This is not a piece of national history, though it owes a great deal to the work of more nationally minded historians. It is an attempt to examine, within short compass, the interaction of the various major cultures of the British Isles from the Roman period onwards. The emphasis throughout is upon the British Isles, in the belief that it is only by adopting a ‘Britannic’ approach that historians can make sense of the particular segment in which they may be primarily interested, whether it be ‘England’, ‘Ireland’, ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’, Cornwall or the Isle of Man.

To concentrate upon a single ‘national’ history, which is based upon the political arrangements of the present, is to run the risk of being imprisoned within a cage of partial assumptions which lead to the perpetuation of nationalist myths and ideologies. Herbert Butterfield, in his essay, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), stressed the importance of trying to see all sides of past conflicts. The modern world in his view arose from both Protestant and Catholic, not from one or the other. In the same way, no single ‘national’ interpretation, whether English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh, can be treated as self-contained. A ‘Britannic’ framework is an essential starting point for a fuller understanding of these so-called ‘national’ pasts.

This point might hardly seem worth stressing, were it not for the fact that, in its continued use of a ‘nation’ paradigm, the historiography of the British Isles still bears traces of its late nineteenth-century origins.