Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION: THE STRUCTURE OF ANGLO-AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE
- 1 THE CONFLICT BETWEEN LAWS: SOVEREIGNTY AND STATE FORMATION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES
- 2 THE CONFLICT BETWEEN DENOMINATIONS: THE RELIGIOUS IDENTITY OF EARLY-MODERN SOCIETIES
- 3 PREDISPOSITIONS: REBELLION AND ITS SOCIAL CONSTITUENCIES IN THE ENGLISH ATLANTIC EMPIRE, 1660–1832
- 4 POLITICAL MOBILISATION: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AS A WAR OF RELIGION
- CONCLUSION: ‘DESOLATING DEVASTATION’: THE ORIGINS OF ANGLO-AMERICAN DIVERGENCE
- Index
1 - THE CONFLICT BETWEEN LAWS: SOVEREIGNTY AND STATE FORMATION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION: THE STRUCTURE OF ANGLO-AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE
- 1 THE CONFLICT BETWEEN LAWS: SOVEREIGNTY AND STATE FORMATION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES
- 2 THE CONFLICT BETWEEN DENOMINATIONS: THE RELIGIOUS IDENTITY OF EARLY-MODERN SOCIETIES
- 3 PREDISPOSITIONS: REBELLION AND ITS SOCIAL CONSTITUENCIES IN THE ENGLISH ATLANTIC EMPIRE, 1660–1832
- 4 POLITICAL MOBILISATION: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AS A WAR OF RELIGION
- CONCLUSION: ‘DESOLATING DEVASTATION’: THE ORIGINS OF ANGLO-AMERICAN DIVERGENCE
- Index
Summary
LAW, NATIONALITY AND NATIONALISM: MONARCHICAL ALLEGIANCE AND IDENTITY
Whatever the causes of the successive breakdowns in governments on both sides of the Atlantic between 1660 and 1832 examined in this book, it is important to establish from the outset that nationalism was not among them; and the evidence for this hypothesis throws much light on those real causes which will be discussed below. Early-modern societies sustained a variety of forms of collective self-consciousness, but these turned only to a small degree on the later preoccupations of ethnicity and language; here as elsewhere, a new term in the early nineteenth century accompanied a new phenomenon. Nationalism was a mentality which postdated, and (it will be argued) necessarily postdated, the profound redefinitions compelled by the events of 1776 and 1789. Its histories appropriately begin with the French Revolution and the Romantic reaction to it, less appropriately finding in early-modern states only ‘protonationalism’: ‘roots’ or obscurely-expressed ‘origins’ of what is wrongly assumed to be a single phenomenon, that nationalism which came to ‘maturity’ in the nineteenth century.
National identity in the ‘old society’ was indeed a very different matter from its later forms, and the early phenomena were in no strong sense the ‘origins’ of the later ones.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Language of Liberty 1660–1832Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, 1660–1832, pp. 46 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993