If the Glorious Revolution had overshadowed the prehistory of dynastic union, then the Treaty of Utrecht haunted its early years. Concluded in 1713, a year before the Hanoverian succession, Britain's separate peace with Louis XIV represented a victory for the proponents of maritime policy. In advance of the treaty, the tory ministry of Robert Harley emphasized the imperial conflict at the expense of its European equivalent. And at Utrecht itself, Britain acquired Nova Scotia and the right to supply the Spanish empire with slaves. While the treaty also left Britain with European possessions in Minorca and Gibraltar, these were important naval bases which could be reconciled with maritime strategy. Nevertheless, they were leftovers of an earlier, more singularly European policy. The same was true of Hanover. At Utrecht, the British government procured French recognition of Hanover's electoral status and its ruling dynasty's right to rule in London. Here the Protestant succession trumped the government's maritime inclinations, leaving its winnings with a more European character than they would have had otherwise. Still, Utrecht offended Georg Ludwig. It abandoned the Holy Roman Empire, and its ruler's claims to the Spanish succession. And notwithstanding its language to the contrary, the treaty seemed to imperil the balance of power – which seemed to embody the Imperial ethic on a European scale. Rather than reinforcing Hanoverian ambivalence about the British succession, Utrecht bolstered arguments for it – particularly that which relied upon the balance of power. Hanoverians saw that Britain's supposed maintenance of the balance of power was not inevitable, but dependent upon the will of its ruler. They became increasingly resigned to the loss of their ruler.

Just as support for dynastic union derived from support for the Protestant succession, the opposition to both correlated highly. Thus it was that Jacobites were the foremost opponents of dynastic union during its early years. They feared Hanoverian ascendancy over Britain, but were initially uncertain about its character. Given the prominence of Anglican theologians in the ranks of British Jacobitism, it is unsurprising that scrutiny initially focused upon religion. Yet as in so many other instances, the Catholic pretender soon cut the ground out from under his nonjuring supporters.

Continental Europe (and thereby Hanover) became less important to the British Empire during the Seven Years’ War. This was perhaps natural, given that the war originated in North America. It nevertheless spread to Europe, where it quickly surpassed the destructiveness of its transatlantic antecedent. France extended its imperial rivalry with Britain to Hanover, which it occupied in 1757. Hanover's vulnerability revived interest in personal union, both in Britain and the electorate. But it also prompted Britain to send an army to Hanover, seemingly substantiating imperial interpretations of their relationship. This was the policy of William Pitt the elder, whose maritime credentials have been greatly exaggerated. His association with Hanover meant that it was his resignation in 1761, and not the death of George II in 1760, that demoted the European continent in British grand strategy. Pitt's fall freed the British-born George III to pursue a more purely maritime vision of empire. But if the new king's hatred of Hanover had derived solely from the electorate's association with his grandfather, it might have ended soon after the death of the latter. George III's hostility lasted longer because of Hanover's connection with Pitt, who represented continuity with the policies and personnel of the previous reign.

Hanover resumed its former significance in British politics during the mid- 1750s, when it was once again endangered by royal policy. Prussia menaced the electorate in 1753, after British creditors protested its default on loans to indemnify East Frisian losses to British privateers. And once tensions with Prussia subsided, France threatened to extend its North American conflict with Britain to Hanover. Newcastle, by now the first minister, reverted to the language of personal union. Newcastle reassured Holdernesse, the British secretary of state accompanying George II in Hanover, that ‘any necessary support for the king's German dominions is founded on justice and declaration of parliament, and is the necessary consequence of our measures at sea and North America’.

Robert Walpole's imperial policy merited Edmund Burke's later caricature of ‘salutary neglect’, except perhaps when it came to patronage. To the extent that he busied himself with foreign affairs, it was European diplomacy which attracted his attention. Walpole especially favored the language of international affairs (as opposed to empire) when considering Hanover's relationship to Britain. Walpole and his circle were the first to elaborate the personal union thesis first introduced by James Drake. But where the theory of England's and Hanover's countervailing sovereignties had allowed Drake and his heirs to separate the two countries legally and institutionally, it functioned to unite the two morally under Walpole. Indeed, Walpole's reputation for hostility to Hanover is greatly exaggerated. He became more sympathetic to the electorate once the foreign policy initiative shifted from Hanover to Britain in the years surrounding 1720. Personal union went from shielding Britain against Hanoverian influence to protecting the electorate from British enemies. Britain's leaders never admitted a legal responsibility, but felt morally obliged, to insulate Hanover from their adversaries’ allegedly incorrect interpretation of the two countries’ relationship. Walpole's problem was that while he took Hanover's initial independence for granted, his assistance to the electorate could inculcate dependence on Britain. Indeed, some of his publicists revived previous generations’ arguments for empire over Hanover. These horrified some opponents, who feared that continental obligations might ensue. Finally, other anti-Hanoverians remained loyal to the older diagnosis of Hanoverian empire over Britain. These were Britain's perspectives upon Hanover until the latter concluded a separate neutrality in 1741 to avoid French invasion. The neutrality ended discussions of empire over Hanover, by illustrating the electorate's independence from Britain. But while the separate peace vindicated Walpole's personal union thesis, it also made both unpopular leading up to the government's collapse in early 1742.

It has been seen that Hanoverian influence between 1714 and 1719 pushed most non-Jacobites into support for personal union. But this position was poorly defined, more often implied than explained. This changed with circumstances during the 1720s. Having used Britain's navy to secure Bremen and Verden for Hanover, George I began to privilege the interests of his kingdom even when this policy might endanger the electorate.

Britain tremendously expanded its extra-European empire during the Napoleonic period, acquiring Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and parts of India. It also consolidated its hold over Ireland with a parliamentary union in 1800–1; the relationship with Hanover was the last remaining dynastic tie of the early modern variety. Even this seemed over, as successive occupations of that country by foreign powers effectively interrupted the two countries’ political relationship. In so far as Hanover's dilemma indirectly resulted from British policy (the failure to evacuate Malta as promised in the Treaty of Amiens), dynastic union continued to attract attention during its hiatus. The ensuing debate in Hanover was unprecedented in scope. Berlepsch's heirs built upon his charge that British empire over Hanover had exacerbated social inequality, while ministerial authors argued that personal union had rendered the French invasion illegal under international law. British interest in Hanover only picked up after France briefly yielded the electorate to Prussia in 1806. Britain's consequent declaration of war against Prussia registered unhappiness with permanent exclusion from the continent, although it prompted howls of protest from opponents of dynastic union. Had Hanover remained under foreign domination, these discussions might have constituted nothing more than an interesting postmortem for dynastic union. But because Hanover returned to the British monarchy in 1813, they greatly influenced the two countries’ future relationship.

As the nineteenth century opened, Britain was reminded of Hanover's vulnerability. Prussia occupied the electorate in the spring of 1801 at the instigation of Russia's tsar, who hoped thereby to forestall British attacks upon neutral shipping in the Baltic. For a second time, British policy had exposed Hanover to a foreign occupation. Charles James Fox reversed his earlier opinion of the Fürstenbund era, observing that though ‘in this instance Hanover has suffered on account of her being under the samesovereign as Great Britain … she is not in any way an ally of ours and much less a part of us’.

The shift in British emphasis from European to extra-European empire, already visible at the end of the Seven Years’ War, arguably caused the American Revolution and certainly intensified during it. If Hanover did not ‘fall back into political irrelevance’ during this period, it did move from intrinsic to extrinsic importance in that it tended to feature as a point of comparison for publicists more interested in Britain's American empire. Nevertheless, their passing references to Hanover shed light on the nature of its relationship to Britain. Increased references to personal union during the 1760s and 1770s bespeak nostalgia for the Walpole era, one also suggested by Edmund Burke's famous paean to ‘salutary neglect’. Although the Hanoverian professor Johann Stephan Pütter coined the term ‘personal union’ and applied it to Britain during this period, Hanover's relationship to the empire attracted far more attention from Pütter's Anglo-American contemporaries. Given the prominence (though by no means dominance) of natural law in American political discourse, it is not surprising that Hanover should feature in arguments against metropolitan sovereignty. But parliament's supporters also resorted to the personal union thesis, if only to restrict its pertinence to Britain's relationship with Hanover. Accordingly, the personal union thesis (at least as applied to Hanover) experienced fleeting consensus among British commentators. But this popularity abated once Americans resolved to separate from Britain altogether, and began to identify with Hanover's supposed status as an exploited imperial possession. And even though Hanover's personal union did not necessarily depend upon the American parallel, the decline of the latter reacquainted Britons with their old skepticism about the ability of personal unions in general to prevent imperial exploitation.

Imperial constructions of Britain's relationship with Hanover proved their durability in America's reaction to the Stamp Act. Metropolitan Britons already paid a tax on legal and commercial paper, which was stamped to indicate compliance. But in 1765 parliament extended this tax to the empire in an attempt to defray the cost of the standing army which would garrison Britain's new American conquests. Additionally, Britain hoped the revenue would pay down the debt it had incurred in the Seven Years’ War. Americans noted ruefully that they were footing the bill for the wartime defense of Hanover, which the parliament had not taxed.

When English and Hanoverian observers began to contemplate their prospective union, both did so with reference to their most recent respective imperial experiences. For England, this had been conquest and reconstruction at the hands of William III and the Dutch state. Although most Englishmen and women continued to support the Revolution settlement against the French-supported Stuarts, they were uneasily aware that it had been imposed by another foreign power. And they extended their ambivalence to the prospect of yet another union with a foreign country. For their part, Hanoverians viewed union with Britain through the prism of the Holy Roman Empire. They approved of the post-1648 Empire, and hoped union with Britain would establish a similar status quo on the European level. Imperial conceptions of the Anglo-Hanoverian union dominated from the beginning.

Britain's union with Hanover was made possible by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although historians have often emphasized the Revolution's British origins, it was primarily a Dutch conquest. Jonathan Israel has shown that the invasion served the interests of the Dutch state as well as those of William III, thereby foreclosing an entirely dynastic (and mostly domestic) account of the Glorious Revolution. The Dutch estates signed off on the expedition in order to bring England into their commercial war against France. The war bequeathed two peculiarly Dutch phenomena to England. The need to reassure a religiously diverse coalition led to England's first lasting religious toleration. The war also consolidated the already perceptible Dutch influence over English public finance, where long-term debt came to supplement the excise tax. Israel also dated the rise of the English parliament to its reaction against Dutch power, once the pacification of Ireland allowed William III to transfer his Dutch army to the continent in 1691. This reaction peaked during the standing-army controversy of1697–9, when parliament frustrated the king's plan for a peacetime standing army and sent his Dutch bodyguard back to the United Provinces. The Dutch union was an important interlude in the European history of British empire in its own right, but it also colored Britain's later imperial relationship with the continental electorate of Hanover. Union with Hanover followed from the Dutch invasion, as naturally as the Angevin empire issued from an earlier William's conquest.

The French Revolution ended a period in which Britain had concentrated on its extra-European empire, and placed the continent at the top of its agenda for the first time since 1760. Similarly, British debate about Hanover reverted to the arguments of mid-century; the electorate was once again intrinsically important, if not mentioned as frequently as before. Strangely, the French Revolution did not introduce an egalitarian strain into British debate over Hanover. There is corroborating evidence for continuity across the watershed of 1789; British radicals followed their predecessors in arguing that Hanover hurt their countrymen irrespective of station. Their omission accentuated Britain's discursive disconnect with Hanover, where the burgeoning press increasingly examined Britain through a social prism. Initially, reformers hoped that dynastic union might facilitate the introduction of British social mobility to the electorate. But Britain's employment of Hanoverian mercenaries against France threatened to reinforce inequality at home and abroad. By the end of the decade, Hanoverian dissidents argued that Britain maintained its empire over Hanover by building up a compliant oligarchy.

Complaints about aristocratic privilege were nothing new in Hanover. But Hanoverians believed the elector was the only political force competent to address it, at least until the late 1780s. But by then, Hanover had been ruled for nearly thirty years by a foreign elector who never visited it. Hanoverians began to imagine that homegrown institutions, such as theestates, might redress the grievances with privilege. This may seem odd, since the estates embodied privilege. But they had recently received a fillip from Göttingen professor Ludwig Timotheus Spittler, who had rhetorically amplified the opinions of Treuer and Strube in his 1786 Geschichte des Fürstenthums Hannover (History of the Principality of Hanover). Spittler, a Stuttgarter who tended to support the influential Swabian estates against the duke of Württemberg, presented a traditionally dualistic analysis of Hanoverian politics in which the estates moderated princely excesses. While he did not address aristocratic privilege per se, his description of the Hanoverian estates as ‘representatives of the nation’ encouraged others to ascribe them a remit for its reform. Even while France witnessed aristocrats’ reluctance to part with their privileges, Hanoverians reposed great faith in their estates’ capacity for self-abnegation.

Tradition holds that Britain's interactions with the outside world have been Janus-faced, distinguishing between transoceanic empire and diplomacy on the European continent. Accordingly, historians have tended to downplay evidence of British empire on the continent. The omission is questionable not merely empirically, but also theoretically, for Europe is geographically and culturally continuous with Asia. Europe is, after all, an Asian subcontinent comparable to India, a familiar subject of British imperial historiography. Including Europe in the history of British empire can solve two stubborn problems. First, it can reduce the cognitive distance between metropolis and periphery that historians of British empire have often regretted. And it will qualify the sense of novelty attending British participation in the European Union, which is itself an empire of sorts. Of course this is opposed by many including John Pocock, who debunks European distinctiveness in order to protect its British equivalent from continental federalism. But for François Guizot and others, European and national exceptionalisms went together. A critique of both enables a truly newBritish history which views political integration with the continent in terms of continuity as well as change.

Both historians and journalists ground British Euroskepticism in the English tradition of unitary sovereignty, dating back at least to the sixteenth century. But at least one country with a similar definition of sovereignty, France, has generally supported European integration. If the argument from sovereignty cannot explain British Euroskepticism, neither can the tradition it seeks to replace. The ‘whig interpretation of history’, with its celebration of parliamentary liberty over administrative bureaucracy, seems to explain the present-day distrust of continental dirigisme. Although British parliaments arose at the same time as continental estates, whig historians emphasize the partial disappearance of the latter during the early-modern period – and the comparative continuity of British constitutionalism. They explain that Britain's geographic position on an island and naval eminence protected parliamentary and civil liberties, which supposedly suffered more insults from continental governments upon the pretext of greater military vulnerability. This is not so much comparative history as geographical determinism, which leaves out counterexamples such as Ireland (an island without a navy) and the Dutch Netherlands (a continental naval power with strong estates).

In May 1900 Professor John Edward Lloyd of Bangor delivered a lecture, entitled ‘Wales and the coming of the Normans’, to the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in London. Dressed in an immaculate dark grey suit and with his high collar, shirt front and cuffs heavily starched, Lloyd spoke with the austere elegance and luminous clarity of the quintessential Victorian don, and even at this early stage in his career the superior talents of a historian who later became known as ‘the lantern-bearer of the lost centuries’ were widely appreciated. Although Lloyd was not the most inspiring lecturer – he preferred, for instance, to say ‘King Henry dismounted from his steed’ rather than ‘Henry got off his horse’ – he had an unsurpassed knowledge of his field and an unflagging desire to raise intellectual standards. Indeed, Lloyd was the founding father of Welsh medieval studies. His address to the Cymmrodorion provided a foretaste of his magisterial two-volume A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, published in 1911, a work which stands as a major landmark in the historiography of Wales. Whereas his predecessors had written from their hearts rather than with their heads, Lloyd turned the history of medieval Wales into a serious academic exercise. His work still occupies a hallowed place in Welsh historical writing, and scholars continue to consult his books with profit and pleasure.

King Edward VIII was one of the few English monarchs who managed to combine an air of effortless superiority with the common touch. In November 1936, amid much cheering, hymn-singing and some grovelling, this glamorous playboy visited the derelict Dowlais ironworks, whose flaming labyrinths had until recently lit up the skies above Merthyr since the late eighteenth century. Keenly aware that Baldwin's government had virtually washed its hands of its responsibility to alleviate the social wounds caused by poverty, malnourishment and unemployment, the king moved among the people, pressing the flesh and visibly expressing his sense of shock and disbelief. There is no reason to believe that he was not speaking from the heart when he uttered the words, ‘something must be done’, a comment which passed into the folklore of Welsh working-class history. Nothing was done, however, and following a brief reign of ten months and nineteen days Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry a twice-divorced American. To most adult males in the South Wales Coalfield, whose lives had been disfigured by long-term unemployment and deprivation, this episode simply confirmed their belief that both kings and governments did not care a fig about their plight.

By contrast, the public mood in the pre-war years had been markedly different. All the evidence seemed to point to blooming material prosperity and vitality. The Welsh were bursting with confidence.

Few twentieth-century poets who composed in Welsh were more widely admired than Waldo Williams. Although he did not produce a large corpus of work, as an imaginative interpreter of the Welsh sense of identity he had few equals. Poems such as Cofio (Remember) and Cymru'n Un (Wales Is One) resonate with historians as compelling expressions of the interdependence of geography, history, landscape, people and language. He referred to ‘things that are long forgotten, / Now lost in dust of eras that have passed’ and viewed the role of the remembrancer as ‘keeping house amid a cloud of witnesses’. Thus, despite the title of this postscript, that which lies in the lap of the future is not part of a historian's remit. A nation is shaped by its history and by its people, and Wales, like every other nation, whether of long-standing or recent construction, requires a bank of cultural memory. History in all its forms, whether true or false, imagined or invented, spoken or written, told or retold, plays a critical role in a people's view of their identity. It is therefore worth considering how talismans of national identity have changed over the centuries and how historians have examined and fostered, according to the needs of their own times, an appreciation of the otherness of Wales. It bears repeating that Wales is an imagined community, a construct which, amoeba-like, changes its shape and character according to the desires of its people and the influence of external forces.

In the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry VIII, a Putney-born state-builder set Wales on the path towards integration within a Greater Britain, a process which reached its conclusion with the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707 and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Such a future, of course, was hardly discernible in 1536 to Thomas Cromwell, the king's chief minister and the architect of the Act of Union (1536), for he was essentially a ruthless pragmatist whose incorporation of Wales into England was part of an overall strategy of recasting diverse elements of the commonwealth into a unitary state. Although he was a master of the perfidious politics of his age, Cromwell was no stranger to Erasmian idealism nor did he lack creative intelligence. The cornerstone of his policy was the concept of ‘unification’, and he was determined to bring good governance to Wales. Cromwell went to the block at the command of his royal master in 1540, but by that stage he had begun a new drive to impose order and ‘civility’ upon the Welsh within an administrative and legal dispensation known as ‘England and Wales’. His blueprint stood the test of time: the Act of Union remained on the statute books until 1993.

In the sixteenth year of the reign of George III, a Llangeinor-born philosopher, writing at a time when British authority in colonial America was disintegrating, published a pamphlet which provided the thirteen American colonies with a powerful ideological justification for rising in rebellion.

Hwch Ddu (Black Sow) and Chwilen Bwm (Beatle the Cockchafer) are two rough-hewn fictional characters in one of the most exuberant and successful Welsh-language novels of recent times. Written in the genre favoured by Boccaccio (who also makes a cameo appearance in the tale), Pestilence (Y Pla) (1991) recounts the odyssey of Salah Ibn al Khatib, a young Islamic student, who was dispatched from Cairo to assassinate the King of France at a time when the calamitous pandemic known as the Black Death was remorselessly pruning the population of Europe. During this picaresque adventure the student found himself in the upland demesne estate of Dolbenmaen in Eifionydd, at a time when the pestilence was threatening to destroy the socio-economic fabric of this small medieval community in north-west Wales. On his arrival, he was immediately dubbed the ‘Dark One’, a satanic figure whose presence boded nothing but ill for the traumatized peasants. The serf girl, Hwch Ddu, gloomily predicted that ‘we'll be no more than flies on a bullock's arse, to be whipped by the devil's tail’, a reminder not only of the transience of human life but also of the sheer impotence of men and women in the face of such a deadly, killing disease. Unfit for the squeamish, this harrowing tale offers a far more convincing insight into the plague-ridden world of fourteenth-century Wales than any conventional historical account based on official documents can provide.