BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

to power during the 1830s under the banner of popular sovereignty in the abstract. 34 The affinity
between liberal landlords and professional do-gooders, Mandler wrote, made possible a
“Victorian revolution in government . . . activist aristocratic politicians working through
ambitious civil servants under the general pressure of popular demands.” 35
Krishnan Kumar presents probably the most comprehensive survey of literature on
English national identity. 36 He reviews work by Hans Kohn, Liah Greenfeld, Gerald Newman
and Linda Colley, as well as by medieval scholars, including Patrick Wormald, all of whom find
beginnings or significant episodes of British national identity in various time periods ranging
from Alfred the Great’s ninth-century West Saxon hegemony and the idea of a gens Angloricum
to the Tudor monarchy, the English Civil War and eighteenth century Anglo-French wars. 37
Kumar dismisses all of these interpretations on the basis that they cannot all be right, although he
generally agrees with Colley’s explanation of British Protestant unity. But because Kumar sees
English identity as distinct from British, a debatable assumption, he locates English nationalism
at the end of the nineteenth century during the heyday of racial Anglo-Saxonism and the rise of
imperial Germany. 38 Consequently, Kumar’s idea of English nationalism and national identity
34 Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals,
1830-1852 (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1990), 19.
35 Ibid., 40.
36 The Making of English National Identity, cited above.
37 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), places the awakening of English nationalism during the Tudor Era,
largely on the basis of literary sources.
38 The Making of English National Identity, 224.
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