Over the past few decades, historians of eighteenth-century Britain have been encouraged to think internationally, but this pressure has come in waves. First, scholars followed the appeals of John Pocock and the example of their colleagues who studied the seventeenth century and engaged in a “New British” history. This demanded that they explore the interactions among England, Scotland, and Ireland, instead of concentrating narrowly on one of these countries. Next a “new Atlantic” history directed attention beyond the British and Irish archipelago. The islands’ past was studied in contexts that spanned the ocean from Europe to North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Most recently, scholarship has taken a continental turn. The story of Britain and Ireland has been told through their close connections with the European mainland. While acknowledging the contributions of other writers who have opened up this last field, this volume by Stephen Conway aims to become its definitive statement. The book sets out to survey all the main similarities, contacts, and shared identities that linked the British and the Irish to the other nations of Europe from 1689 to 1802.
The work is in many ways admirable. It covers a long period while giving broadly equal weight to the different parts of the century and noting subtle shifts between decades. In particular, it is open to the idea that Britain turned its attention away from Europe to its overseas empire in the 1750s, before being rudely dragged back to the continent by the French revolution. However, it also deploys cogent evidence that these changes have been overplayed in other accounts: engagement with Europe remained strong, even in the era of the American rebellion. The book also uses a vast and hugely varied range of sources, impressively ranging beyond printed material, and it is nuanced in argument. It admits, for example, that British patriotism and xenophobia could coexist with close contact with Europe and might even be caused by it. Conway notes, for instance, the horror some Grand Tourists felt on seeing the excesses of popish worship in Catholic regions or the poor standard of continental accommodation, and he presents the contempt felt by British soldiers for foreign armies when their troops fell below expected standards of professionalism. Above all, the work ranges very widely in theme. Successive chapters trace Britain and Ireland’s links to Europe via constitutional practice and thought, foreign policy, finance and trade, cultural admiration for continental refinement, intellectual and scientific conversation, religion, tourism, economic migration, maritime travel, and military service. Each section can serve as an excellent primer of the issues and evidence involved, and the work constantly throws up thought-provoking examples of interaction and European feeling.
This huge ambition, however, causes some inevitable problems. So much is covered that I felt many issues were rushed and did not receive the depth and subtlety of analysis that they may have needed. For example, British views of the French revolution, which Conway shows encapsulated decades of ambivalent British thinking about the applicability of Anglo-Saxon notions of freedom to other lands, are covered in just two—albeit intelligent—pages. To take another instance, the notion of a “Christendom” uniting Europe is correctly stressed. Yet it is seen mostly as an identity that strengthened the idea of the continent in the face of the external Muslim threat, when I would argue that it was far more powerful, and more widely used, as an internal critique of other European nations that were accused of Anti-Christianism. Yet again, there is stimulating coverage of the idea of a common “Gothic” past uniting Europeans, but the important shared heritage of the Roman Empire, and of Greek aesthetics and philosophy, is almost wholly ignored. In all these cases, the forward speed of the prose prevents the full treatment that is needed to fully balance consideration.
Perhaps more damagingly, the relentless citing of examples, of such a broad range of kinds and across so many decades, begins to undermine faith in the significance of the work as a whole. Rather than fully problematizing the links across the Channel, considering why the British and Irish might have felt compelled to make them, and what this said about their mental, political, or economic worlds, the work too often comes closer to simply cataloguing the connections. This is all its scope gives it time to do. For me (certainly unfairly but nonetheless really), this led to a simple, and I am afraid uninteresting, sense of the book’s overall conclusion. Europe, it seems, was very big in the eighteenth century. Its population was huge, varied, intelligent, often prosperous, and sometimes (although absolutely not always) hostile. It was also very close to Britain and Ireland, separated from them by only narrow seas. For all these reasons, the peoples of the islands felt they wanted, or had, to interact with continentals. Certainly, the types of links varied in importance over time, and different sorts of connection were important for different sorts of people, but we must never forget that Britain and Ireland were themselves European. As an argument this has no possibility of being wrong. But as (appropriately Austrian) philosophers would remind us, this also questions its value as insight.
