Roundtable: Four Nations

Abstract

Abstract Nations have long since preoccupied historians. Histories of how nations came to be, how they persisted, and how nations were unmade are innumerable. As a political unit of analysis, the nation has fascinated and divided. On the one hand, histories of the nation have traced the origins of particular nation states, analysing how a large body of people becomes united within a geographic territory through a shared language, a shared identity, and a shared culture. On the other hand, such histories have been criticized for reifying the nation-state, stressing the majority over the minority, and ultimately for obfuscating differences. The nation as a structure can indeed serve the needs of the ruling establishment to create a governing society. How then, can historians retain the nation as a unit of analysis without for example valorizing England in histories of the UK? Why is it so often that in histories of Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are mentioned as a comparable case and not the focus itself? Is it possible to ensure that histories of the British Isles reject and refuse implicit hierarchies that routinely prioritize one nation over other nations? Fundamentally, is it even worthwhile to study the nation instead of, for example, focusing on specific gendered groups, or ethnic communities or labour movements for instance? By focusing on thematic experiences rather than the nation-state can historians avoid inadvertently reproducing structural inequality in twenty-first-century Britain?