In my second year of University, reading for a Bachelor’s in History, I took a course on Czech history. As a case-study of the nineteenth century’s burgeoning European nationalism, it was paradigmatical – the reading list was one of the most wide ranging of that year. Some of the key texts on nationalism, the rise of, were fascinating to me, someone who, whilst identifying as British, and more specifically English (and even more specifically, a suburban Londoner…), has a ridiculously mixed European heritage (being of the tribe, it’s not surprising). Identity has been an undercurrent of my life – growing up in a very mixed race suburb, going to first a faith primary, then a secular grammar, and finally a pretty ethnically homogenous University, I have experienced what it feels like to be in different mixes of people and to wonder how you’re perceived.
Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson took this to another level, to use a hideous cliché. EH is one of the greatest historians I’ve ever read, but Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” was a whirlwind tour on how Nations and Nationalism fit in with Identity, Class and Other Things (lots of Issues and Themes there…) As a book, it’s a tough one – his prose isn’t always crystal clear; as an historian, he assumes that you know his area of expertise (South-East Asia and South America) as well as he does.
However, once I’d got through it a couple of times, my neurons were firing more than they ever had. I had, as the Greeks say, a Megale Idea. The question was “why didn’t England/Britain have a revolution in the 18th and/or 19th century like a large amount of the rest of Europe?” and then “hold on! We had a short-lived one in the 17th”. Further to this, my overview of medieval economic history that year highlighted two things – the Hundred Years War and the Peasants’ Revolt. I connected the dots – perhaps the Hobsbawm and Anderson school of thought that showed a consistency of conditions for nation building, nationalistic thinking and revolutions could be applied to the long 14th century in England.
I wrote a dissertation on that idea, and I lost count of the amount of times I read “Imagined Communities” and Hobsbawm’s “Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: programme, myth, reality” during my third year. Whilst I came to the standard conclusion of a history student (possibly, sort of, you could make that argument guv’nor, to an extent), I did see a definite echo of conditions in 18th and 19th century central Europe with medieval England. Precisely what, you can ask me for a copy of the dissertation…
