In this stimulating and at times provocative study, New Zealander John Pocock brings his formidable knowledge of early modern Anglophone political, legal, and historical discourse to bear on the “new British history,” a field or approach Pocock had considerable influence in creating. It contains much new material and redeploys and revises a number of the author's more recent writings.

Britain's entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 had immediate consequences for many peoples of the British Commonwealth. In countries like New Zealand and Australia, peoples in varying ways and degrees “British” in outlook and historical self-perception interpreted British engagement with Europe as, to some extent, a repudiation of Britain's imperial role and history, of the connectedness of the British and Britishness to places and peoples other than Europe and Europeans. Historiographically, “neo-Britons” responded in one of two ways: by writing histories hermetically sealed off from the presence of Britain or by employing the Pocockian or “new British” mode that explores the experiences, associations, and contestations of various peoples existing first in an “empire” archipelagic and then oceanic and now upon dispersed cultural “islands” indelibly marked by that history. Pocock is troubled by a tendency among the descendants of settler-colonial peoples to write their histories and establish their identities in blanket repudiation of the histories they carried with them, the histories of the metropolis to which they were intimately connected but within which, he suggests, they were not and are not powerless. Pocock proposes alternative histories in which settler-colonial peoples are the active bearers of, and contributors to, a broader and more complex sense of British history.

His narrative is an imperial one, to employ a term Pocock rightly finds loaded and imprecise, but it is one that predates the processes of global settler colonialism through which antipodeans like Pocock trace their cultural lineage. His narrative commences with English dominance of the Atlantic archipelago from the late Middle Ages. Of special importance is the problem of empire as it developed and was perceived under the Tudors. This was the problem of how an English polity—although formed partly in response to its relations with contiguous cultures and realms—was to develop and maintain its own modes of government at the same time as it absorbed or incorporated other kingdoms and colonies. From this developed, arguably, the central problem of British historiography: the tendency for English historiography to propose English history as something unaffected or unmodified by England's periodic interactions with other cultures and polities. Pocock makes the point that, rather than following suit and totally rejecting or ignoring the English element in their narratives, it would be useful for these encountered and encountering cultures to historicize their experiences within a larger “British” series of events and processes. In two substantial sections of the study, Pocock draws attention to and comments insightfully on recent attempts at incorporating Scottish, Irish, and North American material into this new British paradigm. This scholarship—and its demotic analogues—is invariably motivated and problematized by the generation of and reflection on group identities. Pocock claims that this process necessitates two kinds of mutually dependent and mutually problematizing histories: the autocentric and the heterocentric; the, as it were, history of a community's internal activities and experiences and the mutually informing and modifying encounters between a community and those other communities it excludes or marginalizes.

While the experiences of North American colonists culminating in the American Revolution is treated as a consequence of the Tudor imperial problematic, the late eighteenth century is also significant in marking the onset of newer, more familiar species of British imperial activity. First, the subjugation of indigenous peoples in nonsettler colonies like India and, of most significance for Pocock's new-British emphasis, the creation of colonies of settlement peopled from the Atlantic archipelago. Many of these neo-Britons were determined to maintain or reproduce British political, societal, and cultural norms in their places of settlement. Understandably, New Zealand is of special interest to Pocock, and, taking this highly specific but generally revealing case, the study's penultimate section explores the discursive encounter between neo-Britons and Maori. This is a welcome and significant elaboration of a key issue in imperial history. It is of contemporary significance for New Zealanders and for all neo-Britons encountering the legal, cultural, and historical claims of autochthonous or aboriginal fellow citizens. And it is especially pertinent, Pocock maintains, in an era in which all community, group, and national identities as historically generated and perceived are undermined or deconstructed by the imperatives of global capitalism.

The new-British history developed in response to Britain's closer affiliation with Europe. For Pocock, the impending completion of that process of absorption into Europe has a worrying potential to further marginalize or elide part of the histories and identities of neo-Britons. Moreover, he finds the process of absorption—whereby independent nations are required to give over their sovereignty to an ill-defined European superpolity—revealingly undemocratic, pointing to a possible intention to eliminate autonomous political communities and the cultural autonomy associated with the nation-state. For Pocock, this diminution of autonomy and sovereignty is reflected in and enabled by aspects of postmodern scholarship, in particular, current trends to belittle the Euro-American historiographical tradition that privileges narratives of state formation and the development of political communities. For Pocock, such narratives provide a rich resource for the construction of meaningful and sophisticated identities, and we dispense with them at our peril. History remains important; despite the fact that from it we derive complex and problematic identities, for that very reason such identities are not susceptible of ready commodification and obsolescence. This is a work that should be read by all historians of early modern Britain and its settler colonies, as well as by those concerned with the nature, future, and implications of historical inquiry and representation.