BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

domestic politics and foreign policy. Colley provided a comprehensive analysis of early British
unity and identity in addition to her theme of French othering, including the role of the monarchy
as a rallying point, a vibrant press, the cults of Parliament and commerce, the providence of
military success, social clubbing and the expansion of empire. 26 Her focus on Protestant
solidarity against a threatening and denigrated Catholic French other, however, applies more to
the transition from earlier centuries of religious wars than to the rise of political patriotism during
the later eighteenth century. Besides the growing toleration that preceded the Catholic Relief Act
in 1829, Colley herself had exposed the limited utility of Protestantism for French othering in
British radical support for the French-assisted American Revolution. 27 P. J. Marshall has further
contended that, regardless of divided opinion on American definitions of universal freedom, most
Britons had by then identified with imperial and maritime power as a guarantor of British
political liberty, with Protestantism and providence providing supplementary moral
justification. 28
The argument for primarily political origins of British national identity has found support
in the work of Peter Furtado, who traced political patriotism as grounds for criticizing
government to the early Stuart period. Furtado also saw in the symbolic shift from Elizabethan
Gloriana to post-union Britannia a secular association with power politics and maritime
26 Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, 36, 44, 50-51, 56-61, 90, 94.
27 See “Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Raphael Samuel, ed.,
Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols., History Workshop
Series. (London: Routledge, 1989), 1:181, 183.
28 “Empire and British Identity: The Maritime Dimension,” in David Cannadine, ed.,
Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1760-c. 1840 (Basingstoke;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48, 51.
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