Britons

Linda Colley published Britons in 1992 through Yale University Press. Its subject is the invention of a new national identity in the wake of the Act of Union of 1707, and the book is one of the standard accounts of how that identity formed.

Colley's argument turns on two things. The first is war: a succession of conflicts with Catholic France, ending with the long struggle against Napoleon, acted at once as a threat and as a rallying point, pushing the very different peoples of a strongly Protestant culture closer together and reminding them of their common ground. The second is empire, the reward for so much successful fighting, which gave men and women from a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds a strong reason to call themselves British.

Running against that, Colley shows how an overarching Britishness was laid over older regional and national loyalties, and how those older identities, Scottish, Welsh, English or simply local, came back to the surface in the later twentieth century. She fills the story out with individuals, from Nelson and the younger Pitt to middle-class patriots and ordinary families.