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Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

John M. MacKenzie
John M. MacKenzie
Affiliation:
The Institute of Historical Research, London
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The modern historiography of the origins of British national identities seems riven with contradictions and paradoxes. First there is a major chronological problem. Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Second, there is a difficulty in the compilation of such identities. Are they to be found in negative reactions to the perceived contemporary identities of others or in positive, if mythic, readings of ethnic history? Third, can there be a British identity at all when the cultural identities of what may be called the sub-nationalisms or sub-ethnicities of the United Kingdom seem to be forged at exactly the same time? And fourth, did the formation of the British Empire and the vast expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century tend towards the confirmation of the identity of Greater Britain or of the Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish elements that made it up?

Type
Identities and Empires
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 8 , December 1998 , pp. 215 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1998

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