Volume 36, Number 9 · June 1, 1989
The Raj Quartet
By Christopher Hill
The British Isles: A History of Four Nations
by Hugh Kearney
Cambridge University Press, 236 pp., $29.95
This timely book aims to correct many popular errors of which historians, of the British Isles at least, are guilty. Professor Kearney has taught at universities in Ireland, England, Scotland, and the US, so he is well equipped for his subject. The first error is to speak of 'England' when we mean 'Great Britain.' I am ashamed to say that I have committed this solecism in my time. A second error is to assume that the territories which we today call 'England,' 'Wales,' 'Ireland,' 'Scotland' always were England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. 'Later national boundaries were extended backwards into a past where they had little or no relevance,' Kearney writes, 'with the consequence that earlier tribal or pre-national societies were lost to sight.' A consequent error is to assume that the unity of each of these nations, in the form that it ultimately took, is good in itself, and that all history was inevitably moving in that direction.
Review, 2992 words
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