Warren Johnston's National thanksgivings is an empirically rich and well-written study of political preaching in eighteenth-century Britain. The book analyses the rhetoric and arguments of 587 published sermons preached on national thanksgiving days from 1689 to 1816. Examining this unified body of source material in an unprecedentedly systematic manner, Johnston reconstructs the opinions of clergy of numerous denominations about politics, society and national identity. While his book provides a meditation on the themes of Linda Colley's Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (1992), Johnston neither straightforwardly affirms nor denies her thesis that the period saw the formation of a British identity.

After introducing his arguments, Johnston discusses general characteristics of eighteenth-century preaching and national thanksgiving days, referring to much recent literature about sermons and special worship. There follows a series of thematic chapters, discussing preachers’ ideas of providence, their comments on the political and military events inspiring thanksgiving days, and their thoughts about commerce, empire and religious and national identities. Throughout these chapters, Johnston's method is to amass quotations from the sermons, sometimes from a group preached on a particular thanksgiving day, but often ranging across the eighteenth century within a paragraph. The effect of this thematic analysis and juxtaposition of evidence from different parts of the period is to emphasise long-term continuities in the clergy's attitudes. The prominence of a few themes changed over time: ministers were more concerned about partisan division under Queen Anne than in the mid-eighteenth century; fears of Catholicism subsided a little as the period advanced. But much of the book suggests that the eighteenth century did not see substantial ideological change, but instead a gradual consolidation of pre-existing ideas about England's (or Britain's) providential favour, political and military destiny and commercial character. Perhaps it is for this reason that Johnston makes no strong claim that a new British identity emerged after 1707.

Most of the content of the sermons is unsurprising. The government called national thanksgiving days to mark military victories, peace treaties, the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 and the defeat of the Jacobite risings in 1716 and 1746. Clergy were encouraged to preach about current affairs; George i's Directions to Anglican ministers in 1714 forbade preaching on matters of state, but made an exception for thanksgiving days. On these occasions, clergy obliged the crown by celebrating British success in war and extolling the blessings of peace and commercial expansion, while warning of the dangers of political division and lamenting national sinfulness. Johnston's detailed discussion exposes some areas of disagreement. In 1713 a few Whiggish ministers criticised the peace of Utrecht; for some years after George i's accession, the same ministers condemned the Tory government that negotiated the treaty. Most of the time, however, it appears that the preachers of thanksgiving sermons largely agreed in their values and their judgements about political events.

Some of Johnston's more striking conclusions concern the sample of sermons as a whole. More than 587 sermons were published after being preached on national thanksgiving days in the period, but Johnston's sample includes the large majority of sermons and does not have any obvious biases of selection. The book contains eighty-one pages of bibliographical and biographical information about the sermons and their preachers; this section will be a valuable resource for future scholars. A remarkable 88 per cent of the 587 sermons were preached on texts from the Old Testament, with 46.5 per cent on verses from the Psalms alone. 64 per cent were preached by clergy of the Church of England; dissenters (mostly English) were overrepresented with 23 per cent of the sermons. Ministers of the Churches of Ireland (3 per cent) and Scotland (1.5 per cent) were significantly underrepresented. These are interesting findings, and it is a pity that Johnston did not pause for longer over the characteristics of his sample. I suspect, for example, that the underrepresentation of Scottish sermons is not wholly to be explained by the relatively small output of the Scottish book trade (which expanded massively during the period). Rather, it is possible that Scottish preachers and readers were less interested than their English contemporaries in thanksgiving day sermons, with their anodyne politics and limited theological content. A wider survey of sources would be required to test this hypothesis.

National thanksgivings is a British history by integration, rather than comparison. Johnston makes extensive use of his small body of Irish and Scottish evidence, but he does so to illustrate themes derived from reading the English sermons. The impression given is that Scottish and Irish clergy thought the same as their English counterparts. If this is an incorrect impression, the fault largely lies with the source material. By concentrating on thanksgiving sermons only, Johnston is not able to prove how widely the opinions he reports were shared outside England. Moreover, it is not always clear that the sermons conveyed ‘ideas of Britain’. Some of the preachers seemed unsure about which nation they were characterising, slipping between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ or referring indeterminately to ‘our nation’. In a few places Johnston is incurious about national differences. He discusses at length the thanksgiving day held to celebrate the Anglo-Scottish union, but neglects to explain that it was not appointed to be observed in Scotland. Some Britons had more reasons than others to be thankful for the union.

National thanksgivings is an important contribution to our understanding of preaching in the eighteenth century. We should be grateful for Johnston's careful and measured analysis of an important body of source material. If the ‘ideas of Britain’ he documents are mostly familiar, he nevertheless explores them with great attention to detail. There is much in this book for other historians to quote.