When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800, by Jonathan Scott

Abstract

Jonathan Scott’s latest book defies simple characterisation either as a work of intellectual or political history. It pursues several very important themes. In the first place, it seeks to write geography back into the articulation of political identities in England and then Britain between the reigns of Elizabeth I and George III. More specifically, it explores the shifting ways in which writers imagined or conceptualised the relationship of the land to the sea, and within that the evolution of Britain’s ‘island idea’—how, in other words, Britons came to locate their nation ‘outside Europe’ but ‘inhabiting the world’. This, Scott argues, was primarily a product of culture and politics, and to a lesser extent technology. ‘Insularity had always been a geopolitical rather than a geographic claim’ (p. 172); while it may have been ‘informed’ by geography, it was not determined by it. It was an idea which involved the recurrence of themes and tropes across the decades, but also very significant change over time; it reached its fully realised form only after the 1760s. What we see are elements combining and re-combining in different ways, but also being altered by transformed intellectual and geopolitical contexts. Secondly, Scott examines the process of English and then British state formation from the perspective of the ‘discipline of the sea’, the mastery of oceanic transport and naval defence. This is the story of how, as Scott puts it, ‘rural and agrarian English society transformed its government in a mercantile and maritime direction under the extreme pressure of war’ (p. xiii). Scott emphasises in this context the contribution of various factors, not the least important of which was that of London, that most singular of capital cities, which ensured that the path taken would be Protestant, mercantile, and imperial. An ‘outgrowth of a North Atlantic economy and culture’, London was always more than a national city, being also regional and imperial in character. Scott here quotes approvingly from Fernand Braudel to the effect that London ‘created and directed England from start to finish’ (p. 119)—a view which must depend of course on perspective for its veracity. However, the ‘discipline of the sea’ was not easily or quickly learned, proving beyond the grasp of politicians, mariners and merchants for much of the period. As importantly, it was absorbed through copying, and copying mainly from one state—the United Provinces. Here the sea features not as what set England and then Britain apart from the Continent, but rather as what set it on an Anglo-Dutch path of historical evolution, in which three ‘moments’ of ‘proximity’—1584–5, 1649–54, 1688–9—represented also moments of political transformation. The Glorious Revolution, according to this view, completed a process of Anglo-Dutch state building which had been in progress since at least the republican experiment of 1649–53.