Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 English or British? The question of English national identity
- 2 Nations and nationalism: civic, ethnic and imperial
- 3 When was England?
- 4 The first English Empire
- 5 The English nation: parent of nationalism?
- 6 The making of British identity
- 7 The moment of Englishness
- 8 The English and the British today
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
4 - The first English Empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 English or British? The question of English national identity
- 2 Nations and nationalism: civic, ethnic and imperial
- 3 When was England?
- 4 The first English Empire
- 5 The English nation: parent of nationalism?
- 6 The making of British identity
- 7 The moment of Englishness
- 8 The English and the British today
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
Summary
Britain is now called England, thereby assuming the name of the victors.
Aethelweard, Chronicon, 10th century (in Banton 1982:85)This, the most noble of islands, 800 miles long and 200 broad, was first called Albion, then Britain and is now known as England.
Henry of Huntington, 12th century (in Gillingham 1995: 52)Crossing the deep sea, he [Henry the Second] visited Ireland with a fleet, and gloriously subdued it; Scotland also he vanquished, capturing its king, William … He remarkably extended the kingdom's limits and boundaries [until they reached] from the ocean on the south to the Orkney islands in the north. With his powerful grasp he included the whole island of Britain in one monarchy, even as it is enclosed by the sea.
Gerard of Wales, 12th century (in R. R. Davies 1990: 78)The English and others
The historian A. J. P. Taylor once argued that the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century was brought about not by nationalist forces but through a series of wars against other countries – Denmark, Austria, France. The substance of German unity and German national consciousness was not, as the liberals claimed, a deep sense of German culture but the deposit of wars and conflicts that forged a Germany confident of its strength and eager to expand its power. Prussia, which of all the German states had the least interest in German nationalism, was the agency through which Germany achieved this self-definition as a ‘crusading’ power, charged with the mission especially of civilizing the East (Taylor 1945: 114–5).
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Making of English National Identity , pp. 60 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003