Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature

© Blackwell Publishing 2004

Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 071, 1–14

Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Alok

Yadav

George Mason University

Abstract

Discusses two competing, ‘domestically’-oriented understandings of the dynamicsof nationalism in the period 1660–1760 – the notion of an emergent, overarchingand inclusive “British” identity and the notion of English “internal colonialism” inrelation to the Celtic “peripheries”. The author argues, instead, for an approach thathighlights England’s own “provincial” standing in the wider European world of culture

and the ambition to claim an “imperial” role as a way to erase this provinciality.

Two tasks confront those interested in the problematic of literature andnationalism in eighteenth-century Britain: first, to understand the nature ofnationalism in that context and, second, to understand the contributionof literary discourses to the dynamic of nationalism. Traditionally, accountsof European nationalisms have tended to focus either on the Renaissance-Reformation period or on the period of the French Revolution andRomanticism. The religious, even messianic, nationalisms of the earlierperiod and the romantic nationalisms of the later period have provideddistinctive cultural formations and political conjunctures within which toframe the issue of nationalism. The period of the Restoration and theeighteenth century has lacked an equally resonant framework for concep-tualizing nationalism. Indeed, the dominant emphasis has been on theanti- or non-national assumptions of an era of composite monarchies (ratherthan nation-states or religiously defined “peoples”), of a cosmopolitanethos (whether aristocratic or “enlightened” in inflection), and of a neo-classical cultural formation operating in the wake of the transnationalcommunity of the culture of Latinity. This older view of the Restorationand eighteenth-century period has been layered over by recent work thathas taken up issues of nation and empire but there is still much that remainsunclear about how to understand issues of nationalism in this context.

The two most influential works on the topic of nationalism ineighteenth-century England have both been written by historians: GeraldNewman’s

The Rise of English Nationalism

and Linda Colley’s

Britons

.

1

They are both rich and compelling works – though they offer conflicting

2 Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 18C 071, 1–14

arguments – but both of them really focus on the traditionally acknowl-edged “era of nationalism” that emerges with Ossian and Herder, Burnsand Scott. The dates in Colley’s subtitle (“1707–1837”) obscure the factthat the center of gravity of her argument is the reign of George III(1760–1820). Neither work gives us much handle on the crucial periodfrom 1660 to 1760. Not surprisingly, the same is true of much of theliterary scholarship on nationalism and literary culture: even when itappears to promise a wide engagement with the long eighteenth century,it turns out to concentrate on the period from 1760 to 1830; moretypically, this is its announced focus from the start.

2

Such work inevitablyoperates within the orbit of “romantic nationalism” and the need for afuller understanding of nationalism and literary culture in the Restorationand eighteenth century remains. One major study that has sought toaddress this terrain more directly is Howard Weinbrot’s

Britannia’s Issue

.

3

The work is a rich survey of the terrain, and essential reading for anyoneinterested in the subject, but just as many reviewers remained uncon-vinced by Colley’s argument about “Britishness” despite the evidentrichness and value of her book, so, too, something similar might be saidabout Weinbrot’s sense that a harmonious, multistranded “British” literatureis fashioned in the hundred years leading up to Ossian. Neither workconfronts centrally enough the anglocentric character of the “Britishness”that was constructed across the eighteenth century.

The new British history and internal colonialism within the British Isles

The interplay between England and various other regions of the BritishIsles and the formation of national identities within that context has beenthe focus of much recent scholarship. Colley’s and Weinbrot’s respectivevisions of a putatively successful shaping of a harmonious Britishnessare important points of reference in the effort to move beyond insularlyanglocentric perspectives, but another substantial body of scholarship onthe topic operates, at least loosely, with an “internal colonialism” model.This latter work takes its inspiration from several sources: MichaelHechter’s sociological study

Internal Colonialism

, which makes the claim ofuneven development within the British Isles, whereby an English “core”systematically exploits the Celtic “peripheries”;

4

J. G. A. Pocock’s call fora new “British history” or an “Archipelagic” historiography that considersthe interplay of the various cultures of the British Isles rather than focusingexclusively on a single national tradition in isolation (most commonly aninsularly anglocentric historiography, but also narrowly national histo-ries of Scotland, Wales, or Ireland);

5

Eric Hobsbawm and TerenceRanger’s collection of essays on

The Invention of Tradition

, and the critiqueof factitious traditions and cultural (especially commemorative) practicesthat their contributors elaborate;

6

and the postmodern interpretation ofnationalism as precisely such a factitious artifact fostered by the way in


Nationalism and Eighteenth-Century British Literature 3

which Benedict Anderson’s

Imagined Communities

has been taken up (espe-cially by literary scholars).

7

This variety of influences, of which the new British history called for byPocock and the new theorization of the cultural dimensions of nationalismby Anderson are most prominent, has resulted in two dominant emphasesin recent work on nationalism in the British Isles. On the one hand, therehas been an emphasis on the constructedness of national self-conceptions,on how nationalisms and national identities have been shaped and reshaped– or, more tendentiously, imagined, invented, fabricated – in particularhistorical contexts and conjunctures. On the other hand, to the extent thatemphasis has been placed on a critique of the “imperial” relation of Englandto the other regions of the British Isles, there has also been an implicitendorsement of peripheral nationalisms in the British Isles. There isoften a submerged tension between these two emphases that is not simplyresolved by distinguishing between “imperial” English nationalism and“anti-imperial” Scottish or Welsh or Irish nationalisms, since the emphasison the factitiousness of nationalisms (and the ideological delegitimationthat this perspective generally implies) extends to

all

nationalisms equally,and since Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalisms have not uniformly been“anti-imperial” in relation to the wider world beyond the British Isles.Scholars addressing issues of nationalism in the long eighteenth centurywould do well to consider scholarship that argues for the deep historicalroots of English nationality in particular,

8

that addresses the anti-nationalistprejudice of modern western scholarship in the context of the role ofnationalisms in global politics,

9

and that offers sociological and politicalaccounts of nationalism (given the tendency of literary scholarship, espe-cially, to reduce issues of nationalism to issues of identity formation).

10

What I would like to pursue here is some of what we miss when we focusour attention exclusively on the “imperial” dynamic between an English“core” and various Celtic “peripheries”. There is no doubt that the internalcolonialism model engages with some important features of the political,military, economic, religious, and cultural history of the British Isles.

11

Butwhile the attempt to get beyond the limits of an unreflectively anglocentricperspective is wholly laudatory, the use of an internal colonialism modelfalsely conflates the situation of the British peripheries – which, after all, wereor became partners in empire – with the situation of subject populationsin the developing British Empire. The model encourages us to conflateissues of provincial status and subordinate incorporation within the Britishpolity with issues of imperial domination and subjection. The issues hereare complex and varied, depending on whether we are discussing the Gaelic-speaking or Catholic population of Ireland (including the Old Englishcolonists) or the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy or the Presbyterian communityin Ulster, whether we are discussing Catholic and Jacobite Highlanders orLowland Scots and Highland clans loyal to the Hanoverians, whether weare discussing the anglicized Welsh gentry or the Welsh-speaking common



people, whether we are discussing court Whig upholders of the Hanoverianestablishment or members of the Dissenting community or Jacobiteadherents of the Stuart dynasty in England.

12

The significant differencesamong the situations, aspirations, and historical destinies of these, and other,groups mean that we do better to think about “contact zones” and thediverse dynamics and identities that can arise in such settings rather thanframing our consideration of these contexts within the dyadic assumptionsbuilt into the internal colonialism model.

13

Despite the very real differ-ences among the situations and historical experiences of these variousgroups, however, they were all (to varying degrees and at different times)recruited into the military, mercantile, missionary, and settler populationsthat constituted the British Empire. Glasgow became the second city of theEmpire and India became the “cornchest” that fed the Scots and Anglo-Irish as well as the English.

14

The internal colonialism model thus makesit difficult to address the full range and complexity of national identities andengagements in the period and it tends to offer a false political assessmentof the status of the “Celtic fringe” within the British empire.

England’s own cultural provinciality and “colonial” past

What is even more decisively misconstrued when we focus our attentionexclusively on the relationships between an English “core” and various“peripheries” within the British Isles is a proper understanding of thesituation of English society itself and its self-conceptions in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the chief limitations of theinternal colonialism perspective is its tendency to treat England as alwaysalready a metropolitan culture. This erases from view the fact that, withinthe wider European world, England historically had the status of amarginalized culture in the early modern period. If Italian, Spanish, andsubsequently French literary culture could boast wide recognition andinfluence beyond their borders, nothing comparable was true for English-language literary culture. The

acquisition

of metropolitan status for English-language literary culture was one of the signal developments of the longeighteenth century. Moreover, the unwarranted ascription to England ofa metropolitan role ever since the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifthcentury or since the expansionism of an Anglo-Norman hegemony in theeleventh and twelfth centuries (which is where the new British historyoften ends up) may resonate with nineteenth-century English (and British)self-conceptions of the Anglo-Saxons as a premier “ruling race,” intrinsi-cally and providentially endowed with the responsibility of governing“subject races,” but it bears little relation to eighteenth-century outlooksand self-understandings. In this respect, modern scholars, in their pursuitof a critical perspective on anglocentrism, have inadvertantly essentializedEnglish culture as an imperial core far more emphatically than does thehistorical culture they are seeking to examine.



In the first place, English people of the long eighteenth century did notview their past in exclusively “Saxon” terms: many English writers of thelate seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood the ancient Britonsas their ancestors, a notion central to the Tudor self-conception and evident,for example, in the lineage for English poetry constructed in Thomas Gray’s

The Bard

. As various scholars have noted, even during the period of the“Celtic Revival” in the late eighteenth century, there was no consistenttendency to distinguish between Saxon and Celtic antiquities: they wereperceived, often, as part of a single “English” or modern “British” inheritance.Moreover, even when English speakers identified themselves exclusively withthe Saxons (as the conquerors of the native British), they did not necessarilyadopt an imperial view of the national past. Indeed, in many casesthe emphasis was on the “colonial” character of the English past.

15

TheNorman Conquest and the ideology of the “Norman Yoke” was one majorpoint of condensation of this outlook; another was the hybrid characterof the English language, in contrast to the pure and primitive (in the senseof original, unadulterated) languages of societies that had not sufferedcultural subordination. Defoe’s

True-Born Englishman

, Hume’s

Historyof England

, and Blake’s

Jerusalem

all articulate this view of “England” as anation subject to repeated conquests – by Romans, Saxons, Danes, andNormans. The presence of Scottish, Dutch, and German rulers occupyingthe English throne throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesreinforced the sense of compromised autonomy on the part of English society.

So, too, the sense that England took – and gladly took – its literarycultural bearings first from Italian and then from French culture under-lined the extent to which English culture had a provincial, rather than ametropolitan, status. The “burden of the past” for early eighteenth-centuryEnglish-language writers was not necessarily that of a great tradition (asWalter Jackson Bate implies):

16

this is to project our own conceptionof the English literary past onto the eighteenth-century scene. Rather,eighteenth-century culture was more emphatically invested in a progressnarrative about the refinement of the cultural tradition (from past rude-ness to present urbanity) and about the

future

promise and prospects ofEnglish culture. The effort to refine and improve the English language, toshape it into a national language of culture, is a central project in thiscontext. The internal colonialism model leads us to focus on the attempt toeliminate “Scotticisms” from the writing (and speech) of Scottish persons andthis is an important aspect of the issue.

17

So, too, more broadly one mightexamine the provincialization of the other regional vernaculars of the BritishIsles vis-à-vis English: a simultaneous elevation of English to the status ofthe national standard and demotion of other languages of the British Islesto the status of regional patois or obsolete relic. But English itself was byno means seen as confidently ensconced as a language of culture.

18

Understanding the situation and outlook of English culture, especiallyin the era from 1660 to 1760, allows us to get a better handle on the



question I posed at the start – regarding the specificity of nationalistdynamics in this period. If we keep in mind the sense of cultural provin-ciality that I have outlined above, it will not surprise us to find Englishliterary culture of the period from 1660 to 1760 being strongly motivatedby a “nationalistic” aesthetic of cultural autonomy and cultural self-asser-tion. The tenor of much of the literary writing and reflection of theperiod is one of self-vindication – much in the manner of contemporarypostcolonial cultures (or of the literary cultures of the Celtic periphery).

19

It was an age of

English

cultural nationalism – under the promptings of adesire to reposition the national culture from a provincial to a metropolitanstanding on the wider stage of European cultures.

Moreover, England’s belated arrival on the scene of imperial expansion– standing far behind the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch at thestart of our period – also means that in the political sphere Englishoutlooks and self-conceptions were not straightforwardly “imperial”.Indeed, they have been described as ambivalently “anti-imperial” – thatis, critical, in some measure, of the Spanish empire and its conquests andopposed to the ambitions for “universal monarchy” that they ascribed toSpain, to Holland, and latterly to France. The English were thus ofteninclined to view themselves as opposing empire rather than supporting it,and this self-conception feeds into the celebration of a liberal imperialismof commerce and trade, in contrast to the empires of conquest and terri-torial rule maintained by the Spanish and the French, that has beenhighlighted by much of the recent scholarship on eighteenth-centuryBritish imperialism.

20

These outlooks were always crisscrossed and under-mined by other, more typically “imperial” outlooks, but one misunder-stands the specificity of the eighteenth-century situation (especially theperiod 1660–1760) if one assimilates it with the outlooks and self-conceptions of the High Victorian period. In contrast to the view presentedin some of the recent imperial historiography that I have mentioned, Ithink the imperial culture of the period was marked by many “illiberal”strands as well, but my main point here is that unless we attend toEngland’s place in the wider world, a focus on English dominance withinthe British Isles will produce a distorted perception of the investments andoutlooks of English culture.

Imperial nationalism and the role of literature

The important issue for us is what role literature played in this debatebetween “anti-imperial” and “imperial” self-conceptions, between “pro-vincial” and “metropolitan” self-conceptions. And here I think the verdict isunambiguous: given its courtly inheritance, literary culture, insofar as itengaged with these issues, was overwhelmingly identified with an imperialemphasis, imagining and projecting the English monarchy as gloriousin the vein of its rivals, or celebrating a given English author as the



“Columbus” of the intellectual world (even as English political culturemay have been decrying the Spanish assault on the New World). Whenthe center of literary culture and literary practice shifted away from thecourt to the commercial print market, literary culture remained commit-ted to imperial imaginings though sometimes in a different idiom fromthe monarchial imaginings of the past: even in its more “liberal” config-urations, it often took the Roman republic as its model – emphasizinga desire for domestic or internal “freedom” but coupling this with anambition for foreign or external conquest and glory. The gesture of SamuelButler’s

Hudibras

(Part I, 1663), borrowing from Lucan’s

Civil War

– thatEngland should quell its (internal) civil strife and instead channel itscontentious spirit into foreign conquest – is a characteristic outlook ofwriters of the long eighteenth century. An alternative outlook, exempli-fied by the seemingly insular nationalism of Frances Brooke’s

The Excursion

(1777), with its denigration of “foreign” influences – whether those fromFrance and Italy or those from British imperial adventurers in the Eastand West Indies – and its celebration of the “true-born Englishman”and “our old race of English gentlemen” is not really a critique of impe-rial expansion with its train of planters and nabobs; rather, the novelchampions the idea of an autonomous Englishness that ought to reversethe dynamics of cultural influence and assert Englishness as a hegemonicformation, one that influences others rather than being influenced bythem. Literary culture, in its varied idioms and modes, served in generalto call attention to issues of cultural subordination and to create a culturalclimate in which imperial ambitions and longings were “naturalized” asthe only or obvious way to move out of provincial standing. This argumentstands in contrast to older views of English literature in this period – whichhave tended to claim that writers such as Milton, Swift, and Johnson heldanti-imperial outlooks – but it is supported by much of the recent workon empire and literary culture in the long eighteenth century.

There is clearly room for argument here, and I have presented only themost schematic account of the situation. But what I want to emphasize isthe need for literary scholars to broaden their critical engagements to includenot only an analysis of national and imperial representations in literary texts– and the kinds of national-imperial “identities” these representationsarticulate – but also to consider the role of literary works as a culturaldiscourse and cultural practice in the dynamics of cultural subordinationand autonomy, of cultural provinciality and cultural centrality in the BritishIsles, in the wider European arena, and in the extra-European imperialcontext. Issues of cultural power, not just of cultural identity, ought to becentral to any discussion of nationalism and literary culture. The choice ofa framework for analysis is crucial and an insularly “British” perspective,while it moves beyond the limits of a parochial anglocentrism, still canlead us astray if it is not placed in relation to the wider cultural dynamicsof the inter-European and extra-European, imperial arenas.



Notes

1

G. Newman,

The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830

(New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1987); L. Colley,

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837

(New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1992).

2

A good deal of work has thus been produced on late eighteenth-century figures, suchas Ossian, Burns, Blake, Burke, Edgeworth, but relatively little on earlier figures in our period,though see M. Dobson,

The Making of a National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship,1660–1769

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); C. Gerrard,

The Patriot Opposition toWalpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742

(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994); J. Lucas,

England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–1900

(IowaCity: University of Iowa Press, 1990), as well as the works referenced later in this essay.

There is also an older body of scholarship that does not theorize nationalism, but that offersuseful accounts of aspects of literary culture that are germane to the topic: for example,B. Dobrée, “The Theme of Patriotism in the Poetry of the Early Eighteenth Century”,

Proceedingsof the British Academy

35 (1949), pp. 49–65; J. G. Hayman, “Notions of National Characters inthe Eighteenth Century”,

Huntington Library Quarterly

35 (1971), pp. 1–17; C. A. Moore,“Whig Panegyric Verse, 1700–1760”,

PMLA

41 (1926), pp. 362–401; A. D. McKillop, “LocalAttachment and Cosmopolitanism”, in

From Sensibility to Romanticism

, ed. F. Hilles andH. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 191–218; E. D. Snyder, “The WildIrish: A Study of Some English Satires against the Irish, Scots, and Welsh”,

Modern Philology

17(1920), pp. 687–725.

3

H. Weinbrot,

Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian

(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993).

4

M. Hechter,

Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

5

J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject”,

Journal of Modern History

47(1975), pp. 601–21; Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of theUnknown Subject”,

American Historical Review

87 (1982), pp. 311–36.

6

E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds.,

The Invention of Tradition

(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983).

7

B. Anderson,

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism

(London:Verso, 1983). See also the special issue of

Diacritics

29(4) (1999), ed. P. Cheah and J. Culler,devoted to Anderson’s work. Another important influence on the “postmodern” interpretationof nationalism has been H. Bhabha, ed.,

Nation and Narration

(London: Routledge, 1990).

8 See, for example, A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986);Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); A. Hastings,The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997); J. C. D. Clark, “Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660–1832”,The Historical Journal 43(1) (2000), pp. 249–76.9 See, for example, D. Lloyd, “Nationalisms against the State: Towards a Critique of the Anti-Nationalist Prejudice”, in Re-examining and Reviewing the Philippine Progressive Vision, ed. Forumfor Philippine Alternatives (Quelon City: Dilman, 1993); A. Yadav, “Nationalism and Contem-poraneity: Political Economy of a Discourse”, Cultural Critique 26 (1993–94), pp. 191–229.10 The scholarship on nationalism is huge, but some useful ways into it include G. Balakrishnan, ed.,Mapping the Nation (London: Verso, 1996); M. Mann, “The Emergence of Modern EuropeanNationalism”, in Transition to Modernity: Essays on Power, Wealth and Belief, ed. J. A. Hall andI. C. Jarvie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 137–65; and the work ofA. Smith cited previously.11 Important examples of work that has focused on the intercultural dynamics within the BritishIsles with respect to eighteenth-century literary culture are R. Crawford, Devolving EnglishLiterature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The RomanticNovel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); L. Davis, Acts ofUnion: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–1830 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998); J. Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J. Sorensen, ed., “Internal Colonialism”,



Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15(1) (2002), pp. 51–126. These works are not all equally committedto an internal colonialism model, but they all tend to invoke the language of imperialism todescribe the intercultural dynamics between Scotland and England (which is the major focusof all these works). So, too, much of the large body of work on Samuel Johnson’s Journey tothe Western Islands of Scotland operates in this idiom.Other work on Scottish nationalism in the period includes J. Dwyer, “The Constructionof Community in Eighteenth Century Scotland”, History of European Ideas 16(4–6) (1993),pp. 943–8; P. Henderson, “The Eighteenth-Century Revival and the Nature of Scottish Nationalism”,Scottish Studies Review 3(2) (2002), pp. 9–19; C. Andrews, “The Clubbable Bard: SentimentalScottish Nationalism and Robert Burns”, Lumen: Proceedings of the Canadian Society forEighteenth-Century Studies 21 (2002), pp. 105–30; K. Simpson, “Poetic Genre and National Identity:Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns”, Studies in Scottish Literature 30 (1998), pp. 31–42; W. Donaldson,The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,1988); J. A. Smith, “Some Eighteenth-Century Ideas of Scotland”, in Scotland in the Age ofImprovement, ed. N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1970), pp. 107–24; C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creationof an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Studies of the nationalist dynamics and cultural relations between England and Ireland in theeighteenth century include (among the work published in English) substantial bodies of workon specific figures, notably Jonathan Swift and, as previously mentioned, Edmund Burke andMaria Edgeworth. One might also consult I. C. Ross, “The Triumph of Prudence over Passion:Nationalism and Feminism in an Eighteenth-Century Irish Novel”, Irish University Review 10(1980), pp. 232–40; N. Vance, “Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish LiteraryRelations 1780–1820”, Irish Historical Studies 22 (1981), pp. 216–38; N. Canny, “The Formationof the Irish Mind: Religion, Politics, and Gaelic Irish Literature 1580–1750”, Past and Present95 (1982), pp. 91–116; J. T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of IrishNationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam:John Benjamins, 1986); D. W. Hayton, “Anglo-Irish Attitudes: Changing Perceptions ofNational Identity Among the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, ca. 1690–1750”, Studies inEighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987), pp. 145–57; D. W. Hayton, “From Barbarian to Burlesque:English Images of the Irish c. 1660–1750”, Irish Economic and Social History 15 (1988), pp. 5–31;T. Bartlett, “ ‘A People Made Rather for Copies than Originals’: The Anglo-Irish, 1760–1800”,International History Review 12(1) (1990), pp. 11–25; M. H. Thuente, The Harp Re-Strung: TheUnited Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,1994); P. McNally, “ ‘Irish and English Interests’: National Conflict within the Church of IrelandEpiscopate in the Reign of George I”, Irish Historical Studies 29 (1995), pp. 295–314; J. R. Hill,From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1997); McNally, “ ‘The Whole People of Ireland’: Patriotism, NationalIdentity and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland”, in Ireland in Proximity: History,Gender, Space, ed. S. Brewster, et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 28–41; and M. J. Corbett,Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family fromEdgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).12 The issue of Jacobitism has produced a vast literature, which we cannot go into here. But itis worth noting the role of Jacobitism as a vehicle for Anglo-Scottish tensions, certainly throughthe era of the Jacobite revolt of 1745 and Culloden, but also in some respects through the eraof Lord Bute and John Wilkes in the early 1760s. A useful entry into this literature can be madethrough M. G. H. Pittock, “Literature and Nationhood”, in A Companion to Literature fromMilton to Blake, ed. D. Womersley (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 114–30.13 I take the term “contact zones” from M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transcul-turation (London: Routledge, 1992). The work of Robert Crawford works with this more opensense of the range of relations at work in the inter-cultural dynamics of the British Isles,without forgetting the significance of English or anglocentric dominance within this context.So, too, do the programmatic essays of Pocock. See also V. Kiernan, “The British Isles: Celtand Saxon”, in The National Question in Europe in Historical Context, ed. M. Teich and R. Porter(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–34; S. J. Connolly, “Varieties of Britishness:Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State”, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of



British History, ed. A. Grant and K. Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 193–207; C. Kidd,British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); T. Claydon and I. McBride, eds., Protestantismand National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999); M. G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain andIreland, 1685–1789 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Pittock, Celtic Identity and the BritishImage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).14 For discussion of the Irish and Scottish roles in the eighteenth-century British Empire, seeJ. Horn, “British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815”, in The Oxford History of theBritish Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998), pp. 28–52; E. Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire”, in StrangersWithin the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 67–114; I. Adams and M. Somerville,Cargoes of Despair and Hope: Scottish Emigration to North America, 1603–1803 (Edinburgh: JohnDonald, 1993); A. L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants to Jamaica and the Chesapeake,1740–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); C. J. Bryant, “Scots in India in theEighteenth Century”, Scottish Historical Review 64 (1985), pp. 22–41; A. M. Cain, The Cornchestfor Scotland: Scots in India (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1986); J. M. Mackenzie,“On Scotland and the Empire”, International History Review 15(4) (1993), pp. 714–39;N. C. Landesman, ed., Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001); M. McLaren, British India and BritishScotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on IndianGovernance (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2001); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire and theShaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003); T. M. Truxes, Irish-AmericanTrade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); F. G. James, Ireland inthe Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); R. B. McDowell, “Ireland in theEighteenth-Century British Empire”, Historical Studies 9 (1974), pp. 49–63; T. Bartlett, “ ‘ThisFamous Island Set in a Virginian Sea’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801”, in The OxfordHistory of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998), pp. 253–75; and, for a later period, K. Jeffery, ed., An Irish Empire?Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).15 See J. Gillingham, “Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesburyand David Hume”, Historical Research 74 (2001), pp. 17–43; N. Hudson, “The Constructionof English Nationhood”, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 133–69, and J. C. Holt, Colonial England, 1066–1215(London: Hambledon Press, 1997).16 W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).17 See, for example, J. G. Basker, “Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Eighteenth-Century Life 15(1–2) (1991), pp. 81–95; P. Rogers, “Boswell andthe Scotticism”, in New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essay on the Occasion of theBicentenary of “The Life of Johnson”, ed. G. Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), pp. 56–71; D. Hewitt, “Scoticisms and Cultural Conflict”, in The Literature of Region andNation, ed. R. P. Draper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 125–35; and, from a linguisticperspective, K. Kohler, “A Late Eighteenth Century Comparison of the ‘Provincial Dialect ofScotland’ and the ‘Pure Dialect’”, Linguistics 23 (1966), pp. 30–68.18 See, for some aspects of this issue, J. Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal,Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); A. R. Beach, “The Creation of a ClassicalLanguage in the Eighteenth Century: Standardizing English, Cultural Imperialism, and theFuture of the Literary Canon”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43 (2001), pp. 117–41;C. McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); O. Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity andLanguage in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996); Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire;R. Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001).



19 Cf. Michael Meehan’s comment that “the patterns to be observed in Britain through theeighteenth century, of progress in local confidence, in taking inspiration but not intimidationfrom alien models . . . remain of special interest to those in emerging cultures today”, seeM. Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986),unpaginated preface. I document this argument much more fully and elaborate it further inA. Yadav, Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-CenturyBritain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, forthcoming).20 See K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empireand Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003); P. J. Marshall, “Introduction”,in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–27; D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of theBritish Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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