Volume 39, Number 19 · November 19, 1992
How Britain Made It
By Keith Thomas
Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837
by Linda Colley
Yale University Press, 429 pp., $35.00
The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
by Peter Linebaugh
Cambridge University Press, 484 pp., $44.95
The ancient Greeks used to debate whether the polis was natural or artificial. Nowadays, as states fall apart and boundaries are redrawn almost daily, it is not only the devotees of postmodernist jargon who accept that political societies are 'invented' or 'constructed.' States are not the spontaneous and inevitable product of 'natural frontiers,' or 'national character,' but emerge from conflict and are maintained by a mixture of physical force and a carefully nurtured myth of national identity. A nation is what Benedict Anderson famously called 'an imagined political community.'[1] In any such community there will inevitably be some groups who benefit from this arrangement and readily identify themselves with the prevailing myth, just as there will be others who take a subordinate place and feel estranged. The political unions will cohere so long as those in the former category are more powerful than those in the latter.
Review, 4073 words
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