Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?

Abstract

THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE imposed England's rule over a diverse collection of territories, some geographically contiguous, others joined to the metropolis by navigable seas. The various peoples who inhabited those territories were not all treated alike by English colonists, who extended their power by military aggression. At first, a commission to evangelize pagan populations had legitimated English expansion; subsequently, a cultural mission to civilize the barbarian maintained the momentum of conquest; later still, an ideology of domination and a historical mythology together encouraged further English migration and the resettlement of native peoples on the conquered lands. Although the English did export their governing institutions, the exigencies of colonial rule demanded that control of the outlying territories be left in the hands of absentee proprietors or entrusted to a creolized governing elite. That elite in time grew to demand its independence, and appropriated legislative institutions to affirm its autonomy. The English nonetheless remained the cultural arbiters and commercial masters of what remained formally an Anglo-British empire, over which they steadfastly asserted their sovereignty. They had acquired this empire haphazardly and with little determining forethought. Within two centuries of its inception, it had disintegrated, apparently for good. Failure to enforce institutional uniformity, incomplete assimilation of subject peoples, the cultural estrangement of the English settlers from metropolitan norms, and monarchical indifference all conspired to bring about its collapse. Even though such- a narrative of colonial expansion, cultural divergence, and imperial implosion might seem to fit that of the Atlantic empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it in fact describes the British empire that reached its apogee in the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), not the one reconstituted under George III (1760-1820). Its dependencies were not the colonies of North America, the western Atlantic, and the Caribbean but rather Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, the constituent kingdoms and principalities of the northwest European archipelago.1 Yet the very fact that the structure of this medieval narrative so