Change and decay | 5 July 2018

It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s title requires explanation. On the face of it ‘the rise and fall of the British nation’ seems a comforting enough notion, but when Edgerton deploys the term British nation he is not talking about any long perspective, but a very specific, post-imperial, nationalist project of internal reconstruction that rose and flourished between 1945 and the 1970s, only to sink back into the global system from which it had emerged. ‘Making the national explicit’ in this way, he writes,

allows us to notice the non-national features of earlier and later periods. Recognising its temporary existence allows us to also write what might seem paradoxical — a non-national national history. For while nationalism has not been important in the history of the United Kingdom, a certain methodological nationalism which assumes away the nation and nationalism overtly, but covertly makes both central, has been.