Abstract
It is not easy today to think of the English as Seeley defined them over a century ago as an imperial people, as an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nation that spread its peoples and its power over the globe. And the last half of this century has witnessed the demise of an empire whose apparent permanency was summed up by the historian D. W. Brogan in 1947:
Nevertheless, as a rule, when Divine Providence has put a part of the world under English rule, it has usually stayed, often quite willingly, in the state unto which it pleased God to call it. And contemplating this fact we are inclined to agree with Mark Twain: the English are mentioned in the Bible.
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Notes
E. T. Cook (ed.), The Empire in the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 153;
see also Bernard Porter, Britannia’s Burden, The Political Evolution of Modern Britain, 1851–1990, (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 125.
Patrick Wormald, ‘The Making of England’, History Today, 45 (1995), pp. 26–32.
Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (London: Penguin, 1962), pp. 60–1.
Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘This Royal Throne of Kings, this Scept’red Isle’: The English Realm and Nation in the Later Middle Ages (Swansea, 1983), pp. 29–30.
John Turner, Macmillan (London: Longman, 1994), p. 89.
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4.
Keith Jeffrey (ed.), An Irish Empire? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
R. B. MacDowell, Crisis and Decline: The Fate of Southern Unionists (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), p. 21.
A. E. Zimmern, The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 1.
Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 268–9, 273.
Ibid., pp. 5, 18. Even the hard-headed L. S. Amery believed by 1949 in the idea of the Commonwealth as the ‘one great world nation group’ which ‘transcends the boundaries of race and creed’ (P. S. Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 299).
Andrea Bosco, ‘National Sovereignty and Peace: Lord Lothian’s Federalist thought’, in John Turner (ed.), The Larger View: Lord Lothian and the Problem of National Sovereignty (London: Lothian Foundation, 1988), pp. 116–17.
Alex May, ‘The Round Table and the Post-War Commonwealth, 1945–1966’,in Round Table, no. 341 (1997), pp. 95–107, at p. 96.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989 edn), p. xx.
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (2nd edn, London: Verso, 1981), pp. 266, 274.
K. O. Morgan, The Peoples’ Peace: British History, 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 407–8.
R. F. Holland, European Decolonisation, 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey (London Macmillan, 1985), pp. 273, 191–2.
John A. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 11.
F. W. Hirst, Early Life and Letters offohn Morley (2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1927), vol. II, p. 181.
J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Wordsworth Dictionary of British History (Hertfordshire, 1994), preface.
John Wood (ed.), A Nation not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), p. 144.
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© 1999 D. George Boyce
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Boyce, D.G. (1999). Epilogue: The Contraction of England. In: Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27755-1_12
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