National History

British historians embraced national histories as enthusiastically as their German counterparts. They assumed an unchanging national character and rooted the English constitution in the forests of Germany, but they disagreed on whether state or parliament was the vehicle of the national idea. Some historians had much in common with German partisans of power politics. The conservative J. R. Seeley saw Britain's racial destiny in imperial conquest and wrote his Life and Times of Stein in 1878. Geoffrey Elton did not speculate on the racial origins of English virtue but felt nevertheless that the English had discovered the perfect blend of order and liberty. In his Tudor Revolution in Government (1953), he claimed that the foundations of a unitary modern state had been laid in the 1530s by Thomas Cromwell, chiefly through the removal of the influence of the Catholic Church from government. He added that English rule over the "disordered" and "wild" Irish and Welsh was both beneficial and necessary. Interestingly, Elton, although a vociferous defender of value-free empirical history, argued for the theoretical primacy of political history. It concerned, he said, the ways in which people used their reason to organize society into a "properly constructed, continuously living body"—note again the Hegelian notion that through the development of the state a society becomes conscious of itself. Like Fischer, Elton assumed a necessary process of modernization, and the greatness of Cromwell lay in his ability to realize the meaning of history.

The liberal E. H. Freeman (1823–1892) developed the idea of an innate English love of liberty into a vast Aryan project, and his history of the Norman Conquest took the side of the Anglo-Saxons against despotic French invaders. In the interwar period, in the face of the Nazi threat, George Macauley Trevelyan wrote a history of England as the home of liberty yet repeated conventional prejudices about the Irish. Postwar left-wing historians abandoned racism but retained the notion of an English predisposition to liberty. For A. J. P. Taylor, German authoritarianism represented the antithesis of Englishness. The crux of his Origins of the Second World War (1961) was that Hitler's foreign policy represented a continuation of traditional German national aims. Taylor was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and believed that the peace-loving British were ideally placed to find a middle way between the two superpowers. The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson was also a leading campaigner against nuclear weapons. In "The Peculiarities of the English," Thompson described himself as a "socialist internationalist speaking in an English tongue" (p. 37). In his classic Making of the English Working Class (1963), he argued that the English bourgeoisie, frightened by the French Revolution, had betrayed the cause of liberty and failed to carry out a bourgeois revolution. The working class became the bearers of the tradition of the free-born Englishman.

The adaptability of the structures of national historical writing is illustrated by the historical works of opposition nationalists. John Davies's History of Wales (1993) is based on the assumption that although Welshness might be expressed in many ways (the author is especially concerned to reconcile industrial English-speaking Wales with rural Welsh-speaking Wales), there is a core national identity. He traces the resistance of "Wales and its attributes" to predictions of imminent oblivion that go back to Tacitus in 100 C.E. "This book," he concludes, "was written in the faith and confidence that the nation in its fullness is yet to be." The nation constitutes the subject of the historical process, and its realization in the nation-state represents the end of history.

John Davies's book is one of the major sources for Norman Davies's The Isles: A History (1999), which attacks the Anglo-centric Whig view of history and predicts the break-up of the British state. The book was welcomed by the Left and condemned by the Right. Yet its structure is typical of national histories, and in its emphasis on the reconciliation of Celt and Anglo-Saxon, and in the author's interest in J. R. R. Tolkien's dream of harmony between races, the book owes something to the new right's vision of a Europe made up of unique peoples. For Norman Davies, Britain has since the fourteenth century consisted of four distinct nations, all integrated into a European culture. The long separation of Britain from Europe, beginning with the Reformation, is an "aberration" in the history of the Isles. Britain returns to its true vocation with membership of the European Union.