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
7 - The moment of Englishness
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
The English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character;unless this very singularity may pass for such.
David Hume ([1741] 1987: 207)Nations are what their deeds are. Every Englishman will say: We are the men who navigate the ocean, and have the commerce of the world; to whom the East Indies belong and their riches; who have a parliament, juries, etc.
G. W. F. Hegel ([1830–31] 1956:74)The stream of World-History has altered its complexion; Romans are dead out, English are come in … To this English People in World-History, there have been … two grand tasks assigned: the grand Industrial task of conquering some half or more of this Terraqueous Planet for the use of man; then secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest, and showing all people how it might be done.
Thomas Carlyle ([1840] 1971: 202, 205)It will be found that the modern character of England, as it has come to be since the Middle Ages, may … be most briefly described on the whole by saying that England has been expanding into Greater Britain.
J. R. Seeley ([1883] 1971:64–5)English nationalism: the dog that did not bark?
Scottish intellectuals and scholars have for long been exercised by the question, why no nationalism in nineteenth-century Scotland? Scotland was – and is – a small country, dominated by its richer and more powerful neighbour to the south.
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- The Making of English National Identity , pp. 175 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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