Linda Colley - Acts of Union and Disunion

ACTS OF UNION AND DISUNION

LINDA COLLEY is Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has previously taught at Cambridge, Yale and LSE. Her earlier books include Wolfson Prize-winning Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837; Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 16001850 and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History which was selected as one of The New York Times ten best books of the year.

ALSO BY LINDA COLLEY

In Defiance of Oligarchy:
The Tory Party 17141760

Namier:
Historians on Historians

Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837

Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 16001850

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh:
A Woman in World History

Taking Stock of Taking Liberties:
A Personal View

ACTS OF UNION AND DISUNION

What has held the UK together and what is dividing it?

LINDA COLLEY

P

PROFILE BOOKS

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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Copyright Linda Colley, 2014

By arrangement with the BBC

The BBC logo and Radio 4 logo are a trade mark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

Radio 4 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Extract from Seamus Heaneys Act of Union used with kind permission of Faber and Faber, from North (1975, Faber and Faber).

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 013 9

In admiring memory of
JOHN MORTON BLUM
(19212011)

and

EDMUND SEARS MORGAN
(19162013)

Wise Men, Great Friends

A comic map by Frederick W. Rose in 1880, an election year, illustrates the longevity of sharp territorial divisions in the United Kingdom, and how these have often been reinforced and expressed by struggles between its political parties: in this case by the rivalry between Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, in Tory southern England, and the Liberal William Gladstone in Scotland and the North. Subsequent editions of the map also positioned anti-Disraeli sentiment in Cornwall and Wales.

PREFACE

Towards the end of 2012, I was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write and deliver a series of talks on acts of union and disunion, and how they can help us both to understand and question the British past. The number of projected episodes soon expanded from ten to fifteen, but the agreed format involved strict limitations and demands that proved at once challenging and liberating. Each programme was to last no more than fifteen minutes, and my own spoken words were to be intermixed with snatches of music, poetry, diaries, biography, novels, drama and political speeches. From the outset, it was agreed that, while I would focus on England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and on their divisions and interconnections, the programmes would also touch on these countries relations over time with other continents, and with the onetime British Empire. And while the immediate hooks for the series were the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence and a possible referendum on British withdrawal from the European Union, it was clear to me that in order to be useful and faithful to its subject-matter Acts of Union and Disunion would need to be firmly rooted in the long and deep past. Current events are saturated by comment from the media, on the web, and from the politically involved. Professional historians can and should offer something rather different.

Accordingly, I decided to structure the series around the successive legislative acts of union that served to create the United Kingdom, which meant going back to the sixteenth century, and on occasions to even earlier times. I also wanted to examine some of the wider, international unions and would-be unions in which all or some of these islands have been involved, of which the European Union is only the most recent. And I interpreted acts of union generously, looking not just at specific political events, but also at some of the drawn-out processes that at different times aided (or compromised) the imagining and workings of the United Kingdom. In particular, I wanted to address some of the constitutive stories of identity that in the past helped to mobilise and bind together some of the peoples of these islands, but which are now for the most part much depleted. Accordingly, the fifteen broadcasts scheduled for January 2014 were very much my personal interpretations of certain selected themes and connected topics, and there was much else I would have liked to include that had to be left out, or that could only be glanced at. This book is an amplified version of these original radio scripts, and contains much additional material; but it follows the same fifteen-part format and pitch, and is again perforce selective in its subject matter.

Addressing a wider than usual audience on these issues in multimedia formats has been a challenge and an opportunity I have much relished, and not just because it has catered to some of my own longstanding intellectual interests. In recent years, the study and worth of the humanities have come under growing pressure and questioning on both sides of the Atlantic. It is therefore all the more important, I firmly believe, for academic historians to reach out to different constituencies, by way of different methods and technologies, and to demonstrate how and why their discipline possesses a value and interest that extend far beyond narrow specialist circles.

But Acts of Union and Disunion is not just about the past. Nor, in some of its deeper engagements, is it exclusively concerned with one specific polity. For while much of the book addresses the peculiarities of British and Irish history, and of the United Kingdom in which for a time those histories were conjoined, some of the themes it explores and the dilemmas it charts possess a broader resonance. In recent decades, the United Kingdom has become increasingly exposed to changes and trials that are often lumped together under the heading globalisation. The resurgent angst over identity politics touched on in these pages needs to be understood in part in this light: as reactions in one particular location the countries of the United Kingdom to trends such as increasing immigration and erosions of national sovereignty that are being experienced and raged against in many other areas of the world. For all the chatter over Euro-scepticism, the United Kingdom also visibly shares in developments and anxieties that are broadly European. Like many European states (and many states outside Europe), the United Kingdom has had to deal with various stateless national and cultural groupings that in some cases are becoming hungrier for states of their own. This might not pose so many problems if the European Union were indeed what some critics accuse it of being: a mega supra-national state, a new kind of empire in process. If Brussels really were the potent capital of an emerging empire, then not just the new Scotland that may soon come into being, but also say a future independent Cornwall, Mercia, Yorkshire, Wales, Basque Country, Corsica, Faroe Islands, Catalonia, Lombardy, Walloon or Sami republic and more might all hope to find secure shelter and a sense of wider belonging under the EUs capacious umbrella.