BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Welsh) imperium, one that quickly became anglicized. 43 Rodney Hilton has also argued that
before the spread of print and popular theater English chauvinism and “consciousness of a
national identity, in so far as it existed, almost certainly arose from the recognition of a
potentially hostile ‘other’” during Anglo-Scottish border wars and aristocratic wars in France
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 44
Historians have even found ancient precursors of modern national identity in the
association of cultural or ethnic identities with political states. Patrick Geary has placed the
origins of European ethnonationalist politics in late antiquity, when heterogenous populations
coalesced around successful leaders and established territorial kingdoms during the final
dissolution of the Roman Empire. Autonomous kingdoms in turn spawned regional identities,
but certainly not the homogeneously ethnic national groups claimed by nineteenth-century
historians and present day nationalists. 45 Taking a cue from Hans Kohn on the cultural
foundations of nationhood, Anthony D. Smith argues that forms of national community preceded
modern nations and nationalism by more than a millennium. 46 In Smith’s long view the three
forms of national identity—hierarchical, covenantal and republican—have respective ancient
43 Ibid., 80-81.
44 “Were the English English?” in Raphael Samuel, Patriotism: The Making and
Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols., History Workshop Series (London: Routledge,
1989) 1:41-43.
45 The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ; Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 173-74. Geary’s history of European ethnogenesis offers a
corrective to modern essentialist views of ethnic national origins (pp. 1-7).
46 The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and Republic (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2008).
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