This study addresses the significance of ethnic identity within the early modern British world. What was the ideological status of ethnicity in the centuries which immediately preceded the rise of nationalism and racialism? Was ethnic identity an important constituent of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political and religious argument? Or was it largely subordinated to the claims of church, confession, kingdom and constitution? A second line of investigation attempts to unravel the orientation and nature of identity construction in this era, not least because its intellectual leaders still subscribed to the Mosaic account of the peopling of the whole world from the stock of Noah. On a more local level, how did the British, the English in particular, conceive of their ethnic relationship to the rest of Europe? Furthermore, was the familiar antithesis of Celt and Saxon part of the early modern world view?

My initial inspiration was derived not so much from the preoccupations of the new ‘British’ historiography, though these have come to shape the eventual monograph, but from more theoretical themes which concern students of nationalism. There is a general consensus, underwritten by a variety of scholarly approaches in history and the social sciences, that nationalism is a modern invention. However, no single school of modernists monopolises the field, in large part because of the chasm of disagreement over the relative contributions of materialist and idealist factors in the rise of nationalism.