Abstract
‘Insularity is such a fundamental determinant of British history that it is surprising how little attention historians have paid to it.’1 Since Keith Robbins wrote this in the early 1990s, a number of authors have explored this theme, most notably Kathleen Wilson in The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century.2 Yet as far as the late Victorian and Edwardian periods are concerned, Robbins’s statement still essentially holds true: there is no in-depth study that would explore the politics and culture of insularity in late-nineteenth-century Britain.3 This seems surprising when we consider how closely bound up ideas of nationhood and belonging were with island discourses during this time. Insularity was a key concept in late-nineteenth-century British self-understanding. Indeed, it would not go too far to claim that the Victorians and Edwardians were busy constructing their nation ‘as an island’.4
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Notes
Keith Robbins, ‘Insular Outsider? “British History” and European Integration’, in Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 45.
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
Robert Shannan Peckham, ‘The Uncertainty of Islands: National Identity and the Discourse of Islands in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Greece’, Journal of Historical Geography, 29 (2003), 499–15.
Ken Lunn and Ann Day, ‘Britain as Island: National Identity and the Sea’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 124–36.
Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 237–44.
Peckham, ‘The Uncertainty of Islands’, p. 505. See also Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), p. 3.
Cynthia F. Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977), pp. 38–53.
Alfred M. Gollin, ‘England Is No Longer an Island: The Phantom Airship Scare of 1909’, Albion 13, (1981), pp. 43–57.
I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
Keith M. Wilson, Channel Tunnel Visions 1850–1945: Dreams and Nightmares (London: Hambledon Press, 1994).
Paul Readman, ‘Landscape Preservation, “Advertising Disfigurement” and English Identity, c. 1890–1914’, Rural History, 12 (2001), 61–83.
Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jan Rüger, ‘Nation, Empire and Navy: Identity Politics in the United Kingdom 1887–1914’, Past & Present, 185 (2004), pp. 159–87.
James Knowles, ‘The Revived Channel Tunnel Project’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 61 (1907), pp. p. 175.
Alfred M. Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984).
Duncan Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 523–62.
Henry Newbolt, Admirals All and other Verses (London: Elkin Matthews, 1897), p. 7.
Henry Newbolt, ‘England’, in Newbolt, Island Race (Elkin Matthews: London, 1898), p. 78.
Stephen A. Royle, A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
John Robert Seeley, ‘Our Insular Ignorance’, The Nineteenth Century, 18 (1885), p. 864.
Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (London and New York, 1978), p. 239.
W. Mark Hamilton, The Nation and the Navy: Methods and Organization of British Navalist Propaganda, 1889–1914 (New York and London: Garland, 1986).
Ann Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism: Three Popular Leagues’ in Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (eds), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 66–87.
Arnd Bauerkämper, Die “radikale Rechte” in Großbritannien. Nationalistische, antisemitische und faschiste Bewegungen vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 23–73.
John Keegan, ‘The Sea and the English’, in E. E. Rice (ed.), The Sea and History (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 149.
Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Vintage, 2002).
Will Hobson, ‘Trawling for Facts’, Granta, 61 (1998), 186.
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© 2013 Jan Rüger
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Rüger, J. (2013). Insularity and Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century. In: Taylor, M. (eds) The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837–1901. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312662_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312662_8
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