The Making of Britain By France

Admittedly, the title of this article is confusing and bewildering to many. First of all, many might ask, how can a nation be made? The problem is that many of us who reside in North or South America take the expressions "Old World" and "New World" for granted. Yet in reality, nothing is truly "old" or "new." Nor do nations exist by themselves. Rather, nationhood is a construct, "...an imagined political community." [1]

The Act of Union between England, Scotland, and Wales in 1707 was just that, an Act. Political-wise, and technically speaking, Great Britain as a nation dates from 1707. Yet it is hard to suggest that Great Britain as a nation in every other sense came into existence then. Englishmen still thought of themselves as Englishmen, Scots as Scots, and Welsh as Welsh. [2] Yet within the 18th century, this changed. By 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain as a nation in all meanings of the word existed. What caused this massive change?

In many ways, the almost continual series of wars against France between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 led to this massive shft. National identity, historian Peter Sahlins observes, "...like ethnic or communal identity, is contingent and relational: it is defined by the social or territorial boundaries drawn to distinguish the collective self and its implicit negation, the other." [3] Historian Linda Colley, in her soon-to-be classic [4] Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) clarifies:

...men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not. Once confronted with an obviously alien "Them," an otherwise diverse community can become a reassuring or merely desparate "Us." This was how it was with the British after 1707. They came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores." [5]

In many ways, England's experience during the 18th century parallels the American experience during the Cold War. Faced with a hostile Soviet Union, Americans continuously grappled with how to define Americanness by the defining differences between "Us" and "Them." Yet the experiences obviously were different. While "...the British and the French had their teeth so sunk into each other in these years [and long after] that they could neither live together peacefully, nor ignore each other and live neutrally apart," Colley points out that "The result was less a series of separate and conventional wars, than one peculiarly pervasive and long-drawn out conflict which rarely had time to become a cold war in the twentieth-century sense." [6] But as a result of that prolonged conflict, the most prominent nation of the 19th century was born!

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic