18
they drew the analogy with Europeans colonizing the tidewaters of forest
America and inducing the selvaggi (or tangata whenua) to come out of the
bush and settle on the margins of their plantations. So long as there was
plenty of uncleared forest, thought Carte, the natives could go walkabout,
and resume the hunter-gatherer existence, whenever they wanted to.
The presumptions of primeval individualism were still at work. The
savage was the pre-sedentary human, hampered by an incapacity for either
production or exchange from developing the laws, arts and sciences which
were the codified expressions of social relations, themselves essentially
commercial. Agriculture was the precondition of commerce, and com-
merce of civilization. A consequence was the polarization of what Meek
taught us to think of as four stages of human history into two, with the
hunter and shepherd relegated to vagrancy, the ploughman and merchant
to sedentary civilization. Goguet supplied Gibbon with an account of the
production of culture, and in his chapter on the Germans Gibbon went
beyond Goguet in analysing the relations between culture and personality,
psyche and even libido. The forest Germans are savages, but not in a simply
negative definition. This is because they are herdsmen as well as hunters,
possessed of large flocks of beasts with whom they move from pasture to
pasture, and so are capable of mobilizing themselves in formidable armed
migrations. They understand war, therefore, but because they are not
ploughmen understand nothing else, and this imposes limits on their
understanding of themselves. They do not appropriate because they do
not labour, and their energies are consequently underemployed.
The care of the house and family, the management of the land and cattle, were
delegated to the old and the infirm, to women and slaves. The lazy warrior,
destitute of every art that might employ his leisure hours, consumed his days
and nights in the animal gratifications of sleep and food . . . The languid soul,
oppressed with its own weight, anxiously required some new and powerful
sensation; and war and danger were the only amusements adequate to its fierce
temper. The sound that summoned the German to arms was grateful to his ear. It
roused him from his uncomfortable lethargy, gave him an active pursuit, and by
strong exercise of the body, and violent emotions of the mind, restored him to a
more lively sense of his existence.19
18
Goguet, 1758, vol. I, pp. 59–61; Carte, 1747, vol. I, pp. 25–6.
19
Womersley, 1994, vol. I, pp. 237–8.
In this culture, bardic poetry is no longer the chanting of laws which
extend and moderate the social space, but ‘the military song’, exciting the
heroic appetites that save the berserker from his boredom. It is a much
more sophisticated and introspective account than Hobbes’s of the inher-
ent violence of the state of nature. Fear pushed Hobbes’s primitives to
acquire power and collide with one another; the savage, midway between
hunter and herdsman, is impelled to heroic and frenzied action by a
deficient sense of self, and this deficiency is accounted for by his imperfect
capacity for appropriation. If he had ploughed the land he would have
acquired property and other proprietors for neighbours. Relations would
have sprung up between them, laws and morality to regulate those rela-
tions, rational and symbolic sign-systems to express the meanings of law
and morality, and he would have come to know himself as a being involved
in and defined by all the modes of his own socialization. As civilized man,
the individual acquired a much richer and more diverse sense of his own
identity, because there were infinitely more schemes of relationship in
which it could be expressed, articulated, elaborated and discussed. But it
had to be acknowledged at the same time – as Gibbon does in discussing
the difference between bardic and modern poetry20 – that the primitive
sense of self, precisely because it was deficient, was far more intense and
immediate, on those berserk occasions when it found expression, than the
civilized sense of self could ever be. The progress of society was from the
hot to the cool medium; civilization consisted in the production of more
and more ways of being and knowing one’s self, so that in the end one was
left aware that whatever self one was asserting at a particular moment was
other than the self one might assert at some other moment. The enrich-
ment of the self was the diminution of its identity. It is very much the
problem of Rousseau, and it is also the problem of gender as the eighteenth
century commonly formulated it. Women were perceived as the sub-heroic
mediators of complex and civilized society, constantly engaged in softening
and refining the passions of man: this gave them a positive role in the
progress of civilization, but at the same time helps explain why civilized
men so gravely feared becoming ‘effeminate’. The civilizing process might
of its nature be carried too far.
I want now to generalize from what I have been saying, and move towards
its implications for a situation in which pakeha and tangata whenua find
themselves in confrontation and may need dialogue. I shall be considering
20
Womersley, 1994, vol. I, p. 247.
these two categories somewhat abstractly and theoretically, without giving
the immediate practical situation the direct consideration which of course
it needs. The justification for doing so is that theoretical analysis may bring
information and clarification to the practical situation, which the latter
may not reveal to itself. It is of course the discourse of the pakeha which I
have been considering all along, because it is this discourse which I have
made a career of studying. I am emphasizing what there is in pakeha
discourse which has tended to exclude the tangata whenua from getting a
hearing; the danger here is that I may slip into representing tangata whenua
discourse as simply that which pakeha discourse excludes, which would be
inadequate, even though it is important to see why the latter excludes it.
Obviously, the tangata whenua are both free and necessitated to articulate
their own discourse; and fortunately for us all, they are eloquent and
outgoing in doing so. I have two aims: the first to show what there has
been in pakeha discourse which has tended to exclude them, while at the
same time enquiring where in that discourse doors may be found which
might be pushed wider open; the second is to say some things about how
the two discourses may look to one another, and even about what they may
have to say to one another. In this, I shall be rejecting the now fashionable
premiss that every discourse is sealed against every other, because irretriev-
ably it is the possession of those whose power has shaped it. It has been said
that language possesses ‘an infinite capacity for being appropriated’; and if
that capacity is infinite, no language can completely predetermine how it is
to be appropriated, or by whom. A dialogue between discourses, therefore,
may be infinitely difficult in practice, but may not be impossible in principle.
I have been examining pakeha discourse as it was in the Enlightened
eighteenth century, when the tangata whenua were theorized as ‘savages’,
and denied any relation with the whenua on the grounds that they had not
appropriated it through the arable techniques of agriculture. This was how
it came about that, from Ulster in the seventeenth century to Canterbury in
the nineteenth – to say nothing of contemporary Amazonia where the
process is still going on – successive tangata whenua found themselves
expropriated on the grounds that they had not appropriated, separated
from the land on the grounds that they did not occupy it, and even denied
the capacity to become ploughmen, proprietors and litigants, on those
occasions when they tried to assert that they possessed it. All over the world
they are still extremely angry about this, as they should be. But I have also
been saying that though the ideology of agriculture and savagery was
formed to justify this expropriation, it also articulated things which the
pakeha – otherwise known as ‘Western man’ – very deeply believed about
themselves, and have come to believe in the course of their own history;
things which emerged from debates and contestations conducted at the
heart of pakeha culture. It follows, therefore, that though the pakeha were
expropriating the tangata whenua and this was the only thing which the
tangata whenua had occasion to notice about them, it was not the only
thing which the pakeha knew about themselves. They were not only
expropriators, and this made it easier for them to deny that expropriation
was what they were doing; and when we bring expropriation back to the
centre of the picture where it belongs, we have to avoid the reductionism of
supposing that it is the only thing in the picture or explains the presence of
everything else which is there. The pakeha debate with themselves about
themselves; they appropriate and expropriate, but they have debated for
centuries about how they shape themselves and create problems for them-
selves in doing so. Even when they debate their actions in expropriating
the tangata whenua, they are more often than not debating what they have
been doing to themselves in the process, rather than to the tangata whenua.
This is why tangata whenua intellectuals often find pakeha intellectuals
extremely irritating people, and it may seem at this point as if I were after
all describing a closed system of discourse. If the tangata whenua want to
debate the pakeha at all, they will have to find ways of breaking into
this discourse and modifying the ways in which pakeha – even pakeha
intellectuals – conduct it; and this is going to mean that the tangata whenua
accept some of it for themselves. The premisses on which it is conducted
are often most unfair, and we have to look for ways of rendering them less
so. This is why, in this part of the essay, I am looking for doors which may
be pushed a bit wider open.
The pakeha discourse was fundamentally individualist, but this did not
necessarily mean that it was crudely, philistinely or even accumulatively
individualist. It presumed that individuals logically preceded societies and
systems of sociability, and that history was a process by which the individ-
ual rendered himself increasingly a sociable being by entering into a
denser texture of social relationships formed through appropriation and
exchange. Most of the attributes of humanity – including those of human-
ity in its relation with God – were attributes of sociability; history was a
process of humanization through socialization. This was how the tangata
whenua, characterized as ‘savages’, came to be unjustly identified with
individuals not yet humanized through socialization, and so neither fully
individual nor fully social. All through the sixteenth into the eighteenth
centuries and on into the nineteenth, we find records of pakeha debating,
often very seriously, whether the non-pakeha with whom they were dealing
were in this sense primitive, pre-human, or so far short of a capacity to
conduct their own relationships that they could be governed only despoti-
cally.21 It was not the case, however, that the pakeha concerned took
themselves to be free and autonomous individuals and nothing more;
they believed themselves to be individuals who had mastered the process
of self-socialization to the point where they could submit to law and remain
free at the same time. The freedom and autonomy of the savage meant that
he was not yet social or fully human; the slavish oriental was capable of
submitting to law only in the form of despotism which denied his freedom
and humanity.
The process of history as the pakeha understood it could begin only
when individuals appeared who were capable of conducting their own
socialization, and this could occur only when appropriation was the pre-
condition of civilization. The individual must establish his own relation-
ship with the whenua – let us put it this way so as to remind ourselves that it
was a patriarchal relationship – in order to be a person and embark on the
voyage towards law, freedom and exchange. Gibbon’s lazy and bipolar
warriors are examples of what the individual is like before he does this; and
the culture-specific assumptions of an economy based on agriculture and
jurisdiction meant that pakeha ideologies were very nearly incapable of
imagining that property, which was their name for relationship, could be
vested in any tenants other than the individual heads of patriarchal
families. The idea that it could reside in a tribe, a kin-group, a hapu, iwi
or any other such term it may be convenient to employ, was extraordinarily
difficult for pakeha jurists to accept, unless the kin-group could be repre-
sented as a corporation, which is to say a group of individuals supposed by
metaphor and fiction to act as a single individual. [This the Ngai Tahu
have subsequently become.] Their jurisprudence, and their political phil-
osophy, presupposed that the basic human community consisted of indi-
vidual proprietors, whose disputes with one another were capable of being
resolved by the adversarial procedures of law. This community could be
preceded only by an anarchy of vagrant individuals, not yet humanized by
property, whose disputes must take the form of the Hobbesian war of all
against all. When they described tangata whenua as savages, they quite
incorrectly declared that this was their social condition.
It has to be remembered that in thus stigmatizing the tangata whenua,
the pakeha believed that they were describing their own origins. They did
21
E.g. the Spanish debate over the rationality of American Indians, and the English debate over
despotism and servility at the time of the Bengal land settlement.
not in the least mind conceding that they had been savages once, or even that
they had carried a basic individualism from the vagrant into the sedentary
condition. When Chief Seattle, in a famous if fictitious oration on another
Pacific sea-coast,22 accused his pakeha of being wanderers who left their dead
behind them in the earth, he was telling them nothing about themselves
which they did not know already. They believed that they were journeying
through the progress of individuality and leaving Seattle and his people
behind them in a vagrant and savage condition. If the chief was trying to tell
them that his iwi lived in a state of communion with the earth and the dead
ancestors, they were simply unable to listen to him.23 They invincibly
believed that Seattle’s people were impoverished, both materially and spir-
itually, by their condition of undeveloped and unsocialized individuality,
and that their own civilized condition had enriched them socially, culturally
and spiritually, as well as materially. The premiss of individualism did not
motivate them consciously to destroy such conditions of community as
I have imagined Seattle describing; rather, it made them incapable of
comprehending that such conditions might exist. Even when, in the early
nineteenth century, anthropologists formulated the concept of the Indo-
Germanic agnatic community occupying the ground as a kindred, the
pakeha response was to characterize this mode of occupancy as a ‘cake of
custom’, which must be broken up in the ‘progress from status to contract’.24
The implication was that the agnatic community was less a primeval condi-
tion of humanity than a false start, an evolutionary dead end.
The term tangata whenua is nowadays employed to put forward those
assertions of community within the human group and between that group
and the earth, which I mentioned a moment ago. These associations were
of course utterly precluded by the Enlightened anthropology I have been
describing. The human individual it was capable of supposing could
develop a sense of community, even of self, only after he began to appro-
priate and cultivate, to produce and exchange; he could not even have
imagined the intimate associations with kin and earth which the tangata
whenua imagination does in fact proclaim. The Enlightenment mind had
begun to grow aware of the animist perception which locates an atua in
every rock and at every bend a taniwha,25 but dismissed it as superstition, a
22
Quoted in Sharp, 1990, 1997, p. 66. The version of this speech now engraved on monuments in the
city of Seattle is understood to be apocryphal.
23
Unless, indeed, Seattle’s oration should be the work of a pakeha criticizing his own culture.
24
Burrow, 1966. ‘The cake of custom’ is Walter Bagehot’s phrase (Bagehot, 1869), ‘from status to
contract’, Sir Henry Maine’s (Maine, 1861).
25
A Maori dragon or water-spirit.
product of the fear and guilt of Vico’s solitary giant surprised by thunder
in the act of copulation. It knew of complex religious systems, which
imagined spirit and matter emerging together out of some undifferentiated
primary substance, but dismissed these as mysticisms, constructed by
ancient oriental sages seeking to co-ordinate primitive animisms into
unitary metaphysics. The Enlightened mind was bent on the separation
of spirit from matter, of the appropriator from the substance appropriated.
Paradoxically, it may have been in his philosophic materialism, which
made spirit and matter one again, that Diderot got closest to the mentality
of the Tahitians he otherwise made use of without understanding.
His Supplément à la Voyage de Bougainville is of course evidence that
there was in the Enlightened mind an impulse to rebel against its own
perception of history as the progressive diversification (which often looked
like the regressive fragmentation) of the individual personality and to travel
back against the stream of history, in search of some primeval state of
undistracted and undifferentiated being. But it was extremely hard to do
this within the paradigm of primeval individualism. If the Tahitian or the
Huron or the Highlander were simply a noble savage, he would be nothing
more than a hero whose passions were simply expressed and not yet
corrupted by civilization. Rousseau was as forward as any philosophe in
pointing out that the hero was the product of some measure of social
progress, and that the quest for the noble savage might end with the
discovery of the pre-human giant. The tragic paradox in Rousseau’s view
was that the first step away from prehumanity towards humanity was also
the first step towards the corruption of a humanity not yet achieved.
History was a self-defeating process, an attempt to do the impossible, a
confrontation between Polyphemus the savage and Odysseus the liar, in
which any relatively uncorrupt condition could only be a transitory
moment. The union between tangata and whenua, and the sacred time-
lessness in which that union is often said to repeat itself, could only be such
a moment in history.
I am now positing a pakeha imagination in which history is the depart-
ure from the whenua, and starts from the breaking of the circle, the
confusion of tongues, the expulsion from the garden; something which
happened very long ago and goes on happening all the time, so that history
is the normal condition of the human species. This is to invite the opposi-
tion between history and dreamtime, in which to assert the existence of a
tangata whenua is to affirm that there exists, or has existed, a human
community living in a non-historical condition, a sacred and self-relegated
communion with the earth; an affirmation which may be made by tangata
whenua because that really is how they live or used to live, or made by
pakeha in a state of rebellion against being pakeha and living in history.
Once it is made, we are obliged to see history itself as an ideological
construct, an instrument of pakeha ideology, just as to some radical
feminists it will appear a male ideology and to some radical environmen-
talists a human ideology, formed for the use of homo sapiens the destroyer
of the ecological order. All these charges, of course, can be seen as part of a
thoroughly Western discourse of self-accusation, in which Adam and Eve
clutch at their fig leaves and dream angrily of a way back to the garden; so
that there are times when modern tangata whenua, expounding their vision
of a sacred order in the middle of the post-industrial city, sound depress-
ingly like counter-culture intellectuals out of the 1960s. Of course it is
important not to believe this (except when it is true) and to bear in mind
that the tangata whenua discourse articulates a state of affairs which did
exist and in some ways exists still. But once we posit the dreamtime, we
have to believe that the damage has been done, the circle has been broken,
and the tangata whenua have been expelled into history, carrying the
dreamtime with them and necessitated to articulate it as history.26 Like the
dispossessed worshippers in the Hasidic fable, they cannot light the fire,
they cannot speak the prayer, they do not know the place; but they can tell
the tale of how it was done,27 and they find pakeha discourse in a condition
vulnerable, if not always responsive, to hearing the tale told. Once the
pakeha stop seeing their first ancestors as heroic barbarians and see them as
dispossessed exiles from paradise instead, dialogue with the tangata whenua
becomes possible. The question is whether either group will retain a
discourse of liberty, or merely one of self-pity.
Let us return to the contemporary situation. I have reached the point of

presenting the dialogue between te iwi Maori and te iwi Pakeha as a
dialogue between two histories or, more precisely, between two peoples
in history, who find that history itself is heavily biased in favour of one iwi
but is capable – in part for reasons inherent in its character as a pakeha
construct – of being subverted and partly rewritten so as to give voice to the
tangata whenua and substantiate their claims. I have been trying to show
that the pakeha articulation of their history is complex and resourceful, to
26
[It should be remembered that ‘dreamtime’ is an Aboriginal, not a Maori, concept; but for a
philosophical consideration of the point here made, see Tau, 2001a and b.]
27
Quoted and restored to historical discourse by Joseph Levinson at the end of vol. III of
Levinson, 1965.
the point where it is full of means of self-criticism, but that even this tends
to reinforce its capacity to maintain itself. It arises from debates of great
antiquity within Greek and Latin, Christian and Enlightened civilization,
over matters of which the drive to subjugate exterior peoples and the global
environment is only one aspect, however great its importance. It is there-
fore a very tough discourse to tackle and may even take you captive when
you try to subvert it. You cannot subvert it beyond a certain point without
demanding of the pakeha that they give up and cease trying to represent
themselves as an iwi of any kind. There have been uncompromising
nationalists among the tangata whenua recently who came close to making
this demand; and since pakeha self-expression has always been full of self-
division and self-repudiation, there are always pakeha intellectuals who
sound as if they were conceding it. I am suggesting, however, that it is most
unsafe to believe them: what sounds like self-rejection may turn out to be
self-reinforcement and concealed backlash.
The history of the Ngai Tahu claim,28 however – and, one would want
to add, the history of all discourse based on the Treaty of Waitangi – has
not been the history of an encounter between two mutually exclusive
discourses, but that of an attempt to persuade pakeha jurisprudence to
modify its premisses and render itself capable of admitting claims based on
the tangata whenua perception of history and of justice as arising out of
history.29 To a very real extent, the Ngai Tahu have been claiming com-
pensation for what pakeha history has done to them, and alleging tangata
whenua history as a basis of right. This is to propose a bi-cultural percep-
tion of both history and justice, and of social personality as arising out of
both. It is an ambitious if a necessary programme, and there are those who
do not believe it can succeed. It is a question of the possibility of dialogue
between those, employing different discourses, who seek a political rela-
tionship. This is certainly a negotiation of power, but one may hold power
to be negotiable and the negotiation a possible foundation for relationship.
The dangers of negotiation are obvious; one party may entrap the other, or
both may entrap themselves, in some pattern of discourse whose hegemo-
nic potential they do not know how to resist. One should listen carefully to
those who warn that this may happen; but those who deliver their warnings
as indictments have predetermined the outcome.
28
[This meeting of the New Zealand Historical Association was focussed on the recent history of this
claim before the Waitangi Tribunal (Sharp, 1990, 1997).]
29
[I am basing this statement on Sharp, 1990, 1997, and Kawharu, 1989. See also Sharp and McHugh,
2001.]
Let us revert to the problems of a bi-historical discourse. The term
tangata whenua carries with it two claims: one to priority of occupation,
the other to a certain community between tangata and whenua, which
forms the basis of a claim of right. Translated into the Enlightened
discourse of anthropology and jurisprudence which this essay has explored,
the latter claim challenges the pakeha assumption that only appropriation
by individual patriarchs tilling with the plough can create property, right
and social personality. It makes a claim in a deeply important language of
myth; it avers that a community may dream or imagine itself into being by
imagining a collective relationship with the earth, and that this poetic or
mythopoeic act constitutes an act of appropriation as effective as any
carried out by arable individualism. The claim challenges the pakeha
understanding of the modes of appropriation, not the concepts of appro-
priation and property themselves. ‘Property’ has always been a pakeha term
for the relation between human and environment, between tangata and
whenua. The pakeha eye instinctively translates rangatiratanga 30 as ‘prop-
erty’, and the tangata whenua question the adequacy of the translation; the
Ngai Tahu claimants are asking the pakeha to reconstruct their notion of
property, not to deconstruct it. The question it is proper to ask is whether
the pakeha are capable of doing this, or whether both pakeha and tangata
whenua in New Zealand/Aotearoa are irrevocably committed to situating
property in a process leading from the plough to the computer, from the
appropriation of land to the commodification of everything. That is the
Rousseauist and post-Marxist criticism of their present enterprise, and it
will have to receive serious attention.
The aim of the present essay, however, is to look into the past of pakeha
jurisprudence (which is very much a living past) and enquire whether the
obstacles to recognizing tangata whenua claims that have been identified
there may be overcome. Here it seems relevant to consider the language of
Lord Glenelg, in a memorandum of 1837 which is thought to supply a basis
for the recognition of rangatiratanga in the Treaty three years later. Glenelg
spoke with the voice of Enlightened anthropology when he wrote: ‘The
chiefs and people of New Zealand . . . are not savages living by the chase,
but tribes who have apportioned the country between them, having fixed
abodes, with an acknowledged property in the soil’,31 which property may
have been the basis of rangatiratanga as the crown understood it and was
certainly the basis of the tribes’ recognized capacity to enter into a treaty.
30
A word literally translatable as ‘chieftainship’, but better by the Latin dominium.
31
Quoted by P. G. McHugh in Kawharu, 1989, p. 31.
Unless Glenelg supposed the iwi to be agriculturalists appropriating
through the plough, he must have recognized some other process through
which they could ‘apportion’ the land, take up ‘abodes’, and acquire
‘property’. No doubt he was entirely vague about what this might be, but
his language opens up a range of possibilities which the Ngai Tahu
claimants are inducing the Tribunal and the courts to consider. English
common law is no longer so medieval that it is committed to the plough;
we are, rather, afraid that it may have left the plough too far behind; but
there is some reason to believe it capable of recognizing a variety of claims
to property and rangatiratanga. Forty years after Glenelg, Chief Justice
Prendergast pronounced that only a people whose social system was cap-
able of generating sovereignty could enter into treaty relationships, and
that therefore a treaty between kawanatanga 32 and rangatiratanga was
without force or meaning. We are now being reminded that Prendergast
was employing a positivist and ultra-modernist mode of jurisprudence and
that a better understanding of the issues of both 1840 and today may be
obtained by reverting from the positivism of the nineteenth century to the
‘natural’ jurisprudence of the Enlightenment, in the hope of finding that
the gulf between sovereign and non-sovereign social systems was then less
unbridgeable.33 This is to urge the pakeha to explore their own tradition
and history, as one in which positions are contested and debated; another
‘liberal’ programme. If they go back far enough, they may even come upon
Sir John Fortescue in 1471, discussing the customs which give a people its
distinctive identity and observing that ‘all that is loved transfers the lover
into its own nature by usage, wherefore, said Aristotle, use becomes
another nature’.34 Lying deep in the pakeha past, we find language that
affirms a large part of what tangata whenua have to say about themselves
and their claims to recognition; but it is a long time since English common
law found customary communities at the base of its own practice.
Since tangata whenua typically employ a language of myth rather than
usage, they are liable to find themselves affirming a dreamtime, a condition
of sacred relationships with the whenua from which the expulsion into
history is as the expulsion from the garden. If we premise that this
expulsion has occurred and is irreversible, it will seem that they are in
need of a perception or philosophy of history in which the dreamtime is
seen as a phase or episode of the past, a species of Hawaiki.35 Here it may be
32
A quasi-Maori neologism, rendering into Maori phonetics the English word ‘government’.
33
See in particular Hackshaw, 1989. 34 Chrimes, 1949, p. 17.
35
A mythical homeland or point of origin.
suggested that the situation of the tangata whenua of Aotearoa is unlike that
of the Aboriginals of Australia, from whom the term ‘dreamtime’ is
derived. These enormously ancient communities perceive a past which
can only be described in ‘dreamtime’ terms, both because no ‘history’
exists as an alternative to it, and because they have been what Glenelg
and the Enlightenment misdescribed as ‘savages living by the chase’: food-
gathering groups moving across an unappropriated land surface, to which
they relate themselves as tangata to whenua, through song, dream, ritual
and other forms of mythopoeic appropriation which may be hardly
possessive at all. Such are both aboriginal myth and the myth of the
aborigine; but in these islands not in narrow seas the dreamtime is less
supported by antiquity. We are a very recent human colony, perhaps one
thousand years old; we could treble or quadruple that figure, and remain
recent in ethnological time. The effect of this is not to eliminate the
dreamtime, but to change its status.
It is perhaps a still utilizable strength of the old pakeha historical
anthropology that it began with the confusion of tongues, with a dispersion
and diffusion of human groups to populate the planet; if we hold human
history to have begun from some particular and localized genetic mutation,
we still believe something like that. Now in such a vision it is obvious, as it
always was, that there never were any tangata whenua in the crude sense of
people generated by or in the particular area they happened to inhabit; the
whenua must be considered as the totality of the global surface over which
human groups have been moving on the long road from the Olduvai Gorge
to the Rakaia.36 The migratory condition turns out not at all inconsistent
with the claims which tangata whenua make for themselves; but it does tell
us that we have been a species much given to adapting ourselves to various
environments, and the relation with the earth of which tangata whenua
speak was not given or natural or inborn, but had to be achieved through
the exercise of human capacities. This is the point at which the organic
implications of the word whenua turn out to be less literal than metaphor-
ical; they describe a relation with the earth which was not until it was
imagined, until it was constructed by humans exercising their poetic and
linguistic capabilities. If we call it a dreamtime, we should remember that
somebody had to do the dreaming; it was created in the course of history.
The tangata whenua thus become actors in history, who have created
the dreamtime but cannot use it as a refuge. A consequence for self-
understanding is that we were all tangata waka (if I may coin the term)
36
A Canterbury river, like the Waimakariri (above, p. 42, n. 29).
before any of us became tangata whenua; we came here by sea and set about
making ways of living on the land. In terms of modern secondary-world
fiction, we are not of Middle Earth, but of Earthsea.37 Those who very
justly pre-empt the title of tangata whenua were not here from the begin-
ning; they made a beginning, and in their historic memory as well as in the
pakeha’s, human occupation is historically specific and remembered. Nor
did they leave the sacred earth undisturbed. If I could speak with the spirit
voice of the great moa in the Canterbury Museum,38 there might be several
things I had to say to the tangata, of every whenua and every waka. The big-
brained bipeds modify the environment drastically wherever they go, and
the difference here between tangata whenua and pakeha is only one of very
great degree. The first human explorers of this island must have found
themselves in a terrain unimaginably different from any they had seen
before, and when I think of them penetrating the high-country sources of Te
Wai Pounamu39 – even the gorge of the sacred Arahura itself – I wonder
whether they saw all that bush and snow and shingle and water as a womb
or whenua, or whether they saw things much more like what Samuel Butler
and Arawata Bill40 saw.41 Poetic appropriation, dreaming or imagining
one’s way into a relationship with the environment, is a high and precar-
ious human achievement, particularly when one has to do with the waiting
hills and the encircling seas, and it is a poor compliment to the tangata
whenua who achieved it to think about what they did uncritically, just as it
is a mistake to think about the pakeha hypercritically, as if they never
achieved it at all. Here, of course, I am speaking ideologically; I am
affirming that the pakeha have a whenua in their own transitory way, and
I am thinking of the Canterbury poets of my younger days, who set about
poetic appropriation on the clear understanding that no dreamtime was
available. I hold this to be something which the South Island has to say.
[The remainder of this essay, in its previously printed form, consisted of
discussion of some points raised by Tipene O’Regan in his Beaglehole
37
The allusion, if it needs explication, is to the trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien and the two trilogies of Ursula
K. Le Guin. [This essay was written before Middle Earth was filmed in Earthsea, and the latter’s
imagery became that of the former.]
38
An articulated skeleton still on display; the title of a poem by Allen Curnow (1939; Early Days Yet,
p. 220).
39
‘The Greenstone Rivers’, a term sometimes applied to the South Island as a whole. The Arahura is
the most tapu of the rivers where greenstone was found.
40
William O’Leary, a prospector who spent his life in the Southern Alps without finding gold; the
central figure of a poem-cycle by Denis Glover (Glover, 1953).
41
See nevertheless such lines in Glover’s Arawata Bill as: ‘What metal lies / Between those granite
thighs, / What parturition of earth / Yields the golden miraculous birth ?’ (‘To the Coast’, III, lines
10–14). The point is that there isn’t any.
Lecture for 1991, delivered on the same occasion and printed with it.42 He
considered the relations between legal and historical evidence, common
law and indigenous discourse, and the problems of verification raised by
the latter. The issues, of sovereignty and jurisprudence, law and history,
which arose, are pursued, in greater detail than I then attempted, in the
next essay in this volume.]
42
O’Regan, 1992.
CHAPTER 13
Law, sovereignty and history in a divided

culture: the case of New Zealand and the
Treaty of Waitangi
(I)
The aim of this essay1 is to introduce a series of explorations of the relations
between law and history, considered as activities of the human mind in
various states of society. Viewed in such a perspective, ‘history’ is perhaps
better renamed ‘historiography’: the writing of history and the conscious-
ness of it as a thing made by human activity, and in the end the making of
history and the suffering of it as the consequences of human actions and the
processes they have set in motion and cannot always control. Law, I think,
can very often be seen in the same way: as the making of judgements,
coupled with the attempt to determine how far we can live with the
judgements we have made in the past; and this is one reason that law has
been so powerful a contributor to the formation of the historical con-
sciousness which characterizes our civilization.2 Historiography has been,
on the one hand, the narrative of human actions, and on the other, the
archaeology of human practices seen as constituting the contexts in which
the actions have been performed. The codes of law and the records of
1
Pocock, 1998b; originally delivered and printed at Lancaster University as the 1992 Iredell Memorial
Lecture (Pocock, 1992c). It was the first of a series of essays on the transformation of politics and
historiography in New Zealand by the Treaty of Waitangi; see further Pocock, 2000e, 2001b, 2002a.
The attached glossary may assist readers unfamiliar with Maori.
Aotearoa: New Zealand
hapu: sub-tribe
iwi: tribe
kawanatanga: government
mana: prestige, authority, charisma
manawhenua: authority over land inherent in mana
marae: a meeting ground
pakeha: New Zealander of European descent
rangatiratanga: chieftainship, lordship
tangata whenua: people of the land, indigenous, aboriginal
turangawaewae: a place to stand
waka: canoe, ship; lineage tracing descent from a given canoe
2
Kelley, 1990.
226
Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture 227
courts have constituted perhaps the greatest series of archives in which these
practices have been conserved, while the practice of jurisprudence itself has
furnished a great part of the methods and mentality with which we
interpret the actions of the past and connect them with the conditions of
the present. There can be no doubt of the intimate connections between
jurisprudence and historiography since the two began to assume their
modern forms about five hundred years ago.
Yet there are differences between the lawyer and historian in their
reasons for approaching the past and in their practices when dealing with
it, and among these differences is one which separates the relations between
practice and theory in the two disciplines. Lawyers go to the past in search
of authority more or less directly applicable in present actions; historians in
search of information which they know full well can be converted into
authority and which may well be applied to present actions, but which they
are capable of treating in alternative manners – such as the study of the past
for its own sake. It is a consequence that lawyers regularly study jurispru-
dence and even the philosophy of law, whereas historians seldom engage in
the study of historiography, less still the philosophy of history.
The difference is that lawyers well know that their activity is a practical
one, with immediate and drastic effects on the human beings who appear
in the courts for judgement, and that there are strong practical reasons why
they should use theory to heighten their awareness of what they are doing
and allow the consequences of theory to flow back into practice and affect
it. But historians are engaged in no such immediate practice, and do not
have the same practical reasons for engaging in theory. It is therefore easier
for them to believe that the way to write history is to practise the activity,
and that no theory of historiography and no philosophy of history exist
which can be applied to that activity as theory to practice. They are clearly
right for the most part in believing this, not because they are immediate
practical actors but because they are not. The importance of the history of
historiography and the philosophy of history is to be sought elsewhere.
What historians write has consequences for other human beings because it
helps to shape the assumptions and structures, the ideologies, mentalities
and discourses by which social groups define themselves, others and the
world, and act in the relations between the entities so defined; who they
think they are and what they think has been going on can easily have
consequences for themselves and others, and these consequences can easily
be disastrous. Thus there are very strong practical reasons for exhorting
historians to heighten their consciousness of what they are doing in
the world, and what assumptions about the world they are putting into
effect; but the relations between reflection and action to which we are
exhorting them will be relations less of theory to practice than of criticism
to ideology.
This is why there are so many situations in which juristic and historio-
graphic activity are intermingled and imperfectly distinct; in which lawyers
are making history and historians contributing to the making of law; and
why it is both philosophically interesting and humanly important to study
these situations and note in what a variety of ways history is being made in
them. I have a case of the kind to examine: one in which the affairs of my
own country of New Zealand have become interesting to the lawyer 3 and the
historian, the political philosopher and the historian of political thought, in
ways which, I have to confess, in my younger days I never thought they
would be. New Zealanders, somewhat against their inclinations, have come
upon interesting times; it is to be hoped they will survive them.
(II)
In a number of societies created by British and European settlement in the
seventeenth through twentieth centuries – New Zealand and Australia,
Canada and the United States – there is a political resurgence of the peoples
called indigenous because their ancestors lived there before European
settlement began, and usually because these ancestors remain of immediate
importance to them. In the societies I have mentioned, where language, law
and values are in significant measure English in their derivation, these
resurgent peoples state their claims in the language and law of the majority
culture. They claim right, justice and compensation; they rely on principles
of common law and jus gentium (a term I shall prefer to ‘international
law’); but at the same time they allege their aboriginality, their status
as cultures with an existence antedating European settlement, both as
entitling them to make claims which the majority law is bound by its
own rules to respect, and as a source of cultural values and usages which must
continue to guide them and which the majority law must acknowledge as
authoritative even when these are not contained within its structure or
its spirit. In a sense, then, they claim to be living by a law of their own,
which is separate from the majority law and to which the latter must
3
[Paul McHugh, a figure far more important to the making of this volume than his appearance in its
footnotes has suggested, is studying the history of common law in the light of its encounters with
indigenous claims to title. See McHugh, 1991, and a handlist of his writings in Sharp 1990, 1997,
p. 329; McHugh, 2005, reached me too late for profit from its study.]
accommodate itself. However, they commonly do not refer to their own
cultural codes by the name of ‘law’; sometimes because they look on ‘law’
itself as the instrument by which the majority has been dispossessing them
of their land, culture and identity; sometimes because the codes, assump-
tions and vocabulary of Anglo-European jurisprudence are too culturally
and economically specific to be appropriate to the aboriginal codes which
they recall, rediscover, or re-invent; sometimes because they are making use
of the vocabulary of Western radical dissent, which suits their needs
because it presents law itself as an instrument of hegemony in the hands
of some race, class, gender or mode of production.
On the one hand, then, a vocabulary which is not that of the majority’s
law is addressing itself to the courts and legislatures of the majority in
search of legal redress, and in some measure accepting the discourse and
procedure of majority law by doing so. On the other hand, that vocabulary
is being used to claim autonomy from that law and offering itself as an
alternative cultural code with the same authority as law, whether it styles
itself by that name or not. In the language of European jurisprudence –
which our cultural conditioning obliges most of us to accept – the problem
which the claims of indigenous peoples present moves between the theatres
of common law and jus gentium. These peoples are claiming the status of
gentes or nations – in the early modern or pre-modern sense in which jus
gentium uses the latter term – and thereby raising the question of what
degree of sovereignty – again in the pre-modern sense known to the classics
of jus gentium – they possessed at the time of European settlement and may
be said to possess now.
This is not merely a question framed by the needs of late twentieth-
century debate: it can be found, asked and answered – and has served as the
foundation of legal and political arrangements – in the past history of
European settlement; so that to ask it is not to re-invent the history of that
settlement so much as to review and re-state it as it was constructed by
the actors themselves. From the time of the Spanish conquests in
Mesoamerica, European settlement was conducted by agents living in a
universe of jus gentium and endeavouring to avail themselves of its rules.4 It
can of course be said that this branch of law took shape largely in response
to the needs imposed by the encounter with non-European peoples, and it
must be said with great frequency that the ways in which it took shape were
often skewed in favour of the invading settlers and directed towards the
4
There is an extensive literature on the Spanish debate. See most recently, Pagden, 1982; Muldoon, 1994.
dispossession of the indigenous peoples. Even that language is suspiciously
mild when applied to many of the stories which this history contains. But
the invading Europeans did make use of a code of jus gentium, even if it was
only to legitimate their own behaviour. Their use of that code ensured that
in a great many cases treaties were entered into with indigenous people,
who were therefore treated as competent actors, and indeed capable, as
possessors of sovereignty, to enter into such treaties as the kind of con-
tracting parties whom that law envisaged. In many instances, these treaties
were subsequently disregarded; in many more, they were interpreted as a
kind of legal self-annihilation or suicide on the part of the indigenous
contractor, so that to enter into a treaty was to lose the right to enforce it
and consequently all rights under it. But enough of these treaties have
survived – in the sense that there are still peoples defined by them and
living under them – to make it a common strategy in the politics of
indigenous resurgence to appeal to them, claiming not only rights under
them but the measure of sovereignty which their status as treaties affirms to
have existed then and to be claimable now.
Such appeals and claims necessarily generate debates in the interpret-
ation of history, occasioned in the first instance by the decision to treat an
action in the past as possessing authority in the present; a decision taken by
lawyers or persons acting as lawyers, which raises questions to be answered
by historians or persons acting as historians, but over which lawyer and
historian must in the end diverge and go separate ways. The history of how
a treaty was drawn up and entered into must be rehearsed in the light of the
always contestable question of how it was intended and understood by the
original parties, of whom it may be presumed that one was and the other
was not European and already familiar with the language of European law.
An attempt must be made to reconstruct the mentality of an indigenous
society already distant in time; but it must be added that persons in the
present, affirming themselves the descendants, representatives or continu-
ators of that society, will be interpreting the acts and intentions of their
supposed ancestors, imposing pattern on the past, authority on the present,
and interpretations of history on the events and processes between. The
heirs of the original European signatories will be doing the same, and their
situation will be complicated by the circumstance that they possessed then
and probably possess now the upper hand in imposing the categories of
European jurisprudence, but now consent to have their position ques-
tioned and evaluated, both by the categories of their own law and by the
injection into the argument of cultural codes which are not European, but
must be reconstructed in a largely (but challengeably) Europeanized
present. Two points must sooner or later be reached. At one it will be
recognized that alternative histories are contesting for authority; not simply
alternative accounts of the same events, but alternative cultural codes which
give conflicting accounts of what authority is, how it is generated in and
transmitted through time, and how time and history are themselves struc-
tured by the authoritative systems set up by humans existing in them. At
the other, the historian will have made an appearance, declaring that the
enterprise of reconstituting events and processes, mentalities and authority
structures, existing or ongoing in the past, has developed beyond the point
at which it serves the jurist’s need to find authority there which is applicable
in the present. This historian will be operating in bihistorical and bicultural
terms, recognizing that all parties to the debate are trying to live in two
histories simultaneously penetrating one another.
During the establishment of European settlement, many treaties were
entered into with tribes – if that is the appropriate term5 for societies
operating a complex kinship structure rather than a state, identifying
themselves by means of shared genealogies and mythologies, and living
by hunting and gathering and planting rather than by arable cultivation.
These tribes were recognized by treaty and jus gentium as ‘nations’ or gentes,
and endowed with the capacity to exert rights and hold property – often, of
course, to no other end than that they should be deemed capable of parting
with it or selling it. Many fictions were thereby imposed on peoples who
did not always understand them, but had their own ways of understanding
themselves and what they were doing when they entered into what the
Europeans called treaties – hence of course the European conviction that all
men by nature possessed the legal capacity for possession and alienation,
compact and confederation.
But it is evident to our historic sensibility that any such treaty was a
compact between two discourses, two means of understanding and operat-
ing what it was, and the modern indigenous nation has access both to
European means of interpreting a treaty and to the modernized form
(whatever it may be) of the indigenous discourse by which the treaty may
have been understood then and is understood now. If the dominant
European culture has remained ethnocentric to the point where it does
not understand the indigenous discourse and cannot operate it, that culture
5
In New Zealand it has been found appropriate to use the Maori word iwi, and leave its meanings to
emerge through bicultural discourse. [The word, however, has a history in both Maori and pakeha
usage, which leaves it at some points open to challenge (Ballara, 1998). There are points in this essay
where I might have done better to use hapu for iwi.]
does not have access to the bilingual resources open to the otherwise
repressed indigenous culture. The latter can therefore: (1) claim to be the
‘nation’, sovereign to the point of ceding some things and retaining others,
which the original treaty presumed it to be; (2) operate its indigenous
discourse to affirm its customary, traditional, genealogical and mythic
identity, and employ this identity in affirming its legal personality under
the treaty and claiming rights, or compensation for lost rights, in both
treaty and traditional terms. If the dominant culture does not have access to
the indigenous discourse – what in New Zealand is called te reo Maori – it
must choose between allowing that discourse to be used against it, and
facing the charge that it is seeking to annihilate the indigenous discourse
and the nation that employs it. Often, of course, the dominant culture has
been seeking to do exactly that; but we have reached the point of encoun-
tering the politics of bilingualism and biculturalism, and of recognizing
how an indigenously affirmed identity may be both the grounds and the
means of conducting a claim simultaneously in the discourse of European
law and against that discourse and law. The appellant comes before the
court partly to challenge its jurisdiction, and in so doing alleges indigenous
history against the history of the law and the treaty. Yet there remains the
paradox – which operated for Europeans at the time of settlement – that it
is hard in law to indict an opposed authority without at the same time
legitimating it.
Treaties under jus gentium are entered into by nations, and nations
possess both sovereignty at the time of making the treaty and a self-
defining history antecedent to its making. This provides the double force
behind such words as ‘indigenous’, ‘aboriginal’, the Maori tangata whe-
nua and so on. It is crucial to the indigenous group that it should be able
to define itself as a ‘nation’, possessed of both history and legal or rights-
bearing personality both before and since the making of the treaty; and in
so doing it lays claim to sovereignty – if that term be used to denote the
possession of rights and the capacity to alienate and resume them – in
both the pre-treaty past and the post-treaty past and present. To the
extent that the indigenous group is part of a larger sovereign state, it has
now reached the point of affirming that the state’s sovereignty is based on
the treaty and is shared among sovereign contracting partners. State and
sovereignty rest on the exercise of what Locke called the federative power,
the power to form treaties, whether or not the state in question is a
confederation. It is evident to our minds that this is an extremely risky
assertion; it is less evident that it entails both pre-modern and post-
modern thinking.
Australia is largely an exception to the pattern I have begun to describe,
since there it was not typical to enter into treaties with aboriginal groups,
which were often too small and mobile to render treaties of much use and
could easily be dismissed as in a ‘savage’ condition that rendered them
incapable of treaty-making. The United States and Canada are perhaps the
most typical, in that they possess political structures which are federal or
confederal for reasons of their own, and were not formed by processes in
which treaties with indigenous nations played a central part. They can thus
recognize the forming of federal covenants with such nations and not feel
the exercise of their own federal structure to be threatened. The Sioux or
the Mohawk can claim to be sovereign nations in a special treaty relation
with the United States; but as the Canadian confederal structure has
been laid open to redefinition, there has emerged a ‘Conference of First
Nations’ whose adherents claim ‘inherent rights’ – i.e. rights inherent in
their structure as nations and antecedent to any Canadian nationality or
sovereignty – which entitle them to be consulted and give their consent
before any new relations between provinces reconstituting Canada assume
a final form.
New Zealand is exceptional for the reason that it is not a confederation
but a unitary and sovereign state, whose sovereignty seems to rest upon a
treaty – the Treaty or te Tiriti of Waitangi – which preceded and can be
said to condition the declaration of the crown’s sovereignty in 1840. Alone
among the cases I have been considering, then, the political sovereignty
which affirms and defines the national identity can be considered con-
tingent, or dependent, on the performance or non-performance of a treaty
between two cultures or discourses, whose meaning and history can be
debated in two languages entailing two understandings of law, culture,
sovereignty and their existence in time. It is potentially a very exciting
debate and a very dangerous one; the more so as it comes at a time when
New Zealand’s identity, sovereignty and national continuity are already
exposed to a variety of challenges. The fact that these challenges are so
posed that they cannot be met without using the term ‘sovereignty’ on
more than one level of meaning lends complexity, both political and
historical, to the issues to be discussed.
(III)
As part of the process of establishing the crown’s sovereignty over
New Zealand in 1840, a treaty was drawn up and signed by the
crown’s representative, Captain Hobson, and the chiefs of a number of
independent iwi (‘tribes’) at Waitangi in the north of the North Island. It
was subsequently proffered to the chiefs of other iwi, and accepted by most
if not all of them, in both islands. It was not a treaty with the Maori people
as a whole, and that people did not then or subsequently form a single unit
or confederation for purposes of legal or political action; the word ‘Maori’
was only just coming into general use to distinguish the indigenous
Polynesians from the European settlers, and the tribe, hapu or iwi remains
for most the group of identification. However, since nearly all iwi have
entered into the treaty relationship, it is reasonable to see its provisions as
underlying the relations of Maori to the crown wherever they can be found.
It can be debated just what role the Treaty has in the establishment of
crown sovereignty in New Zealand. A claim could be made on the grounds
of prior discovery, which gave Britain a right not shared with any European
nation to pre-empt land from the indigenous inhabitants, and this right of
pre-emption has been exercised, in ways often hard to reconcile with the
language of the Treaty, to purchase and sometimes confiscate land or
dispose of it by legislative or executive action. The crown’s sovereignty
can be defined as an exclusive right to acquire land and to dispose of the
title to it by sale or grant, and this right is claimed exclusively of other
nations on the grounds of discovery. But a series of proclamations, instruc-
tions to royal officials and private memoranda belonging to the period
make it quite clear that the crown had no intention of proclaiming
sovereignty without the consent of the inhabitants, and give us a number
of clues as to how this consent was to be granted. In written statements by
the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, and the Colonial Secretary, Lord
Glenelg, it is confirmed that the inhabitants of New Zealand are not
‘savages living by the chase’ (i.e. not hunter-gatherers with no relation to
the soil, which is to assign them a fairly advanced place in the scheme of
history worked out in the recent Enlightenment), but that they are capable
of occupying the land and apportioning it between them.6 It would be
interesting to know whether Russell and Glenelg had been informed, by
missionaries or others, that the Maori were turning to agriculture and
beginning to plant and harvest cereals, as some of them were; whether they
recognized in them some other capacity for occupation and apportion-
ment, such as is claimed and conceded today; or whether the crown’s intent
was to attribute to them a capacity for property as a preliminary to a
capacity for alienation. This intention was shared by the agents of several
6
Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg, memorandum, 15 December 1837; CO 209/21/21409; Kawharu,
1989, p. 31.
commercial enterprises, including the New Zealand Company, who were
making land purchases from Maori and desired to legitimate them.
These documents further state that though the tribes or iwi do not
constitute a sovereign state, in the sense that there is no supreme authority
which rules them all and can speak on their behalf, they nevertheless
possess a ‘sovereignty’ (the word used) which cannot be subordinated to
another without their consent; and this appears to state the juridical basis
on which the meetings occurred at Waitangi and on which the Treaty was
drawn up and signed. A good deal could certainly be said about the motives
of the British ministers in using this language. They were trying to establish
a negotiating position in advance of the French (always a prudent thing to
do); and if we take the view that their intention already was – as it soon
afterwards became – that of investing the crown with a title to New
Zealand land which it might dispose of in parcels to settlers, we can add
with much plausibility that their purpose in attributing sovereignty to the
iwi was to invest them with the capacity to transfer it to the crown.
Nevertheless their language did attribute to the indigenous people a
capacity to enter into treaties and to possess land and rights before they
began to negotiate; and we must add that this attributed to them a
history, a previous and inherent existence, a past, a present and a future.
The language of European jurisprudence had that effect, and it further
attributed to the Treaty itself the status of a historical document, a docu-
ment performing an authoritative act in history, to which reference could
be made in the future by actors who saw it as exerting authority in their
present arising from their past. Much of the subsequent history of the
Treaty recounts the attempts of pakeha jurisprudence to deprive it of that
status, and the counter-attempts of contemporary bicultural jurisprudence
to restore it.
It would be reasonable to give a Lockean reading to the language used by
Russell and Glenelg. A dispersed sovereignty is being attributed to the iwi;
having occupied their lands, they possess a right in them, and this right
extends to the authority to do, by the law of nature, what is necessary in
virtue of their occupancy. They may, for example, make war upon one
another – as was certainly their practice at the time – in defence or
furtherance of their claims. What is missing from the discourse is the
further Lockean principle that one acquires property in land only by mixing
one’s labour with it; the iwi are distinguished from hunter-gatherers by their
capacity for occupancy, but how far that capacity depends upon one for
labour in the form of cultivation is not made clear, and this was to be a
source of philosophical difficulty when a Maori perception of occupancy
which did not depend upon cultivation and exploitation collided with a
pakeha perception which did. However, that was not the issue in the
approach to Waitangi. Russell and Glenelg were saying that the iwi
possessed sovereignty dispersed among themselves, but had not yet found
it necessary – and, they may have silently added, had not yet developed the
capacity – to transfer that sovereignty to a civil government capable of
exercising authority over and on behalf of them all. The language of the
British ministers made it plain that this transfer should not occur without
the consent of the iwi freely given; but at Waitangi they invited the chiefs
there assembled to give that consent. There was, as it happened, in the
islands composing New Zealand, no one like Kamehameha in Hawaii,
Cakombau in Fiji, or Tubou in Tonga, capable of conquering and estab-
lishing a territorial hegemony which Europeans might consider a kingdom,
doing so from within indigenous history and using it to act in the new
history imposed by European contact. The programme of establishing a
central sovereign authority arose out of the activities of the British and
French governments, missionary and settler enterprises; and this origin
rendered more problematic the business of explaining the programme at
Waitangi in inter-cultural terms – that is, of speaking out of a European
discourse to a Polynesian discourse when the two were framed in discon-
tinuous cultural worlds and had different immediate agenda. The chiefs
were not to know the whole of the British reasons for wanting a sovereign
government in New Zealand; they had not evolved, or expressed in their own
discourse, reasons of their own for conceptualizing or wanting one. Nor
would the British officers, missionaries, speculators and settlers have been
able to see far into the Maori mental world, even if they had desired to do so.
Where the minds of the two cultures came close enough to meeting at
Waitangi to engender misunderstandings – divergent interpretations of the
same events or utterances – was over the conceptualization of title to land.
The British desired sovereignty not just in the form of a protectorate
defending control over New Zealand against external or foreign competitors,
but in the form of a civil government with authority to effect and regulate the
transfer of lands from indigenous occupants to immigrant or settler owners.
The iwi so far involved in this process knew that they were effecting such
transfers, but did not expect to be dispossessed as a result of doing so; and
such language is inadequate in so far as it is too European to express the
Maori perception of what the occupancy of land was. The iwi for their part
had difficulty in grasping that the crown was proposing to acquire a pre-
emptive sovereignty, a sovereign role for itself in acquiring title to land from
indigenous occupants and transferring it to settler owners.
What was at issue was not merely the creation of a Lockean sovereignty
with authority to regulate the transfer of lands, but that of a pre-emptive
sovereignty with authority to make itself the source of legal title to land.
The nature of both possession and sovereignty was being developed along
lines well known to the civil law; transitions from usus to dominium and
from dominium to imperium were being invoked and brought into the
process. The Maori participants were not to know this, since it was not
their language; but they had a highly developed language of their own for
talking about the occupation of land, the claiming of land, and the passage
of land from one control to another. Whether means of translation from
one discourse to another were found, whether they could have been found
in good faith, and whether they were indeed pursued in good faith, are
issues in the historical interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.
The Treaty (or te Tiriti ) was bilingually conducted and texts were drawn
up for signature in both English and Maori. Literacy was developing
among Maori and the texts had been orally debated; the issue is not
therefore that the chiefs did not know what they were signing, but that
no satisfactorily final text existed or ever has.7 The redactors of the Maori
text were themselves pakeha – a term I shall use from now on when
speaking of Europeans in the New Zealand bicultural setting – missionaries,
with interests of their own not identical with those of the Maori or
necessarily of the crown. They employed what is known as ‘missionary
Maori’, a vocabulary which contains Maori terms adapted or created to
express pakeha legal, political and religious concepts. More than one Maori
text of te Tiriti exists, and was presented to various iwi for signature after
the gathering at Waitangi; these texts are not identical with one another,
and philologically exact English translations of them do not always
reinforce the official English text recorded by the officers of the crown.
It is therefore possible to understand both the extreme Maori view that te
Tiriti is a fraudulent document, and the extreme pakeha view that the Treaty
has no binding or legal force. In circumstances I shall presently describe,
however, it has attained the status of a fundamental text, possessing
authority and open to interpretation; and both lawyer and historian will
recognize the problems in reconstituting a past and assessing its authority
in the present which must next arise. Law is being made in a context of
disputed authority and disputed interpretation; that is how law is made and
history is written. It is less common, though not unknown, for this to
happen in a context of bilingual documents and bicultural interpretation.
7
Kawharu, 1989.
The crucial area in the several texts has come to be one in which
something is ceded to the crown, which in the Maori text is termed
kawanatanga and in the English ‘sovereignty’, and something is retained
by the chiefs and iwi, which in Maori is termed rangatiratanga and in
English ‘full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and
estates’. The passage obviously – at least to European minds – raises the
classic issue of the relation of sovereignty to property, but behind that lies
the fundamental issue of the crown’s adoption of a pre-emptive title. What
looked like a guarantee of possession to the iwi has in practice meant to
them the imposition of a greater capacity for alienation than they desired.
The crown has in the past used its kawanatanga to determine who the
possessors of rangatiratanga in fact are, to individualize tribal tenure in
order to facilitate the sale of land, and to take into possession and dispose of
lands which the iwi understood to be theirs by the kind of title which
rangatiratanga connotes and which, though undefined in 1840, the crown
implicitly recognized them as capable of exercising. Now that the crown’s
title to have done these things is being disputed in terms of a retrospective
and retroactive reading of the Treaty, it is important to discuss what was,
and what has been, conceded under the name kawanatanga and retained
under the name rangatiratanga.
Kawanatanga is missionary Maori, an attempt at a rendering of the
English word ‘government’; similarly, and rather potently, the Treaty itself
is sometimes called a kawanata or ‘covenant’. The English text renders
kawanatanga as ‘sovereignty’, by which the Maori signatories may have
understood in the first instance something like a ‘protectorate’, though
they would also have understood that the Crown intended, and was being
empowered, to maintain this exclusively of other Europeans or Americans
who might seek it. What is less clear is how far they understood the
extensions of the English word ‘sovereignty’ into the powers of civil
government. Was it understood as keeping the peace among the iwi and
hapu (tribes and sub-tribes) or as adjudicating disputes over land between
them? It is perfectly clear, however, that they did not think they were
conceding to the crown any ultimate authority over or title to the lands of
the two major islands; it is the question of crown title which has in the end
become crucial. On the other hand, the distinction between kawanatanga
and rangatiratanga itself makes quite clear that they were intent on retain-
ing some ultimate authority over land, and were aware of the dichotomy
between something which they were retaining and something which they
were conceding. One of them is on record as saying ‘the shadow goes to the
Queen, the substance stays with us’, but later declaring that he had been
wrong and the saying should be reversed; I regret that I am unable to
comment on the Maori words he used or their significances.
The crucial term in Maori understanding of te Tiriti both was and has
become rangatiratanga; in full te tino rangatiratanga. This is much nearer
being an authentic Maori term, though it was already capable of missionary
usage; significantly, it was being employed as a Christian sacred term, in
translating the words ‘thy kingdom come’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Rangatira
was the word for a chief, and the suffix tanga gives to English-speakers the
word ‘chieftainship’, which by no means inappropriately suggests that the
signatories intended to retain authority as well as possession, dominium as
well as usus. Rangatiratanga connotes not only ‘possession of the land’, but
‘possession according to Maori ways, according to the structures of author-
ity and value inherent in iwi society’. The chiefs had no intention that they
or their peoples should become mere subjects of the crown, whose posses-
sion of the land was protected by crown law indeed, but only by the kind of
law the crown was accustomed to administer. Rangatiratanga connoted
their own authority as rangatira, and at least one of them announced that
he would never sign the Treaty for fear of finding himself subject to a
power not his own. For these reasons, modern Maori interpretation reads
into rangatiratanga the Treaty’s recognition of a right to possession, not of
lands, forests and fisheries alone, but of the norms and values, the social
structure and culture, inherent in the occupancy of land as the iwi then
recognized themselves as occupying it; in other words, the possession of
themselves, their identity as a people. They claim to have been dispossessed
of this identity, contrary to the provisions of te Tiriti; and they claim that
the dispossession was unjust, and that the Treaty entitles them to reposses-
sion of both land and cultural identity (which are inseparable) where
repossession is possible, and to compensation and resources to use in
building a new identity where it is not. A new problem instantly arises.
Claims under a treaty, or under a common law, are in principle negotiable;
claims to a unique and all-inclusive cultural or spiritual identity easily
become non-negotiable. In the terms being used in this essay, the question
becomes whether the Maori and the pakeha occupy a single history of
interaction, or two histories incompatible with one another; and this
problem is occasioned by the fact that kawanatanga and rangatiratanga
are each translatable as ‘sovereignty’, when the word is used on its two levels
of Lockean meaning. ‘Sovereignty’ begins to denote the power to consti-
tute one’s own history, on the level of conceptualization and possession and
on that authority and action. Even to write history may entail a claim to
make it; but to what or whom can that claim be addressed?
We encounter here the crucial significance of the term whenua. Its
primary meaning is land or an area of land, inhabited by tangata, or people,
constituting a hapu or iwi; but it further and simultaneously means
placenta, and alludes to the custom of burying the afterbirth in the land
as a symbol or vehicle of unity with the ancestors. Consequently, tangata
whenua – a term by which modern Maori distinguish themselves – means
both ‘people of the land’ and ‘people of the birthplace’; it asserts both
priority of occupation and a physico-spiritual unity with ancestors and
with the land, through one another, which constitutes the identity of the
iwi; and the last word now denotes both particular tribes and the Maori
people or nation – te iwi Maori – as a whole. These are modern usages, and
I do not know how far the phrase tangata whenua was used in the debates at
Waitangi in 1840; but the word whenua was certainly present, and carried
with it the load of meanings I have been describing, which would pervade the
meaning of the treaty term rangatiratanga to an extent which the missionary
draughtsmen may not have understood and which would overflow the
distinctions between sovereignty and property present in the minds of
the crown’s representatives. The crown was already in the position of having
the chiefs transfer sovereignty in one sense to it, while having the chiefs retain
sovereignty in another for themselves. This verbal ambiguity mattered only
in English, but the transaction was vastly complicated by the unacknowl-
edged circumstance that rangatiratanga – sovereignty in the second sense –
carried with it the psychic and mythic loads of the term whenua.
There was a Maori term – there is little reason to consider it a post-
contact invention – for the authority with which an iwi could claim
occupancy of an area, thus exercising that capacity for appropriation
which in European eyes distinguished Maori from savages. This term
was and is manawhenua, an extension of the word mana, with which we
are somewhat familiar as denoting prestige, authority, and traditional and
charismatic force of personality; we have many words of our own for it. An
iwi in the person of its chief or rangatira – though chief and people were
not so far distinguished from one another as to require a conscious fiction
of representation – might – to the extent that the ancestors were in the
whenua as placenta – assert that the iwi derived its physical and spiritual
identity (of which mana was the dynamism) from the whenua as land.
When one iwi subjugated another and appropriated its mana and whenua,
it absorbed the defeated into its own substance, occasionally and for
specific reasons by methods too direct to be described. The ancient com-
munity of a people with its lands and ancestors was not always an idyll; the
point is that it all stood, and to some degree still stands, in Maori eyes as the
mode by which they possess not merely land but themselves, and are what
they are. The mystifying thing about Western capitalist society is that we
believe property to be an extension of the self, yet believe that it can
constantly be in a state of transference from one self to another; and it
was this mystery that the crown was about to impose on the iwi at
Waitangi. It is a large part of what we mean by the term ‘history’.
It has been suggested by more than one modern Maori author that if it
was the crown’s intention to acquire sovereign authority in the sense of a
title to land, a sovereign capacity to act in all transfers of property in land
from one possessor to another, the term kawanatanga as used in the Treaty
concealed the reality that what the chiefs were being induced to concede to
the crown was manawhenua. Moreover, this reality had to be concealed,
not merely because they would never have agreed to the proposal, but
because it would have been an unthinkably deep affront even to ask it of
them. The chief who exploded into rage saying he would never sign the
Treaty and the chief who hoped for the moment that they were giving up
the shadow and retaining the substance may have sensed that something of
the kind was afoot. But to suppose that they were being deliberately
deceived, we must suppose that the British officers and missionaries
knew what manawhenua was, and knew that they dared not ask the
rangatira and the iwi to give the crown not merely control over transac-
tions, but mana over the physical and spiritual substance of themselves.
They may not have understood this, and the guarantee of rangatiratanga
may have meant in good faith that the iwi would be able to sell land and
accept the crown’s jurisdiction over sales, without giving up the essential
dominium over it; but the implicit concession that the Maori were not
savages does not necessarily mean that the pakeha recognized in them any
kind of sovereignty they were going to keep. Extinctions of title, it was
believed, could be justly arranged under the kawanatanga–rangatiratanga
relationship.
The modern Maori claim is twofold, or rather is being made on two
levels. On the one hand, it is being asserted that many dispossessions of
Maori have occurred which must be judged unjust in terms of the agreed
meanings of the language used in the Treaty. On the other, it is being
asserted that the surface meaning of that language is itself inadequate, and
can be rendered just only when we recognize the implication that the
rangatiratanga reserved to the iwi both conceals and contains all that is
meant by a multitude of Maori terms from which I have selected mana-
whenua as the most informative. The Treaty and te Tiriti are therefore
unsatisfactory and even fraudulent on one level, justifiable only by
interpretation on another, and this judicial procedure is a means of
recognizing and rectifying much that has passed in New Zealand history
since 1840.
We are to recognize here a judicial and historiographical situation of a
familiar type. A document from the past which exercises authority in the
present is being interpreted and the thrust of its authority re-assessed, in the
light of perceptions exercised in the present. At the same time it is being
asserted that these are perceptions of the historic reality of what occurred in
the past and has gone on occurring into the present, and we are not yet at
the point where lawyer and historian must go separate ways and arrive at
positions adopted for separate reasons. It is worth noting also that historical
criticisms which reveal shortcomings and perhaps dishonesties in the
language and conduct of the Treaty are not being used to subvert it and
dismiss its authority, but rather to reinforce it. By this blend of historical
criticism and judicial interpretation, we offer to render the Treaty a better
instrument for assessing what has happened in the past and rectifying the
past’s consequences in the present. The historian will add – and the lawyer
need not deny – that this is both a way of heightening our understanding of
history and a means of enhancing our capacity to act in it.
(IV)
To say these things is to utter a series of relatively reassuring statements in
the familiar discourse of the ancient constitution; that is to say, English
legal reasoning, which has long understood the similarities and differences,
the complex but not antagonistic relations between judicial interpretation
and historical criticism. The situation becomes much more complex, and
perhaps a good deal less reassuring, when we recognize that the claim made
on behalf of the tangata whenua entails the statement that te Tiriti both
conceals and fails to recognize, and implicitly contains and does recognize,
a complex system of property, sovereignty and culture – of whenua, mana
and tangata – which is discontinuous with that system built into the
historical structure of English common law and European jus gentium. It
means among other things that those inhabiting the system inhabit a
history which is differently conceptualized, differently based and main-
tained by different modes of action, from the history presupposed by
English and European jurisprudence. This recognition is thrust upon us
once we acknowledge that the claims of manawhenua entail, or once did
entail, or may be said to have once entailed, the occupancy of the earth by
ancestral communities, linked with their ancestors through the earth, and
maintaining their identity, sovereignty and mana through this continuity.
To live in such a continuity is to live in a different history from that of the
pakeha. The claim that the Treaty guarantees rangatiratanga now becomes
the claim that te iwi Maori possess a treaty right to their own history, have
been unjustly dispossessed of their history, and may now justly repossess it
or make claims to compensation where this is not possible. Bicultural is
bihistorical; the language thus stated implicitly concedes that the Maori
have been partly forced out of their history into pakeha history, but at the
same time calls on the pakeha to recognize and restore Maori history, living
in relation to it where they cannot live within it themselves. Bicultural
jurisprudence becomes a mediation between radically dissimilar percep-
tions and experiences of history.
It is a premiss of this essay that sovereignty, legislative and political, is
among other things a mode by which a human community seeks to
command its own history; to take actions which shape its policies in the
present, and even – since a great deal of history has in fact been written in
this way – to declare the shape of the historic past and process out of which
it deems itself to be issuing. Neither of these modes of self-determination
ever has been or will be in the absolute power of any sovereign community;
but this does not prevent us asking what may become of a community’s
capacity either to make or to write its own history if its political sovereignty
should be surrendered to forces from without or radically challenged by
forces from within. With respect to the latter possibility, what has hap-
pened in recent New Zealand politics may be described as follows. Maori
people, in part if paradoxically because they were becoming increasingly
urbanized, found it proper to emphasize their status as tangata whenua in
claiming either restitution of their relation to the land or compensation for
its loss. Though now a moderate-sized minority of the population, they
were able to get attention for their claims, and adopted the strategy of
making these claims under the Treaty of Waitangi. There has come into
being the Waitangi Tribunal, a body judicial in character and even author-
ity, empowered to hear claims by Maori arising out of performance or non-
performance of the Treaty’s provisions. Though its proceedings are judicial
in character and distinguished judges – several of them Maori learned in
the law – have sat on and presided over it, its findings are not binding at
law, but rather take the form of recommendations of such authority – one
might say mana – that courts and parliament do well to give them atten-
tion. This authority derives from the circumstance that the Treaty which
the Tribunal interprets states the preconditions under which the sovereignty
of the crown, and therefore of courts and parliament, came to be established
and New Zealand came into existence and later became a sovereign nation.
The Tribunal therefore does more than hear cases against the crown; it
investigates whether the crown has or has not been discharging conditional
obligations subject to which sovereignty was transferred to it in the first
place. This is why its recommendations cannot be binding at law, but are
such that the law is well advised to give them attention; it has, in the last
analysis, a real if limited capacity to query the legitimacy of the sovereign’s
jurisdiction. Clearly, this is a capacity to be exercised at discretion. In
demanding restitution from a sovereign, it is a poor strategy to suggest that
the sovereign lacks the authority to make such restitution. This was one
route by which the kingdom of England fell into civil war and dissolution
of government in the seventeenth century.
Issues brought before the Tribunal may in principle turn upon the
relations of kawanatanga to rangatiratanga in the language of the Treaty;
that is, upon the questions of how sovereignty was conveyed to the crown,
of whether the crown has been discharging the conditions under which
sovereignty was conveyed to it, and of whether sovereignty, while conveyed
to the crown in one sense (kawanatanga), was retained by the iwi in
another sense (rangatiratanga), thus constituting a fundamental condition
under which the crown legitimately exercises its sovereignty. To anyone
with an elementary knowledge of English and European history, these are
momentous and rather frightening questions. The Treaty of Waitangi has
become New Zealand’s ancient constitution, its Magna Carta, its funda-
mental law, its original contract; and all these historical analogies should
serve as reminders of how easily a challenge to sovereignty in the name of
any of them can become a dissolution of government, an appeal to heaven,
and a lapse into civil war and the state of nature. Moreover, not even
Magna Carta and the original contract were presented in the form of
treaties between equal sovereign partners, between whom, jus gentium
informs us, there must be either the state of treaty or the state of war;
and the fundamental law of New Zealand was being presented in the form
of a treaty. Finally, the effect of the Treaty was, however you look at it, to
transfer title to land into the jurisdiction of the crown, and all real property
in New Zealand, pakeha and for the most part Maori, is now held under a
title conferred by the crown. To press contractual doctrine so far that the
crown’s sovereignty ceased to be legitimate would mean that no proprietor
was certain of the title under which he held; and what the pakeha of 1628
and 1688 did in the like circumstances is a warning against letting them
recur. During 1988 I found myself reminding New Zealand students that
all classical pakeha political philosophy was about land rights and
sovereignty, and all of it was a remedy for civil war. In 1998, the prospect of
New Zealand’s repudiating the crown and establishing a republic appears
remote.8
Happily, in the view of most of us, none of these dire consequences ever
looked likely to recur. The Treaty was not represented as a negotiation
between equal sovereigns, but as a Lockean process whereby sovereignty in
its dispersed form was conditionally converted into sovereignty in a cen-
tralized form; so that to remind sovereignty of the conditions under which
it has been granted remained a claim against it, and did not become the
‘appeal to heaven’ which is issued when sovereignty is declared forfeit or
delegitimized. Nevertheless, the original contract remained as a treaty
between two nations, with the difference that one was then possessed of
sovereignty only in its dispersed form, while the other possessed it in its
centralized form. The Maori were able to contend that their treaty was with
the crown direct, with the consequence that only Maori may bring com-
plaints before the Tribunal, and individual pakeha are debarred from doing
so on the grounds that their relations with the sovereign are conducted
through other channels. There has also occurred a significant retreat from
the position laid down in 1877 by Chief Justice Prendergast in Wi Parata v.
Bishop of Wellington,9 to the effect that the Treaty was of no legal force
because only nations already possessed of legislative sovereignty possessed
the federative capacity to enter into binding treaties. What is noteworthy
here is that Prendergast’s judgement is now seen as resting upon a strongly
positivist jurisprudence, which made so much of full political sovereignty
as to relegate to the condition of savagery any social form not possessed of
it. New Zealand’s newly bicultural jurisprudence is now withdrawing from
these nineteenth-century presuppositions towards those of the more nat-
uralist jus gentium of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which
conceived of the acquisition of property, rights and sovereignty as taking
place by stages in the process of history as then conceived. It has to do so if
it is to make sense of the Treaty at all; we have seen that this was specifically
based on the presumption that the Maori were not savages and were
sufficiently possessed of sovereignty to be capable of transferring it to the
8
[The authority of the crown has passed to the parliament and people of New Zealand. The Maori
have a treaty with the crown, contracted before either existed, and have successfully prevailed on
parliament and people to acknowledge that the crown’s obligations have passed to them with its
authority. In the event of a republic, the Maori would be compelled to renegotiate the Treaty with a
parliamentary and electoral majority that had just carried out a dissolution of the government and a
reversion of power to the people. There are few, if any, Maori republicans.]
9
Kawharu, 1989, pp. 110–13.
crown. Whether this means that the Treaty can check the sovereign parlia-
ment in its legislative course is a question it may be wise to leave
unanswered.
The jurisprudence of the Waitangi Tribunal – which is prudentia juris
even more than ratio legis – thus enjoins the pakeha to explore the history
of their law retrospectively, moving back in time in search of a perspec-
tive in which they can understand the tangata whenua and their own
attitudes towards them. The pakeha may thus discover how deeply rooted
in their history is their perception of property and sovereignty, with the
self-propelled activity of the individual at its centre. However far back
one goes in the past of feudal and Roman jurisprudence, one never comes
upon the community linked with its ancestors in the whenua as the
primary tenant of land; that was left behind in an antiquity so remote
that no Western myth declares it plainly. Travelling back through the
past of the common law, one may indeed come upon a time when statute
was rooted in custom and second nature, which may assist in under-
standing what the tangata whenua have to say about themselves; but one
may end convinced that, since their Hebraic and Hellenic beginnings,
the pakeha have been travelling away from the whenua towards the
individualization of tenure and the conversion of land into commodity
and commodity into information, which governs our history today even
if Karl Marx said it was going to. In the history of that process, the full
and absolute sovereignty which the later jus gentium predicted and the
positivists like Chief Justice Prendergast imposed upon history seems to
have become an incident. In reverting to a pre-positivist jurisprudence,
one reverts to a phase before the absolutism of sovereignty; it is necessary
to do so in order to cope with a situation in which sovereignty rests on a
treaty and may be contingent upon its fulfilment. But we all live in a
world in which it is becoming rapidly contingent upon many more
things than that, and is everywhere being subjected to the requirements
of the international market; even when confederations break up and
sovereignty is claimed by their constituent republics or tribes, that is
the effect aimed at or achieved. It is an ideological consequence that the
individual finds an identity less and less in membership of any sovereign
community, state, nation or iwi; more and more, the individual is
commanded by a convergence of forces to think of identity as contingent
in itself, to be negotiated in an allegedly free market of interacting
possibilities. Since modern indigenous peoples do not live on reserva-
tions which shield them from these constant displacements of person-
ality, one must ask what they are achieving by their characteristic
strategies. In what history will they find themselves living, when they
claim to be living in the whenua?
(V)
We have simplified (and perhaps radicalized) the Maori claim to rights
under te Tiriti by saying that they claim the guarantee of rangatiratanga to
have been a guarantee of manawhenua; that is, a tribe’s occupancy of the
land furnishes it with a spiritual substance or continuity (mana), which in
turn is extended as power over that land (whenua) and becomes a mode of
appropriating it and constituting personality on its foundation (the Maori
term for this is turangawaewae, the place where one stands). The personality
thus constituted is that of a group whose communion with the ancestors
and the land is constantly being renewed, and there is notoriously little
room in this image for those creative conflicts between revolutionary
groups and individuals which furnish history as the pakeha understand it.
There are potent ancestor figures, but one must go back to the demigod
Maui to find the Polynesian Prometheus. In the nineteenth century it used
to be held that only the European masters of the planet possessed a history
in the sense of autonomy, self-determination, progress and revolution, and
that this was one reason why they were its destined masters. Today the
whenua in one form or another is being used to challenge this view of
history, and is finding much favourable response from a post-industrial
civilization increasingly tired of its own history. Perhaps conservation is
better than revolution; it may not be conservatism to say so. But if juris-
prudence is a main source of our sense of history, the use of the whenua in
jurisprudence brings up the problem that the whenua’s extension in time
may be not history but the dreamtime – to use the invaluable Australian term
for the communion with ancestors that may be experienced but is not to be
narrated or criticized. What is to happen when the dreamtime is used as a
basis for claims at law?
The term tangata whenua, like its homonyms ‘indigenous’ and ‘abori-
ginal’, implies two kinds of claim. One is simply a claim to priority of
occupation, and need not entail more than a linear sense of time; the other
is a claim to the kind of occupancy of space and time implicit in the
concept whenua, and entails a relationship with the cosmos so close and
exclusive as to contain both space and time within itself. The iwi, the
ancestors and the whenua are all, as it were, contained within one another
in the self-repetitive scheme whose items reduplicate one another; Adam
has not stepped out of paradise into a world he must make and change by
his own labour. The dreamtime may thus be contrasted with history, and
may contrast itself to its own advantage with the latter’s universe of ends
and means, effort and frustration, self-realization and self-rejection.
The tribunal and the courtroom, whether ethnocentrically Western like
Prendergast’s or conscientiously bicultural like the Waitangi Tribunal, are
necessarily acting in the world of history; they may respect the dreamtime
but cannot submit to it. Their business is with the contestable, and there is
no contesting with the dreamtime; this is painfully apparent when the
latter is appealed to, not simply to discomfit the world of the pakeha in the
name of the tangata whenua, but to assert contestable claims disputed
among the tangata whenua themselves. Sir Tipene O’Regan, a Ngai Tahu
activist from the South Island who shrewdly understands both law and
history, has distinguished two types of situation in which iwi contest for
primacy.10 In one, both contestants allege genealogy and tradition, surviv-
ing in both oral and written forms; dispute is possible between them, each
attaches truth-status to the statements it puts forward as history, and the
courts are free to decide what kinds of evidence outweigh others. Courts of
common law have of course been dealing with this type of situation since
time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, and in most
cases of this kind they are required to determine only what complainant has
last been unjustly dispossessed in a plea of novel disseisin. However the
professional historian may evaluate the claims of oral history, the courts are
in search only of rules and evidence and testimony acceptable to both
parties, and there are times when the historian is out of place in the
courtroom; O’Regan warns him how easily the expert witness becomes a
hired advocate without knowing it. The prudentia juris governs the situa-
tion; nevertheless it is important to remember that the contestant iwi may
be not merely staking out claims but affirming their deepest sense of
identity. The whenua is not just the tribe’s lawful possession; it is the
tribe itself.
This is where the second type of situation may arise out of the first.
Litigants may appear claiming to represent, or constitute, an iwi more
ancient than any other, tangata whenua in the literally aboriginal sense.
When asked to substantiate their claims with evidence, they may reply that
they have no need to; the voices of their ancestors speak to them in the
rocks and trees, and speak to them as they speak to no others. I do not have
to remind a readership including lawyers how any court or tribunal is likely
to respond to that. It is entirely possible that such claims are fraudulent and
10
O’Regan, 1992.
put forward in no good faith. Any tribunal will be strongly inclined to
think so, since the representation of evidence which cannot be assessed will
look like an attempt to mislead the court or derail its jurisdiction. Yet the
evidence presented by litigants in the first and more manageable type of
situation will contain accounts of times when the ancestors spoke directly
to the occupants of the whenua, and the second set of litigants is only
expanding and exploiting the kind of testimony offered by the first. Courts
may be obliged to deconstruct whenua and dreamtimes in order to render
them justiciable (in a sense, that is what has been happening ever since
1840), but the Waitangi Tribunal has been charged with rectifying, if not
reversing, this process. In the universe of jurisdiction statements may be
either true or false; it is not so in dreamtime, which is the universe of myth.
History, the breakdown of the dreamtime, may be the precondition of
judgement, and a dreamtime which comes to court for judgement may
destroy itself, win or lose.
The problem before such courts is to treat dreamtimes with respect while
regarding them as incidents in contingent reality; the law has faced such
problems before, encountering or inventing a ‘time beyond memory’. Here
the tangata whenua of New Zealand present a problem less daunting to the
pakeha philosopher than that of the Aboriginals of Australia. The latter, an
inconceivably ancient people, arrived so long ago that no mythic or historic
record preserves the memory of the journey from the there to the here; all
Aboriginal myth is cosmic myth and the only time known to it is the
dreamtime. This may well be connected with the fact that at the time of
British settlement they were the hunter-gatherers whom Lord Glenelg
described as ‘savages living by the chase’ and unable to apportion land as
did the iwi of New Zealand. They moved long distances across a land
surface they did not much cultivate, relating themselves to it as whenua by
dreams and songs and sand paintings. Myth or not – and there is now a
myth of the Aborigine in the Australian imagination – they present the
image of a dreamtime so perfectly realized that there was nothing else; and
how this is converted into a legal claim to rights must be a fascinating and
complex story, perhaps yet to take place.
But Aotearoa – a modern Maori and pakeha term extended to the whole
of New Zealand – is a very young whenua in terms of human occupancy,
settled no more than a thousand years ago, in comparison with the mini-
mally forty thousand of Australia. The iwi and hapu can name the waka or
canoes in which their ancestors arrived, and locate in genealogical and
chronological time the names of ancestors who came from other islands to
Aotearoa, or from one part of Aotearoa to another. The ability to do so is
part of the affirmation of manawhenua; one’s name, one’s mountain, one’s
river, one’s ancestor and one’s tribe – and so one’s turangawaewae. The
individuals named may be mythical; yet there is an important sense in
which those who can name them are living in history rather than myth, and
can take their manawhenua with them to court with less fear of losing it.
Those who have resorted to the ineffable voices of their ancestors are justly
suspect if they cannot name them. How the ancient Australians set about
the process of naming is another story, and I would not even dream of
suggesting that they did not do it; but I am suggesting that those they
named were located in a different sort of time.
From this point it is possible to re-inspect the discourse which divides
the inhabitants of New Zealand-Aotearoa into tangata whenua and pakeha,
indigenous minority and settler majority. For one thing, the latter is
becoming diversified by new waves of immigration – Europeans who are
not pakeha, Polynesians who are not Maori, Asians who are not either – to
the point where the old term pakeha, with its British and Irish connota-
tions, may cease to be comprehensive, and may be replaced (none too
satisfactorily) by the new tau iwi (for immigrants in general). But to
confine ourselves to the two older terms, it is possible in the perspective
I have presented to suggest that Maori and pakeha are not simply indigen-
ous and immigrant, but that both may be characterized as tangata waka –
peoples of the ship, who have ocean voyages and the discovery of islands in
their memory, their language and their history. This argument may well be
mistrusted as tending to deprive the tangata whenua of their priority and
aboriginality, but I do not see that it would do that. It would firmly assert
that their ancestors were the first human settlers, with a right of priority in
that sense unequivocal. As for the wider and more intimate connotations of
whenua, mana and rangatiratanga, it would affirm the extraordinary
achievements of the ancient tangata waka, who arrived from beyond seas
at islands very unlike those they had previously known and set about
establishing, by myth, dream, genealogy and all their practices of occu-
pancy and culture, the sort of relations with the environment that made
them tangata whenua. The whenua and the dreamtime would thus be
situated in history, made the achievements of human beings acting in
human time to invent mythic time; it would be like the reduction of
custom to statute, of the ancient constitution to historic changes in the
patterns of land tenure, proposed to the common law in the increasing
historical sophistication of the seventeenth century. Whenua and dream-
time would indeed be deprivileged to the extent that they lost any status so
sacred that it could not even be discussed, and instead became contestable
and negotiable before the tribunals and the courts; but contests for mana-
whenua between separate iwi, or groups replacing iwi, have ensured that
result already, and both Maori marae (or meeting-places) and pakeha law
courts are already equipped with complex speech-patterns designed to
assign priority between claims to ancient standing. The court can respect
the dreamtime, though it cannot abdicate before it.
There seems to be no reason in principle – though there are plenty of
alarming difficulties in practice – why the procedures being set up should
not be capable of dealing with disputes arising since the Treaty, under the
Treaty and even before the Treaty. The parameters of common law are
capable of being expanded to the point where they can recognize and
decide to respect the parameters of manawhenua. I see this process as
having begun and, if it can be continued, as one of the things being done
well and going well in contemporary New Zealand. Even the debate over
the ultimate location of sovereignty, implicit and explicit in the appeal to
the Treaty, can lead to the definition and renegotiation of sovereignty. But
these are propositions about law, constitutional law and jus gentium; and
this paper is concerned with the interrelations of law and history. It should
not be difficult, and I hope I have not made it more difficult, to see how
legal argument, conceived as appeal to past practices and the preconditions
of authority, leads to reconstruction and reconstitution of history, con-
ceived as the history of practice and authority, and even to juridical debate
between such reconstitutions. To this point we are in the world of the
lawyer, guided by the purposes of jurisprudence. But once we begin to
debate questions of human identity and selfhood, questions of property
and personality, whenua and mana, the scene changes; both lawyer and
litigant find themselves faced with the preconditions of legal behaviour, the
preconditions of who and what they are, and with history as the process of
creation and change in those preconditions. If this sounds like an idealist
conception of history, I shall reply that we are sometimes necessitated to
conceive of history in that way.
I have tried to show that the differences between Anglo-European law
and Maori-Polynesian manawhenua are such as to lead to very different
conceptions of how human beings live in society and social time, and to
that extent in history. By expanding – somewhat beyond the practical
necessities of the contemporary New Zealand situation – the mythic and
cosmic implications of the term whenua, I have tried to show how the
concept of history itself can become the antithesis of another way of
conceptualizing the continuity of human existence, for which I have used
the term dreamtime. It can of course follow that the concept of history is
itself a tool of cultural imperialism, and my proposal that there should be
two tangata waka is quite frankly a programme for bringing the whenua
and the dreamtime into the domain of human history and subjecting them
to contingency, contestability and the sovereignty of human judgement.
I see the entire Treaty debate as a negotiation of the term under which
that sovereignty is to be exercised. If it is said that this is to give the pakeha
the advantage, by subjecting the tangata whenua to history which is a
pakeha construct, I shall reply that the pakeha has, since his first beginnings
as he remembers them, been necessitated to live in history and not in
paradise or the dreamtime; Adam, Cain and Nimrod, Cadmus, Odysseus
and Orestes, saw to that at the beginnings of our mythology. Second, I shall
reply that the modern tangata whenua are living in history when they
remind us of what we so much want to hear, that there is an alternative to
history. They are not so much living in the time of the ancestors, as
reminding us that they were recently and unjustly expelled from it by
history, and using the law’s capacity to recognize injustice as a mode of
making claims against history and those who have profited by it. They both
submit manawhenua to the courts, and use manawhenua as a challenge to
the courts. This is unsurprising to the traditions of common law, as well as
to the tradition of the Maori marae, a meeting ground where challenge and
acceptance are very closely related. It is therefore possible to take a sanguine
view, and speak of a contestation with law within the law, and with history
within history.
But such sanguine views can themselves be challenged; denounced, for
example, as ‘liberal’ by those to the left of liberalism who use ‘liberal’ as a
term of opprobrium. The root of this criticism is undeniably strong and
deep.11 It reduces to the assertion that the pakeha history which both
common law and jus gentium help define has been from the beginning,
and still is, irreversibly set towards individualization of tenure, towards the
conveyance and commodification of lands, towards the dissolution of
property into credit – of the whenua into the cash flow – and beyond
history as the pakeha have conceived it into that unchecked reign of the
world market in which some have rather prematurely (but still not imper-
ceptively) discerned ‘the end of history’. Such criticism urgently warns the
Maori against having anything to do with the law of the pakeha, on
the grounds that it is an instrument designed to dissolve any claim to
manawhenua the iwi might make, and would even dissolve such a claim in
11
Kelsey, 1994, p. 131. ‘Liberal’ as a term of opprobrium is of course now overwhelmingly a tactic of
the right.
the act of seeming to concede it. This, it is said, is precisely what the Treaty
of Waitangi itself was designed to achieve, and what New Zealand history
has been achieving ever since. The issue raised in reply by the whole story
I have been discussing is whether the current Maori resurgence is capable of
exploiting the law in the name of manawhenua and persuading it to certain
reversals of the course its history has been taking.
The criticism here outlined has a good deal of substance; it is put
forward by surviving Marxists among others. As Marxism recedes into
the past as either a system or a programme, we may pick its bones and find
there some important critical perceptions. Let me conclude by examining
some of its predictions as they may affect the pakeha, rather than the
tangata whenua, in the historical context shared by both. We are living in
a time when sovereignty is being devolved, debated, deprivileged and
consolidated. It is being claimed by some who have not had it before, as
political confederations break up, and it is being given away by others
whose history has been shaped by it, as new economic communities are
formed and acquire governing authority. As a New Zealander, I find it
significant that the debate over the Treaty of Waitangi, an investigation
and redefinition of the foundations of national sovereignty, was initiated
under the fourth Labour government of 1984–90, which will be remem-
bered in the national history – if the nation survives to have one – as a
unique blend of the creative and the radically destructive. I use the adverb
to give emphasis to the latter adjective because the other politics initiated
by that government are reducible to the rapid and often the forced sale of
national assets – those owned by the state to begin with, and then more and
more of those which might constitute a national economy – into hands so
widely dispersed that their sale amounted to a radical (and not yet a
profitable) abdication by the state to a market international or extra-
national in character. It is no accident that the Waitangi Tribunal owes
much of its authority to an appeal to the Treaty against a decision to transfer
lands acquired by the crown to state-owned enterprises over which the
market was to have an authority which the crown has abdicated; or that it
could be asked what meaning there would be to Maori re-acquisition of
ancestral mana over off-shore fishing grounds if all that could be done with
it was to negotiate the sale of fishing rights to operations based in Korea
and Taiwan.12 The iwi found themselves in a world where sovereignty
might mean mostly the right to dispose of sovereignty, the re-acquisition of
12
New Zealand Maori Council v. Solicitor-General [1987] 1 N.Z.L.R. 641; Muriwhenua Fishing Report
(1988); Sharp, 1990, 1997, pp. 80–5.
rangatiratanga and the renewed abdication of kawanatanga; precisely
where they had been one hundred and fifty years before. This time the
pakeha – or quite a number of them – shared the same predicament.
(VI)
I would like to conclude by emphasizing the concepts of property and
sovereignty in relation to history, as they have stood since they were first
formulated in European and English thinking. Property – the capacity to
call something one’s own – denoted the link between personal and social
identity and the material world; sovereignty denoted the capacity to
employ membership in a self-governing community to affirm personal
and communal self-determination in the taking of political acts which
determined national and international history. Hence, of course, the dis-
astrous German idealist conviction that the state (even the state at war) was
the highest expression of freedom of the personality. The link between
property and sovereignty was long attacked by socialists on the grounds
that it led too rapidly towards the commodification of both property and
personality; it is now attacked by free-market theorists on the opposite
grounds that it impedes what looks remarkably like the same process.
Instead of living in political communities where we were – supposedly –
members as individuals of the sovereign which determined its role in
history, we are to live in economic communities where our role as self-
enacting individuals has yet to be defined as other than that of the
consumer. And it is hard to say that consumers determine their own
destiny. We may all have to go and live where the market most has need
of us – as consumers, by the way, more than as producers. I have heard
Sir Tipene O’Regan observe that the problem before both tangata waka is
how to avoid becoming boat people.
The history of New Zealand, since and including the Treaty of
Waitangi, can easily enough be brought under this paradigm. I have
been using terminology both Maori and pakeha in examining an enterprise
in renegotiating sovereignty, items which require both te iwi Maori and te
iwi pakeha to recognize their identities as historically contingent; to do this
can stimulate one’s capacity to rethink and regroup. But negotiability and
contingency are dangerous grounds. It is no accident that the decay of the
sovereign state has been accompanied by a criticism, which at times
amounts to an assault, on the notion of personal identity, which we are
enjoined to see as perpetually renegotiated under conditions which can
never be other than contingent. To be forever renegotiating one’s identity,
inhabiting the other’s contingent universe as well as one’s own, is politically
stimulating and morally educative, so long as one retains a self to negotiate
with and some allies in negotiation. It is an altogether destructive experi-
ence once one lies under the imperative to surrender one’s achieved identity
to the first comer with a stronger accusation of guilt or greater purchasing
power. One of the shrewdest of New Zealand political theorists, Andrew
Sharp, has warned against mistaking his conclusion about the irreducibility
of Maori and pakeha conceptions of justice for a post-modernist mani-
festo.13 We cannot always be foxes, he says, negotiating our selves all the
time; we must be lions sometimes if we mean to act, hedgehogs sometimes
if we mean to think, and the political conclusions are not always irenic.
To put a similar point in my own way, I confess myself tired of being
deconstructed, and in search of turangawaewae, not so much a place to
stand as a means of standing somewhere. As an expatriate from a world of
vast seas and small islands, I know about the special significance of making
landfalls and setting foot ashore; and the archetype I admire is Odysseus,
that man of many wiles who has seen many cities and been captured by
none of them, not even Ithaca his home. Odysseus therefore lives in history
and not in the whenua; if he has a whenua he can leave it and return; but at
the end of the poem, he and his son are left remarking that as they have just
killed most of the political élite of Ithaca, it is not clear what is to happen
next, and we do not quite know what peace Athena makes for them.
Political community therefore matters, and so does sovereignty. In the
case I have been reviewing, Maori and pakeha have been renegotiating
sovereignty even as it is being sold out from under them, and I can imagine
conditions in which they both want their rangatiratanga and turangawae-
wae back again, and have to begin by deciding whether they are still there to
demand them.
13
Sharp, 1992, p. 27.
PART V
Britain, Europe and Post-Modern History

CHAPTER 14
Sovereignty and history in the late

twentieth century*
(I)
An aim pursued in the preceding section was that of showing it possible for
a sovereign state, a self-governing community, to open its sovereignty to
debate, to render that debate open-ended and ongoing, to debate the
history in and on which it has been founded, and to proceed to a con-
frontation and negotiation between two concepts of sovereignty and of
history; all this without dissolving the state or abolishing its sovereignty. It
follows that a debated sovereignty is still a sovereignty, and a debate over
sovereignty an exercise of sovereignty. It follows also that sovereignty
entails a making of history, and may rewrite a past in the act of making a
future; though it is equally true that the past which the state has partly
made in the act of making itself is resistant to rewriting, for the reason that
it has in some measure happened, and its preconditions and consequences
do not simply go away. All these propositions suppose that the debate
imagined does not end in secession, stalemate or violence, but reaches some
measure of agreement; either a decision to terminate or transform the
debate and its history, or an agreement to continue it into a future, in
which the differing concepts of sovereignty and history continue a dialogue
that changes them even while they persist. This is to suppose a great deal,
but not an impossibility; we live, however, in times ideologically unfriendly
to the exercise of sovereignty in history, and there are pressures on us to
assume that to debate a sovereignty and acknowledge that it is problematic
is thereby to terminate its history. These essays contain an argument that
this is not necessarily the case.
The United Kingdom is a far more complex entity than New Zealand,
and is situated in a history much older as well as more complex. In the thirty
years since these essays began to take shape in New Zealand, as a response to
259
260 Britain, Europe and Post-Modern History
the United Kingdom’s pursuit of membership in the union of Europe, both
entities have endured a complex history, in each of which their sovereignty
and its history has been challenged.1 The present writer has no intention of
relating either history in depth, for the reason that he has not lived in them;
he has watched them take shape from the standpoint of an expatriate living
in the United States, and claims only that there are things that can be said
from that distance, and with the godwit’s degree of detachment. While New
Zealand has been engaged in redescribing its sovereignty and its history as
consequences of a treaty between two peoples, it has also been exposed to
forces of globalization which render it more doubtful than ever whether it
exercises sovereignty over its own resources or in its own economy. Since it
has always been a dependent economy, however, these doubts are not new in
its history; and it has not been faced, as the United Kingdom has, with an
immediately adjacent union of states demanding that it progressively sur-
render its sovereignty to an association in which the concept of sovereignty is
itself doubtful, and that it rewrite its history to meet the demands made by
absorption into such an association. Such has been the historic experience
the United Kingdom has faced, and is still living through, in the thirty years
of this volume’s formation. Since the term ‘Europe’ implied a role for Britain
in whose future New Zealanders expected no place, and from whose past
history they might find themselves written out, it seemed desirable to stake
our own claim to a part in that history by rewriting it ourselves; to do so,
however, was to raise the question whether the ‘British history’ thus rewritten
might not continue, rather than disappear.
This has been the importance – in so far as it has been important – of the
original proposal that ‘British history’ should be conceived as the con-
vergence of a number of histories, and the formation of a single state,
nation or history be considered problematic; it being borne in mind that
problems are questions to which the answer may not yet be known.
From the antipodean viewpoint the primary consideration was that the
‘Commonwealth’, as an association of British nations acting together as a
world power, was being eroded in consequence of a loss of ‘empire’ in
several senses, and of a British decision to join ‘Europe’ – an association of
recently defeated states compensating for their loss of extra-European
empire by constructing a shared and highly globalized economy, in
which sovereignty became problematic. There was a consequent demand
that ‘British history’ should be rewritten, as in future it should be enacted,
in terms set by such an association; though what this ‘European’ history
1
For an earlier treatment, see Pocock, 1992d.
Sovereignty and history in the twentieth century 261
would be was unclear, since it had not yet been written and entailed the
unmaking of much history that had been; it would apparently replace
‘European history’ hitherto written as a history of states. What was clear
was that it would be a history not imperial, not oceanic, and above all not
in any way American; these being histories that ‘Europe’ was being con-
structed to displace. Not much time went by before it became clear that it
would also not be a history of sovereignty, since ‘Europe’ entailed a
surrender of sovereignty, the precondition of so much of the history that
had been written hitherto. There arose an invective which proclaimed that
‘nation state’ and ‘sovereign state’ were obsolescent, and the histories
written in them an imprisonment within false and dying identities; though
more has so far been written with the intention of dissolving these histories
than of replacing them. It is not yet clear what kind of history ‘Europe’
requires or whether it wants one at all; its perception of human action in
social time may be both post-modern and post-historic.
Together with this invective – almost but never quite as part of it – arose
another, which proclaimed the ‘breakup of Britain’ and sought to use the
proposal to write ‘British history’ as the convergence of a number of histories
as a means of bringing that convergence to an end.2 This was in some
measure conceived on the left, or what had been the left, where enmity to
the alliance between capitalism and the state produced a willingness to see
the state abolished. It should have been evident that capitalism would survive
this abolition and might even welcome it; ‘Europe’ might well be seen as a
merger of states no longer sovereign in a globalized economy whose directors
were responsible to no state (and no people) at all. What was remarkable
about this programme, as it affected British history, was that an ideology of
nationalism – Scottish, Welsh and at a distance Irish – was being used to
project the breakup of a multinational state by ideologues who claimed that
the nation-state was obsolete. It might well follow that the target of this
invective was the state, with the nation and its unmaking alike means to the
state’s abolition; a scenario in which the nations used to break up the state
would then find themselves not states at all. There were proposals for a
Europe of ‘regions’, which were to enjoy economic rationality and cultural
exchange – very real benefits – but would not exercise any sovereignty, or
government of the self, or perhaps any self at all. Nationalism might be a
mere prelude to a consumerism which would swallow it entire.
The intended deconstruction of the United Kingdom becomes, in a
rather interesting way, an intended deconstruction of the English as
2
Nairn, 1977, 2000; Pocock, 2000c.
a nation, or as the language now in fashion goes an ‘identity’.3 We have seen
that the Kingdom of Great Britain, the First and Second Unions, and the
‘first British empire’ in colonial America, were all extensions of the ‘empire’
of the English over themselves. The ‘breakup of Britain’ is proposed on the
grounds that the English are no longer capable of this extended empire –
or, it would seem to follow and the gravediggers of sovereignty would have
it, of empire over themselves. There occurs at this point a complaint against
them for refusing to develop an English ‘nationalism’ under the flag of
St George, which would conduce to the breakup of the United Kingdom;
instead, they stubbornly persist in seeing themselves as an imperial people,
governing themselves in unity with ‘Britain’. Their alleged incapacity for
empire in the island or the archipelago, however, is explained by this school
of thought as the consequence of the termination of the Second British
Empire; that is, of empire in the modern sense of rule over peoples not
European by culture. Lacking this empire, and the global power that went
with it, the argument continues, they no longer need, nor have they the
power to maintain, the United Kingdom constructed at the outset of the
eighteenth century as an instrument of power in Europe and empire
beyond it. They are no longer capable of empire in any sense, even over
themselves – or they would have developed the quasi-nationalism sug-
gested by the scenario of breakup – and have no future outside a regional
Europe in which their ‘identity’ is by no means assured, since they refuse to
adopt any alternative history to that of empire. To enlarge the apophthegm
attributed to Dean Acheson, they have lost an empire and are failing to find
a role, or even engage in the negation of one.
There now arises a rhetoric of ‘Europe’ as either an alternative identity or
an alternative to identity; concepts to be considered later in this concluding
section. Before examining them, it is important to reiterate that the
account of ‘British history’ proposed in these essays draws lines between
‘empire’ in the archipelago and ‘empire’ beyond it. It may not be a
sufficient truth that the Union of 1707 was constructed merely as a
means to power in Europe and commercial and colonial empire beyond
it. The history of civil and religious war in both British kingdoms and
between them may suggest that ‘empire’ in the Tudor sense had a history of
its own, and the commercial and polite civil society which Enlightenment
offered as a remedy for such wars may have set up interactions between the
two nations which persist independently of ‘empire’ in the modern sense.
3
The literature of ‘identity’ in recent years would fill a voluminous bibliography. A representative item
is Kumar 2003, the subject of some but not all of the reflections in this paragraph.
And if economic and cultural globalization are rendering political auton-
omy unnecessary, why are the Scots encouraged to pursue it? As against
such arguments, however, it is a certain truth that the failure of global
empire and power is one of three forces – the failures of industrialism and
socialism being the others – which have produced in the English and the
British (supposing there to be such a people) what is known as a ‘crisis of
identity’, in which they doubt who they are and what they have done and
should be doing in the world – the Acheson formula being once more
applicable – and Scottish nationalism can be perceived as a response to an
English failure of nerve. In these circumstances, an abandonment of history
and sovereignty, and an acceptance of a mass culture as much global as
European, might well seem attractive alternatives; even self-contempt may
be a means of escape.
But it is a noteworthy circumstance – which the schematization of
British history in these pages serves to highlight – that the last decades of
the twentieth century, during which post-imperial and post-historical
ideologies were at their height, were also the period of the Irish Troubles:
a second phase of the warfare between semi-insurgency and counter-
insurgency which the Second Union had done so much to give to the
world. The advocates of the breakup of Britain and the end of sovereignty
have used this ongoing crisis as another instance of the devolution which
they see as bringing the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland) to an end; but what this semi-visible thirty years war has in fact
illustrated is the truth that ‘empire’ – in the primary sense of the distribu-
tion of sovereignty within the Atlantic archipelago – has not ceased to be a
problem in statecraft with the emergence of the Irish republic as a sovereign
state. Two stable sovereignties, the kingdom and the republic, each legit-
imated by its own history, are now allied – one could almost say con-
federated – by the need to inform a border province that can never belong
fully to either of them that it no longer has the power to disturb the
legitimacy of authority in either state, and that these have the power to
compel its factions to remain face to face until they can reach some
accommodation. This policy depends upon the willpower of the two
sovereigns, and its success is not guaranteed; but it is a clear case of the
exercise of imperium by the two states that have found themselves obliged
to partition the second island of the archipelago between them.
Faced with subversion or terror, the sovereign state comes back –
however clumsily – to life; a problem in empire, even when it calls for a
solution in mixed sovereignty, is not to be dealt with by renouncing it.
Writings from time to time appear which suggest that the problem of
Northern Ireland would disappear if the kingdom and republic were not
sovereign states but regions of a European Union. To the present writer, it
is evident that they are handling their problem by the exercise of sover-
eignty, where the clash between sovereignties is at the heart of it. Europe,
whose recent record in such matters is less than impressive, wisely steers
clear of the dangerous politics of Northern Ireland, but contributes to a
possible solution by providing the republic with a prosperity – the first in
Ireland’s long history – that the northern mini-state desires to share. It is
for sovereignty to arrange the politics under which this may be possible.
Where there is sovereignty, there is also history. I have written else-
where4 of the impressive evidence that the Irish Republic – long noted for
the obsessiveness of its historical memory – is coming to realize that,
precisely because its sovereignty is legitimated by an agreed reading of
history, it can afford to entertain alternatives to that reading and admit that
the reading of history never comes to an end. It will be a long time before
two histories can stand face to face in the North, but sovereignty entails an
ability to face history, not to face away from it. This is why the history of
Britain in Europe requires careful consideration; it is not to be a literature
of self-annihilation.
(II)
In the first of the two following essays – they were written ten years apart –
I examine the concept of ‘Europe’ as it appears in the perspective adopted in
this volume. As an Antipodean and a neo-Briton I have no cause to love the
concept of European union; it does not offer me inclusion, and tends to
exclude me from an association and a history to which I thought I belonged.
This, however, is a quarrel I have with the now European British; other sub-
species of European do not know or care that I exist. Furthermore, the
experience of marginalization is neither unknown nor unmanageable in the
antipodean and expatriate terms in which I am accustomed to encounter
history. There are other reasons for the attitude I adopt towards Europe and
the European project: an attitude that may be termed ‘Eurosceptical’, in the
proper sense that it is sceptical about ‘Europe’. A reason for this is the
apparent inability of ‘Europe’s’ apologists to confront scepticism, exempli-
fied in the vulgar use of the word ‘Eurosceptics’ to indicate those caught up
in an atavistic and undiscriminating opposition to the project in its entirety.
4
Pocock, 2001b, pp. 94–5.
I see this as (of course) a rhetorical tactic, but more intimately as a part of
what has been termed Europe’s ‘democratic deficit’, itself a consequence of a
deep-rooted conviction that democratic electorates will not readily consent
to a renunciation of their sovereignty, and must be lured into doing this by
stages. They are induced to take limited steps in that direction, and are then
told that these steps are irreversible and oblige them to more of the same
kind; democratic legitimation can come only late in the story and can
indicate only acceptance of what has been done without their understanding
it. I have many times heard, as a main argument for further steps towards
union, that ‘we’ – whoever is speaking at the moment – have no choice but to
take them; a very bad reason for doing anything, since it ensures that ‘we’ will
do it unwillingly and badly – assuming that ‘we’ continue to exist, as perhaps
it is intended that we shall not.
The ‘democratic deficit’ may therefore be deliberately imposed. A more
immediate consequence is that the nature of the decision being taken may
be rhetorically justified but cannot be critically explained, so that ‘Europe’
is the less able to explain itself or respond to the questionings of others. In
these essays and others accompanying them, I have explored the indeter-
minacy of ‘Europe’ as a concept or a reality, and its consequent tendency to
define itself in uncriticizable terms. This indeterminacy is partly geographi-
cal; ‘Europe’ has no natural frontiers on its eastward side, and the claim
that ‘Europe is a continent’ is as imprecise as the claim that ‘England is an
island’. The indeterminacy now becomes cultural as well as geographical; a
culture formed within an open space is now seeking to define it. ‘Europe’ –
a term originally denoting the lands we call the Balkan peninsula – has
come to denote the civilization, and the history, that took shape in the
Latin-speaking western provinces of the former Roman empire. This
civilization, while undergoing the complex processes which still dominate
our understanding of ‘history’, expanded eastward, into the peninsulas of
western Eurasia, and westward, into the oceans of the world, where it
colonized the two American continents and established transitory but
important empires in the rest of the planet. Having lost control of its
former colonies and empires – I set the ‘neo-Britains’ somewhat apart from
these categories – ‘Europe’ now retreats into itself and, at least in the case of
Britain, requires its former imperial powers to proclaim that the history
internal to neo-Latin Europe is the only history they have.
I have been interested in the indeterminacy of ‘Europe’ on its eastern
side; the extension of the European Union beyond, first, the frontier
established by a disintegrating Soviet power; second, the open marches,
as they might be called, where neo-Latin history – Catholic, Protestant,
Enlightened – merges uneasily with a history formerly Greek Orthodox
and Ottoman Islamic (a history, it should be kept in mind, that has
produced less of the intensive and reconstructive self-examination which
has made ‘Western’ history so dominant a science). On this frontier the
European Union and its American quasi-partner fought a damagingly
unsuccessful police action in the former Yugoslavia, and now confront
new indeterminate frontiers with a post-imperial Russia and a radically
incoherent Islam. (Turkish historians are invited to comment.) This
volume, however, has been concerned with a westward expansion and a
westward openness and indeterminacy: archipelagic and Gaelic, Atlantic
and American, oceanic and antipodean; and with contending that in these
processes – to which a neo-Iberian dimension has not been but should be
added – histories have taken place which those of ‘Europe’ cannot ignore or
abolish.
To say this, however, is to ask how, or whether, histories written as
distinct from one another can subsequently be connected and even inte-
grated. There instantly arises a further series of questions: those of how
histories have come into being of which the former question can be asked,
and whether they will continue in being. These prove to be questions in
political history, in the political history of historiography, in which the
concept of the sovereign – miscalled the ‘national’ – state proves central
and problematic. It is not really the case that the history of ‘Europe’, or of a
globally distributed Euro-American ‘West’, has been or should be written
simply as a series of ‘national’ histories; but it has been written as a process
in which the formation and problematic survival of self-determining
human communities has been centrally important, and most of the his-
tories formerly written and presently scrutinized have been constructed in,
and in various senses by, such communities, as narratives of their origin
and experience, the problems they have encountered, and their internal
contestations as to the form they will take as human associations and
structures of power. These narratives have been political constructs, have
performed all manner of political intentions, and have been involved in all
manner of political processes; but to the extent to which the politics in
which they have been formed have been open politics, they have been
self-contestatory and open to criticism, and can be read as records of
societies’ arguments with Self and Other, as to what manner of human
association the historic communities shall have been and shall be. The
ability to relate such histories does something to make a ‘state’ a ‘nation’,
distinct from its linguistic, ethnic or cultural base. For this reason the word
‘nationalism’ has been deliberately exiled from these pages, and I shall
consider the term ‘identity’ only in the last essay of the volume, when its
relations with ‘alterity’ and ‘history’ may be taken up.
But we have next to consider the possibility that ‘Europe’ may be part of
a process intended to ensure that there will no longer be autonomous
human communities writing histories that narrate the problem of auton-
omy. Since the European project has from the start been based on the
surrender of their sovereignty by states, nations and peoples, and its
transference to agencies which are not those of any known form of political
association – the ‘democratic deficit’ forbids ‘Europe’ to define itself – the
possibility exists that it aims at terminating the phenomenon of politically
autonomous communities, and that of history, lived as well as written, as
the continuous life of an always-precarious autonomy. If this were so,
political life, considered as the association of individuals to form societies
and conduct their histories, would be targeted for extinction. There was
from the outset a case for regarding ‘Europe’ as a project with such aims:
not neo-Latin but global, not modern but post-modern, professing an
ideology of post-modernism which presents all human experience as
immediately fictitious, and thus serves the needs of a global economy
and information technology always desirous – in a way that recalls
Marx’s ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ – to destabilize existing human relations
in order to commodify new fictions, themselves targeted for early
obsolescence.
In ‘Deconstructing Europe’, the next essay in this volume, I imagined a
‘Europe’ in which this process should have been carried out, and ‘history’
would be reduced from a series of problems in which ‘we’ had been and still
were living, to a series of images encountered in a tourism of the mind. This
was an apocalypse or dystopia, and I did not present it as more than a set of
possibilities that needed to be considered. There was already a possible
scenario of Jihad v. McWorld ,5 in which tourists might be killed, as they
were later in Luxor and Bali, for their cultural aggression against those who
could not afford to be tourists; and I was writing in 1991, ten years before
the increase of tensions (always present) between Europe and a deeply
disturbed United States, between British, French and Germans as to the
structure of Europe and its relations with America, or between Europe and
America on the one hand and a deeply disturbed Islam on the other. There
were forces here that could lead to revival of sovereignty, empire and even
national autonomy, whose dialogue or dialectic with globalization might
not be at an end.
5
Barber, 1995.
To this angry and confused ‘conversation of mankind’ I ventured to
contribute the suggestion that there were relationships between the exis-
tence of autonomous communities, the capacity to write history, and the
government, and even the presence, of the collective or the individual self.
What I am calling post-modernism for short reduces all these to fictions, as
indeed they often are – historians have known this for a long time – but we
need means of criticizing these fictions, including those arising in immedi-
ate response to experience, if experience itself is to survive (as some suggest
it will not). I see these means of interpretation as requiring the continued
existence of social and political communities, which shape themselves as
they interpret themselves and their encounters with the world, and com-
mand the time in which to do this. How these communities are to exist,
and the narratives they construct are to be justified, in a global condition of
instant information and multiple identities is a problem to be confronted,
in face of an existing rhetoric which enjoins their immediate surrender.
I find myself at this point saying that we must have selves if we are to govern
them, and that histories are ways of having selves in communities of
autonomy. This is not going to be easy.
In ‘The politics of the new British history’ – originally a lecture written
before but delivered after the events of September 11, 2001, which have yet
to be re-experienced, re-imagined and interpreted – I went over much of
the ground covered by the essays in this volume, and considered the effects
of writing such history in its insular and archipelagic, and therefore its
European, settings. I was implicitly contending that a history of either
Britain, or at another level of generality Europe, must consider, before it
can transcend, the extent to which it has been the creation of national and
multinational states, and that this is particularly applicable to the history of
the archipelago enacted and written since Irish independence. I was also
concerned with the relations between sovereignty, autonomy and his-
toriography, a subject on whose theory I had begun to write,6 and with
the proposition that any autonomous entity requires both a history of what
it has been to itself and a history of what it has been to others. Given a
degree of political autonomy, these two histories may criticize each other,
but neither can reduce the other to falsity or non-entity. To say this,
however, one must deal with problems of alterity, self and other. The
last essay in this volume will consider the politics of identity and
historiography.
6
Pocock, 1997d, 1998a.
CHAPTER 15
Deconstructing Europe
History is about process and movement; yet up to now it has taken as given
the perspectives furnished by relatively stable geographical communities, of
whose pasts, and the processes leading to their presents, history is supposed
to consist. All that may be changing, with the advent of the global village,
in which no one’s home is their own; with the advent, too, of a universally
imposed alienation, in which one’s identity is predefined either as some
other’s aggression against one, or as one’s own aggression against someone
else, and in either case scheduled for deconstruction. Yet the owl of
Minerva may continue to fly, as long as there is an ark left to fly from;
and the historian, who must today move between points in time, must
recollect voyages, and may still recollect voyages between known points
with known pasts, recalling how the pasts changed as the presents shifted.
Two voyages, then, furnished the prelude to this essay in historical
reflection:1 one beyond what is known as ‘Europe’, the other within it.
The former was the later, and is therefore the nearer in time; it is therefore
remembered first. It was a voyage in May 1991 to New Zealand, which
is this historian’s home culture; he is aware that few of his readers know
that there is a culture there, or can readily believe it stands at the
centre of anyone’s historical consciousness. It was in that month a culture
very deeply in crisis and threatened with possible discontinuation: more
than for most reasons because the Europeanization of Great Britain
had deprived it of its economic (and, like it or not, its previous spiritual)
raison d’être, and it had not yet found another. Not having yet found –
wherever the fault might lie – new markets of outlet, it had resorted to
policies of privatization which amounted to the forced sale of national
assets in the hope of attracting new investment capital, a subjection of
national sovereignty to international market forces such as the European
1
Pocock, 1991b, 1992a, 1993a, 1994a, 1997c (the text here followed). For other essays on the same
subject, see 1993b, 1993c, 1997a, 2002b.
269
Community – only in this case there was no community – is supposed to
stand for. This had reached the point where it was being seriously proposed
to sell New Zealand public schools to their own boards of trustees, and the
trustees were making it known that they had no money to buy them with.
In the midst of this scene of understandable demoralization, relations
between the largest minority and majority ethnic groups – Maori and
pakeha, Polynesian and Anglo-European – were giving rise to a complex,
serious and conceptually sophisticated debate over the legal, moral and
historical foundation of the national identity. The owl had taken flight, but
the dusk could be felt approaching. In history nothing is as certain as night
and day; but it was a measurable possibility, if not an inevitability, that the
history being intelligently debated might simply be terminated because the
international economy had no further need of the community whose
memory and identity it was.2
An effect this had upon a historian who had lived for twenty-five years
in the Northern Hemisphere, while remaining a product of the Southern,
was sharply to jolt his awareness of ‘Europe’. The historic process he saw
before his eyes in New Zealand had begun with the British entry into the
European Community, and had not been alleviated by that Community’s
economic policies. This is to say nothing of the moral policies of some of
its member nations: the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior has not been
forgotten in New Zealand, and there is a deep conviction that the French
do not care, and cannot understand that anybody else does. In New
Zealand – as when resident in the United States of America – he found
himself in a culture governed by ‘Western’ values and given shape by their
historic (and imperial) expansion: yet it seemed that there was a mystique
of ‘Europe’ which laid claim to these values while excluding others from
the community which claimed to base itself upon them. And the same
mystique seemed to proclaim the subjection of national sovereignty to
international market forces without making more than sporadic progress
towards the creation of any new kind of political community governed by
its citizens, to replace that whose obsolescence it so readily proclaimed.
New Zealand, only yesterday a viable social democracy with policies and a
government of its own, looked like an extreme, because extra-marginal,
case of where the post-sovereignty process might lead.
The response might be a retreat into militant and even violent local
populism – the Third World, to which New Zealand was threatened with
relegation, was full of examples of the kind. But New Zealanders had
2
[That was then; this is now.]
Deconstructing Europe 271
been and still were a non-impoverished, civilized and international people,
used to travel, to join the world and its history – distant though they found
them – and to look at history through looking at others’ way of seeing it.
An owl departing from the South Island of New Zealand must define
the region in which its flight has navigational meaning. Until half a century
ago, New Zealand’s national existence was situated less in the Pacific ocean
than in a global area defined by British naval and imperial power, running
from Britain and Flanders through the Mediterranean and India to
Australia, Singapore and beyond. This imperial area possessed a con-
sciously preserved history which was less that of empire or imperialism
than that of British culture, political, religious, social and historical. Of
this, New Zealanders – and, subject to their own more Irish mythology,
Australians – saw themselves as part; it was believed to be the history of
a culture with a global capacity for creating and associating new nations.
Even now, when it has survived the power that once held it together, this
history is part of their perception that they inhabit ‘Western civilization’,
though they do not inhabit ‘Europe’. The accession of the United
Kingdom to the European Community entailed a rejection by that king-
dom’s peoples of the former global capacity of their culture; it was
a confession of defeat, and at the same time a rejection of the other nations
of that culture, which seemed to entail a decision that there was no longer
a British history in which New Zealand’s past or future possessed a mean-
ing. The South Pacific owl of Minerva, finding its environment endan-
gered, faced the task of rewriting New Zealand’s British history, while
taking part in the revision of all British history in which the historians of
the United Kingdom have engaged in the post-imperial and quasi-
European era now going on.
An assertion by means of which the owl defined its flight path and air
space was therefore the assertion that ‘Western civilization’ extended
beyond ‘Europe’ into those oceanic and continental spaces irreversibly
Westernized by navigation and settlement in the seventeenth through
nineteenth centuries. Europeans are often anti-American enough, and
the United Kingdom British hostile enough to their imperial past, to
deny and wish to sever this relation to the world: but the inhabitants of
the world thus created are under a necessity of keeping its history alive, and
an obsessive ‘Europeanness’ can appear to them a device aimed at excluding
them from visibility. As part of the assertion that ‘the West’ extends beyond
‘Europe’, therefore, there are owls of Minerva who define themselves
as navigating in the continental spaces of North America and Australia,
or – and this is the case of the sub-species under examination – the
enormous oceanic spaces of the austral Pacific ocean, which Polynesian and
European navigators have lodged in their memory and tradition. Take a
globe in your hands, one not mounted on a spindle which preserves the
intellectual dictatorship of Gerardus Mercator; rotate it until the islands of
New Zealand are at the centre of the hemisphere you face. You will be
looking at one facet of the New Zealand historical imagination, and you
will be able to see Australia and Antarctica, but nothing worth mentioning
of Indo-Malaysia, Asia or the Americas. There is a history which has to be
created in this space, and when it is not a history looking back up the lines
along which culture has travelled – towards what Maori called Hawaiki-
paa-mamao, the spirit land high up and distant – it has to be the history of
small communities in an ocean of planetary size. Writing Pacific history is a
challenge to the imagination: it both is and is not a history of ‘the West’,
and it certainly is not a history of ‘Europe’, even when a history of
‘Europeans’.3
These are spaces by which the antipodean historian defines his relation
to the world, and the need to see the planet as if the Southern Hemisphere
contained its centre makes him aware of others. There is the Indonesian or
Indo-Malaysian space from which he is separated by the mountains of New
Guinea and the deserts of Australia; there is the northern ocean defined
by the ‘Pacific rim’ and the movements of Japanese, American and neo-
Confucian capital; there are the spaces defined by the major civilizations of
Asia, and west of them the extensive and at present disastrously incoherent
domains of Islam. There is the enormous space of northern Eurasia,
formerly co-extensive with the Soviet Union, which may be glimpsed
from cruising altitude on a flight from Tokyo to London. These offer the
imagination a post-colonial route towards Europe, and towards the memory
of the second voyage by which this essay is dominated.
This is the memory of a seven-month sojourn in Europe during 1989,
moving through Calabria, Sicily, Tuscany, the Alpine region, south-west
Germany and the Netherlands. The revolutions of Eastern Europe were
beginning, and it would have been possible to set out by ferrovia or
autostrada and watch the border crumble: but there was work to be done,
and in any case a lingering feeling that history is for its immediate
participants and not a spectacle for tourists. One was close enough, at all
events, to experience a sensation that we were witnessing the end of a
3
[In the Journal of Pacific Studies issue in which Pocock, 1997d, appeared, the possibility was canvassed
that ‘Pacific history’ should be defined as that of central Polynesia, exclusive of Hawaii and New
Zealand, seen as involved in histories other than that so defined.]
European era forty years long, and of a definition of ‘Europe’ predicated on
the partition collapsing before one’s eyes. The term ‘Europe’ had come to
be often used co-terminously with ‘the European Community’, an association
of former imperial states having in common the experience of defeat –
Germany of defeat and partition, France, Italy and the Low Countries of
defeat and occupation, Britain of exhaustion following victory – and the
loss of colonial empires (in all cases except the first after 1940) which had
recovered enough to form a powerful combination based on the pooling of
some sovereign powers and the removal of obstacles to the movement
across their frontiers of international economic forces and some of the ways
of living immediately dependent on them: this was the process intended to
reach a culminating point in 1992.
The formation of this Community had been accompanied by an ideology
of ‘Europeanness’, which sometimes affirmed that the culture possessed in
common by these national communities, and the history of this common
culture, was of greater moral and ideological significance than their several
distinct national sovereignties or than the history shaped and written – as in
the classical age of European historiography it had been – by their several
existences as sovereign nation-states claiming to exercise control over their
several histories. Politically as well as historiographically, there had been
problems attending this fecund and exciting enterprise: it was not asserted,
for example, that there existed or should exist a ‘European people’ or a
‘European state’, using these terms in the singular; and consequently –
following the logic of political historiography – the ‘European history’
which was developing was (rightly enough) a plural history of divergences
and convergences, in which a cultural commonality interacted with a
diversity (often a warlike and destructive diversity) of political sovereignties
and national histories.
In this, European historiography continued in its classical patterns, the
history of the state retaining its primacy even after giving up its claim to be
a moral absolute. In partitioned Germany, and in an Italy still plagued by
consequences of the forced unification of the Piedmontese and Neapolitan
kingdoms in 1861, there continued to be debate whether the national state
had been a historical necessity or could have taken some other path. There
was less sign that the French were inclined to regard ‘France’ as a con-
tingency or accident of history; but even in Britain – which came to
‘Europe’ late, reluctantly, and with many signs of self-contempt – there
was an enterprise of considering ‘British history’ as existing distinctly from
the history of ‘England’ and of asking whether the extension of English
sovereignty had created a ‘British’ nation with a history of its own. The
historian writing this essay and remembering these voyages could claim
some role in furthering this enterprise, and since the questions which it
posed could be answered in the affirmative or the negative, it might either
reinforce or subvert the existence of ‘British history’ as a distinct and
intelligible field of study.
In ways such as these, the process of ‘Europeanization’ stimulated the
classical historiography based on the conception of the state: it became
more exciting, and yielded richer information, when the state and the
nation were perceived as precarious, contingent and ambivalent rather
than as moral absolutes and historical necessities. At the same time, however,
the experience after 1945 of Western Europe, and the planet’s advanced
cultures in general, was conducive to post-modernism and alienation –
meaning by these overworked terms that there were many competing
memberships, allegiances, values and involvements, of which none was
altogether satisfactory and each might be seen as competing with the others
for mastery of the individual subjectivity which they had formed among
them without rendering it satisfactory to itself. This was a problem at least
as old as the European Enlightenment, and long antedated the temporary
settlement of 1945. Under these conditions, however, it greatly encouraged
an ideology, historiography and sub-culture of alienation in which every
historic formation bearing on the individual consciousness became a
candidate for deconstruction and rejection by that consciousness, which
was in turn forced by the logic of historicism to deconstruct and reject any
self or identity it might seem to possess. Since ‘Europe’ was the classic locus
of this kind of consciousness, the deconstructive attitude became part of
the ideology of ‘Europeanness’, and ‘Europe’ was thus well placed to
deconstruct its competitors, while retaining for itself an essential lack of
identity, of much tactical advantage in the assertion of hegemony: the
Great Boyg won by refusing to name himself.
It was of course open to anyone to give him a name. When one saw
praise of la cultura europea in graffiti on south Italian university walls
in 1989, one was given to understand that some conservative Catholic
programme was using these words in a code of its own; ‘Europe’ meant
different things to different people, and they were busy deconstructing one
another’s meanings. All this, however, was ideologically and historio-
graphically normal: a ‘Europe’ which incessantly challenged and debated
its own identity was part of the civilization to which as a ‘Westerner’ one
belonged, and ‘America’ in its own way did the same thing. What left the
closed or open character of ‘Europe’ in greater doubt was its geopolitical
situation. Demarcated down to 1989 by a military, political and ideological
barrier running through central Germany and Europe, the European
Community could look like a neo-Carolingian construct: a regrouping of
Neustria, Franconia, Burgundy and Lombardy in the area defined by the
Treaty of Verdun in the ninth century, modified by one major exclusion
and one inclusion of lands not so defined. The exclusion was that of eastern
Germany, the inclusion that of the British islands; both areas had been
historically dominated by differing forms of Protestantism.
In the latter case, standing nearer to the concerns of the owl of Minerva,
the entity’s insular situation had separated it in some degree from two of
the major historical experiences undergone in western Eurasia. Through
military weakness, it had avoided involvement in the Wars of Religion
fought down to 1648 (though some argued that it was by that date caught
up in a war of religion of its own insular kind); through naval, mercantile
and industrial power, it had escaped conquest and liberation in the Wars of
Revolution after 1789, and again after 1939, and had succeeded in playing
a dominant role from an external situation. From the time of their con-
solidation at the end of the seventeenth century, the British kingdoms had
been able to exercise power in Europe while maintaining their distance
from it. Only the loss of that capacity since 1914 was obliging the United
Kingdom to seek membership in the European Community, and however
strongly the step could be justified it could not altogether lose the character
of a historic defeat and an enforced separation from a past by which the
British had previously known themselves. It was this step which had left
the British nations of the Pacific ocean denied a role in ‘European’ history
and in ‘British’ history considered as part of it: oceanically situated in the
face of the economic power exerted by Japan and the Lesser Dragons, and
liable to be told that as neither ‘European’ nor ‘American’ (nor ‘British’?)
they belonged to no ‘Western’ community acting together to maintain
itself (should it need to).
These were the circumstances in which the ideology of ‘Europeanness’ could

appear closed, exclusive and deconstructive. It is, in fact, not the case that the
European Community had developed an accredited historiography of its
own; there have been tentative ventures in that direction, which down to 1989
would have led towards a neo-Carolingian synthesis addressing itself to
Germans on the loss of the east, Italians on the miseries of the south and
British on the loss of detachment from the adjacent continent. What took a
much more visible shape was an ideology of ‘Europeanness’ which enjoined
the rejection of previously distinct national histories without proposing a
synthetic or universal history to take their place. When the British are
enjoined to consider themselves ‘European’, it is usually with the implication
that they should not consider their history as in any way distinctive; and
though this injunction has not been notably effective, it has strengthened the
tendency towards the kind of post-modernism in which any Lebensform is
presupposed an act of hegemony, an imposition to be deconstructed.
‘Europe’ could therefore become the ideology of a post-historical culture, in
which varyingly affluent and varyingly alienated masses – there is an aliena-
tion of the consumer as well as an alienation of the deprived – float from one
environment to another with no awareness of moving from one past, and one
commitment to it, to another. It would be a problem in historicity to
determine whether this freedom from commitment were an illusory or a
real condition; either seems possible.
The mystique of ‘Europe’, which has often made it possible to use the
word as an incantation with which there can be no argument, may have
been the product of a turn towards a post-historic consumer culture, but it
has also been a product of the Community’s singular success in creating
a common economy, elements of a common culture, and some institutions
of a shared administrative – it seems too soon to call it ‘civic’ – political
structure. All these were the connotations of the word ‘Europe’ as it was
being used down to 1989, and as it was still used as it looked toward 1992.
In the former of these years, however, the collapse of the Wall, the
Curtain, and much more besides, deprived ‘Europe’ of its partition along
the militarized and policed frontier which had defined its identity, as
opposed to the presumed alternative culture of late Leninism. It turned
out that this alternative was not merely a failure, but had for a long time been
no more than a pretence; mass action and mass sentiment rejected it, because
for many years nobody had believed in it enough to make it work; and the
liberal-democratic capitalism of the Community was faced with the task, not
of transforming a counter-culture, but of filling a vacuum and tidying up a
gigantic mess. The collapse extended beyond the Central and Eastern Europe
occupied in 1944–5, deep into the Soviet Union itself and the heartlands of
northern Eurasia, where what collapsed in 1991 was not only an economic and
political order but a system of states historically included in an empire: so that
the ideological transformation of the continent instantly took on a geo-
political dimension. ‘Europe’, used both as a term of mystique and as a
synonym for the European Community, came face to face with a Central
Europe, an Eastern Europe, and a Eurasia extending through Siberia, which
had not been integrated into its post-modern culture and did not belong
with any simplicity to its history. The Community proved to be a regrouping
of the lands of west Latin culture, as modified by Enlightenment, revolution,
and the wars of Germany with France and Britain, uncertain in its relations
with the historic consequences of Protestantism, and now obliged by the
re-unification of Germany to recall how far the twentieth-century wars had
been a consequence of German–Russian encounters in the environment
formed by Eastern Europe. Beyond a Slavonic Europe of largely Catholic
culture could be discerned a wide cultural zone whose history was
Orthodox and Ottoman beyond the point of belonging to the history of
Latin Christianity and its secularization.4
The region was ethnically diverse and politically indeterminate. Among
the disturbing consequences of the liberations of 1989–91 – the tunnels at
the end of the light, as someone put it – was the discovery that forty-five to
seventy-five years of revolutionary totalitarianism, long credited with a
capacity to wash brains and rebuild minds, had eliminated none of the
ethnic and sub-national antagonisms of western Eurasia. (It did not help to
add that two centuries of West European imperialism had enjoyed no
better success in Africa and southern Asia.) The collapse of socialism
proved to be a collapse of empire, the only if inadequate force which had
attempted the subjugation of these hostile identities; and the Russian-
dominated federation of the Soviet Union, the Serbian-dominated federa-
tion of Yugoslavia, began a disintegration which continued through the
revolution of August 1991 and the war in Bosnia. Both European and
United States policy-makers faced a choice between encouraging the
devolution of sovereignty as a means of creating larger market economies,
and maintaining existing centralizations of sovereignty as a means of
preventing endemic inter-ethnic warfare – war having become a means
less of asserting the interests of states than of posing ethnic challenges to
their authority. The European Community faced this problem in respect
of Yugoslavia, the United States of Iraq, both of the Soviet Union; and
there were uncomfortable parallels in Canadian North America. This
problem has many aspects. It raises the conceptual question – now
extended from west to east – whether sovereignty can be re-arranged
without re-arranging the pasts of which sovereignty makes human
communities aware, and whether sovereignty can be treated as a contingent
convenience or inconvenience without history itself becoming similarly
contingent and manipulable.
4
[I edit these words in 2004 as these regions are at the point of being drawn into the European Union.
It is in the logic of my argument that this should call for massive rewriting of history, but that this
may not happen.]
This is a familiar problem in Central and Eastern Europe, where the
distinction between ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’ peoples was invented as a
debating device in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and turned against it –
but by no means eliminated – by the policy-makers of Versailles and
Trianon. A New Zealander has some reason to know what it may be like
to belong to a people which thought it had a history and is now instructed
by others that it has none. These are devices in the discourse of empires and
the unmaking of empires. The next discovery is that ‘Europe’ may be at
the point of becoming an empire uncertain of the frontiers of its own
discourse, as it faces the question of how far to intervene in the ethnic strife
of Croats and Serbs, and as differences between the policies of its major
nations emerge over the admission of central and eastern states to the
Community. The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989 is
that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are everywhere open and
indeterminate. ‘Europe’, it can now be seen, is not a continent – as in the
ancient geographers’ dream – but a sub-continent: a peninsula of the
Eurasian land-mass, like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive
chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked
geophysical frontier. Instead of Afghanistan and the Himalayas, there are
vast level areas through which conventional ‘Europe’ shades into conven-
tional ‘Asia’, and few would recognize the Ural mountains if they ever
reached them. In these regions the states and cultures of Latin, Catholic–
Protestant and Enlightened ‘Europe’ both merge and do not merge with
others, of Orthodox, Islamic, Russian and Turkish provenance, as what we
call ‘Europe’ is ambiguously continuous with what we had better learn to
call ‘Eurasia’.5
This is an essay in and on historiography, a meditation for owls of
Minerva watching history change behind them under changing global
light-conditions in which it is monocentric any longer to speak of ‘gathering
dusk’, since dusk to one culture may be dawn to another; though again, it
has to be remembered that we claim to be diversifying the world’s cultures
precisely when, and because, we are in fact homogenizing them. The
debate over multicultural education has to be read in that complex of lights
and shadows. At the outset of this essay it was premissed that historiogra-
phy was the study of change and memory, which is why it lies both behind
and before the owls flying against the time-stream: the study of the
processes of change in which we are all involved, counterpointed by the
maintenance in the present of identity as members of coherent
5
[A paragraph is omitted here, as too far removed from the circumstances of 2004.]
communities possessing coherent and recollectable pasts. Since it has been
regularly assumed that these communities in the present are relatively
autonomous political entities – it is less than a century since ‘history’
could be defined as ‘present politics’ and ‘the memory of the state’ – these
definitions of historiography have a political dimension. They presuppose
that one of the aims of the state is to exercise some control over its own
history, defining its past and seeking to determine its future; that the liberal
state associates individuals with it in this enterprise, that of seeking the
freedom – thus history used to be defined as ‘the history of freedom’ – to
act as citizens in the determination of their own historicized identities; that
political sovereignty was so far the state’s means of prescribing its historic
past and future that it was doubtful whether the individual could be
accounted free, in history as in politics, unless a citizen of an autonomous
and sovereign political community.
There is consequently an association between sovereignty and historio-
graphy; a community writes its own history when it has the autonomous
political structure needed if it is to command its own present, and typically
the history it writes will be the history of that structure. Such a history need
not, though it very often will, be written uncritically; it may be written in
ways that reveal its existence within a historical context larger than itself, its
contingency upon many historical processes which it does not command.
There are other kinds of history which can and should be written, and a
historian or person of historical sensibility is at liberty to decide that these
kinds possess priority over political history and history of the state. A class,
gender or ethnic group which has been excluded or repressed by the
political community must write its own history and that of the state in
terms of this experience, though whether such a history can be written in
exclusively negative and eristic terms is another question. A national
community which has existed by assimilating diverse ethnic groups to an
ethnically specific culture – the United States is a major example – must
decide how to measure the history of the assimilating culture against that of
the cultures undergoing an assimilation which may be incomplete or false.
There is nothing sacrosanct, or privileged, about the history endangered
by sovereignty: and yet the history of historiography as we know it obliges
us to ask whether it would exist without history of this kind, whether
historiography would exist without the state. One reason for this is that
sovereignty and historiography, a voice in controlling one’s present and a
voice in controlling one’s past, have been and may still be necessary means
by which a community asserts its identity and offers an identity to the
individuals composing it. Certainly, it can and must be asked whether it
can pursue this enterprise, and maintain the means of doing so, without
making war against other communities or denying an identity, a politics
and a history to subjugated communities within its hegemony. But if the
abandonment and the redistribution of sovereignty are to become general
practices recommended to or imposed upon states, or communities of
states, which were formerly sovereign and wrote their national histories as
histories of their autonomous politics, one must also ask: if the sovereignty
is to disappear, what is to happen to the historiography? If the historio-
graphy is to disappear, what is to happen to the identity? If the autonomous
political community is to disappear, what is to happen to the political
identity and autonomy of the individual?
These questions appear to be intimately linked, and one can imagine an
‘Austro-Hungarian’ set of answers, in which the surrender of sovereignty to a
common set of institutions is found to have privileged some communities,
but not others, to claim certain kinds of hegemony as ‘historic peoples’, while
failing to provide the governing structure itself with a history which is that of
a community or provided anyone with an identity. There was in the Austrian
case an ‘imperial’ mystique, as there is now a ‘European’ mystique, which
claimed to have a history but on the whole failed to make good that claim;
and to this it may be added that empires commonly claim to be communities
and to possess histories, but often fail in a diversity of ways to satisfy the
communities they incorporate that their claim is good.
At this point new sets of questions may be asked. Is the supranational

community we look at in the double perspective of this essay – the
European Community, since no Pacific community is in process of for-
mation – a species of empire, in which ultimate political control belongs to
some institutions rather than others, to some national communities rather
than others? The problems placed before the Community by the changes
taking place in Central and Eastern Europe seem to make this a reasonable
question; there are certainly differing German, French and British policy
preferences regarding the future of the states of Eastern Europe. If we
answer the question in the affirmative, we return ‘Europe’ to the domain of
reason of state. ‘Empire’ and ‘confederation’ are not mutually exclusive
terms, but are ranged along a spectrum of meanings: it may be said,
however, that if there is to be a ‘Europe’ commanding its political present,
there must be a political structure capable of defining its own past and
writing its own history. On the other hand, the ‘mystique of Europe’ that
has taken shape does not seem to offer a political history, which as far as can
be seen would have to be that of a plurality of states acting in their own
history and never yet confederated or incorporated in a lasting imperial
structure. This opens the way to the reply that the question has been
wrongly posed, and that the community being shaped is not a political
community in the sense of a redistribution of the sovereignty possessed by
states, but a set of arrangements for ensuring the surrender by states of their
power to control the movement of economic forces, which exercise the
ultimate authority in human affairs. The institutions jointly operated, and/
or obeyed, by member states would then be not political institutions
bringing about a redistribution of sovereignty, but administrative or entre-
preneurial institutions designed to ensure that no sovereign authority can
interfere with the omnipotence of a market exercising ‘sovereignty’ in a
metaphorical because non-political sense. There would be an ‘empire’ of
the market which would not be an empire as the term is used in the
vocabulary of politics, because that vocabulary would itself have lost its
hegemony.
One might emerge with an uneasy hybrid, an ‘empire’ of the market in
which residual political authority was unequally distributed between the
political entities subject to its supra-political authority; or with a more
benign, at least a more familiar, scenario in which confederated nations
successfully operated shared institutions designed to allow market forces
that freedom of operation which it had been agreed should belong to them.
The problem of empire would not have disappeared, since it would be
possible to find former national communities which had been denied their
sovereignty and their history, or simply abolished as viable human com-
munities, either by inclusion within or by exclusion from supranational
common markets of the sort being imagined. It will be remembered that
this essay is being written in part from a New Zealand point of view. In the
East European and Eurasian settings – perhaps also in the North American
as regarded from Quebec – member states of hegemonic confederations
are to be seen claiming an independent sovereignty, very possibly with a
view to joining common markets to which sovereignty must be given up as
soon as asserted; the pooling of sovereignty in some regions and the
fragmentation of sovereignty in others may be two sides of the same
medal; but there may be yet other regions in which market forces simply
reign without bothering to exact common institutions from the commu-
nities they rule, make and unmake. There have been informal empires as
well as formal.
This essay is designed to ask questions about the voice of politics and
history in what Michael Oakeshott termed ‘the conversation of mankind’.
What happens to the sometime citizens of a formerly autonomous
community when it is enjoined to give up its political sovereignty and the
capacity to write its own history? To the United Kingdom British when
they are enjoined to cease claiming a history of their own and accept that
they have no history except that of a Europe which has not been written
yet? To the New Zealand British when they are ejected from Anglo-
European history and enjoined to consider themselves part of a Pacific
world which has no common history and may never acquire one? The craft
of historiography suggests some responses to these predicaments. The
United Kingdom British have the option of writing the history of
Europe on the assumption that the history of the British peoples does
indeed form part of it and radically modifies the ways in which it must be
understood once this is admitted. The far more isolated and differently
threatened New Zealanders, to whom others rather deny than extend
options, may easily recognize that they are made up of voyaging peoples,
Polynesian, European and latterly Asian; they may write their own history
as shaped by voyaging, and voyage themselves in search of other histories to
which oceanic distances connect them by the very radicalness of separation.
Owls of Minerva may send back messages from other points in what is only
planetary space.
But this is to presuppose that the voice of self-defining political and
national historiography will survive. There have been political and social
preconditions of its existence, and these may be in process of supersession.
Let us imagine a state of affairs in which political communities had been
effectively reduced to insignificance, and humans could identify themselves
only as existing in market communities, engaged in no other self-defining
activities than the manufacture, distribution and consumption of goods,
images and the information (if that is the right word) relating thereto.
It would in principle be possible to write the histories of such communities,
and these histories might be full of unexpected and intriguing information
about their conduct and the character of human life as shaped by them.
The proposition that life in the non-political community is as historically
informative as life in the political is as old as the New History, which has
cropped up at intervals since Voltaire published the Essai sur les Mœurs ;
but New Historians have usually been political actors, with political
motives for de-emphasizing the political. If we imagine a dystopia or
eutopia in which market communities exercised complete hegemony, we
may ask whether the ruling élites of such communities would have much
interest in seeing their official histories written, or whether the individual as
consumer would have the same interest as the individual as citizen, or as
social actor interacting with the political, in seeing himself or herself as a
critical actor modifying rule by his or her responses to it, and wishing to see
the history of such modifications written.
The preconditions of historiography would not be met if the market
communities had acquired an unlimited power of changing the produced
and distributed images of what they were and what human needs they were
designed to satisfy, if there were no alternative to responding to the images
presented by the system that distributed them, and if the communities were
incessantly and therefore uncritically engaged in this transformation of
their self-images. There could then be no critical histories of images, but
only images of history. To imagine this is, of course, to imagine the
dystopia of Brave New World or 1984, in which rulers as well as ruled are
totally assimilated to the systems they operate. It may be replied that
market communities do not deprive the individual of agency to the
dystopian extent, while leaving open the question whether they will,
under post-political conditions, contain individuals with enough sense of
agency to require histories, as we know them, to be written. The problem
will become more acute if we imagine market communities as lacking
temporal stability, as constantly dissolved, transplanted and transformed
by the market’s insatiable demand for new human needs to satisfy; or if
we imagine communities marginalized by the market, mere pools of
unwanted labour with little or no purchasing power. Such fluctuating or
frozen human masses would have little history and less need or will to write
it; perhaps there are prerequisites for having a history at all. For the
purposes of the present essay it is not necessary to predict the prevalence
of such non-communities; but it is not mere fantasy to imagine them.
It is nearer description than imagination to say that we already have the
makings of the historical or post-historical ideology which might take the
place of historiography in such communities and non-communities as we
have been supposing. This is the ideology of post-modernism, which – to
simplify matters – may also be called the ideology of alienation, and a great
deal of post-political historiography is already being written according to
its specifications. It presupposes that all history is invention, and that all
invention is alien and an imposition; any context in which the self might
find meaning is imposed on the self by some other, and any specification of
the self is similarly imposed, with the consequence that the self is always
false, an imposition of, or imposture against, its own unrealizable existence.
History is the study of constructs, and its aim is invariably their decon-
struction. It used to be argued that this knowledge was the escape into
freedom, until it was discovered that there remained no subject to be free,
and it can still be argued, within limits, that it teaches a critical skill very
useful to selves constantly threatened with identities imposed by others,
and constantly obliged by the nature of history to be on the move between
contexts in which identity must be varyingly realized and asserted. As a
strategy, it is a good one for living and fighting back in the world of
uncriticized market forces which incessantly impose new and non-referential
images of who one is and what one wants: but as ideology it is the
instrument of that world and operates to reinforce it. The marketers of
images instruct us that we have no selves other than those they choose to
impose upon us; the deconstructionist intellectuals, if they are not willing
to stop somewhere and make a stand, tell us exactly the same thing. In all
too many cases they have become anti-humanist enough to get no nearer
making a stand than casting us either as oppressed – which is not so bad –
or more commonly as oppressors of some other, to whose alienated
consciousness they then enjoin us to submit our own. Their motives in
doing so should be scrutinized and may be conjectured.
It is easy enough to see how this could become the ideology of a post-
political, post-industrialist and post-modernist Europe or America. The
affluent populations wander as tourists – which is to say consumers of
images – from one former historical culture to another, delightfully free
from the need to commit themselves to any, and free to criticize while
determining for themselves the extent of their responsibility. How far this
is a freedom to make their own history, how far a freedom from any need to
make it, may be debated. Meanwhile the non-affluent form underclasses,
pools of labour ebbing from one area of underemployment to another. The
ideology of alienation, a luxury to the affluent, is a necessity to them, and as
long as the state, feeling little need of a highly educated workforce, chooses to
underpay its teachers, public education will be a means of perpetuating the
underclass’s pseudo-revolutionary discourse, which will double as the means
of promotion into the educated bureaucracy. It will produce quite an
intelligent, articulate and disenchanted populace, offered by history no
means of associating themselves in politically active communities, but only
in self-congratulatory yet self-accusatory sects and counter-cultures of the
apparently or really alienated, capable at best of the special-issue activisms
which constitute populism but not democracy. Thus the post-historical and
post-political culture one can imagine taking shape in Western Europe if not
North America; more isolated communities might be more deeply threatened.
These are regions of continental and oceanic proportions beyond the
common markets in which post-modernism can flourish. Early in 1991,
Tatyana Tolstaya drew attention to such a region in western Eurasia not far
beyond Europe: ‘in the West the sense of history has weakened or com-
pletely vanished; the West does not live in history, it lives in civilization (by
which I mean the self-awareness of transnational technological culture as
opposed to the subconscious, unquestioned stream of history). But in
Russia there is practically no civilization, and history lies in deep,
untouched layers over the villages, over the small towns that have reverted
to near wilderness, over the large, uncivilized cities, in those places where
they try not to let foreigners in, or where foreigners themselves don’t go.’6
In using ‘civilization’ and ‘history’ as antithetical terms, Tolstaya is engag-
ing in a dramatic departure from conventional Western language. By
‘history’ she means the experience and memory of the past unprocessed,
in the nature of raw sewage: unmediated, uninterpreted, uncriticized and
(incidentally if not centrally) unsanitized, present but not controlled,
unimpeded in its capacity to drive humans to do unspeakable things.
There are many areas of the settled earth (some of them in great Western
cities, as the United States knows to its cost) where ‘history’ is like this. But
when Tolstaya says that ‘history’ dies where there is ‘civilization’, she
departs deliberately from Western discourse, since there we still believe
that ‘civilized’ societies can write and debate their history, interpret it,
argue over it, succeed or fail in coming to terms with it, even regard it as
‘the nightmare from which one struggles to awake’, and be the more
‘civilized’ for this ability to criticize it and reduce it to process. Even the
loss of sovereign autonomy can stimulate the owl to take flight and map the
territory of the past in greater detail and new perspectives: this happened in
Edinburgh and Glasgow during the Scottish Enlightenment, and has been
happening in both British and New Zealand historiography in response
to Europeanization.
To us it does not follow that history disappears when it is interpreted,7
but Tolstaya may be reminding us that this state of affairs cannot be relied
on to last. The privatizing state may be ending its alliance with the clerical
and intellectual élites who were its accredited interpreters and critics; it
would rather its universities were vocational schools – if that – than centres
of inquiry; and as we look through Europe into Eurasia, where the
intelligentsias have been devastated by the life and death of the Party,
we may be looking into a world where the post-modern which is indifferent
to history lies side by side with the pre-modern which cannot rule history
and is ruled by it. Along this faultline between tectonic plates, we wish
6 7
Tolstaya, 1991. See, however, Plumb, 1970, and Lowenthal, 1985.
to say, unspeakable things will continue to happen, and the historian – that
spokesperson for excluded modernity – may find something useful to do:
but if there is no political domain in which historical understanding seeks
an opportunity to act, is there anything that can be done?
Tolstaya’s very striking language reminds us of a sense in which the
‘end of history’, prematurely announced a little while ago, might theoret-
ically happen. Francis Fukuyama was (perhaps) imagining that the
growth of the state and the processes of revolution might cease to be
effective makers of history, given the universal triumph of a global market
which took no account of frontiers; that the politics culminating in state
and revolution were the means by which human beings attempted to
control their history; that ‘history’ was the name for that process when
under human control; and that henceforth humans would not make their
history by their own thought and action, but the forces of the market
would make it for them. Tolstaya is envisaging a not wholly different
state of affairs, in which ‘civilization’ resolves and abolishes history
and only barbarism retains it. Given these premisses, the post-modern
historian – when not living, as many still do, in a fantasy world in
which linguistic criticism secures and continues the Leninist supremacy
of the inquisitorial intelligentsia – will attempt to discover ‘history’ in the
micro- or macro-experiences of humans in the global market and its
culture. Those who maintain the modernist, or at any rate the pre-
post-modernist, perspective will maintain that politics does not disappear
with the Bismarckian or the Stalinist state, that humans continue to set
up political structures to control their own history and contest for the
power which comes from the attempt to control it, and that politics and
history remain among the active forces which shape human lives and give
them meanings. But the new world disorder coming after 1989 calls in
question the premisses of this debate, by calling in question the bipolarity
of Tolstaya’s (to say nothing of Fukuyama’s) projection. The boundaries
between ‘civilization’ and its opposite, barbarism, between history
assimilated and history uncontrolled, have been broken open, and there
is a zone to which politics and history are once more relevant. Europe is
again an empire concerned for the security of its limites, and we may
cautiously recall Gibbon’s projection, in which the inhabitants of the
civilized provinces have ‘sunk into the languid indifference of private life’
and history is being made for them by the encounters of soldiers and
barbarians along the frontiers – the new barbarians being those populations
who have not achieved the sophistication without which the global
market has little for them and less need of them.
It is time to stop projecting and fantasizing:8 but in late 1991 it seems
apparent that ‘Europe’ – both with and without the North America whose
addition turns it from ‘Europe’ into ‘Western civilization’ – is once again
an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide
whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable
cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats
if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be
part of ‘Europe’. These are not decisions to be taken by the market, but
decisions of the state; and they are revealing clearly enough that ‘Europe’
is still a composite of states, whose historically formed interests give them
non-identical attitudes towards the problems of ‘Europe’ and its border-
lands. Classically state-centred historiography returns to relevance, and
even salience, once the crises of historic Russia and Yugoslavia present
themselves before a Europe in which Germany has once again become
united. There is still something for history to do – this is not put forward as
a cheering prospect – whether written about the past or enacted in the
present; the end is not yet. One may of course perform an act of faith,
professing that these phenomena are all transitory and that sooner or later
the global market will have exterminated politics and history all around the
globe. When that happens, the end of history will have arrived; but to
celebrate 1992 as if ‘Europe’ were a secure and self-regarding ‘homeland’,
intent only on its post-modern and post-historical self, might be to look
rather like the emperor Philip the Arab, celebrating the Secular Games at
one of Gibbon’s great ironic moments.
This essay has been written with a certain disrespect for the post-modernist
intelligentsias, whose arrogance and provincialism at the moment expose
them to their share of derision. But the post-modern phenomenon itself is
entitled to respect: there really are senses in which the political community is
losing its place at the centre of our allegiance (and allegiance itself any centre
in consequence), and the non-political structures – or alternatively, those
structures which enlarge the meaning of the ‘political’ until it has no
boundaries – surrounding our existence are acquiring histories, or non-
histories, of their own. Therefore the current ‘new history’ or anti-history
is entitled to its place. The thrust of this essay is towards suggesting that it is
not entitled to more than a place, and will not be enabled to claim a
monopoly or an allegiance. Politics, the state, and various kinds of war,
will continue to command our attention; Tolstaya’s confrontation between
‘civilization’ and ‘history’ will continue to generate a history in which both
8
[I did not fantasize the Islam of 2001–4.]
are involved; and even within, as well as outside, the global consumer culture
generated by the all-conquering market, communities will continue to assert
their politics in order to have a voice in determining their history. It is
reasonable therefore to predict, and even to recommend, a continuing
dialogue, or family quarrel, between the political and the post-political, the
modern and the post-modern, the historical and the post-historical, history
in older and in newer senses. It is perhaps in eastern, not western, Eurasia
that it will finally be seen whether ‘history’ has come to an ‘end’ or not.
‘Europeans’, in this prediction, would write their history in ways which
both privileged and deprivileged the centrality of states, admitting that they
cast long and sometimes dark shadows in a present which may transcend
the past but cannot abolish it; the pretence that there can be invented some
uncomplicatedly ‘European’ history which both includes and excludes the
histories of all the nations would be given up. The British would write their
history into that of ‘Europe’, rewrite the latter’s history as modified by
their presence in it, and continue on occasion to write the former as seen in
perspectives which are less continental than insular, archipelagic, oceanic
and imperial. They would probably not be the only European national
society to do so. As for that culture with which this essay began – New
Zealand, cut adrift from its ‘British’ history by the advent of ‘Europe’, and
for some purposes to be renamed ‘Aotearoa’ – it may already have lost both
political and economic control of its present and future: but if it survives at
all, its historians will have learnt (as they are learning) many new perspec-
tives. They are learning rather rapidly to write their history as that of two
cultures in stubborn interaction, and this reinforces rather than diminishes
their sense of its autonomy; engrossed by the processes of settlement, they
are already writing micro-histories of local experience and discourse, at
their own distances from the history of politics and the state. If (again) they
survive, their owls of Minerva will send out messages before as well as
behind them on their flight, and they will address both Pacific history –
which is that of small intense communities formed, separated and con-
nected by voyagings over oceanic distances – and the history of ‘Europe’,
‘Britain’ and other northern land-mass cultures from which they are
derived and which they need to see in their own way. They will inform
‘Britain’ that it has a planetary history it will not be able to forget, and
‘Europe’ that, as there is a Eurasian world into which it shades without
fixed borders, so there is an oceanic (and likewise an American) world
which it created and which enlarges it into ‘the West’. Barriers between
empires went down in 1989, and the intercontingency of the world
increased. What do they know of Europe who only Europe know?
CHAPTER 16
The politics of the new British history
I have been asked to give this lecture1 in several places to audiences interested
in the concept, perhaps also in the programme, known as ‘the new British
history’; a name I hope it will soon shake off, now it is becoming accepted as
a programme worth discussing and, more importantly, practising. The
lecture is being delivered to audiences Irish, Scottish and English, all situated,
as I am myself, outside that south-east region of the British island where the
English kingdom and state took shape and learned to help fashion an English
and British identity. Since this new history was originally offered as a
replacement for a history which was that of the English state and the
provinces of its empire, we now need to get past a stage in which it is that
of the latter peoples with the English left out; I shall be arguing that British
history of the English is something which we need and have difficulty in
providing. British history is an archipelagic and oceanic rather than a merely
English history; but it is not a history of a group of offshore islands doomed
to re-absorption in a sub-continental hegemony from which they have been
contingently and temporarily separated.
I have just uttered an ideological and therefore a political statement; to say
anything about the history of a political association – in these cases an
association of state and nation – is to say something about its politics; and
to say something about what its history has been or may be is both to say
something about its politics and to express a political judgement. So I have
entitled this lecture, ‘The politics of the new British history’, and I should
now like to pursue what that title implies in two directions. In the first place I
shall say something about the political situations in which this ‘new history’
was conceived and to which it has been addressed, and something about what
1
Originally delivered at University College, Dublin (particular thanks to Maurice Bric), King’s
College, University of Aberdeen (particular thanks to Jane Ohlmeyer) and the University of
Liverpool (particular thanks to Anne McLaren), during October 2001. At Liverpool it became the
David Beers Quinn Lecture, the last delivered in Professor Quinn’s lifetime. It is here published for
the first time.
289
it may signify as a discourse in and upon these situations. In the second place,
I shall enter into the domain of political theory, in which I was once trained,
and try to say something about what it may mean for a political society to
have a history, and what sorts of political action are performed when such a
history is constructed, interpreted, criticized or overthrown. It will turn out
that the history of a political society is not unconnected with its sovereignty,
and the pursuit of this history is very far from unconnected with the present
and future distribution of sovereignty within these islands and outside them.
Let me remind you, then – following up my first set of intentions – that
the ‘new British history’ was proposed to a meeting of the New Zealand
Historical Association in Christchurch in the year 1973. New Zealand’s
history was formed in a relationship with the United Kingdom during the
latter’s imperial period and entailed a mythos according to which that
kingdom and the several neo-Britains formed an association with a good
deal of equality about it. 1973 was a moment in the process of British entry
into Europe, and it was already apparent that this process was requiring the
British to adopt a new view of their history, in which they were no longer,
and as far as possible had never been, an imperial or oceanic people at all,
but something called European instead; and whatever that meant it
entailed the negation of our historic existence as neo-Britains, and of any
account of British history in which we had part. Clearly, something would
have to be done about this situation, and a variety of strategies presented
themselves. One was to set about writing the history of New Zealand in
ways that made it as autonomous as possible, stressed the ways in which it
had been made there and nowhere else, and presented elements of
Britishness and connection with Britain in an exterior and alien perspec-
tive. In the ordinary processes of settler nationalism, this kind of historio-
graphy was already well in place in 1973. It has gone on developing ever
since, and has shed enormous amounts of light in many unexpected places;
in particular, it has facilitated the writing of a history of the encounter
between the settler and the indigenous peoples, between pakeha and Maori,
in which the imperial crown has not ceased to be a presence. But there are
limits to the extent to which it can be denied that New Zealanders have
been a British and neo-British people. Even when they deny that they are,
they are admitting the importance of that thesis in their minds; and there
are moments when settler nationalism looks like some kind of British
radicalism in transplanted form. They can deal with this by continuing
to write their history as that of an argument with themselves and with
others, which is of course the only way in which the history of a self-
conscious association can be written at all; but this is a point at which it
The politics of the new British history 291
becomes desirable to have an alternative strategy to that which I have
described so far.
In retrospect, the 1973 proposal for a new British history looks like the
search for such an alternative. If one version of that history – let us call it the
Anglo-imperial one – was at the end of its utility, at least one other must be
found; and if the Brits (as we now learned to call them) were indeed
proposing to rewrite their history in ways that left us out, it was clearly in
our interest to rewrite it ourselves, in ways that both made sense of us to
ourselves and reminded them that we and they were parts of one another’s
history. The proposal to diversify the history of the Atlantic archipelago, and
present it as a problematic system of empire, was put forward in an archi-
pelago on the other face of the planet, which needed to define its own place
in this increasingly problematic history, and for which must be claimed a
right to take part in interpreting it as a means to its own self-determination.
It is important to notice the central, conscious and deliberate ambiva-
lence of this ‘new history’ towards the concept of empire. It was a response
to the winding-up of empire, but it was never a call to idealize that empire
in the past or continue it into the future, for the reason that the winding-up
of empire struck us as an act of empire in its most objectionable form. The
Brits – and this does mean particularly the English – were behaving as if we
were items in their patrimony, and they were entitled to pension us off and
dismiss us when it suited them; we were replying – in language once used
by Scots to Charles I and the English parliament – that we had part in
David the King as well as they. (I find in much contemporary literature that
Scottish nationalism increased in proportion as it appeared that the English
did not know what to do with themselves, and were therefore behaving as if
nobody else existed.) But to assert, as the ‘new history’ did, that empire,
meaning a history shared by an association of peoples, had never belonged
exclusively to the Brits – in the Anglocentric sense of the word – and was
therefore not theirs to wind up as they chose, was necessarily to assert also
that this empire and history belonged exclusively to no one, and therefore
to render problematic the extent to which it was an empire at all. ‘British
history’ is therefore the history of a problematic; it renders problematic the
extent to which it has been unified, the extent to which it can be called
‘British history’, the extent to which there exists or has existed a ‘British’
people or community of peoples who say it is their history. But to
problematize is not to deconstruct; the questions I have just asked are
questions, meaning that we do not know the answers, that there may
be answers, that there may be more than one answer, that we may have
to choose between them or to combine them. Implanted in our minds, we
suddenly realize, is the malignant assumption that to question a human
construct is to prepare its disappearance; but human institutions disappear,
not because they are questioned, but because they have run out of answers.
To ask a question is to take this risk, since we ask it because we do not know
the answer; but human associations may be thought of as devices for
finding the answers to questions, even for reframing the questions so that
they can be answered; and to suppose a ‘British history’ which constantly
asks itself what it is, and whether that is the right question, may be to
suppose that it will continue to ask these questions and find answers
to them, and so to exist. All this may be built on the single point that
‘British history’ is among other things the history of an empire, which
problematizes that empire’s history. It does not ensure that this history will
continue, but it entertains the possibility that it may.
Clearly, British history faces problems, because its business is to problem-
atize itself. I shall leave undiscussed, as to be settled only in the future, the
central problem of how far there has been, or will continue to be, a ‘British’
national or multinational community which has a history and possesses the
political means of continuing it into a future. The politics of this historio-
graphy are directed more towards asking this question than to giving answers
to it – though to those who already have an answer, the proposal to leave it
unanswered will look like giving an answer other than their own. I want to
turn to a historiographical problem that underlies even this central question.
The ‘new British history’ was offered as a replacement for an older view of that
subject, in which it was presented as that of an English state enlarged into a
British kingdom, and of a predominantly English political community under-
lying it, so that histories other than English were presented as peripheral, to be
recounted and indeed noticed only when they were capable of modifying a
history which hardly sprang from them. Let me remind you that this proposal
was put forward in New Zealand, whose highly interesting history is never
noticed by anyone, on much the same grounds. It followed, however, that the
term ‘British’ could be used as the equivalent of this Anglocentred history it
was proposed to replace, and both Scottish and Irish historians were heard to
wonder whether it would not perpetuate this history instead of replacing it.
The original proposal, I think, was to use the term ‘British’ in a rather different
way: to denote a context which the several histories both shared and contested
among themselves; and because there was no unified history – no history to be
finally written as that of a self-defining inclusive history – available or pre-
dictable for this context, ‘British history’ was from the start intended to be self-
problematizing in the way that it has been. There remained, nevertheless, an
important problem in nomenclature: should the adjective ‘British’ be used
comprehensively, as it is for example when the islands of this archipelago are
collectively referred to as ‘the British Isles’? These terms ‘British’ and ‘Britain’
are not politically neutral; their history in Scotland is unlike that they have in
England, and both these are unlike that they have in Ireland, where there are
good reasons in the republic for rejecting them altogether. I was from the start
willing to use the term ‘the Atlantic archipelago’, but this has failed to catch on:
partly for the rather interesting reason that you cannot form a generic adjective
from it, partly for contrary reasons having to do, as I see it, with a general
invective against naming or defining or having any identity at all, which is part
of the politics of post-modernism.
Problematization again lies at the heart of this matter, but it is both
possible and necessary to look beyond it. The Irish entity has steadfastly
and with much success refused inclusion in a British political community or
its history; there is obviously a strong case for saying that Irish history is not
part of British history and demands to be considered apart from it. In reply,
however, there is a strong case for saying that the rebellion against inclusion
in British history is a very large part of Irish history and has done much to
shape the national identity of which it is the history; and there is also a case
for saying that ‘British history’, in any sense in which it can be defined, has
been deeply shaped by the Irish rebellion against it. This applies certainly to
the history of state formation in these islands, and also to that of the
formation and existence of self-defining communities; and all these histories
would seem to be still going on, and to defy both immediate resolution and
prospective liquidation. We need to go on writing them, as we need to go on
enacting them. The rejections of ‘British history’ in one sense are part of it in
another; and in projecting a periodization of ‘British history’, I have found
myself organizing it both around successive attempts at a ‘British’ union –
1603, 1707, 1801 – and around the concept of two massive secessions,
American in 1776, Irish in 1921, which both modify the course of this history
and are themselves modified by what they are seceding from. This both
problematizes ‘British history’ and juxtaposes it with histories to be distin-
guished from it; but problematization does not cause it to disappear.
The case of Ireland raises another set of questions, which I should like to
look at in ways that may lead us back to the problem of the conjunction of
the words ‘British’ and ‘English’. To use the term ‘Ireland’ is to imply, very
truthfully, that there may be supposed to exist a community known by that
name, with which and with whose history individuals may identify, to the
point where there exists a state formed by, affirming and continuing that
history; that there are areas where the boundaries of this identity are violently
contested only underlines its existence. Where such entities exist – and
there are several of them going to make up ‘British history’, if not to exhaust
its meanings – each of them requires and constructs a history of itself,
designed to make sense of itself to itself, and to record how the people
composing it have come to be what they are and to have interacted among
themselves so as to construct it as it is and themselves as part of it. Histories on
this, let us call it ‘national’, scale are both ideologically inevitable – since
without them the pronoun ‘we’ cannot be used at a political-historical
level – and politically and historiographically justifiable, since it is possible
to write them in ways both complex and self-critical, encouraging a similarly
sophisticated awareness among ‘us’ of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ have been
doing. There will be those among us who press for alternative histories, and
there will be those who object strenuously to the presentation of history in any
form that admits an alternative; but it is in the nature of politics that we
should confront these problems, and in a properly working politics there will
be means of dealing with them. It is true, however, that a historiography,
sophisticated and self-critical about the relations between those perceived as
included in the society whose history is being written, may be a good deal less
so about those not perceived as included. These latter may be found within
the society itself – the enormous and universal problem of the history
of women here arises – or they may be found outside it, or ambiguously
situated on its borders. Here we meet the famous Others, and we are familiar
with a rhetoric that seems to suggest that the Self cannot be constructed
without the distorted image of an Other, and is itself distorted by the falsity of
the relation in which it defines itself. Now this is all too often all too true; but
I want to say that ways exist of moderating this situation, and that when
we meet with histories that seem to recount the formation of Selves in no
other way than by the invention of Others, we should remember to mistrust
those for whom the deconstruction of identities and communities seem
to have become a programme; they may not know who they are working
for, but I think I do. We need to work towards a state of things in which the
self may criticize itself in its relationships with others – accepting by the way
the fact of its historical contingency and non-final determinacy – while
maintaining the political and historical continuity of its association with
those with whom it is associated. I have no great difficulty in envisaging a
historiography quite good at maintaining this complex and multiple kind
of awareness, and I am interested in the ‘new British history’ as that of a
number of entities, converging and diverging in ways that render them
contingent upon one another, while retaining the ability to recount their
several histories in so far as these continue to make sense to those who find
them to do so.
It is a premiss, then, that any long-standing political community –
nations rather predominantly included – needs two histories, recounted
in narratives which should be perpetually confronted but are distinct. One
is the narrative of how its members have interacted with each other in order
to produce it and conduct its affairs; the other that of how they and it have
interacted, or failed to do so, with those internal and external who are not
included in it. These two histories shade into one another; there are vast
gray areas where they do so; frontier disputes between them can have real
and bloody political meaning. Before passing on, let us note the fallacy of
supposing that the second history necessarily discredits or deconstructs the
first. It supplies a context to it, and gives it new and uncomfortable
meanings; but the fallacy I have mentioned is part of a conspiracy against
the democratic state. It is because political histories have this dual character
that a multinational history like the British has its problematic character;
and it is for this reason that ‘new British history’ can be regarded as
politically suspect from every point on the spectrum. If Scottish and Irish
historians have suspected it of a design to deprive their national histories of
autonomy by including them in a wider narrative, Anglo-British historians
may as well suspect it of dissolving that narrative into its national compo-
nents; and what becomes of any autonomous history when it is contextual-
ized by association with others? There are those who have tried to use the
new British history – and there are those who distrust it because it cannot
be used – as part of a design to deprive all its components of their
sovereignty in their history, and reduce them to autonomous regions of
an acephalous empire known by the name of ‘Europe’. To those who may
want to say that ‘Europe’ is not designed to be such an empire, I should
reply that they have an interest in resisting such a design whenever it shows
itself. The politics of regional nationalism in an era of globalization are
complex, ambivalent and potentially treacherous; and this is part of the
politics of historiography.
Let me revert to the historiographical problems that arise when ‘British
history’ is written as the convergence and divergence of a number of
histories, many of them defining peoples, nations or sub-nations who
may be thought of as contributing either to the making of British history
or perhaps to its unmaking. There are at least three national histories visible
as parts of this mixture, and at least one of them must be thought of as both
national and imperial. Some national and sub-national formations antedate
the attempted formation of a ‘British’ state; others are shaped in the course of
the latter formation or in reaction against it. Scottish nationalism, for
example, rests on the history of a state which existed before its entry into
the British union and now desires to redefine its position and its identity;
Irish, on the other hand, has been far more directly confronted by the
problem of what kind of state and what kind of nation were to be formed
by the resistance to Anglo-British and Scottish domination. There is the
question of how far both ‘Scotland’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ are the products
of a Norman-Anglian kingdom’s offensives against maritime Gaeldom.
David Quinn raised the problem of how far these, and the much larger
English offensive against Ireland generally, carried over into the colonization
of Atlantic America. ‘British history’ observes that this colonization was
largely but by no means wholly an English affair, and as such played its
part in British history until these colonies associated themselves in a federal
union – an act deeply un-English and un-British – and engaged in a conquest
and colonization of the North American continent.
‘American history’ at this point departs from ‘British history’ more
decisively, I wish to suggest, than ‘Irish history’ succeeds in doing. There
is a paradox here: American history is decisively shaped by Protestant
sectarianism – English, Scottish, Irish and German – and is therefore
culturally akin to Anglo-British history, whereas Irish history can be
contextualized within a history of Catholicism which ‘British history’
excludes as its Other. Here perhaps is the central problem of writing an
Irish history. But American history becomes that of a continental and
global civilization, while Irish history remains committed to the problem
of distributing sovereignty within these islands. There is a certain question
which Kingdom and Republic are having to address together and cannot
give away with their sovereignty to ‘Europe’; they must retain sovereignty if
they are going to deal with it.
Not all component peoples of ‘British history’ are nations or desire to be
states; and the term ‘Britain’ designates a state which may have been simply
an empire and may not have consolidated a nation (I use those verbs and
moods to ask a question, not to suggest that the answer is known). It is when
‘state’ and ‘nation’, politics and history, begin to designate one another that
there arises that need of a double history of which I have been speaking; and
the function of ‘British history’ here is not only to supply each Self with its
Others, but to furnish as many as possible of those Others with histories of
their own as Selves, and the means of speaking and acting back at the primary
Self – who is, as often as not, the English. The political function of
contextualization, to put it in other terms, is not to disarm history, but to
re-arm histories. Let me remark, in parenthesis, that the enterprise in New
Zealand historiography with which I have had most to do is that of
redesigning it as a relationship between pakeha history and Maori history.
Clearly, there are risks being run in taking up such enterprises. There are so
many forces operating at present to take ‘our’ history from ‘us’ and deconstruct
‘us’ as historical beings – there is even something to be said for such forces and
I may be addressing hearers who want them to succeed – that to employ
contextualization as a means to the strengthening of histories is to play cards
that may be turned against one. But if politics is the art of being ruled while
one is ruling, there should be no objection to histories which empower Others
to act upon one while one acts upon them. This is the case for British history as
problematic, the history of several nations and sub-nations which may or may
not have shared a political association. But there is a central problem here
about which I should say something in the last part of this lecture.
This is the problem of the English: of fitting them, and of seeing how
they may fit themselves, into this ‘new British history’. Because it has been
presented as an alternative to an older scheme in which it was the history of
an English state and the latter’s occasionally visible provinces, it has
necessarily counter-privileged histories written from the point of view of
these provinces, no longer seen as such; and these histories have been in the
usual measure self-regarding, designed to explain the Welsh or the Scots to
themselves, with the English as external if omnipresent actors. But they, the
English, have their history, which has acted in the history of others.
T. M. Devine’s The Scottish Nation 2 is a wonderful book, from which I
have learned a great deal I ought to have known long ago; but there are
moments in reading it when I say to myself, ‘Where were the English all
this time?’, meaning the English, not just the Westminster politicians.
Many Scots went to live in England – there is a tradition of English
comment on this – and it seems that some English went to live in
Scotland. Professor Devine mentions that they did, but though he tells
us in some detail what became of the Lithuanians, the Jews, the Irish, the
Italians and the Asians in Scotland, he does not pursue the fortunes of the
English there. Perhaps there were not enough of them to merit treatment;
but on the larger scale of British history, I should like to know more about
how these cultures interacted and helped to shape one another, conceivably
into Britishness. That Scottish culture was in danger of Anglicization would
seem to be an important feature of the story, but not the only reason for telling
it. We have to get beyond relations of inequality if we are to get beyond them.
I am saying that the new history has to get beyond the unmaking of an
Anglo-British paradigm, the aim with which it began; after which that
paradigm can be re-admitted to the story and seen to act within it. This is
2
Devine, 1999. [See now Watson, 2003.]
not easy, both because of a past of Anglo-British domination and because
the histories of distinct communities cannot altogether cease being written
in terms of Self and Other; but once this is admitted, we can see that the
new history has made very considerable progress in overcoming these
difficulties. This is even true of the historiography written by the
English, to which I now want to turn. The predicament of the English is
that it is peculiarly hard for them to separate English from British
history and use the latter to contextualize the former, for the reason that
the history of how they have governed themselves is hard to separate from the
history of how they have governed others. (This, by the way, contains
the explanation of the famous ‘empire in absence of mind’; more than
most imperial peoples, they have been intent on governing themselves and
have failed to pay equal attention to their governance of others, or their
partners in that rule.) During what I propose as the early modern period of
British history – say from 1530 to 1830 – the central problem was the often
insecure maintenance of empire as defined in the English Act in Restraint
of Appeals (1533): that is, the empire of English authority over the English
realm, exercised through royal and parliamentary sovereignty in both
kingdom and church. For reasons either essential or accidental, it had to
be decided, and the decision either imposed or negotiated, how far this
‘empire’, and the forms of church and kingdom it implied, were to be
extended to other realms subject to the wearer of the English crown; and in
Scotland, Ireland and English America, we meet with profoundly different
histories stemming from this question. If we take the English Reformation
and the Church of England as one tap-root of British history, it will follow
that Norman Davies was not talking absolute nonsense when he identified
their foundation as the fatal moment when British history became sepa-
rated from that of ‘Europe’ and succumbed to the illusion of its own
existence.3 The histories I have identified take place in an empire formed
by the multiple sovereignties of the British crown; they do not take place in,
though they interact with, the relations between that crown and the
adjacent sovereignties of the west European peninsula. That being so,
you are welcome to call them ‘European’ if you can attach some stable
meaning to the word; I dare say there are several.
For these and some further sets of reasons, it may never be possible for the
English to see their history as other than that of an imperial people; one
3
Davies, 1999, p. 512. To be Anglican was to be neither Catholic, Lutheran, nor Calvinist; and these,
being European, pass the test of reality. For Davies’s view of Pocock, 1974, see pp. 1025–7; I of course
see it as less deconstructive in its intention, and less ineffective in its reception, than he does.
possessing extremely distinctive institutions, memories and culture of its own
which have nevertheless incessantly involved them with others who do not
share them or have put them to purposes of their shaping. This does not mean
that the English are imbued with a relentless need to dominate others; it does
mean that sovereignty and empire are hard to separate in the histories they
remember of themselves, so that with the ending of Anglo-British empire in
the association of the archipelago, they are finding it exceptionally hard to
furnish themselves with a new history, of the sort which we might call British.
A ‘British history’ of the English is much to be desired; it should be constructed
by the English themselves; but it would be unwise to hold one’s breath.
Let us explore some further reasons for this. The successive failures of
imperialism, socialism and industrialism – a triple hammer of blows hard
for any people to endure – fell upon the British and upon the English, the
Scots and the Welsh in so far as they were and might remain engaged upon
the British enterprise. Unlike the Scots, and more doubtfully the Welsh,
the English did not have open to them the recourse of nationalism as an
ideological and emotional replacement for their former history. Unlike the
flag of St Andrew, the flag of St George – and it is of interest that one sees
this displayed – indicated no alternative politics and no alternative history.
It is a cardinal problem of the new British history that the Scots, and
incomparably more the Irish, are able (and obliged) to recount it from the
outside, retelling the imperial narrative in the voices of people to whom it
was done, and who had histories of their own that interacted with it;
whereas, the more one insists that the old British history was at bottom
the history of England, the clearer it becomes that the history of England is
not to be separated from the old British history, the empire of the English
over themselves from the history of their empire over others. The only
alternative offered them to the nation-centered histories available to the
other peoples of the archipelago has so far been the fine old radical history
of a people perpetually in rebellion against the empire of their masters –
a historiography which may be traced back to William Cobbett, author of
the first anti-history of England,4 in which he decided that the root of all
evil lay in the Dissolution of the Monasteries; a conclusion not only Tory
and crypto-papist, but deeply and unalterably English, as if English history
could only be unmade from within.
I think I am saying that the ‘new British history’ of the English will have
to be the ‘old British history’ retold: the ironies of a history in which
sovereignty over themselves was inseparable from sovereignty over others,
4
Cobbett, 1824.
an empire they didn’t much want but couldn’t help exercising and, of
course, at times enjoying. The future of ‘Britishness’ depends on the
prospects of remaking their relationship with the relevant others in new
forms which they will share with them, and I am reasonably cheerful about
these prospects. A ‘new history of England’ is in fact developing at breath-
taking speed, on levels both populist and academic, but it will feed into the
perception of a ‘new British history’ in ways which the inescapably imperial
character of English history of the past will make unlike the ‘British
histories’ taking shape outside England. It will consist of re-interpretations
of the ways in which the English have interacted with their empire, and
these re-interpretations are already taking shape.
If this were to happen in the sort of future predicted and preferred by the
‘new British history’, it would occur in a world of mixed, conditional and
shared sovereignties. That history is rather far from forming part of
the rhetoric of abdication. It supposes that there are political, sometimes
national, entities possessing histories which they are able to criticize,
re-interpret and see as both affecting and affected by the histories
of others; so that the identity formed in a history, and the political will
to continue forming it, are contingent and contextualized. To recognize
one’s identity as historically contingent is the best way of maintaining it
in a universe of histories; to recognize it as contingent upon the identities
of others the best way of maintaining it in a political universe. There is a
correlation between the political community’s ability to recount its
history critically, and its ability to continue that history into the future;
I call that ability sovereignty, and I am prepared to assert that there can be
no sovereignty without a history. I see identity, history, sovereignty and
politics as under attack, on a front probably global and certainly
European, and I oppose the project of a multipolitical history to the
project of absorbing states and their histories into a global culture of
commodification enforced by its attendant bureaucracies. The present
state of archipelagic history interests me because just as the latter project
is at the height of its demands, the Kingdom and Republic find them-
selves obliged to deploy their sovereignties on an imperial scale, hoping
thereby to bring about a redistribution of sovereignty in a province which
can finally belong to neither of them. Their shared history seems likely to
be prolonged into an indefinite future; and so may that of the English and
even the British. The future history of the peoples of New Zealand will no
doubt recount itself.
CHAPTER 17
Conclusion: history, sovereignty, identity*
(I)
The title of this essay is adapted from ‘Conclusion: contingency, identity,
sovereignty’, an address delivered to the 1994 Conference of Anglo-
American Historians and subsequently published in the volume recording
the proceedings on that occasion.1 I confessed myself, in my opening
remarks, tempted to adopt the role of old Simeon in the Gospel and cry
Nunc dimittis ; after twenty years of misleadingly apparent neglect, the
subject I had proposed in Christchurch at a conference in 1973 had recently
and rapidly acquired a literature and become the subject of the conference
at which I was speaking. I said I would reject that temptation, however,
since I did not wish to vanish into the history I had proposed, and there was
still a good deal to be said about it. Ten more years have passed, and I find
myself presenting a selection from what has been said and a synthesis of
what may remain sayable.
In this volume I have laid emphasis on the antipodean perspective.
Situated as it is at the ends of voyages, it presents societies and their histories,
and even the autonomy needed to create such histories, as inventions (not
to say creations) of fairly recent date. New Zealand, where human habit-
ation may be less than a millennium old, encourages this vision in one
way; Australia, where European settlement just as recent confronts an
Aboriginal presence so ancient as to be paleolithic and recoverable only by
carbon-dating and cosmic myth, in quite another. In these lands of settle-
ment the lieux de la mémoire are either recent or almost irrecoverable; they
cannot be documented and renarrated over two to three millennia in the
ways that permit European and Mediterranean cultures to regard themselves

1
Pocock, 1995b.
301
as old and lands of settlement (including of course the American) as rather
contemptibly new. Settler cultures, where memory and history are either
new or transplantations of the old, must renarrate history in ways that pay
attention to the voyage; but the forces that threaten the lieux de la mémoire
with commodification or oblivion are the same in the new worlds and in the
old. Tourism at Luxor or Stonehenge is much the same as tourism at Ayers
Rock (renamed Uluru2) or Waitangi; it may be possible to re-educate it as an
awareness of history, but the obstacles are evident and formidable.
These essays have been much concerned with sovereignty, and with a
supposed relation between sovereignty and history, of which more must be
said in conclusion. They lead to a present, and look towards a future, in
which the continued existence of sovereignty is questionable but may
persist. In that future the neo-Britains will pursue the problems of sover-
eignty, imposed upon Canada since the beginnings of its history, but self-
imposed upon New Zealand by a recent decision to open sovereignty to
debate and treaty. These are internal problems, independent of any rela-
tionship with Great Britain, but entailed by the history of crown in
parliament as sovereignty’s principal constituent. These nations, or com-
binations of nations, will continue to exercise some kind of sovereignty and
make, write and interpret some kind of history. It is of the United
Kingdom that this statement cannot be made without incurring some
kind of challenge.
The rewriting of British history, as proposed and practised in these
essays, has been an exercise in multinationality. Without abandoning the
premiss that the ‘empire’ or government of the English nation over itself
has been enlarged into an ‘empire’ of Britain included in a state predom-
inantly English, it has proposed the histories of two other nations, of which
one – Scotland – remains within Britain while challenging and possibly
terminating its structure as a state, while the other – Ireland – has become
independent through a revolutionary process, while remaining linked with
Britain by a shared economy and the problems of a self-disputed border
province. This has been a history of states, and of the nations formed
around these states: Scotland possessing a nation-state structure antedating
the union of Britain and now seeking greater autonomy outwith3 it, Ireland
presenting a history in which state, church, nationality, and it may be
2
There are now programmes of restoring indigenous place-names, with or without the abolition of
those conferred by settlers.
3
I defer to the practice of using Scottish words, as here instead of the English ‘without’, when
endeavouring to give voice to Scottish thinking.
Conclusion: history, sovereignty, identity 303
added identity, had to be hammered disputatiously into being in the
process of resisting English/British rule. If Welsh history has received less
attention than it should have been given, it is because the absence from
earlier history of a Welsh state structure has excluded the Welsh people
from the history of states and the formation of nations around them which
was long the mainstream of Euro-American historiography, and of which
this ‘new’ British history is so manifestly a specimen. It has presented a
problem within mainstream historiography, in so far as it has left problem-
atic the question whether a durable British state has consolidated around
itself a durable ‘British’ nation whose history may be written. We live in a
time, however, when any question about the duration or identity of a state
or nation seems framed to expect a negative answer. We need to ask why
this should be.
Two sets of answers have presented themselves. In the first place, a post-
industrial global economy has produced patterns of human interaction
which disregard – the fashionable word is ‘transgress’ – existing boundaries
between states, nations and the civil societies formed around them, with
the result that many humans no longer feel themselves to be living in such
associations, participating in their politics or belonging to their transmitted
or inherited cultures. The communication of culture has become a good
deal more electronic than behavioural or social, and the patterns in which
humans live have become fluid to the point where they are images in the
mass mind, instantly transmitted and rapidly replaced. In such circum-
stances it is difficult to have a history at all, or to live in a state or society
whose history is the record of its continuity. In the second place – it may be
only a distinctive aspect of these conditions – humans now live in the midst
of an information explosion, in which they are intensely aware of the
instantaneous and fictitious character of most of the information conveyed
to them, but are immersed in it to such an extent that information and
fiction appear to constitute the only social universe available. The barriers
between information and entertainment are thus eroded, with highly
specific consequences for both politics, which become comedy, and his-
tory, which becomes fiction. There has always been much truth in both
these visions, but vision now becomes substituted for truth.
New power groupings, and their ideologies, arise. The executive class –
it looks like a class – directing the global economy demands, not only that
states and national cultures shall get out of the way of the flow of commod-
ities and information, but that the sovereignty of the state and the distinct-
iveness of the culture shall be modified, eroded, obsoleted and abolished, to
the extent necessary to the economy’s supremacy. This is bad news for the
retention and study of history, up to and beyond the very considerable
extent to which histories have so far been written in, for and by autono-
mous communities, as records of their formation, development and inter-
nal or external crises and resolutions; written narrations and interpretations
of the history they claim to have made and suffered. These histories have
always been in considerable measure selective, authoritative, rhetorical,
biassed and fictitious; but the internal contestations characteristic of polit-
ical societies will have produced discourses capable of challenging all these
attributes, and a developed political society will claim the ability to criticize
and renarrate its own history even as it invents it. At the point, however, at
which criticism becomes what we term post-modern, criticism and inven-
tion are alike swallowed up in fiction. Employing such phrases as ‘the
invention of tradition’ – traditions, of course, are at various speeds
invented – a discourse will take shape which depicts all history, past and
present, not only as invented but as instantly invented, by actors as few and
in circumstances as transitory as the narrative can be made to bear; a view of
history produced by and reinforcing the conditions of an information
explosion, in which all information is fiction recently produced and
instantly to be replaced. This discourse is the work of a new class, in
which the entrepreneurs of culture (including politics and history) as
entertainment are joined by allegedly subversive critics who, pretending
to warn us that all information is fiction, perpetuate the condition in which
it can be nothing else; they will attack with peculiar vehemence any body of
information – such as history as historians use the word – which offers to
criticize, and so conditionally to validate, itself. This is a generalization, to
which counter-generalizations may be offered, but it depicts a state of
affairs recognizable enough.
(II)
A political society may be expected to have a history – remembered,
discussed, written and interpreted, in ways that approach the meanings
of the term ‘historiography’ – which affirms its origins, the source and
continuity of its authority and legitimacy, and significant events and
processes constituting the narrative it relates to itself. The function of
this history is of course ideological, in the sense that it maintains the
society’s authority rather than subverting it, and much of its content will
be mythical in several senses of the word; it will be difficult to question it,
and one may be discouraged from, or persecuted for, doing so. On the
assumption that the intellect is always opposed to authority, therefore, one
may see a society’s publicly received history as necessarily opposed to
criticism: a structure of myth and ideology which the intellect cannot but
subvert. Yet the history of the term ístoria itself suggests that historians
have always asked questions about history, and that the word suggests both
authority and enquiry; nor need we leap to the conclusion that the history
of historiography is reducible to the collision between the two. Politics is a
contestatory activity, and the history of a political society will be a history
of contestation. It is not a long step to the further conclusion that the
history such a society constructs of itself will be both contested and
contestable; there will be contested accounts of what has occurred in
history, contested accounts of what political authority has been and should
be – it is at this point that political theory and philosophy appear – and
contested accounts of how history has been, may be and should be written,
in the ongoing context of a society’s debate with itself as to what it is, has
been and ought to be. This will not be enough to ensure that the debate will
be conducted under liberal, open or tolerant conditions; but it will ensure
that the debate is present and seen to be present. We may therefore think of
a political society as one that constructs a history of itself that is contestable
and contested.
It is not necessarily true, then, that history is always written by the
winning side; the relations between winners and losers are complicated,
and most histories of the Caesars were written by defeated senators who
wrote the history of their defeat without expecting to change it. It is nearer
the truth to say that histories are written by those with enough power and
voice to take part in the political contest, and that those excluded from that
contest to the point where they were never even losers will find it hard to
write history or have it written of them. The silence of the subaltern
presents itself. Any political society excludes two classes of persons: those
interior to the society but denied political voice within it – this definition
has very often included women – and those exterior to it, organized or not
organized into political societies of a comparable kind, who must be
accounted strangers and may be accounted enemies. These two classes
contain most of those currently termed ‘the Other’ – that strange and
flattening term so much employed as a means of undermining the author-
ity of the Self. What is immediately to be noticed is that the history a
political society constructs will be a history of its self; it will be written by
and for those engaged in its self-contestatory activity, and will be contest-
able in the sense that it is a narrative of contests already known to be going
on. It will not be news to the citizens – if we may employ that term – that
they live under a contested authority structure, or that they have
neighbours whose authority structures (and histories?) differ from their
own; knowing these things is part of what makes them citizens. They will
possess a history of contests among themselves over the distribution,
justification and character of authority, and will believe that these contests
may be continued, if they cannot be resolved, without bringing their
history to a final disruption. As Machiavelli observed, the point about
the Secession of the Plebs is that the plebs did not secede.
The political structure which enables a society to contain its self-
contestations and continue its history may be described in terms which
combine and offer to reconcile the notions of authority and liberty.
Ex imperio libertas, in the words of an ancient Roman; we are free because
we possess authority, exercised over ourselves and over others, which we use
to determine what we are and shall be – at which point arises the problem
of those included in our imperium but not in our libertas. There has been an
empire over ourselves, as well as an empire over others; our history
empowers us to continue contestation among ourselves, and may or may
not meet the challenge to it arising when those excluded from it claim a
voice in contesting it. But so far as ‘we’ are concerned – ‘we’ being the
members of any society free and sovereign enough to use the word – ‘our’
sovereignty, ‘our’ liberty, and (to introduce the word) ‘our’ identity,
depend upon ‘our’ having a history which we are able to continue. It
helps, to say the least, if ‘we’ are in a position to go on recounting it. We
know it to be contested and self-contestatory; we have installed among us a
set of beings called historians, whose task is not only to record the contests,
but to record the conditions and pre-conditions under which these have
been conducted; we have empowered them both to reach conclusions
irrespective of their immediate impact on the contestations currently
going on, and to point out that the conditions under which society exists
and conducts its contests are historically contingent and may not endure.
These are the terms on which sovereignty and history exist together, and
‘we’ exist within them. If ‘we’ should cease to have the authority to say what
we have been or to decide what we shall be – a decision which sovereigns
take in acting upon a world of infinite contingency they cannot command –
‘we’ should not exist at all. ‘You’ and ‘they’, not included in ‘us’, may
challenge ‘our’ authority over them, and recount the histories that entitle
them to this challenge; but ‘we’ must have both history and sovereignty
sufficient to reply to it.
These essays in British history have deliberately multiplied the sover-
eignties engaged in it, and consequently the histories of which it may be
seen to consist. They have emphasized the contestability of all these
sovereignties and histories: the extent to which they are contestable within
the societies they provide with histories, in their exterior relationships with
one another, and under the historical conditions whose contingency they
do not deny. At the conclusion of the narrative in which these essays are
combined, ‘British history’ and perhaps ‘history’ as so far conceived
encounter the conditions here termed ‘post-modern’ (a use of that term
which does not extend to every use to which it may be put): a set of
conditions under which human identity is so far absorbed into a global
economy and culture that the formation of political societies employing
sovereignty to determine their histories appears obsolete, impossible or
dangerous. These essays do not conclude with an apocalyptic vision in
which this has already happened or is bound to happen; but to say that it
may not happen betrays a willingness to suggest that perhaps it should not.
Certainly, to supply a history of sovereignty that emphasizes its complexity
and contestability is to lean towards suggesting that perhaps it will, or
should, continue into the future. This concluding chapter will itself con-
clude by examining some rhetoric aimed against the continuation of
sovereignty, and enquiring what these suggestions may imply.
(III)
‘But don’t the pakeha have a terrible identity problem?’ said a New Zealand
television interviewer to an Auckland colleague. No, he replied; they know
perfectly well who they are, and if they have problems deciding what they
are, they know they are the people who have these problems. In the same
way, but with reference to a time three centuries ago, an excellent work
entitled The People with No Name 4 envisages Scottish settlers in Ulster at
the point of a further emigration to North America, where – but interest-
ingly not in Ulster – they would become known as ‘the Scots-Irish’. At that
point, the author suggests, they knew they were neither Scots nor Irish, if
only because they might be considered either, but defined themselves by
that predicament; ‘the people with no name’ was not a self-description that
would have frightened them. Here’s to the selves they would never, never
be! Certainly, their subsequent conduct, on both sides of the Atlantic, does
not suggest any great lack of self-confidence, nor can their recurrent
ferocity be ascribed to an identity crisis – though it may have something
to do with the establishment of identity among others. The immediate
point of these anecdotes is that it may be more important to have a history
4
Griffin, 2001.
than to have an identity. To have a history, and know what it is, is to know
that it may be contestable; if it supplies you with an ‘identity’ that is
contestable, it may empower you to live in that contestation and know
yourself as its outcome, in which case you establish your identity by
continuing to contest it and to allow others to contest it with you. If you
end by conceding that your identity will always be contingent and imper-
fectly resolved, that may be a sign of adulthood and the ability to live in
history; the eye will be more or less satisfied with seeing, and may find that
condition stimulating. It is an implied pre-requisite, however, that your
history is one in which you have not quite lost a voice in determining your
identity. The condition called post-colonial is the condition of having
lacked any power to contest an identity imposed upon you, which is why
it is never quite the condition of former colonists, such as the Scots-Irish
and the pakeha.
It is implicit in the first anecdote, however, that you should initially
mistrust those who ask, or offer to tell you, about your identity, because the
term has been annexed by those who use it with an intention of weakening
it; from which it may follow that you should think carefully before
embarking on a search for it, since the search may have been framed to
ensure its failure. Identities are human creations, and the creation takes
place in history; but much of the contemporary literature on this subject
makes use of a post-modern idiom, employing such terms as ‘invention’,
‘making’ and so on to present the process as fragile, instantaneous and
dependent on an immediate context, so that the ‘making’ of an ‘identity’ is
often designed to lead as quickly as possible to its unmaking. The possi-
bility that identities may come into being over time, may be ‘invented’ and
assented to by humans involved in complex processes, or that they may be
reinforced by their survival in changing circumstances, is not to be counted
on but is too easily left out of account. So is the possibility of a history of
changing and contested identity, of which we may see ourselves as the self-
conscious products; our ‘identities’ as roles we choose to adopt, knowing
that they have been shaped for us over time and that history has filled them
with ambivalences we knowingly accept as we take them on. It is more
important to have a history, and to know what it is, than to ransack it in
search of a moment at which we acquired an identity we may not have any
longer.5
It is of interest that in the British and even the English cases, the self-
destructive search for identity has become associated with the concept of
5
I think this is a possible criticism of Kumar, 2003.
empire. Britishness, we are told, comes into being and goes out of it with
the success – so described as to point direct to subsequent failure – of
English empire in the Atlantic archipelago and British beyond. These
essays have endeavoured to supply a more complex narrative, in which
empire within the archipelago is distinguished from, and related to, empire
in the global oceans, and the empire of the English over others from the
empire – the sovereignty – of the English over themselves. We are told,
however, that because the English lack any identity apart from their empire
over others, and have generated no nationalism separable from that empire,
their post-imperial identity crisis is more severe than that of those in the
post-colonial condition, and peculiarly likely to lead to their being melted
down into Europe; though at the same time it is blamed for their resistance
to that euthanasia. These essays have asked whether empire, meaning the
exercise of sovereignty within the archipelago, has in fact disappeared with
the emergence of the Irish republic as a second sovereign state. As to
Britishness, they might also have asked whether the Unions have or have
not set up a shared history in which the nations of the larger island will find
it convenient or necessary to continue living.
Logically at least, the thesis that the English can imagine themselves only
when they are ruling others is akin to the doctrine that the Self can be
defined only in relation to an Other, either dominating or dominated as in
the relation of master and slave. There is substance to this; it has been
convincingly argued that the eighteenth-century British were invented in
antagonism to the French, and even that the French of that era achieved
national identity only by hating the English.6 To add examples from the
field of the present volume, the Declaration of Independence invents a
‘British people’ – who had yet to invent themselves – so that an ‘American
people’ may be invented by separating themselves from the former.
‘Europe’ certainly defines the United States as its Other, but has not
attempted the invention of a European ‘people’; it would be too political
and democratic to do so. Australian nationalism a century ago was built
upon pretending to hate the English7 and really hating the Chinese; and
there are New Zealand literary intellectuals so far unable to imagine
themselves in any way but as the result of ‘decolonization’ that each age
cohort in turn dates their emancipation from English cultural models at a
6
For the French as necessary Other to the British, see Colley, 1992; for the English as necessary Other
to the French, Bell, 2001; a fearful symmetry. For a different approach to the formation of identity in
the eighteenth century, see Kidd, 1999.
7
Not all Australians were Irish.
time more recent than did their predecessors, thus perpetuating what they
pretend to escape. The phenomena of alterity are very real, but there is the
danger that they may be over-simplified. The world is full of Others; they
are a heterogeneous lot, and our relationships with them are diverse (where
they exist at all). We do not have to select any one of them – though it is
true that we often do – for the paranoid and sadomasochist relation
between inventions that the Other is used to designate; and the contention
that the Self cannot exist without positing an Other of this kind is clearly
intended to deconstruct the Self, which must be as false and fictitious as the
Other it has defined itself by inventing. To warn us is one thing; to convict
us, in advance of the act, is another.
There is reason to suspect that the ideological offensive against political
associations capable of making, remembering, interpreting and question-
ing their own histories has reached the point where the individual as well as
the collective self is targeted for demolition, and the concept of ‘identity’ is
being used to deconstruct itself. There are forces in our world that do not
wish us to say ‘we’ or act on that basis – since to do so might impede their
selling us a new ‘identity’ tomorrow – and since saying ‘we’ and saying ‘I’
are intimately linked, they discourage the Self from believing it can manage
its own experience, just as they discourage the society from believing it can
manage its own history. These forces have succeeded in creating a world in
which it is indeed difficult to act or reflect in the ways discouraged by their
ideology, and we may have to experiment with new kinds of association
and new kinds of history if we are to retain the autonomy which politics
and history stimulate by challenging. Meanwhile, we had better mobilize
all the resources we have and can retain, for seeing, remembering, criticizing
and continuing the histories we may have had. These essays have endea-
voured a strategy of conservation – to use a good word where ‘conserva-
tism’ is accounted a bad – for the protection of history as an endangered
environment; but they suppose its ecology to be as full of active forces, both
creative and destructive, as it ever was. History in danger may be danger-
ously capable of continuing itself.
Bibliographies
A. PUBLICATIONS BY THE PRESENT AUTHOR, 1974–2004,

IN FIELDS CONSTITUTING BRITISH HISTORY
Note: Footnote references have been by author and date. Works marked (B) in
footnotes will be found in Bibliography B.
1974: ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’, New Zealand Journal of History, 8, 1,
pp. 3–21 (Chapter 2 in present volume).
1975: Reprinted, with comments and a reply, Journal of Modern History, 47, 4,
pp. 601–24.
1980: ‘Hume and the American Revolution: dying thoughts of a North Briton’, in
David Fate Norton, Nicholas Capaldi and W. L. Robison (eds.), McGill
Hume Studies (San Diego: Austin Hills Press), pp. 325–43.
1982: ‘The limits and division of British history: in search of the unknown subject’,
American Historical Review, 87, 2, pp. 311–36.
1983a: ‘Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: a study in the varieties of eight-
eenth-century conservatism’, in Marie Peters and others (eds.), Essays Presented
to Professor N. C. Phillips (Christchurch: University of Canterbury), pp. 5–47.
1983b: ‘Outgrowing the hucksters: review of Keith Sinclair, A History of the
University of Auckland ’, New Zealand Journal of History, 17, 2, pp. 185–91.
1985: Virtue, Commerce and History: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in
the eighteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (Items 1980
and 1983a reprinted.)
1987: ‘States, republics and empires: the American Founding in early-modern
perspective’, Social Science Quarterly, 67, 4, pp. 703–23.
1988a: Reprinted in Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (eds.), Conceptual Change
and the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas), pp. 55–77.
1988b: ‘The fourth English Civil War: dissolution, desertion and alternative histories
in the Glorious Revolution’, Government and Society, 23, 2, pp. 151–66.
1988c: The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom (Colorado College Studies
25, Colorado Springs).
1991a: ‘The significance of 1688: some reflections on Whig history’, in Robert
Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688: the Andrew Browning Lectures, 1988
(Oxford: the Clarendon Press), pp. 271–92. (Chapter 8 in present volume.)
311
312 Bibliographies
1991b: ‘Deconstructing Europe’, London Review of Books, 13, 19 December,
pp. 6–10. (Chapter 15 in present volume.)
1991c: ‘Sicilian origins of Homer’s Odyssey: Samuel Butler and Lewis Greville
Pocock: the discovery of islands’ (The Press, Christchurch, 20 July 1991).
1992a: ‘Die Dekonstruction Europas’, Lettre Internationale, 16, pp. 15–21.
1992b: ‘Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology’, New Zealand Journal
of History, 26, 1, pp. 28–53. (Chapter 12 in present volume.)
1992c: Law, Sovereignty and History in a Divided Culture: the case of New Zealand
and the Treaty of Waitangi (University of Lancaster; the Iredell Memorial
Lecture). (Chapter 13 in present volume.)
1992d: ‘History and sovereignty: the historiographic response to Europeanisation
in two British cultures’, Journal of British Studies, 31, 4, pp. 358–89.
1993a: ‘La déconstruction de l’Europe’, Lettre Internationale, 37, pp. 11–16.
1993b: ‘Notes of an Occidental Tourist I, II’, Common Knowledge, 2, 2, pp. 1–5, 8–18.
1993c: ‘Vous autres européens – or inventing Europe’, Filozofski Vestnik/Acta
Philosophica, 14, 2 (Ljubljana: Slovenska Akademija Znanosti in
Umetnosti), pp. 141–58.
1993d: ‘Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790. Part I: the
imperial crisis. Part II: Empire, revolution and an end of early modernity’, in
Pocock, 1993, pp. 246–320[B].
1994a: ‘Deconstructing Europe’, reprinted in History of European Ideas, 18, 3,
pp. 329–46.
1994b: ‘Two kingdoms and three histories? Political thought in British contexts’,
in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish political thought and the
union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 293–312. (Chapter 4
in present volume.)
1995a: ‘Empire, state and confederation: the War of American Independence as a
crisis in multiple monarchy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire:
political thought and the union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 318–48. (Chapter 9 in present volume.)
1995b: ‘Conclusion: contingency, identity, sovereignty’, in Alexander Grant and Keith
J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British history (London:
Routledge), pp. 292–302. (Title source for Chapter 17 in present volume.)
1996a: ‘Standing army and public credit: the institutions of Leviathan’, in Dale
Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (eds.), The World of William and Mary:
Anglo-Dutch perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press), pp. 87–103.
1996b: ‘The Atlantic Archipelago and the War of the Three Kingdoms’, in
Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem,
c. 1534–1707: state formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (London: Macmillan),
pp. 172–91. (Chapter 5 in present volume.)
1996c: La Ricostruzione di un Impero: sovranità britannica e federalismo americano.
(Trans. Sergio Luzzatto. Macerata: Biblioteca del Laboratorio di Storia
Costituzionale Antoine Barnave; Manduria, Bari, Roma: Piero Lacaita
Editore.)
Bibliographies 313
1996d: ‘The making of new kinds of history’, New Zealand Books, 6, 4, 25, pp. 15–17.
1997a: ‘What do we mean by Europe?’, Wilson Quarterly, winter 1997, pp. 12–29.
1997b: ‘Removal from the wings’, London Review of Books, 19, 6, pp. 12–13.
1997c: ‘Deconstructing Europe’, reprinted in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson
(eds.), The Question of Europe (London: Verso), pp. 297–317.
1997d: ‘The historian as political actor in polity, society and academy’, Journal of
Pacific Studies, 20, pp. 89–112.
1997e: ‘The making of new kinds of history’, reprinted in Lauris Edmond, Harry
Ricketts and Bill Sewell (eds.), Under Review: a selection from New Zealand
Books, 1991–97 (Lincoln, NZ: Lincoln University Press), pp. 158–63.
1998a: ‘The politics of history: the subaltern and the subversive’, Journal of Political
Philosophy, 6, 3, 219–34.
1998b: ‘Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture: the case of New Zealand
and the Treaty of Waitangi’, reprinted in McGill Law Journal, 43, 3,
pp. 481–506.
1999a: ‘The Four Seas and the Four Oceans’, in Cool Britannia? What Britishness
means to me (Lurgan: Ulster Society Publications), pp. 158–63.
1999b: ‘Nature and history, self and other: European perceptions of world history
in the age of encounter’, in Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb and Bridget Orr
(eds.), Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press), pp. 25–44.
1999c: ‘The New British History in Atlantic perspective: an Antipodean commen-
tary’, American Historical Review, 104, 2, pp. 490–500.
1999d: ‘British history: the pursuit of the expanding subject’, in Wilfred Prest
(ed.), British Studies into the 21 st Century: perspectives and practices
(Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing), pp. 58–72.
1999e: ‘Thomas May and the narrative of civil war’, in Derek Hirst and Richard
Strier (eds.), Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 112–44.
2000a: ‘The Third Kingdom in its history: an afterword’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.),
Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 271–80. (Chapter 6 in present volume.)
2000b: ‘Protestant Ireland: the view from a distance’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.),
Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: the Four Courts Press),
pp. 221–30.
2000c: ‘Gaberlunzie’s Return’, New Left Review, 5, pp. 41–52.
2000d: ‘The Union in British history’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
6th Series, 10, pp. 181–96. (Chapter 10 in the present volume.)
2000e: ‘Waitangi as mystery of state: consequences of the ascription of federative
capacity to the Maori’, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders
(eds.), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 25–35.
2001a: ‘Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology’, reprinted in Judith
Binney (ed.), The Shaping of History: essays from the New Zealand Journal of
History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books), pp. 38–61.
314 Bibliographies
2001b: ‘The treaty between histories’, in Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (eds.),
Histories, Power and Loss: uses of the past – a New Zealand commentary
(Wellington: Bridget Williams Books), pp. 75–96.
2002a: ‘The uniqueness of Aotearoa’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, 145, 4, pp. 482–87.
2002b: ‘Some Europes in their history’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of
Europe: from antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 55–71.
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Index
Aborigines as secession from British history 293

as affected by colonization 7 ancien régime see Enlightenment
colonial relations with 189 Anglicanism 298 n. 3
importance for Australian viewpoints on Anglo-Indian empire 162
history 301 Anglo-Irish historiography, and the distinction
see also dreamtime between kingdoms and marches 79–80
Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) 65, 70, 72 Anne (queen of Great Britain)
and the concept of empire 136, 137, 138, 164, coronation oath and the 1707 Union 177
167, 298 relationship with the English and Scottish
and sovereignty 140 churches 110
Act of Succession (1701) 140 anthropology
Act of Tolerance (1689) 140 Enlightenment views 199–213
The Administration of the Colonies (Pownall) 154 pakeha discourse 215–18, 223
‘age of the monstrous regiment’ 51 anti-popery, and political radicalism 112
Age of the Three Kingdoms 74–6, 80–1, 164 Antipodes
monarchy 137–8 views of the concept of empire 187–9
see also Three Kingdoms 137–8 views of history 301
Age of Union 81 Antrim, Marquis of 91–3
agriculture, as the key to civilization 210–12 Aotearoa see New Zealand
American colonies Arawata Bill (William O’Leary) 224
and British history 40, 56, 136, 296 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 7th Earl of, role
and the concept of empire in connection with in the War of the Three Kingdoms 88
Britishness 182 aristocracy
and the crisis of empire 148–62 political role, late eighteenth century 162
effects of the 1688 Revolution 131–2 Whig views 132
growth creates the problem of ‘empire’ 111 Aristotle, on primeval individualism 205
interrelationships 160 the Ascendancy 109
relationship with the concept of the English Atlantic archipelago 29, 77–9, 94, 293
empire 188 sense of empire reinforced by the Irish
role in the Age of the Three Kingdoms 74 Troubles 263
seen as English, effects on perceptions of the see also British Isles
colonization of Ulster 167 atua 217
settler nationalism 171–3 Auckland (New Zealand) 12
see also colonies Australia
American history colonial status 189
relationship with British history 77 colonization 7
and compared with Irish history 296 lack of treaties with Aboriginal peoples 233
American people, identity 309 and the Second World War 17–18, 193–4
American Revolution 89, 153 viewpoints on history 301
effects on the concept of British history 29 see also colonies; Commonwealth; Dominions
historical logic 155 Australians, creation of identity 309
329
330 Index
Austro-Hungarian empire, culture, in relation to British history
ethnic groups 280 as affected by the concept of Europe 22,
authority, and liberty, within political 47–51
structures 306 as affected by nationalism 302–4, 306–7
autochthony, Gibbon’s repudiation 200–1 author’s support for the concept 26–43
and the colonization of America 296
Bacon, Francis concept ix–xi, 198
concept of British history on the 1603 Union 27 as affected by British membership of the
on union between Scottish and English legal European Union 259–61
systems 70 and the concept of the age of the Three
Baillie, Robert 34 Kingdoms 74–6
Banks, Joseph, views of cannibalism 209 and the concept of empire 262–4
barbarism 286 and the creation of national states 268
baronage, role within Scottish political discourse distinction from English history 273–4
61, 64, 65 effects on New Zealand historiography 13–16
Bartlett, Robert, on the concept of Europe 90 evolution through English expansion into
Basho, Matsuo 54 neighbouring countries 47, 50
Beaglehole, John C. 15, 20, 24, implication in the European struggle against
43, 209 universal monarchy (1793–1815) 113
Beckett, J. C. 28, 80 Ireland’s role within 164, 165–6, 169–70
Belich, James 16 n. 34, Jacobean union and the English problem 52–4
n. 35, 194 political thought 56–7,
belief systems 134–6
and the Enlightenment 128 post-Second World War 17–18
historians’ interest in original validity in relation to the new British history 292–3
201 in relation to the War of the Tree Kingdoms 84
bellum civile, and bellum sociale 89, Scotland’s role as a result of the union of the
90–2, 93 crowns 62–5
Bentham, Jeremy 70 Scottish history contained by 59
biblical history, contribution to the history of seen as within the Atlantic archipelago 77–8
human origins in the Enlightenment 205, sense of as affected by the concept of Europe 26
202–3, 208 sovereignties within 306–7
Bindoff, S. T., on the absorption of Northumbria as understood within the Dominions 188–96
into England 32 British Isles 77
Blackwood, Adam (opponent of Buchanan), on distrust of the concept 94
emperorship 72 see also Atlantic archipelago
Bland, Richard, on the legal standing of colonies The British Isles: a history of four nations
151–2 (Kearney) 77
Boece, Hector, political discourse about British settlements, political resurgence of
Scotland 58 indigenous peoples 228–33
Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, and patriarchy 208 Britishness 185–6
bourgeoisie 211 concept in the Second Age of Union
Brasch, Charles 10, 14 (1801–1921) 183–4
Britain Buchanan, George ( James VI’s tutor), political
English possibly disregard the concept 26 discourse about Scotland 58, 61, 62,
membership of the European Union and its 65, 75
effects on New Zealand ix, 20–1, 269–71, Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of 65
275, 288, 290–1 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 201, 208
nature as an island 55 Burke, Edmund 121
term denied meaning by A. J. P. Taylor 24–6 on the legal status of the colonies 150
British culture, dependence of the Dominions on the questioning of George III’s dynastic
upon 191–2 legitimacy 172
British empire, and the search for identity sees the 1688 Revolution as civil war 117, 118
308–9 Burnet, Gilbert, reported conversation with
British historiography, in relation to Europe 288 William III (5 November 1688) 114
Index 331
Butler, Samuel 224 exploitation of ecclesiastical fragmentation
impressions of New Zealand 10 115–16
Chester, legal status in relation to the crown 154
Camden, William 26 Christchurch (New Zealand) 12
Canada church ascendancy, effects on relations with
Anglo-Canadian discourse 162 ‘Dissenters’ in Ireland 174
as a collection of sovereignties 198 Church of England
colonial status 188–9 1688 Revolution’s impact 127, 128
and the problems of sovereignty 302 insecurity 145 n. 27
role in the Second World War 193 James VI and I’s relationship with 52, 53
treaties with indigenous peoples 233 monarchical control over in England as a
see also Commonwealth; Dominions symbol of empire 50
Canadian colonies monarchy’s headship restored in the 1688
relationship to British history 40–1 Revolution 168
see also colonies and the problem of Protestant Succession
Canmore, Malcolm (Malcolm III, king of under the 1688 Revolution 141
Scotland?) 63 ruling structure’s instabilities fuel fear of civil
cannibalism, Enlightenment views 209 war in the 1688 Revolution 115
Canterbury poets 224 churches
Cape Town king’s relationship with under the 1603
and the protein bridge 16 Union 71
see also South Africa relationship with the Enlightenment concept
capitalism, association with possessive within the Three Kingdoms 110
individualism 204 role in England and Scotland, as affected by
Caribbean colonies the 1707 Union 168–71
and British history 56 status in the American colonies 111, 149
see also colonies churchmen, doubts of the legitimacy of the
Carte, Thomas monarchy after the 1688 Revolution 121
on the mnemonic quality of Welsh bardic civil society, and the state 71
poetry 211 civil wars
on vagrancy 212 avoidance by means of standing armies and
Catherine of France (widow of Henry V), public credit 123–6
marriage to Owen Tudor 50 n. 10 avoidance in Scotland and Ireland during the
Catholicism, state relations within Ireland as 1688 Revolution 129–31
affected by Enlightenment 175 concept 86–8
Catholics expectations of in the 1688 Revolution
nationalism, and the Irish secession from the 115–21
British empire 183 potential continues after 1688 Revolution 121–3
role in Ireland in relation to James VI and I role within the Wars of the Three Kingdoms
166 138–9
Caxton poets and historiography of New Zealand substitution by party politics 111
10–12 civilization
Caxton Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) 10 made possible by agriculture 211–12
The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe and the self 213
(Mathews) 27 Tolstaya’s understanding 284–6,
Channel Islands 287–8
legal status in relation to the crown 154 clan system, role within Scottish political
as part of British history 4 discourse 61
Charles I 117 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl 86
concept of kingship 65 Clark, J. C. D.
religious role of the Three Kingdoms 98 ancien régime thesis 145 n. 27
role within the English Civil War 85 on the American Revolution as a war of
and the War of the Three Kingdoms 28–9, religion 81
83, 86 clergy, episcopal clergy dispossessed in Scotland
Charles II 117 108
332 Index
Cobbett, William, on the Dissolution of the Cromwellian union (1651–60), effects of Scotland
Monasteries 299 and Ireland 167
Coke, Sir Edward 70, 71 crown
Colley, Linda 75 authority, after the 1688 Revolution 139
colonial assemblies 151, 154 the crown in parliament, and sovereignty 302
colonialism 6–7, 9, 190 English Crown assumes monarchical role over
in relation to empire 181–2 Ireland 50
in South Africa 189 loyalty to in Ireland rather than to parliament
colonies as part of settler nationalism 172
and British history 56 relationship to the churches in the American
foundation by neo-Britains 187–91 colonies as a problem of ‘empire’ 111
legal status 149–62 relationships with parliament, within
see also American colonies; Australia; Commonwealth history 190
Canadian colonies; Caribbean sovereignty
colonies; Dominions; New Zealand; in the Treaty of Waitangi 234, 236–7,
South Africa 239–41, 243–4
colonization, historical perceptions of under the Hanoverian régime with regard to
colonizers 7–9 the colonies 150–2, 154–60
commerce, made possible by agriculture 211 status as the British crown after the 1603
common law 151 Union 96
practice in Scotland 69 unity with parliament not to be broken by
Commonwealth ideas of confederation 172
effects of British membership of the European Crowns, Union (1603)
Union 260 English and Scottish views 136
English possible disregard for 26 and the union of Great Britain 66–74
relationship with British history 41–2 Cumberland, William, Duke of, reduction of
see also Australia; Canada; New Zealand marches to obedience 80
Commonwealth history 190–1 Curnow, Allen 224 n. 38
relationship with the concept of nationality and the historiography of New Zealand 10,
held by neo-Britains 191–6 11–12, 16
confederation, application to British history 134 writing as ‘Whim Wham’ 195–6
Conference of Anglo-American Historians Curtin, John (Australian prime minister) 17, 18, 193
(1994) 301 custom, and identity 222
Conference of First Nations 233 Cyclopes 205, 208–9
Constantine the Great (Roman emperor) 72
cult, in the court of James VI and I 51 Dante Alighieri 202
Cook Captain James, views of cannibalism 209 Davies, Sir John (James I’s Attorney General for
Cookson, J. E. 13 Ireland)
Cornwall, role within the English Civil War 85 apologia for conquest 80
Cornwallis, Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquis 177 on Hibernicization of Anglo-Norman settlers
corporations 216 27, 33
court records 226 Davies, Norman, on the separation of Britain
Covenanters, role in the War of the Three from Europe 298
Kingdoms 99 de Gaulle, Charles (French president), veto on
Cowan, Edward 59 Britain’s application to join the European
Craig, Sir Thomas (Scottish jurist) Union 20
on the place of the law under the 1603 Union de Guignes, Joseph, on human origins 202
68, 70 De laudibus legum Angliae (Fortescue) 70
political discourse about Scotland 58, 74 Declaration of Independence 111, 158–60, 161,
on the Scottish and English legal systems 53 173, 309
on Scottish law’s historical distinctiveness 58 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) 199
Cromwell, Oliver decolonization, neo-Britains’ experiences 194–5
and the concept of empire 136 Defoe, Daniel
reduction of marches to obedience 80, 92, 93 on the 1707 Union as fundamental law 145
treatment of Scottish medieval records 34 on standing armies and public credit 124, 126
Index 333
democratic deficit, and the renunciation of as multiple monarchy, within Commonwealth
sovereignty within Europe 265, 267 history 190
Devine, T. M. 297 politics
Diderot, Denis 218 in the American colonies 111–12
‘Diplomatic Revolution’ 147 in Ireland during the eighteenth century 112
Discoverie of the True Causes . . . (Davies) 27–8 and the search for identity 308–9
Dissent 115 and state 164–5, 167, 169–70
‘dissolutions of government’ 138, 139, 146, 159 status assumed under the Tudors 50
‘Dominion’ (Fairburn) 192 n. 10 England
Dominions concept of civil war within the First War of the
relationship to the concept of British history Three Kingdoms 138–40
188–94 and the concept of empire 136–8
see also Australia; Canada; colonies; New conquest of its neighbours 47
Zealand during ‘the long eighteenth century’ 168–9
Douglas, Archibald, Earl of (Shakespeare, effects of the Norman Conquest 47
1 Henry IV ) 32 government, effects of the 1688 Revolution
dreamtime 142
as basis for claims at law 247–52 historiography, in relation to Ireland 36–7
separation from history 218–19, 222–4 influence on Scottish political discourse 60
see also Aborigines James VI and I’s relationship with
Durham, legal status in relation to the crown 154 the church 52, 53
Dutch history, relevance to the 1688 legal system, impossibility of any
Revolution 107 amalgamation with the Scottish legal
system under James VI and I 53
Earthsea 224 nature of the monarchy in relation to both
Edward I (king of England), attempts to conquer James VI and I and Charles I 64–6
both Wales and Scotland 47 problem of English identity within British
Ellesmere, and Viscount Brackley, Sir Thomas history 52–4
Egerton, Baron 70 role in the Age of the Three Kingdoms
Emancipation, difficulties with in Anglo-Irish 74–5, 80
relations 177 role in British history with the evolution of the
emigration, in relation to the concept of empire Kingdom of Great Britain 168
187–9 role in the War of the Three Kingdoms 86,
emperorship, James VI and I’s concept 72 86–8, 91, 93
empire role within British history 30–1, 33–4, 37–40
ambivalences 35 role within the new British history 94, 96,
application to British history 134, 136, 137 297–300
concept status as a sovereign kingdom 164–5
as affected by Irish secession from the the union of England and Scotland (1603) 71
British empire 183–5 views of the 1707 Union 143
as affected by religious establishment 173 as incorporation rather than confederation
as affected by Union with Ireland 176–8 145–6
antipodean views 187–98 as one of annexation 136
as applied to the 1707 Union 145–6 the English
and the European Community 280–2 failure to distinguish between Englishness and
and multiple monarchy 148–62 Britishness 185
within British history 262–4 nationhood threatened by the loss of empire
within the new British history 291–2, 298 260–3
within the Second Age of Union 186–7 English Civil War (1642–6) 54
concept as affected by settler nationalism 172 effects on constitutional history 167
concept as understood in relation to Irish involvement 28
imperialism and colonialism 181–2 nature 84–6
Europe’s relation to nation-states 287 role in the War of the Three Kingdoms 82,
and the growth of the American colonies 111 99–100
loss by England as a threat to nationhood 260–3 see also War of the Three Kingdoms
334 Index
English historiography, political discourse European Union
134, 135 British membership, and its effects on New
English history, as the dominant conception Zealand ix, 20–1, 269–72, 275, 288, 290–1
within British history 77 formation and effects on national sovereignty
the English problem 47 275
Enlightenment 110, 126–7, 132 membership, effects on United Kingdom
anthropological views 199, 214–18 historiography 259–61, 282
and belief systems 128 Euroscepticism, and the concept of Europe 264–5
relations with religion within Irish nationalism executive classes, disregard of nationalism 303
174–6 expropriation 214–15
role in British history 169
Escorial, role in monarchical government 73 Fairburn, A. R. D. 192 n. 10
Essai sur les Mœurs (Voltaire) 201, 202–3, 282 federative power 232
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) Fergus the Conqueror 63, 68
127–8 Ferguson, Adam 210
Established Church see Anglican Church Filmer, Sir Robert, anthropology and
established clergy, Whig views 132 patriarchy 208
ethnic groups, cultures, in relation to national First British Empire 181, 182
communities 279–80 see also British empire
Europe First War of the Three Kingdoms see War of the
and the Atlantic archipelago 78–9 Three Kingdoms
Britain’s role in the struggle against universal Fletcher, Andrew 101
monarchy (1793–1815) 113 political theory on the 1707 Union 144, 145
concept 90, 264–7 on standing armies and public credit 124, 126
effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union Fluellen, Captain (Shakespeare, Henry V) 50 n. 10
276–8 Folger Institute Center for the History of British
effects upon the sense of British history 26 Political Thought 51, 56, 94,
as seen within the European Union 276 100, 134 n. 1
and the concept of empire, in relation to Fortescue, Sir John 53
nation-states 287 on custom and identity 222
historiography, in relation to that of its on monarchy 67, 70
constituent parts 288 Four Courts explosion (1922) 34
influence France
on the 1688 Revolution 139–43 intervention in post-Restoration politics 140
on the concept of nationalism 295 national identity achieved in opposition to the
on the idea of British history x, 22, English 309
134–6 and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior 270
upon the history of Britain as this affects the Frederick V (Elector Palatine and King of
concept of empire 186–7, 196–7 Bohemia – the Winter King; James VI and
involvement in the 1688 Revolution 168 I’s son-in-law) 66, 72
lack of identity 309 Fukuyama, Francis, on history and
relationship with Britain and its effects on market forces 286
British history 47, 47–51
relationship with Great Britain after the 1707 Gaeldom, culture 59–60
Union 109–11 Gallicanism, in James VI and I’s kingship of
relationship with the Three Kingdoms 107–8 Ireland 52
and the Second War of the Three Kingdoms Gay, Peter 200
(1688–91) 93 Geoffrey of Monmouth 26
European Community, and the concept of George III 121
empire 280–2 dynastic legitimacy questioned 172
European historiography and national indictment by the American colonists 159, 160
sovereignties 273–8 legal status in relation to the colonies 156
‘European’ history 260–1 and monarchical political theory 157
European settlements, political resurgence of monarchical role 67
indigenous peoples 228–33, 253 opposition to Union with Ireland 177
Index 335
party politics no longer a form of civil war Haida Gwaai (sculpture; Bill Reid) 197–8
111–12 Halfway Round the Harbour (Sinclair) 14
power 149 Hamilton, Alexander 161
views about 147, 148 Hanoverian régime, legitimacy 147–8, 172
Gibbon, Edward 156, 286 Hanoverians, sovereignty of the crown with
on bardic poetry 213 regard to colonies 150–2, 153–62
dismisses autochthony 199–200 hapu 226 n. 1, 234, 238, 240
and Goguet 209–12 Harrington, James, on the English Civil War 86
on the re-organization of the English militia Hawaiki 222
147 Hedley, Thomas (seventeenth-century MP), on
on savagery 208, 212 the common law and Parliament’s
on standing armies 124 integrity 53
use of ‘extensive’ monarchy 143 n. 21 Henry IV, conspiracies against as viewed by
Ginkel, Godert de, 1st Earl of Athlone, reduction Shakespeare 32
of marches to obedience 80 Henry V (Shakespeare) 50 n. 10
Glendower, Owen (Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV) Henry VIII, role in British history 50, 51
involvement in conspiracy against Henry, Robert 26
Henry IV 32 Herodotus 73
Glenelg, Charles Grant, Lord (British Colonial Highland charge 92–3
Secretary) 234, 235, 236 Highland Clearances 183
on the recognition of rangatiratanga 221–2 Highlands and Islands, role within British history
understanding of Aboriginal inhabitants as 31, 32
savages 223 Hill, Jacqueline 134 n. 1
globalization Histoire des Huns, Turcs et Mogols
effects on British history 47 (de Guignes) 202
implied by the concept of Europe Historia Majoris Britanniae (Major) 97
196 historians, problems in the writing of history 35–6
as threat to nationalism 303–4 historical imagination 272
Glover, Denis 10, 224 nn. 40, 41 historiography
godwits 14 and law 226–8, 242, 251
The Godwits Fly (Hyde) 14 relations with politics 304–6
Gog 210 and sovereignty 279–80
Goguet, Antoine-Yves, anthropology 209, within Scotland 129
210–11, 212 history 283–6
Goodall, Jane 209 as affected by the imagination 10–12
Gordon riots 112, 125 Antipodean viewpoints 301
Gould, Eliga H. 147 concepts 87, 198
on re-organization of empire 80 and their bearing on British history 30
Gowrie conspiracy 66 development 269
Great Britain and dreamtime 218–19, 224–4,
1603 Union 65–74 248–9, 251
fundamental concepts not achieved 146–8 and identity 307–10
Kingdom, exercise of empire 168 as perceived by colonizers 6–8
not co-terminous with United Kingdom, in relation to property 254–5
A. J. P. Taylor’s views 24 in relation to sovereignty 254–5, 259–64, 266,
relationship with Europe after the 1707 Union 268, 300, 302, 306
109–11 role in the dialogue between pakeha and
see also United Kingdom tangata whenua 219–20, 230
great moa (articulated skeleton) 224 Tolstaya’s understanding 284–6, 287–8
Greco-Roman culture, understanding of History of Scotland (Robertson) 129
citizenship 206 Hobbes, Thomas 62, 98–9, 117,
Griffin, Patrick 307 119, 126
Griffiths, Arthur 40, 41 and state of nature 213
Grotius, Hugo 152, 155, 159 on war 122
Gunpowder plot 66 and wars of religion 90
336 Index
Hobson, Captain (crown representative at the historiography, and the impact of English
signing of the Treaty of Waitangi) 233 history 36–8
human origins involvement in the War of the Three
Enlightenment understanding 202–13 Kingdoms 28–9
Gibbon’s interests in 200–2 James VI and I’s kingship 51
tangata whenua as metaphor for 202, 203, 204, legal status in relation to the crown 154
207–8, 210, 212 nature as an island 55
Hume, David 37, 120, 124 parliament, evolution within the Free State 184
on the English Civil War 86 as part of the British empire 181
historiography 132 political claims for relations with the English
and the history of England 128–9 government, late eighteenth century
political theory on the 1707 Union 144 162–3
on the re-organization of the English militia 148 and the politics of empire during the
use of ‘enormous’ monarchy 143 n. 21 eighteenth century 112
Hume of Godscroft, David, political discourse relationship with Anglo-Norman England 47
about Scotland 58 relationship with Great Britain after the 1707
Hyde, Robin 14 Union 109–11
role
identity in the Age of the Three Kingdoms 74, 75, 80
apart from the concept of Britishness 186 in British history 31–2, 37–40
and custom 222 in the new British history 94, 95, 97–103
and history 307–10 in the War of the Three Kingdoms 54, 86,
imagination, effects upon the sense of history 88, 88–90, 90–3
10–12 Scottish origins within 63
imperialism 6 secession from the British empire 182–5
and Britishness 186 secession from the concept of British history
in relation to empire 181–2 x–xi
Inchiquin, Murrough O’Brien, Earl of 91, 92 seen as engendering civil war in England 167
India settler nationalism 171–2
and the concept of empire 181, 182 tenancy law reform, early seventeenth century
Scottish influence over the British empire in 27–8
India 186 Union with, effects upon the concept of
indigenous discourse (te reo Maori) 232 empire 176–8
indigenous peoples views of the 1707 Union 143
colonial relations with 188, 189 wars of religion and nationalism 174–6
political resurgence in former British and William III’s policies 122
European settlements 228–33, 253 within British history 164, 164–7, 169–70
individualism see also Northern Ireland
possessive individualism as definition of Irish Confederates, role in the Wars of the Three
humanness 203–6 Kingdoms 99, 101
within pakeha discourse 215 Irish diaspora, effects on British history 41
individuals, identity as contingent 246 Irish Famine, and the diaspora 183
Indo-Germanic agnatic communities, concept 217 Irish history
industrialism, and Britishness 185–6 compared with American history 296
information explosion 196 in relation to British history 77–8, 293
as threat to nationalism 303–4 Irish nationalism
inherent rights 233 in relation to the new British history 296, 299
Ireland role in British history 302–3
civil war avoided during the 1688 Revolution Irish Republic
129–31 and the concept of empire within the Atlantic
conquest during the 1688 Revolution archipelago 309
109 sovereignty, and the sense of empire 263–4
effects of the 1688 Revolution 141 Irish Troubles, as reinforcement of empire within
effects on British history 29 the Atlantic archipelago 263–4
English crown assumes monarchical role over 50 Islam, and the indeterminacy of Europe 266
Index 337
islands, nature 55 land
Isle of Man, legal status in relation to the crown links with tangata whenua, and claims of right
154 200
Israel, and the covenant as evidence of human title to land, as conceptualized under the
origins 205 Treaty of Waitangi 236–7
iwi 201, 226 n. 1, 231 n. 5, 235, 240 land tenure, as property, in relation to
monarchical rule 79
Jacobitism 121 Landsman, Ned 134 n. 1
James VI and I language
and the concept of empire appropriation 213
137 law and historiography 226–8, 242, 251
and monarchical political theory indigenous people’s understanding and
64–6, 157 practice 228–9
monarchical role in relation to Ireland 167 making 237
political theory 51–3, 60, 61 politics, applied to links between peoples and
about Scotland 58, 62, 63 their land 200
of monarchy 81, 83 and poetry, Goguet’s views 210–11
religious role of the Three Kingdoms 98, 101 status under the 1707 Union 68–71
James VII and II law codes 226–7
actions in the 1688 Revolution avoid civil war Le Gros, Antoinette (author’s mother) 4
117–19, 121 Le Guin, Ursula K. 224 n. 37
attempts to reorganize control of the American legal systems, failure to unite the Scottish and
colonies 131 English legal systems under James VI and I
effects of his flight 141–2 53
exploitation of ecclesiastical fragmentation Levack, Brian, The Formation of the British State
115–16 71
expulsion during the 1688 Revolution 168 Leviathan (Hobbes) 117
use of a standing army avoids civil war 112 Lewis, C. S., use of term ‘Scotch’ 25
Jihad v McWorld (Barber) 267 and wars of religion 90
Johnston of Warriston, personal papers as liberty, and authority, within political structures
evidence of political thought in seventeenth- 306
century Scotland 34 Limerick, Treaty 109
Jones, Colonel Michael 91 Lindsay, Sir David 64
jurisprudence 216 literacy levels, links with high levels of
bicultural jurisprudence applied to the Treaty government control 34–5
of Waitangi 242–7, 252 Locke, John 125, 126
pakeha and tangata whenua views on the acquisition of property in land by
220, 221 cultivation 235
practice 227 on ‘dissolution of government’ 139
and the understanding of human origins 203–6 expectation of civil war 117, 118, 119, 120, 121
use of whenua 247–51 on federative power 232
jus 204 on knowledge 127–8
jus gentium 228, 229–30, 252 repudiates Molyneux’s settler nationalism 130
application to indigenous peoples when party theory of revolution 146
to treaties 231–3 Louis XIV (king of France) 100, 168
kawanata 238 MacArthur, Douglas 18

kawanatanga 222, 226 n. 1, 238 Macaulay, Catharine 120
Kearney, Hugh 77 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, 1st
kilstlaai (shaman) 197 Baron 118, 119, 124, 147
kingdoms, and marches 79–81 MacColla, Alasdair 92, 93, 99–100
‘king’s two bodies’ see James VI and I, political MacDiarmid, Hugh 38
discourse Macfarlane, Alan, on possessive individualism
kiwis 14 204
Knox, John, political discourse about Scotland 58 McHugh, Paul 228 n.3
338 Index
MacInnes, Allan 101 moana 5
on the Covenanters’ role in the War of the Molyneux, William 101, 103, 130
Three Kingdoms 99 monarchy
Mackay, Jessie 192 n.11 emergence of national monarchies 58
Macpherson, C. B., on possessive individualism 204 extension as a result of the 1688 Revolution 143
macron vowels 25 legitimacy after 1688 Revolution 121
Madison, James 161 political nature within England and its
Magna Carta 244 influence upon both James VI and I and
Magog 210 Charles I 64–6
Mair, John political nature within Scotland 63–4, 65–6
Historia Majoris Britanniae 97 relations with the churches, and the 1688
political discourse about Scotland 58, 59, 60, Revolution 116, 117
67, 75 religious role of the Three Kingdoms 98–9
The Making of Modern Ireland (Beckett) 28 role in Ireland 101, 103
mana 21, 226 n.1 role in relation to the churches in both
manawhenua 240–1, 252 England and Scotland at the time of the
Manwaring, Roger 68 1707 Union 168–9
Maori role separated from that of Parliament in the
as affected by colonization 7, 9 American Revolution 101
colonial relations with 189 within the Age of the Three Kingdoms 137
history, and pakeha history, in relationship to see also crowns; Crowns, Union (1603);
New Zealand historiography 296 multiple monarchy; sovereignty
origins of the word 234 Monasteries, Dissolution 299
and pakeha money, use as a mark of civilization 211
debates over sovereignty 270 Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of 100
dialogue between in the light of the new involvement in the English Civil War 28
British history 290 role in the War of the Three Kingdoms
property ownership 252–3 88–9, 91
rights, under the Treaty of Waitangi 247–9 Morgan, Hiram, on Ireland’s role in the War
sovereignty 188 of the Three Kingdoms and marches 79,
exercise in relation to the Treaty of 90, 92
Waitangi 243–5 Morrill, John
marae 226 n.1, 252 on the English Civil War 83
marches, and kingdoms 79–81 on ‘wars of religion’ 90
market forces, and history 286 Mountjoy and Earl of Devonshire, Charles
Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, use of Blount, 8th Lord, reduction of marches to
public credit to pay his armies 123 obedience 80
Marxism, criticisms of property ownership 253 multiple monarchy
masculine imagery, use in accounts of human and the causes of the War of the Three
origins 205 Kingdoms 80, 81, 82, 83–4, 86, 89, 91–2
Mason, Roger A., on political discourse and the and empire 148–62
‘matter of Scotland’ 58, 59 under the Stuarts 137
Mathews, David 27 within the Atlantic archipelago and Europe 79
Maui 247 within British history 135
Medbury School, author attends 4 n. 2 within Commonwealth history 190
Meek, Ronald 210, 212 myths, in settler history 8–9
Melville, Andrew, political discourse about
Scotland 58, 62, 65 Napier, John, political discourse about Scotland
Middle Earth 224 58
militia The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Basho) 54
English militia, re-organization as a home- nation-states
defence army under the Hanoverians 147–8 and British history 268
monarchical control, as means of avoiding civil Europe’s relationship with, in the light of the
war 117 concept of empire 287
missionary Maori 237 obsolescence 261
Index 339
national communities, relationship with ethnic basis upon the Treaty of Waitangi
sub-cultures 279–80 233, 234
national histories 95 viewpoints on history 301
within Commonwealth history see also colonies; Commonwealth; Dominions
191 New Zealand Company 235
nationalism New Zealand Historical Association
democratic nationalism, in Ireland 290
177–8 New Zealand Journal of History 13
denied within the concept of Europe 266 New Zealanders, creation of identity
effects on British history 302–4, 309–10
306–7 Ngai Tahu 216, 220, 221, 222
promotion as a means to attack the concept of Nicholls, Mark 97
British history 261 Nimrod, depiction as a Titan 202, 207
settler nationalism 130 Nine Years War (Ireland) 166
threats to 303–4 Noachic paradigm of human origins 202, 220–1
within the new British history 293–300 nomadism 210
nationality, bearing upon British history 30–1 Norman Conquest
nationhood, indigenous people’s claims to 232 effects on British history 31–2, 39
nature, state of, in legal terms 152 effects on England 48
neo-Britains influence upon political developments within
and decolonization 194–5 Scotland 63
foundation of the colonies 187–91 ‘North Britons’ 37
nationality, in the context of the Northern Ireland 296
Commonwealth 191–6 influence on the concept of empire within
and the problem of sovereignty British history 264
302 see also Ireland
neolithic revolution 208 Northumbria, role within British history 31, 32
new British history
and the concept of empire 291–2 Oakeshott, Michael 281
politics 289–91 Odysseus 255
problems with the concept 94–6, 102–3 Ohlmeyer, Jane 89 n. 17, 103
in relation to British history 292–3 on French and Spanish intervention in the
relationship with nationalism 293–300 War of the Three Kingdoms 91
New English, settler nationalism 171–2 on the Marquis of Antrim 92–3
New Light Presbyterianism 173 use of the term ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’
New Zealand 100
as affected by Britain’s decision to join the Old English
European Union ix, 20–1, 259–60, loyalty to the Stuarts, as dominant theme in
269–72, 275, 288, 290–1 the Irish role in British history 96, 98–9,
colonial status 189 100–1
colonization 4–7 settler nationalism 102–3, 171–2
historical imagination 272 O’Leary, William (Arawata Bill) 224
historiography Oliver, W. H. 15–16
as affected by the Caxton poets 10–12 O’Mahoney, Conor 96, 99
as affected by the growth of Maori-centred orang-utans, Enlightenment understanding
narratives 9 209
development 13–16 O’Regan, Sir Tipene 224–5, 254
Maori sovereignty 188 on iwi contests for primacy 248–9
as the relationship between pakeha history De l’Origine des Loix, des Arts et des Sciences
and Maori history 296 (Goguet) 211
Second World War to date 16–19 Ormonde, James Butler, 12th Earl and 1st Duke
as a part of British history x, 3–23 of 28, 91, 92
referred to as Aotearoa 226 n. 1 Ossian 211
role in the Second World War 193–4 ‘the Other’ 305, 309, 310
sovereignty 198, 302 Owen, J. B. 13
340 Index
Paine, Thomas 112, 121 Pocock, Lewis Greville (author’s father) 3
pakeha (Europeans) 226 n. 1, 237 Pocock, Lewis Greville (author’s great-
characterized as tangata waka, and their rights grandfather) 3
in relation to those of the Maori 250 Pocock, Mary Agard (author’s aunt) 3
colonization of New Zealand 5–6, 11 poetry
dialogue with tangata whenua bardic poetry 213
213–17 and law, Goguet’s views 210–11
discourse on anthropology 215–18, 223 Pole, J. R., on the American Revolution
identity 307, 308 29, 40
and Maori polis, origins 205
debates over sovereignty 270 polite society 206
dialogue, in the light of the new British political radicalism, and anti-popery 112
history 290 Political Representation in England . . . (Pole) 29
histories in relationship to New Zealand politics, relations with historiography 304–6
historiography 296 Polynesians, colonization of New Zealand 5
political philosophy 204 Polyphemus 205
property ownership as criticized by Marxists Pont, Robert, political discourse about Scotland 58
253 Popper, Karl 206
Panama, and the protein bridge 16 post-colonialism 6, 308
parliament post-modernism 268, 287, 307
disaffection from as part of settler nationalism 172 ideology 283–4, 285–6
political role in the early seventeenth century Pownall, Thomas, on the legal status of the
64 colonies 154–5, 156, 159
role separated from that of the monarchy in the predestination, William III’s reported remark to
American Revolution 101 Gilbert Burnet (5 November 1688) 114, 116
unity with the crown not to be broken by ideas Prendergast, Chief Justice
of confederation 172 on the importance of sovereignty in relation to
parliaments entering into treaty relationships 222
1707 Union 143–4 on the legal force of the Treaty of Waitangi 245
relationship with the crown, within Price, Richard 120, 121
Commonwealth history 190 property
party politics, as a form of civil war 111–12 acquisition of property in land by cultivation
patriarchy, within human evolution 208–9 235
patriotism, emergence in the eighteenth century concept in relation to history 254–5
147–8 as understood by pakeha 216
peerage, political role in England 64 property ownership 246
The People with No Name (Griffin) 307 pakeha and Maori attitudes towards 252–4
Percy, Henry (Hotspur) (Shakespeare, 1 Henry as understood in the Treaty of Waitangi 240–1,
IV) 32 244, 252–3
personality, Maori sense, as basis of claims to property rights, pakeha and tangata whenua views
rights 247–50 221–2
Peters, Marie 13 protein bridges 190, 193, 194
Phillips, N. C. 13 New Zealand’s involvement with 16, 17, 18
Pitt the Elder (William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham) Protestant Reformation, in Scotland 166
148 Protestants, loyalism within Ireland 176
Plato 206 public credit 142
ploughs, and possessive individualism 204, 207, as means to avoid civil war 123–6
208, 210, 211, 212 Pufendorf, Samuel, Freiherr von 152,
Pocock, J. G. A. 155, 159
understanding of British history x, 3–4, 9–10, Pym, John 68
13, 19
visit to Europe (1989) 272–3 Quebec Act (1774) 157, 173
voyage to New Zealand 269–72 Quinn, David, on the colonization of Atlantic
Pocock, John Thomas (author’s great-great America 296
uncle) 3 ‘the rage of party’ 121
Index 341
Rainbow Warrior, sinking 270 Scotland
rangatiratanga 226 n. 1, 238–9, 240 anti-popery as a substitute for political
Rapin de Thoyras, Paul 119 radicalism 112
Rational Dissent 170, 173 attitudes to the 1707 Union 168
rebellion, universal right 172 church-state relations, in the light of the 1707
recolonization 194 Union 170–1
Reformation, in England and Scotland 66 civil war avoided during the 1688 Revolution
Reid, Bill (sculptor) 197, 198 129–31
religion, relations with Enlightenment within civil war within the First War of the Three
Irish nationalism 174–6 Kingdoms 138–9, 140, 167
religious establishment, effects upon the concept Henry VIII’s policies towards 51
of empire 173 historical writing within 129
resentment, culture 13 historiography, and the invention of British
Revolution (1688) history 37
civil war avoided in both Scotland and Ireland impact upon the concept of the union of Great
129–31 Britain 67–74
contexts within the Three Kingdoms and importance for the British empire in India 186
Europe 107–8 involvement in the War of the Three
effects on the American colonies 131–2 Kingdoms 28–9
effects of continental power politics James VI and I’s relationship with the church
140–3 52, 53
and the expectation of civil war 115–21 legal system, not united with that of England
historiography 140 under James VI and I 53
impact on the Anglican Church 127, 128 nationalism, and the ‘breakup of Britain’
and the legitimacy of the régime 121–2 262–3
and the restoration of the monarchy as head of political discourse 58–66
the Anglican Church 167 presbyterian effects in the light of the 1688
Robertson, John 145, 153 Revolution 142
Robertson, William 73, 129 relationship with Anglo-Norman England 48
Roman Empire, relations with the Atlantic role
archipelago 30 in the 1707 Union 101, 137, 144
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques in the Age of the Three Kingdoms 74–5, 80
on heroic nature 218 in British history 30–2, 38–40
on human potential 207 in the new British history 94
political theory 144–5 in the War of the Three Kingdoms 33–4, 54,
Royal Supremacy 52, 99 86, 88–9, 91, 93, 100
Russell, Conrad 81–2, 83, 86 status as a sovereign kingdom 164, 166, 167
Russell, Lord John (British Prime Minister) 234, Scots, acceptance of Britishness 185
235, 236 Scots-Irish 171, 175
Russia, civilization and history 284–5 Scott, Jonathan 155
Rutherford, Samuel, political discourse about Scottish Enlightenment 110
Scotland 58 Scottish historiography, political discourse 134,
135
Sacheverell riots 125 The Scottish Nation (Devine) 297
sacred history, as contribution to the Scottish nationalism 291
understanding of human origins 202–3 in relation to the new British history 295–6, 299
St Heliers (Jersey), author visits (1950) 4 role in British History 302
Sarpi, Pietro, Fra Paolo 98 Seattle, Chief 217
Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (Lindsay) 64 Second Age of Union (1801–1921)
savages as affected by Irish distinctness from the
Glenelg’s understanding of 223 concept of Britishness 183–4
term not applied to the Maori 234, 245–6 and the concept of empire 186–7
term used in describing humans in a presocial deconstruction 181, 182–3
state 207–8, 212, 215 engendering of democratic nationalism in
‘Scotch’, use of the term 25 Ireland 177–8
342 Index
Second British Empire 181, 182 as used in the Treaty of Waitangi 238–41,
Second War of the Three Kingdoms see War of 243–5
the Three Kingdoms Soviet Union, collapse, and effects on the concept
Second World War, effects on New Zealand’s of ‘Europe’ 276–8
historiography 16, 17–18 spontaneous generation, Gibbon’s repudiation
the Self 200
and civilization 213 Springborg, Patricia 205–6
concept, in the understanding of human Stamp Act (1765) 149
origins 207 standing armies 142
identity in relation to the Other 305, 309, 310 as means to avoid civil war 122–6
settler cultures, viewpoints on history 301 the state
settler nationalism 171–3, 290 and civil society 71
Shakespeare, William and empire 164–5, 167, 168–70
Henry V 50 n.10 German concept 254
views of conspiracies against Henry IV 32 responses to nationalism within Ireland 176
Sharp, Andrew 255 ‘state of nature’ 159
shepherding, role in human evolution 210 states, sovereignty in relation to history 259–64,
Sidney, Algernon 63 266, 268
Sinclair, Keith, and New Zealand historiography Statute of Wales (1536) 165
13–14, 19 Stevenson, David, on Alasdair MacColla 92
Smith, Adam 210 Strange Multiplicity (Tully) 197
Smith, David L. 97 Stuart, Charles Edward (‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie)
Social Science and the Noble Savage (Meek) 210 147
socialization, as the mark of humanity 215–16 Stuart, James Francis Edward (son of James VII
soldiery, political awareness, in the English Civil and II) 141
War 85 Stuarts, as a multiple monarchy 137
‘Song of the Drift’ (Mackay) 192 n. 11 Suez, and the protein bridge 16, 17
South Africa Supplément à la Voyage de Bougainville (Diderot)
colonial status 189 218
colonization 7 Switzerland, confederation, as model for Europe
and the problem of empire over non-European 144
peoples 191
see also Cape Town; colonies Tacitus, description of the German forest
South African war (1899–1902), neo-Britains’ peoples, as used by Gibbon 199–200, 208,
involvement 192–3 211, 212
‘sovereign state’, obsolescence 261 Tahitians, Diderot’s views of 217
sovereignty 246, 253 ‘Take Your Time, History’ (Curnow) 195
concept tangata whenua 5, 7, 11, 199, 226 n.1, 240
after the 1688 Revolution 119–22 anthropology 217–19
in relation to history 254–5 as basis for claims at law 220–22, 247
debates between Maori and pakeha 270 dialogue with pakeha 213–17
as empire 309 links with land, and claims of right
and historiography 279–80, 300, 302, 306 200
indigenous people’s claims to 230, 232, 233, used of history and dreamtime 222–24
235–7 used of human origins 202, 203, 204, 207–8,
maintenance as established under the Act in 210, 212
Restraint of Appeals (1533) 141 taniwha 217
national sovereignties in relation to Europe taonga 21
260–1, 273–8, 281–2 taxation, and the American colonies 151
in relation to history 259–64, 266, 268 Taylor, A. J. P., denies meaning to the term
renunciation within Europe leads to ‘Britain’ 24–6, 27
democratic deficit 265, 267 te reo Maori (indigenous discourse) 232
roles within British history 306–7 Te Wai Pounamu 224
and treaty relationships 222 Thirty Years War, and the War of the Three
Tully’s understanding 197–8 Kingdoms 107
Index 343
Three Kingdoms loss of national sovereignty and membership of
Ireland’s role 97–100 the European Union 275–6, 282
relationship with Europe 107–8 not co-terminous with Great Britain,
see also Age of the Three Kingdoms; War of the A. J. P. Taylor’s views 24
Three Kingdoms see also Great Britain
Tolkien, J. R. R. 224 n. 37 United States
Tolstaya, Tatyana, understanding of history and history 78
civilization 284–5, 286 immigration from the British Isles
Tompson, Richard S. 77 187
treaties, basis on jus gentium when concluded role in the Second World War 193
with indigenous peoples 230–3 treaties with indigenous peoples 233
Treatises of Government (Locke) 117, 119, 120, Ussher, James (Archbishop of Armagh) 99
121 Utrecht, Treaty (1713) 110, 147
treaty relationships, and sovereignty 222
Trenchard, John, on standing armies and public vagrancy 209–11
credit 124 Vattel, Emmerich de 152, 155, 159
Trew lawe of free monarchies (James VI and I) Versailles, role in monarchical government 73
66 Voltaire 282
tribes, as recognized by treaties 231 on human origins 201, 202–3
Tudor, Owen, marriage to Catherine of France Volunteer movement 130
(widow of Henry V) 50 n. 10
Tudors Wace (Norman chronicler) 4
concepts of empire 50, 145 Wade, Field Marshal George, reduction of
sovereignty 119 marches to obedience 80
Tully, James, on sovereignty 197–8 Waitangi, Treaty 220, 221
turangawaewae 226 n. 1, 247, 250 as basis of New Zealand’s sovereignty 233–7
Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte bicultural interpretation 242–7, 252
de 123 effects on New Zealand’s history 260
Two Bodies, monarchical concept 64–5, 67–9, exercise of sovereighty under 243–5
70, 71, 72–4 Maori claims 247–49
Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl, rebellion 79 sovereignty defined 238–42
variant texts 237
Ulster, colonization, effects on Ireland’s role in Waitangi Tribunal 243–6, 249, 253
British history 166–7 waka 5, 201, 226 n. 1
Ulster Protestants, Unionism 184–5 Wales
Ulster Scots, settler nationalism 171 incorporation into England (1536) 50, 165
‘The Unhistoric Story’ (Curnow) 196 legal status in relation to the crown 154
Union (1707) 39–40, 262 role
effects 108–9 in the Age of the Three Kingdoms 74
on relationship between Great Britain and in British history 31, 303
Europe 109–11 in the English Civil War 84, 85
as incorporation rather than confederation Wallenstein, Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von 123
145–6 War of the English Succession 142, 168
Scottish attitudes towards 168 War of the Rough Wooing 51
views of 143–5 War of the Three Kingdoms 28–9, 80–1, 100, 164,
Union (1800–1) 164 167
Unionism, as affected by Irish secession from the and civil war 138–40
British empire 184–5 and the English problem 54–5
United Irishmen 112 nature 88–90
national republicanism becomes republican and role of monarchy 81–4, 86
nationalism 174 Scotland’s role 32–4
United Kingdom Second War of the Three Kingdoms 93,
English possibly disregard 26 100
history, as affected by European Union see also English Civil War (1642–6); Three
membership 259–61 Kingdoms
344 Index
warfare, involvement of the Dominions in European policy and the Second War of the
twentieth-century wars, and the effect on Three Kingdoms 100
relationships with British history 192–4 policies in connection with the 1688
‘wars of religion’ 90–1 Revolution 107, 108, 114–15, 116, 129,
Wars of the Three Kingdoms see War of the 140–2
Three Kingdoms popular title of argued by Locke 120
Washington, George 172 use of a standing army avoids civil war
Wellington 12 122–3
Welsh William the Conqueror 67
acceptance of Britishness 185 Williamson, Arthur
claim on the title of ‘Britons’ 67 James VI and I’s concept of emperorship 72
use of terms ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ after 1536 political discourse about Scotland 58
incorporation 97 Wolfe Tone, Theobald 172, 176
Western civilization, as distinct from ‘Europe’ women, role in society 213, 305
271 World Wars, neo-Britains’ involvement 193–4
whakapapa 3, 5 Wormald, Jenny
whenua 5, 240 on the clan system in Scotland 61
use in jurisprudence 247–51 on differences between levels of private and
Whig history, interpretations of the 1688 public violence 80
Revolution 114–33, 131 effects of union on English political theory 70
‘Whim Wham’ (Allen Curnow) 195–6
Whitehall, role in monarchical government 73 Yeats, W. B. 38
Wi Parata v. Bishop of Wellington 245 York, James VI and I’s proposal to establish seat
Wilkes, John 121 of government at 72, 73
William III Yugoslavia, and the indeterminacy of Europe
conquest of Ireland 109 266

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THE DISCOVERY OF ISLANDS

The Discovery of Islands consists of a series of linked essays in British

J . G . A . P O C O C K is Harry C. Black Professor Emeritus at the Johns

Cambridge University Press

© in this collection J. G. A. Pocock 2005

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

First published in print format 2005

isbn-13 978-0-511-13070-0 eBook (NetLibrary)

isbn-13 978-0-521-85095-7 hardback

isbn-13 978-0-521-61645-4 paperback

Preface and acknowledgements page ix

PART I: THE FIELD PROPOSED

1 The antipodean perception (2003) 3

PART II: THE THREE KINGDOMS AND THE ENGLISH PROBLEM

3 The field enlarged: an introduction (2004) 47

PART III: EMPIRE AND REBELLION IN THE FIRST AGE

7 Archipelago, Europe and Atlantic after 1688 (2003) 107

PART IV: NEW ZEALAND IN THE STRANGE MULTIPLICITY

11 The neo-Britains and the three empires (2003) 181

PART V: BRITAIN, EUROPE AND POST-MODERN HISTORY

14 Sovereignty and history in the late twentieth century (2003) 259

A volume such as this is necessarily indebted to many helpers. The footnote

Baltimore, Maryland, 2004

I have ventured on a complete listing of my publications in the field in

The Field Proposed

The antipodean perception*

*[Written for this volume in 2003.]

British history: a plea for a new subject

It seems all wrong to be delivering a memorial lecture for John Beaglehole.1

The Three Kingdoms and the

The f ield enlarged: an introduction*

Two kingdoms and three histories?

Dr Mason has edited, and powerfully helped in writing, a series of essays1

The Atlantic archipelago and the War

The Third Kingdom in its history

The essays in this volume1 were delivered to a seminar sponsored by the

Empire and Rebellion in the

Archipelago, Europe and Atlantic after 1688*

The signif icance of 1688: some ref lections

Empire, state and confederation: the War

The Union in British history

New Zealand in the Strange Multiplicity

The neo-Britains and the three empires*

*[Written for this volume in 2003.]

Nobody had counted on the ideology of ‘Europe’, now requiring the

Tangata whenua and

Biblical history supplied a moment from which the history of human

Let us return to the contemporary situation. I have reached the point of

Law, sovereignty and history in a divided

Britain, Europe and Post-Modern History

Sovereignty and history in the late

*[Written for this volume in 2003.]

These were the circumstances in which the ideology of ‘Europeanness’ could

At this point new sets of questions may be asked. Is the supranational

The politics of the new British history

Conclusion: history, sovereignty, identity*

*[Written for this volume in 2004.]

A. PUBLICATIONS BY THE PRESENT AUTHOR, 1974–2004,

B. WORKS CITED OR REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT