By the end of the eighteenth century Britain was a world power on a scale that none of her European rivals could match. Not only did she rule a great empire, but the reach of expeditionary forces from either Britain itself or from British India stretched from the River Plate to the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. Britain's overseas trade had developed a strongly global orientation: she was die leading distributor of tropical produce diroughout die world and in the last years of the century about four-fifths of her exports were going outside Europe. Britain was at die centre of inter-continental movements of people, not only exporting her own population but shipping almost as many Africans across the Atantic during die eighteenth century as all the other carriers put together. It is not surprising therefore that British historians have searched for the qualities that marked out eighteeth-century Britain's exceptionalism on a world stage. Notable books have stressed, not only the dynamism of die British economy, but developments such as the rise of Britain's ‘fiscal-military state’ or die forging of a sense of British national identity behind war and empire overseas.

The Hereford Map is drawn upon a single pentangular skin of very high quality and, presumably, expense. It measures some 5′2″ by 4′4″ at its longest and widest points, and has, in addition to the world map from which it takes its name, a number of ornamented borders, inscriptions in Latin and Anglo-Norman, and illuminated scenes. The map thus has a great many claims to the attention of medieval historians, art historians and linguists, but I would single out three. Firstly, as a result of the loss of the Ebstorf Map, the Hereford Map is now die largest and most elaborate medieval mappa mundi known to have survived. Secondly, it is still one of the most difficult there is of the genre definitively to date, place and understand; this in the face of over more than one hundred and fifty years of effort on the part of a whole series of accomplished scholars and cartographers, effort of which the recent short and penetrating book by Professor Harvey is a triumphant example. Thirdly, though the map is rightly now regarded by the Hereford Cathedral Chapter as one of its greatest treasures, and is quite beautifully cared for and displayed in Hereford, we are still all a little hazy about how it got there in the first place. Professor Harvey suspects it may originally have been made in Lincoln, a suspicion to which I might perhaps now bring a little additional support. But if it was made in Lincoln, how, then, did it come to Hereford, when did it come and, perhaps most importantly of all, why?

The performance of Ireland as an autonomous state since 1922 remains a contentious subject. Joseph Lee's withering critique of Irish economic backwardness and cultural parochialism, which he holds to be rooted in a narrow adhesion to the ‘possessor principle’ against the ‘performance ethic’, charts a long-term failure to rise to the challenge of statehood. It is not appropriate here to attempt even a summary of his sprawling, bristling account; I want to focus on an aspect highlit by Denis Donoghue when he reviewed it in die London Review of Books. ‘The first and most important fact about modern Ireland,’ Donoghue contended, ‘is that, after die Civil War, there was unquestioned transition to democracy.’ On this view, modern Irish history is, pace Lee, in essence a success story. As Brian Farrell put it, die capacity of die Irish parliamentary tradition to ‘encompass, neutralise and institutionalise’ the disastrous split of 1922 ‘makes die Irish experience unique among the new nation-states of the twentiedi-century world’. Tom Garvin has recendy reinforced this verdict by pointing to the surprising speed with which any tendency to military intervention in Irish politics disappeared. This after a Civil War in which die new Army—lacking any experience of subordination to the civil power— had saved die life of the infant Irish Free State. Indeed, far from witnessing the politicisation of the military, Ireland ‘rapidly became one of the most demilitarised societies in Europe’.

Over the last thirty years the work of historical demographers, spearheaded by Sir Tony Wrigley, Roger Schofield and others at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, has demonstrated the centrality of marriage to explanations of early modern English demographic change: ‘a history of English population in this period in which nuptiality did not figure prominently would resemble the proverbial production of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.’ Although their ‘neo-Malthusian’ or ‘neo-classical’ model of population levels kept in ‘dilatory homeostasis’ by negative feedback relationships between living standards, age at first marriage and the proportion of the population never marrying has not been immune from criticism, it is now generally accepted that changes in fertility rather than in mortality account for population stagnation in mid-seventeenth-century England, and for its renewed and rapid growth from the 1730s. Moreover, having flirted with, and subsequently discarded, changes in marital fertility as a proximate cause of fluctuations in the birth rate, Wrigley and Schofield are now convinced that nuptiality was decisive. For Wrigley, ‘the crucial importance of the tension between production and reproduction which affected all pre-industrial societies’ explains why marriage had a ‘significance…far wider than the purely demographic.’ ‘Marriage,’ he argues, ‘was the hinge on which the [early modern English] demographic system turned.’

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.

It is perhaps more usual for the giver of the Prothero lecture to choose a subject which has been a part of his intellectual baggage for a long time. In contrast, what I am about to offer falls more honesdy into the category of work in progress. I am presendy at a very preliminary stage in a project that may both take me a long time and lead me up many alleyways. I am concerned to understand how the Catholic Reform of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was funded. In the term ‘Cadiolic Reform’ are included charitable and educative initiatives, the funding of missions, the conversion of die heathen, the expansion of religious orders, die provision of books and images (biblia pauperurm) to improve and elevate the minds of the simple into mysteries they could not otherwise conceptualise, and die erection and furnishing of new churches. I would argue that taken as a package this funding process, about which I will be presently more specific, represents one of the largest private money-raising processes ever undertaken. It has, perhaps, a particular interest today when attempts are being made to reinvigorate die spirit of private philanthropy and to dismande or cause to wither away public commitment to assistance or subsidy.

The Royal Historical Society will not be startled to learn that one of the best-informed essays on William Camden was written by its quondam president, Sir Maurice Powicke:

A great book might be written about Camden, his life and his works, his wide circle of friends and correspondents and his humanity. It would be a very difficult book to write, for its author would have to be steeped in the social history of the time and to be familiar with the personal life, the friendships and all the correlated activities of scholars all over the western world in Camden's day. To recapture that society with learning and imaginative amplitude might well engage a fine and patient and sympathetic scholar in the work of a lifetime.

There has long been some measure of agreement that European people in the middle ages adhered to a form of Christianity which was ‘folklorised’, ‘enchanted’, or ‘magical’. Interwoven with the traditional creeds and the orthodox liturgy were numerous beliefs and practices which were intended to ensure spiritual and bodily welfare, and guard against misfortune. To the endless frustration of theologians, ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ stubbornly refused to remain clearly separate, despite the intellectual effort expended in forcing them into different compartments. ‘Superstitious’ rites or beliefs repeatedly intersected with the official Catholic cult. It was believed that if a talisman were placed under an altar-cloth during mass, it would acquire spiritual potency. Orthodox prayers were constantly adapted to serve the needs of popular magic. Clergy, let alone layfolk, found the line between acceptable and superstitious practice difficult to draw. For a graphic illustration of this problem, one need only look at the following recipe for curing a hailstorm caused by sorcery:

But against hailstones and storms, besides those things said earlier about raising the sign of the cross, this remedy may be used: three little hailstones are thrown into the fire with the invocation of the most Holy Trinity; the Lord's Prayer with the Angelic Salutation is added twice or three times, and the Gospel of St John, ‘In the beginning was the word’, while the sign of the cross is made against the storm from all quarters, before and behind, and from every part of the earth. And then, when at the end one repeats three times, ‘the Word was made flesh’, and says three times after that, ‘by these Gospels uttered, may that tempest flee’, then suddenly, so long as the storm was caused to happen by sorcery, it will cease.

On 25 May 1785, a M. Lousteau arrived at the police station in Port Louis, Isle de France (now Mauritius) to complain that his slave Jouan had been abducted. He described Jouan as an ‘Indien’, ‘Lascar’ and ‘Malabar’, and said that he had learned that he had been smuggled on to the royal ship Le Brillant, bound for Pondicherry in southern India, by one Bernard (whom Lousteau describes as a ‘creol libre’ but who later is described as ‘Malabar, soi-disant libre’ and ‘Topa Libre’). The story of the escape had been told to him by a ‘Bengalie’ slave called Modeste, who belonged to the ‘Lascar’ fisherman, Bacou. A number of people had apparently assisted Jouan's escape in other ways—most importantly his trunk of belongings had been moved secretly from hut to hut before being embarked with him. Lousteau was a member of that ever-growing professional group of eighteenth-century France and its colonies: the lawyers. He was clerk to the island's supreme court, the Conseil Superieur. He supported a large family, he said, and the loss of Jouan represented a serious loss to their welfare. Jouan, it turned out, was no ordinary slave. He was a skilled carpenter who earned his master a significant sum every month; he was highly valued, and Lousteau had refused an offer of 5,000 livres for him. What is more, he could be easily recognised, for he was always exceptionally well turned-out and well-groomed. To facilitate in the search for his slave, Lousteau provided the following description of him:

He declares that his fugitive slave is of the Lascar caste, a Malabar, dark black in colour, short in height, with a handsome, slightly thin face, a gentle appearance, with long hair … that he is very well dressed, abundantly endowed with clothes, such as jackets and shorts … wearing small gold earrings, a pin with a gold heart on his shirt, and on the arm a mark on the skin which he thinks reads DM.

The modern historiography of the origins of British national identities seems riven with contradictions and paradoxes. First there is a major chronological problem. Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Second, there is a difficulty in the compilation of such identities. Are they to be found in negative reactions to the perceived contemporary identities of others or in positive, if mythic, readings of ethnic history? Third, can there be a British identity at all when the cultural identities of what may be called the sub-nationalisms or sub-ethnicities of the United Kingdom seem to be forged at exactly the same time? And fourth, did the formation of the British Empire and the vast expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century tend towards the confirmation of the identity of Greater Britain or of the Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish elements that made it up?

In January 1556 Charles V renounced his rights to the Iberian kingdoms and passed them on to his son, Philip, who at once assumed the title of King of Spain. To his surprise and consternation, the English council refused to endorse it and pertly reminded him that the Kingdom of Spain did not exist. While the title had long been used, and almost every language had an equivalent for Spain and Spanish, the truth was that legally there was no such entity. Philip II's will reflected this judicial reality. He was, ‘by the grace of God, king of Castile, Leon, Aragon, the Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Portugal, Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Mallorca, Seville, Sardinia, Cordoba, Corsica, Murcia, Jaen, Algarve, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, the Eastern and Western Indies, the islands and terra firma of the Ocean Sea; archduke of Austria; duke of Burgundy, Bravant and Milan; count of Habsburg, Flanders, Tirol, Barcelona; Lord of Biscay, Molina etc.’. This lengthy litany partly explains why he and all his contemporaries habitually resorted to the title King of Spain as convenient short-hand. As we will see, however, there was more to it than simple utility. The terms were used because they were broadly understood and accepted. But it will be apparent at once that the concept of a specific Spanish identity in the sixteenth century is likely to be particularly problematic since Spain did not exist.

In a much-cited statement Ernest Renan once commented that the nation was a daily plebiscite. Whereas the state's essence are institutions and laws, the nation exists first and foremost in the consciousness of the population. How strongly a population identifies itself as a nation differs over time and from one section or class to another. The nature of the external challenges facing a community will also help to determine its sense of identity. Though different groups and individuals may all claim membership of the same nation, they may still disagree radically about the institutions, memories, symbols and values which embody that nation and make it worthy of allegiance.

British Empire in India saw major transformations in the identities of its Indian subjects. The growth of the modern state, the introduction of new systems of knowledge, the expansion of capitalist modes of production, and the spread of communications of all forms—railway, telegraph, post, press—made possible the fashioning of all kinds of new identities at local, regional and supra-regional levels. One of the identities which developed most strikingly was the Muslim. Indeed, at independence in 1947 it gained the particular accolade of embracing its own modern state in the shape of Pakistan. This political outcome, however, was just part of an extraordinary series of developments in Muslim identities under British rule which shed light not just on the nature of British rule but also on major changes at work in Muslim society.

It is useful, for the sake of my topic today, that since I declared my title the Republic of Zaire (in May 1997) changed its identity, or at least, resumed one of its former names, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The change is also a nuisance, because the new/old name revives the likelihood of confusion not only with ex-Zaire's neighbour across the Zaire River, the Republic of Congo, but also with the people called BaKongo, who owned the name in the first place. I will try to explain all that in a moment.

During the long crisis of the Spanish empire between 1810 and 1825, the Creole leaders of Spanish American independence asserted a new identity for the citizens of the states which they sought to establish, calling them ‘Americanos’. This general title was paralleled and often supplanted by other political neologisms, as movements for independence and new polities took shape in the various territories of Spanish America. In New Spain, the insurgents who fought against royalist government during the decade after 1810 tried to rally fellow ‘Mexicans’ to a common cause; at independence in 1821, die Creole political leadership created a ‘Mexican empire’, the title of which, with its reference to the Aztec empire which had preceded Spain's conquest, was designed to evoke a ‘national’ history shared by all members of Mexican society. In South America, die leaders of the new republics also sought to promote patriotic feelings for territories which had been converted from administrative units of Spanish government into independent states. Thus, San Martín and O'Higgins convoked ‘Chileans’ to the cause of independence in the old Captaincy-General of Chile; shortly afterwards and with notably less success, San Martín called upon ‘Peruvians’ to throw off Spanish rule. Bolívar was, likewise, to call ‘Colombians’ to his banner in die erstwhile Viceroyalty of New Granada, before advancing south to liberate Peru in the name of ‘Peruvians’, and Upper Peru in the name of ‘Bolivians’, where the Republic which his military feats and political vision made possible was named after him.

It is a commonplace that European rule contributed both to the consolidation of the nation-states of Southeast Asia and to the aggravation of disputes within them. Since their independence, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have all faced the upheavals of secessionism or irredentism or communalism. Governments have responded to threats of fragmentation by appeals to national ideologies like Sukarno's pancasila (five principles) or Ne Win's ‘Burmese way to socialism’. In attempting to realise unity in diversity, they have paraded a common experience of the struggle for independence from colonial rule as well as a shared commitment to post-colonial modernisation. They have also ruthlessly repressed internal opposition or blamed their problems upon the foreign forces of neocolonialism, world communism, western materialism, and other threats to Asian values. Yet, because its effects were uneven and inconsistent while the reactions to it were varied and frequently equivocal, the part played by colonialism in shaping the affiliations and identities of Southeast Asian peoples was by no means clear-cut.