To be misunderstood – at least in part – is the inevitable fate of all authors, a prospect which looms very large in the present case. This project has not been about the importance of ethnic identity in the discourse of the British world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: rather, it has involved an attempt to demonstrate its secondary place in political argument. Our real subjects have been the mainstays of the early modern world view – respect for the authority of the Bible, one's confession and the established institutions of church and state. These have been approached obliquely through the ways in which the inescapable, but ill-defined, facts of ‘ethnicity’ were shaped by the gravitational pull of these first-order determinants of public debate.

While ethnic consciousness played a relatively minor role in politics, pedigrees – of families, peoples, nations, institutions, church practices and doctrines – clearly mattered a great deal. Furthermore, given the narrow confines of a 6,000–year-old world, it was far from impossible to trace such lineages back to their ultimate origin, though few had the assurance of the Scots antiquary Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty who traced his family line back to Adam ‘surnamed the protoplast’. There is, however, a serious point here: provenance was the keystone of legitimacy, whether Biblical, confessional or institutional.