Welsh Journals

REVIEWS A UNITED KINGDOM? UNITING THE KINGDOM? THE MAKING OF BRITISH HISTORY. Edited by Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer. Routledge, 1995, pp. 310, £ 25.00. BRITONS: FORGING THE NATION, 1707-1837. By Linda Colley. Revised edition, Vintage, 1996. £ 12.99 paperback. I In the 1850s Anthony Trollope wrote a sub-Carlyleian tract in which a New Zealander returned to a Pompeii-like London to contemplate the ruins of English civilization.1 Unpublished, it was cannibalized in several novels. Its theme is reanimated by a modern New Zealander, Professor J. G. A. Pocock, in his afterword to Sandy Grant's and Keith Stringer's impressive symposium, based on the 63rd Anglo-American Conference of the Institute of Historical Research in 1994. The fact that Pocock's erudition about early modern constitutionalism is throughout spiked with a strong slug of New Zealand animus a British community forgotten about by the mother country after 1973 makes one expect originality in the early modern period, but the medievalists are also in good form. The puzzle comes when we get closer to the present, and to the situation which has generated Pocock's gloom. If Conrad Russell's statement that 'there is no case for a medieval British [political] history' seems after a reading of Part II more than arguable, the impending constitutional change overshadowing David Marquand's afterword poises the later themes between two 'general crises' of British history, in the mid-seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. When in 1977 the Open University set up its course on Seventeenth Century England [sic]: A Changing Culture?, it was too difficult to persuade the Course Team Chairman, Christopher Hill, that events elsewhere in these islands were significant. Anglo-Britain and Anglo-Marxism had obviously been 1 Anthony Trollope, The New Zealander, written 1854 (Oxford 1972).