The History Boys, an altogether enjoyable movie that one feels uncomfortable criticizing simply because it is so pleasantly liberal, represents exactly the kind of myopia about Britain that Michael Gardiner wishes to combat in The Cultural Roots of British Devolution. Set in Sheffield in the 1980s, the movie suggests a nation where the center still holds; where schooling properly leads to Oxford or Cambridge; where the pupils in the Oxbridge class are predominantly English, but incorporate mainstream-seeking South Asian and African-Caribbean representatives; and where critical thinking about British history is taught to the students merely in the guise of a good answer for an exam, or the quirkiness of the overtly gay teacher. The center holds, indeed, with the students moving on in life to take up their fair share of positions in the Establishment—school principal, another gay school teacher, black magistrate, developer, wealthy attorney—alongside their (un)fair share of the less fortunate—a member of the Gulf War dead.

A reading of Gardiner's work, however, would lead a viewer to wonder about this presumed, and naturalized, center. It might lead us to turn the War Memorial scene, where the young teacher leaves the students contemplating the historical “truths” associated with what they have been taught about the First World War (the teacher's rendering of the war perhaps fitting with the imperialist vision of a Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War), into a pivotal moment leading the students to reconsider their own class, racial, and gendered locations and the so-called truths that they have been fed about these. The black student might have begun to wonder about what was happening in Brixton, the Muslim student might have begun to contemplate the colonial roots of and routes to his own presence in England, and the gay student might have read a thing or two about the Stonewall Rebellion in San Francisco. For Gardiner, “Britishness is … a state reliant on continuous cultural effort not to expose its division” (11), and he would no doubt see The History Boys as just another part of this cultural enterprise.

What is so compelling about Gardiner's Cultural Roots is that it isn’t merely about the empire striking black and the black striking back; it isn’t just about the empire as something “over there” in India or in Africa. Gardiner finds empire written into the very construction of the nation-state and so the roots of devolution are there too at the very beginning. What occurs in Scotland and Wales, or Brixton for that matter, is anticolonial in nature and linked intellectually and politically to other nationalist movements. Situating devolution in this way, as an anticolonialist impulse emanating from within the British Isles, provides a very illuminating perspective on what is generally considered a reaction of racial subordinates abroad to their white imperial overlords.

Gardiner takes the reader through the different cultural elements of the devolution impulse, from its origins in the 1707 Act of Union down through Norman Tebbitt, Notting Hill Carnivals, and Trainspotting, to what he sees as the present need to define post-British national cultures. The Scots take on a prominent role throughout, providing fodder for the imperialist impulse from James Thomson's “Rule, Britannia” and the many Scots dispersed throughout the empire to those endeavoring to “recover” a nationalist identity from the imperial confection that they, partly, have wrought. As such, Gardiner posits the Anglo-Scottish relationship as the key to understanding both the nature of the union and its impending breakup. Whether or not Scotland deserves such a position of centrality as a mover in the process of empire and devolution is open to question—recovering nationalist identities can be prone to excess—but it is certainly true that looking at Scotland in this light provides a great deal of insight into the nation-state's imperial constitution, or lack thereof.

My own favorite of these chapters features a discussion of the peculiarities of Scottish education, which turns out to be not so peculiar. As a student at Edinburgh University in the late 1970s, the differences between the Scottish system and the English one were very evident to me, but growing up in the English one made it seem like the “natural” order, one from which the Scots seemed to have deviated. Gardiner, however, very cleverly shows how the inverse is the case, linking the Scots and their educational theories to the continent and mentioning connections to those other devolutionists across the pond in America. The Scottish system may have seemed quirky to the uninformed, but in actuality the shared enlightenments of Scotland and America nurtured systems of education that were more open to ideas and more aware of social and public needs than the English utilitarian, empiricist, and individualistic model ironically “emblematic of an over-adaptation to Britain” among its many Scots’ promoters (82).

The earlier chapters appealed to me more than the later ones, owing to the fact they more closely resembled intellectual history than the later ones, which seemed closer to Cultural Studies. Call me a British empiricist for my failure to relate to the later chapters to the same extent as I did the earlier ones, but they are very heavily laden with cultural references, and if one missed one of the referents, whether it be to the Sex Pistols, Jah Wobble, or Joy Division (and sitting in the United States is clearly not so good a vantage point as Japan, where Gardiner seems to reside), then the point could easily be lost. Just as I chose to use an example from a movie that the reader may not have seen, his point therefore perhaps remaining somewhat opaque (and apologies if that is the case), Gardiner skips through so much material in such a short work that it sometimes detracts from the excellent points that he is making.

Never lost in the wealth of material on British culture is the fact that this book is a manifesto of sorts, advocating devolution and supporting this process by providing historical roots for it to build upon—naturalizing the process of devolution as a counterpoint to the naturalized imperial state with its own false histories. Rather than trying to Anglicize the immigrant in the ways imagined in The History Boys, for example, giving them all a topping Oxbridge education, Gardiner would suggest that it is more important to recognize that they already are a part of national history and culture, and that their fragments require not absorption but recognition. Of course, Gardiner notes, there will be those who fear such impulses, as they will threaten “Britain,” with its “good-humoured procrastination” and benign “gradualist democratic traditions” (177). But, for those under the imperialist yoke good humor and democratic traditions have been less easily discernible. Moreover, Gardiner asserts, being combined together in a Great Britain and allowed to posture in either a Thatcherite or Blairite fashion has enabled otherwise harmless and civilized nations like England, Scotland, and Wales to remain a threat to world peace.