Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century

Essays in Honour of Keith Robbins

Frances Knight, Stewart J. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409451488
• eBook ISBN: 9781317067238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The British state between the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century was essentially a Christian state. Christianity permeated society, defining the rites of passage - baptism, first communion, marriage and burial - that shaped individual lives, providing a sense of continuity between past, present and future generations, and informing social institutions and voluntary associations. Yet this religious conception of state and society was also the source of conflict. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought limited toleration for Protestant Dissenters, who felt unable to worship in the established Church, and there were challenges to faith raised by biblical and historical scholarship, science, moral questioning and social dislocations and unrest. This book brings together a distinguished team of authors who explore the interactions of religion, politics and culture that shaped and defined modern Britain. They consider expressions of civic consciousness in the expanding towns and cities, the growth of Welsh national identity, movements for popular education and temperance reform, and the influence of organised sport, popular journalism, and historical writing in defining national life. Most importantly, the contributors highlight the vital role of religious faith and religious institutions in the understanding of the modern British state.

PART I
Religion and Identity

Chapter 1
Defining Britain and Britishness: An Historian’s Quest. An Appreciation of Keith Robbins

Bruce Collins

I

In a disquisition on British intellectual life in the twentieth century, Stefan Collini regretted the decline in the role of public intellectuals and noted in particular the absence of historians from such luminaries’ ranks. Although he stressed the readiness of historians to address wider audiences than academic specialists, he devoted extended attention only to A.J.P. Taylor, whose infatuation with generalizing and popularizing, and concern to entertain and to shock, demonstrated the dangers ensnaring eager habitués of the world of the tabloids and the sound media.1 Collini’s work raises the question of whether historians pay sufficient attention to the impact of each others’ work. While there has been long-standing interest in the legacy of the most polemical and best-selling historians and while recent attention has been accorded some historians’ work as public intellectuals, such interest is relatively narrowly focused.2 This is because the role of public intellectual has been defined beyond the reach of virtually all practising historians. Collini offers a definition which requires high academic standing in a chosen discipline, access to and influence over a wide public, a capacity to say important and interesting things to that audience and a lack of prescriptive attachments to other causes or organizations.3 An obvious response is that Collini’s model, by setting too specific a threshold, has excluded many practitioners who seek to influence significant but not sizable audiences, not least the sixth-formers and university students who form the overwhelming majority of those spending large amounts of time reading the subject, as well as those who teach them. Without ever reaching mass readerships, historians constantly produce books of synthesis and reinterpretation, as well as more accessible works of research, which are intended to shape opinion. In a world in which we learn to influence as much by nudge as by exhortation, by networks as by rallies and by nuance as by grand theory, sustained engagement with small but educated audiences represents a far from negligible role for the historian. If allowed thus to consider the role of public intellectual more expansively and more generously, I would offer an appreciation of the work of Keith Robbins as an example of the wider and unremitting efforts of professional historians to engage in public persuasion and opinion-leadership. By moving beyond the world of the media don, it is possible to suggest that the work of professional historians relevant to ‘public’ discourse is more pervasive and even more impressive than Collini asserts.

Keith Robbins has dedicated himself to disseminating a public understanding of history. Apart from serving as editor of History for ten years and then as president of the Historical Association, he has edited numerous historical series, including Profiles in Power and the Longman History of Religion in Britain.4 But the core of his achievement has been a dozen books, stretching from a substantial study of the Munich crisis published in 1968 to a major examination of the Christian Churches in the British Isles during the twentieth century, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, and a substantial political history of the world since 1945, published in late 2012. From the very beginning, he has consistently tackled major controversies and wide-ranging themes. Yet despite the sheer breadth of his interests and range of his analyses, this corpus contains at least four recurrent concerns: defining Britain and Britishness; understanding Britain’s international role, especially with regard to Empire and to Europe; locating processes of historical change in a framework of institutional decision-making; and explaining the nature of religious activity and faith in a British context. By exploring these themes, it is possible to make a case for the educative role of the professional historian as an interpreter of how contemporary societies emerged from and interacted with their pasts.

II

Robbins was one of the first historians to place the heterogeneity of the United Kingdom at the centre of his analyses.5 Robbins reflected most fully on Britishness and the disparate and elusive ingredients from which the United Kingdom was ‘blended’ in his Ford Lectures, published in 1988 as Nineteenth-Century Britain: Integration and Diversity, and in Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (1998). The latter book’s first chapter sketched the mediaeval interactions of the four countries, and their complex internal politics and governance. He then showed how such contrasting and unstable entities were pulled together by political ambition, military initiative and dynastic accident and aggrandisement. For much of his Ford Lectures, he discussed and documented a wide variety of nineteenth-century interaction and integration, involving culture, religion, business, politics, education, sport and patriotism. While fully recognizing diversity, he argued for the creation of networks across all these aspects of British life. In many respects, integration, sometimes seen as a by-product of the imperial adventure imposed by the landed establishment through its control of the state, became the work of the professional and commercial middle classes. The universities and the formation of professional elites through higher education received particular emphasis, and indirectly provided an alternative to the overwhelming weight given by Ernest Gellner to mass literacy in the formation of national consciousness. Nor did integration flow simply from Anglo-Saxon expansionism. From the injection of new men into England’s intellectual and political life to the introduction from Scotland of such innovations as golf, chartered accountancy and Lipton’s tea, the direction of influence was neither one way nor easy to categorize.6

Although the creation of a more closely integrated cultural, economic and political entity progressed strongly in the nineteenth century, integration was neither complete nor consistent. An earlier attempt at general synthesis – The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870–1975 – admittedly began each of its four chronological sections by assessing the state of the United Kingdom as a whole and by sketching its external relations, particularly with the Empire and later Commonwealth and with Europe. But one distinctive feature at the time of its publication, in 1983, was the separate attention given to conditions in the United Kingdom’s four component countries. The Eclipse of a Great Power begins with the four countries’ diversity in the 1870s and Nineteenth-Century Britain emphasizes how diversity remained vigorous even in areas where closer collaboration or interaction flourished; for example, missionary activity remained the responsibility of the separate Churches, and football of both types was organized by separate English, Scottish and Welsh boards.7 Powerful particularisms meant that the loosening of ties and the reassertion of Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities from the 1970s can readily be accommodated within Robbins’ framework. He begins The Eclipse of a Great Power with a discussion of difference and he ends Great Britain with reflections on ‘regions and nations’ which conclude that ‘The matter of Britain … after 2,000 years, was still under debate’.8 This emphasis on the importance and yet elusiveness of national identities has larger implications. When, at the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington’s notions about an impending clash between Islam and Christian-Judaic ‘civilizations’ were being developed, Robbins injected a cautionary scepticism. He stressed that 160 of the world’s 190 countries in 1998 experienced ethnic problems and that contemporary trends were part of the perennial clash and convergence of civilizations. If the quest for larger ideological underpinnings to global interactions had taken new directions, there remained no basis for worth-while predictions in a global society riddled by ethnic and regional conflicts.9

Robbins’ approach to explaining Britishness is far less schematic than most modelling of the nationalist imperative would require. He acknowledges the force of legacies and myths from the past without prioritizing them. He documents the role of language and education without accepting Ernest Gellner’s insistence upon their formative influence. He allows for the role of the state and ruling elites in propagating ideas and images of national identity without giving their agency the manipulative and causative power ascribed to them by Eric Hobsbawm.10 He insists that Britishness has been a phenomenon of sporadic rather than continuous intensity, and declines to characterize it as demotic or delusional or diversionary. His approach describes the many ways in which divergent groups have developed and expanded a sense of Britishness according to widely varying opportunities and circumstances. Middle-class professionals, through career progression and personal ambition as much as through pressure group activity, have been as effective in generating a sense of Britishness and a complex of ‘national’ networks and organizations as have any ruling elites intent on heading off popular political protest or discontent by fostering a false consciousness of national identities and aspirations. Indeed, the landed political elite remained ambivalent about the development of Britishness. If Lord Rosebery in 1882 warned Scots that ‘the swift amalgamating power of railways … the centralisation of Anglicizing empire … the compassionate sneer of higher civilization’ had eroded Scottish identity, Lord Salisbury, during his premierships in the period 1885–1902, simply sought, without any triumphalism, to steer the country in the Conservative interest through turbulent times.11 No programme to define or redefine Britain emerged in those years as an upper-class strategy to diminish the attractions, real or putative, offered by radicals, trade unionists or socialists to promote internationalism or ‘regionalism’.

Much theorizing about nationalism has played down the impact of international competition upon the process of defining nations. Robbins’ concern to explore international relations and the ways in which international developments shaped Britain enables him to provide a more complex and ever-shifting depiction of how Britishness should be seen as part of a continuing and often volatile process of self-definition and redefinition. A persistent theme has been the relationship with France and continental Europe more generally. Both a long-term and a short-term view of British history supports the conclusion that decisions involving international alignments or alliances typically hinged on political calculations which flowed from transient influences and objectives. Robbins shows how inconsistent and indeed malleable official attitudes were. Even mediaeval monarchs waxed and waned in the importance they attached to ruling specific tracts or expansive territories in France. It was natural immediately after the Second World War for the British to entertain a low regard for European political aptitudes and institutions, as well as for the Europeans’ capacity to organize themselves into effective defensive alliances. Equally naturally, the British government saw Britain as the only reliable ally through whose good offices the United States might be able to exert influence over Western Europe. Some analysts in the 1940s even entertained the notion that Britain could offer an ideal synthesis of both the capitalist and socialist ingredients that were applicable not just to post-war Europe but also to the United States, which had been lifted only by war-related spending out of the depression of the 1930s. By 1961–63, however, membership of the Common Market had become a vital means by which Macmillan’s Conservative government hoped to modernize Britain itself. Twenty years later, the European Community had a quite different ideological role as an open field upon which a newly invigorated and entrepreneurial Britain was to flex its commercial and manufacturing muscle. But in the 1990s the European project degenerated, in the eyes of sceptics, into a politically centralizing bureaucratic juggernaut. As recently as 1983, the Labour party pledged to withdraw from the European Community, whereas ten years later it was the Conservative government which was virtually torn apart by the ratification of the Maastricht tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I RELIGION AND IDENTITY
• PART II CONFLICT AND IDENTITY
• Select Bibliography of the Publications of Keith Robbins
• Index