Jeremy Black evidently wants us all to resist presentist perspectives in the understanding history, but it is clearly the current debates over the fate of the United Kingdom, both in terms of its place in Europe (Brexit) and of the relationship of its component parts, that motivated the book's production. Moreover, whatever strictures he puts before them, readers of English Nationalism will no doubt approach it through lenses colored by their own perspective on those very debates. Black is also no stranger to the writing of sweeping historical surveys, and this compact book is another such broad synthetic survey, directed at an audience wider than academics: it is an accessible read. But the desire for accessibility has come at the cost of some analytical rigor: although evidently aware of their complexity, Black skates briskly over the debates on the origins of nations and nationalism, the meaning of identity, and the relationship of nation to state in such a facile way that scholars with any familiarity with these issues will find this book deeply unsatisfying.

The core arguments of the text can be briefly summarized. Black maintains that English national identity is not a recent construction, but instead is one that can be traced back to the founding of an English state prior to the Norman Conquest. The “deep history” of this Englishness is suggestive of a distinctive English nationalism that has been complicated, however, by the multiplicity of other national identities that emerged over the course of the past thousand years in the British Isles, and especially by the complication of an Anglo-Scottish monarchy in the seventeenth century and an overarching British identity in the eighteenth. Literature and other cultural manifestations of national awareness and feeling are frequently deployed (including good discussions of religion), but the core of each chapter's discussion is almost always the state and ways in which the state and its agents understood or deployed national rhetoric and policies.

The emergence and success of other nationalisms within the British Isles since the nineteenth century—and particularly the Scottish example in the last fifty years—all generally based on hostility to the English, has led to a revival of Englishness as both a distinct identity and as a political force. If this recent Englishness is rather inchoate as political nationalism, it is so because there is no longer a distinctive English state at which to direct national loyalty; it is a potent source of popular feeling (mostly anger) despite that lacking. Black is careful not to claim that this revived Englishness is the only motivation driving “Leave” supporters in the Brexit referendum. Indeed, the chapter on “populism”—despite not providing any kind of definition—is salutary in its careful discussion of popular motivations while also suggesting “populism” as crucial context for the Brexit debate.

The text is full of caveats, careful expositions of exceptions, and qualifications about the reach and, indeed, the changing content of national consciousness over time. Conceptually the book is catholic, but the short discussion of key terms in the introduction does no justice at all to the huge body of analytical literature on the nation, nationalism, national consciousness, or national identity—in terms both of theory and of the literature that applies those concepts to Britain itself. “National identity” and “Englishness” are thrown around with particular promiscuity as if simply deploying the words in a variety of quite different historical contexts demonstrate the existence of something more concretely “national” and continuous than an awareness of the political geography of the English state.

At the outset, Black guards against the raiding of history in the service of nationalist mythology. And yet in arguing for the relevance of England's “deep history,” Black (consciously or not) is offering us a history not just of nationalism, but one infused by it—albeit of a liberal variety. If consciousness of “being English” or that “England exists” (194) over the thousand-year span of the book was limited to certain populations at different times, imagined and reimagined according to historical contingency and circumstance, and always complicated by dynastic, regional, linguistic, religious, and other social identifications—which in effect is what the book quite reasonably shows—then why should we accept that the “deep history” of the English state is in any way relevant to more recent evocations of English national consciousness? Black even concedes as much in his preface with the assertion that while Scottish nationalists make use of the deep past, like the battle Bannockburn (1314)—the frame of reference for current English nationalism is much more recent and ironic, such as Britain's “finest hour” in 1940.

The point for Black seems to be that contemporary Englishness should be based, or find meaning in, England's deeper past. But that is a historian's wish: as historians we all want our subject matter to be found relevant and important. More particularly, in the way this book is structured and presented it is an English nationalist's wish. For it is implicit, and sometimes explicit (177), throughout the book that Black views the nation-state as a strong, welcome, and even necessary basis for group identity, and the English currently lack such a nation-state. And that is a proposition that many historians and analysts of nationalism will find deeply problematic—regardless of what they think of the current Brexit crisis.