Religion and national feeling in nineteenth-century Wales and Scotland

Abstract

Wales and Scotland were in the nineteenth century, as they have remained in the twentieth, nations within a multinational state. Where boundaries of nation and state did not coincide in nineteenth-century Europe there was commonly a surge of feeling in favour of achieving a remedy. This was equally true of nations like Italy and Germany that were divided internally by political frontiers and of nations like the Serbs and the Rumanians who were lumped together with other peoples under the rule of greater powers. There was an efflorescence of nationalism, that is, of the political assertion of nationhood. The British Isles were not immune, for Ireland was deeply affected by the new mood. Yet Wales and Scotland were largely untouched by the nationalist spirit. Only from the 188os, with the example of the Irish Home Rulers to imitate, was there any significant stirring of aspirations after self-government, and then the vanguard in both nations gave no thought to the possibility of taking independence as its goal. Wales and Scotland were remarkably quiescent when viewed in a European context.