This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars to evaluate the viability of four nations approaches to the history of the United Kingdom from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It recognises the separate histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and explores the extent to which they share a common, British history. They are entwined, with the points at which they interweave and detach dependent upon the nature of our inquiry, where we locate our core and our periphery, and the cause and effect of our subject.
The collection demonstrates that four nations frameworks are relevant to a variety of topics and tests the limits of the methodology. The chapters illuminate the changing shape of modern British history writing, and provide fresh perspectives on subjects ranging from state governance, nationalism and Unionism, economics, cultural identities and social networking.
|
|
|
1 A New Plea for an Old Subject? Four Nations History for the Modern Period |
|
|
3 | (30) |
|
|
|
2 J.G.A. Pocock and the Politics of British History |
|
|
33 | (26) |
|
|
3 `A Vertiginous Sense of Impending Loss': Four Nations History and the Problem of Narrative |
|
|
59 | (26) |
|
|
|
|
4 The Eighteenth-Century Fiscal-Military State: A Four Nations Perspective |
|
|
85 | (26) |
|
|
5 The Scottish Enlightenment and the British-Irish Union of 1801 |
|
|
111 | (24) |
|
|
6 Celticism and the Four Nations in the Long Nineteenth Century |
|
|
135 | (26) |
|
|
7 The Beefeaters at the Tower of London, 1826-1914: Icons of Englishness or Britishness? |
|
|
161 | (28) |
|
|
8 Regional Societies and the Migrant Edwardian Royal Dockyard Worker: Locality, Nation and Empire |
|
|
189 | (26) |
|
|
9 Four Nations Poverty, 1870-1914: The View from the Centre to the Margins |
|
|
215 | (26) |
|
|
10 Wales and Socialism, 1880-1914: Towards a Four Nations Analysis |
|
|
241 | (26) |
|
Index |
|
267 | |
Naomi Lloyd-Jones researches responses to Irish Home Rule in Britain. Margaret M. Scull writes on the Catholic Church during the Northern Irish Troubles. They are both based at King's College London, UK, and are co-founders of the Four Nations History Network.