The Four Nations: a History of the United Kingdom.
Ward, Paul
The Four Nations: A History of the United Kingdom, by Frank Welsh.
New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002. xxviii, 478 pp. $35.00 US
(cloth).
There have been many changes since A.J.P. Taylor asserted the
necessity for the primacy of England within British history in his book
English History 1914-1945 (1965). The major historiographical turning
point carne in 1975 when J.G.A. Pocock urged "British"
historians to consider the way in which the national histories of
England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the overseas colonies were
inextricably linked. Historians including Hugh Kearney, Norman Davies,
and Jeremy Black took up the challenge. However, devolution in the
politics of the United Kingdom has been accompanied by devolution in
history writing, with emphasis being placed on the separate national
development of the four nations. There is now an abundance of books
calling themselves "new" histories of Scotland, Wales, and
England. Welsh's The Four Nations is firmly within the
"British" tradition of considering the intertwined histories
of the four nations and takes the genre out of the academy to the
general reader. This is a concise and readable history of the
integration of the territories that first became England, Scotland,
Wales, and Ireland, then were shaped into Britain, and ultimately were
forced into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Welsh has organized his book in a chronological structure,
beginning his narrative at 54 BC, "since it was during the four
centuries of Roman administration that the internal boundaries of these
islands were defined" (p. xxiv). This chapter, like those that
follow, considers all parts of the British Isles. Hence chapter two
examines the period from the dark ages to the Norman Conquest,
considering England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in turn, discussing
both their separate and intertwined developments. The next two chapters
take the story up to the mid-sixteenth century, looking at border
disputes and wars of independence in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
Welsh's employment of a concise writing style (chapter three covers
250 years in 32 pages) means that the reader is carried through the
centuries at speed, but without loss of clarity. This is clarity of
narrative rather than analysis: summaries of the interpretation in
introductions and conclusions to chapters would have aided readers'
understanding and enabling them to draw breath before the assault on the
description of subsequent centuries. Any general history will by
necessity be succinct and Welsh skillfully continues the narrative
through the sixteenth-century Reformation to the seventeenth-century
wars and the Acts of Union between Scotland and England and then Britain
and Ireland in the eighteenth century.
Throughout, Welsh has stuck to his brief of examining the four
nations and the relationships between them, but this does entail greater
discussion of the sense of difference between the nations rather than
the sense of similarity between them. The tensions, disputes,
jealousies, riots, rebellions, and risings make for more exciting
history than the agreements, consensuses, common interests, celebrations
of unity (often around the Crown), and long periods of peaceful
development of the "British" nature of the United Kingdom.
Hence, Ireland gains increasing attention in Welsh's last five
chapters. Necessarily, Welsh describes the rising of 1798, the
(successful) campaign for Catholic emancipation, the repeal movement,
the Famine of the 1840s, the demands for Home Rule, the Easter Rising
and its aftermath (culminating in the formation of the Free State), the
new constitution of 1937 and the declaration of Ireland as a republic,
and its withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1949. Scotland and Wales are
considered in similar terms, with devolution in 1998 marking the climax
of the story, as "the most important year for British
constitutional history since 1707" (p. 397). Welsh's narrative
is, therefore, one of dramatic adjustment in the relationships between
the four nations. In some ways, constitutional changes may have outpaced
the changes in identities of the inhabitants of the four nations. In
Wales in 1997, only just over 50 per cent of the electorate voted for
devolution. In Scotland, where the pro-devolution vote was overwhelming,
responses to the Moreno question, which asks people to consider the
relative strengths of their different identities of place, suggest that
while around one-third of Scots no longer consider themselves to be
British, another third consider themselves equally British and Scottish,
and the remaining third wavering between the two. This substantial
survival of Britishness in post-devolution Scotland and Wales suggests
the resilience of British national identity and re-affirms the multiple
nature of people's identities. These themes are certainly not
neglected in Welsh's account, but neither are they emphasized.
In an otherwise thorough book, there is a serious omission.
Welsh's focus is very much on the territorial relationships between
the four nations, but this is at the cost of a failure to consider
issues of immigration in the twentieth century. Alongside the
re-adjustment of the political relationship between the four nations
there has been a cultural adaptation to the arrival of different groups
of immigrants--Jewish, Irish, Asian, African, West Indian, Chinese, as
well as many others--and more importantly, their desires and those of
their sons and daughters born in Britain to accommodate identities
associated with both their previous heritage and present cultural
identities. Such issues ought not be left out of account in a history of
the four nations.
Otherwise, The Four Nations is a fine book, providing a concise and
clear history of the British Isles since the Romans, engaging the
current historiographical trends of recognizing the diversity of the
Isles to the general reader, while also continuing to accord attention
to the forces for unity across the centuries.
Paul Ward
University of Huddersfield
