Abstract
The United Kingdom began life as a religious creation. Protestantism was the state’s civic religion, and providentialism its moving civic philosophy. The sense of the British as a chosen people has survived through many recreations – through imperialism, a state founded on social citizenship and a state with a global mission based on a special role in the Pax Americana. The post–Second World War settlement fused social citizenship and a global military role. But the crisis of the 1970s, and the decay of British military power, destroyed social citizenship and undermined global pretensions.
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Notes
- 1.
Colley 1996: 19–20.
- 2.
Ibid: 19.
- 3.
Quoted, Seeley 1883/1971: 109.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
On the comparative point, Burleigh 2005: 263 and 271.
- 7.
Davies 1999: 752.
- 8.
On Catholics especially, Bossy 1979: 295–363, but also Bossy’s stress on the incorporation of Catholicism into the tradition of dissent.
- 9.
Joyce 2013: 46.
- 10.
Notably ‘Recessional’ (1897) and ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’, the latter from Kipling’s great reimagining of British history, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906).
- 11.
On the influence of Seeley on figures like Joseph Chamberlain see Gross’s introduction to the 1975 edition of Seeley.
- 12.
The first quotation is from p. 66; the two others from p. 12.
- 13.
Ibid: 231.
- 14.
‘Our Lady of the Snows’; Canadian Preferential Tariff 1897.
- 15.
Hintze 1902/1975: 177.
- 16.
‘Empire and Liberty’ was adopted as the motto of the Primrose League, founded in 1883 to commemorate Disraeli’s ideas.
- 17.
Anderson 1991: 187–206.
- 18.
Friel 1981.
- 19.
- 20.
Consider Kipling’s extraordinary anti-semitic poem Gehazi, 1913.
- 21.
On which, Searle 1971/1990.
- 22.
Norman 1976: 279–363.
- 23.
- 24.
On this centralism Sharpe 1982.
- 25.
Howell 1986: 7, and Howell’s book for a brilliant account of the lost tradition of Connolly, MacLean and Wheatley.
- 26.
Cowling 1971. Any reader familiar with Cowling will recognise my debt to him, especially in my emphasis on the importance of statecraft.
- 27.
- 28.
On the latter Bulpitt 1986.
- 29.
McGuinness 1985/2013.
- 30.
Cannadine 2002: 94.
- 31.
Lycett 1999: 571 and 534.
- 32.
Butler and Stokes 1974 is the canonical study.
- 33.
Authoritatively described in Middlemas 1979: 174ff.
- 34.
- 35.
Edgerton 2005 for the authoritative account of this.
- 36.
The phrase is Edgerton’s 1991.
- 37.
This draws on Moran 1986: 9–28.
- 38.
- 39.
Mackintosh 1962: 376–7, 469 and 542 on Hankey and the Secretariat.
- 40.
Shils 1972: 144–6.
- 41.
Collini 2006: 113 has fun at the expense of the metropolitan parochialism of the BBC early talks policies; and figures on radio receivership, p. 437.
- 42.
For a summary view, Woodward 2004.
- 43.
Marshall 1951.
- 44.
Bagehot 1867/1963: 82–5.
- 45.
Bullock 1983: 614–82 for this.
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Moran, M. (2017). The State Created. In: The End of British Politics?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49965-9_2
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