Editor's Introduction

This issue is largely devoted to a special section on “Ethnicity, Nation, and Citizenship.” European historians have long been interested in these problems, contrasting notions of citizenship based on blood with those based on birth and developing such concepts as the “imagined community.”1 As in other empires, the task of creating the “imagined community” of the nation has been complicated by the multinational character of the kingdom, and ethnic, linguistic, local, and religious loyalties could sit uneasily with needs of the national state. But British citizenship has always had its peculiarities, resting on both blood and birth. These themes have increasingly preoccupied British historians in the last few decades and have often appeared in the pages of the Journal of British Studies.2

We hope to have many future special sections, and special issues, on such thematic concerns that span the centuries or that focus on a particular time period. The current section came about through serendipity, as the theme emerged from articles that came over the transom, and subsequently the editor solicited a few more. However, all the articles have gone through the same anonymous rigorous review and editing process; the readers did not know which articles were solicited.

The medieval English state, of course, was formed out of a congerie of Anglo-Saxon invaders, Norman invaders, and Celtic inhabitants of the border territories. Paul Dalton's article, “The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century,” shows the fragility of that creation. In the twelfth century, the Normans were acquiring an identity as English, but their “other” was the Celtic peoples whom they feared would rise against them. Geoffrey of Monmouth used the Prophecies of Merlin to warn the Normans that if they did not mend their ways, they would lose their rulership over England.

The Reformation played an important role in cementing allegiance to the state by creating a national church, but tensions remained around the issue of language. Conversion to the Church of England depended on the ability of priests to communicate with their congregations, as Gianetta Hayes demonstrates in her well-researched article, “Ordination Ritual and Practice in the Welsh-English Frontier, c. 1540–1640.” The Church was able to find some Welsh-speaking clergymen, thus helping the Reformation succeed in Wales. Hayes ends her article with a brief contrast with Ireland, where the colonizing Protestants rarely tried to convey reformed beliefs to the Irish in their own language. Reaching across the boundaries of language to proselytize for religion may have created a stronger union between England and Wales (and eventually Scotland), unlike Ireland's always ambiguous status.

As the English state consolidated and stabilized by the sixteenth century, questions of subjecthood and citizenship became more important, but tensions emerged between local loyalties and the exigencies of the state. In the English context, the idea of the citizen derived from the rights of freemen in a city, rights based on descent. But subjecthood depended on allegiance to a king, who could grant the rights of citizenship (as in citizen of the nation) through naturalization. The legal precedents for English citizenship were based, rather ambiguously, both on jus soli, or being born on English soil, and jus sanguinis, or descent from an English person. Calvin's Case (1608), which concerned the citizenship rights of Scots at a time when the thrones of England and Scotland were newly united, seemed to settle the matter by stating that citizenship was based on the place of birth.3

Jake Selwood's important article, “English Born Reputed Strangers: Birth and Descent in Seventeenth-Century London,” demonstrates that matters were more complicated. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century citizens of the City of London insisted that citizenship must derive from English birth and descent; they did not want even the English-born sons of foreign merchants to acquire the freedom of the city. However, the state had a different idea of citizenship and subjecthood. It wanted to naturalize those aliens who would be useful to the state; subjecthood therefore depended on sovereignty and national interest rather than an inborn privilege. The City of London insisted on its own local definition of citizenship based on descent long after Calvin's Case. This xenophobic notion of citizenship, combined with a robust assertion of local rights against the national state, continued long after, most notably in John Wilkes's London-based agitation for parliamentary reform and against the Scots in the 1760s and 1770s.

This tradition expanded as white settlers fanned out across the Empire. In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada white settlers vigorously demanded democracy for themselves while expressing hostility to rights for indigenous people.4 In his fascinating article, “Imperialism, Atheism, and Race: Charles Southwell, Old Corruption, and the Maori,” John Stenhouse recounts the life of the irrepressible Charles Southwell, who began his career as a well-known atheist and radical in mid-nineteenth-century England. Driven out of both England and Australia for his atheism, he ended up in New Zealand. There, he began to campaign for the rights of ordinary white settlers against the elite Anglican establishment and Methodist missionaries who supposedly coddled the Maori. For Southwell, democracy for white settlers could triumph only if Maori rights were suppressed.

In the United Kingdom, ethnic prejudices persisted, especially against the Irish. In her article, “Wars among Savages: Homicide and Ethnicity in the Victorian United Kingdom,” Carolyn Conley ingeniously demonstrates the extent of this prejudice by contrasting the judicial statistics of violent offenses with newspaper editorializing. English, Scottish, and Welsh newspaper commentaries persistently blamed foreigners for violent crime, but this stigma fell most heavily on the Irish. Despite the stereotype of the Irish as excessively violent, crime rates were much lower in Ireland than in England, but newspapers tried to ignore or explain away this fact. Indeed, Irish defendants were much more likely to be convicted than English defendants for similar crimes.

In the final article, we turn to the question of gender and citizenship. Gender trumped the principle that British citizenship derived from birth when a British woman married an alien. Starting in 1791, she lost her citizenship as a result.5 Laura Tabili's powerful article, “Outsiders in the Land of Their Birth: Exogamy, Citizenship and Identity in War and Peace,” demonstrates the tensions between local and national definitions of citizenship and illuminates broader questions of gender and nation building. She focuses on South Shields, where many British women married German or Scandinavian seamen and other migrants. During World War I, fearing that they would be treated as enemy aliens, many of these women had to apply to be naturalized back into their birthright status as citizens. To prove their citizenship, they elicited references from neighbors, coworkers, and relatives, revealing a local notion of belonging that rested on different criteria than that of the national state.

At the same time that we wish to use special sections and issues to focus on specific problems, most of our articles will continue to stand alone as excellent work that may not fit in these categories. One example is our lead article, John Dwyer's remarkable “Ethics and Economics: Bridging Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations.” Dwyer argues that Adam Smith was not a capitalist ideologue, contrary to popular belief. Smith sometimes criticized commerce as corrupting and admired the virtuous agriculture of improving Scottish owners of small estates. Known as the prophet of individualism, Smith, as Dwyer argues, in fact focused on the “moral community.” However, by 1790, Smith became more and more skeptical about the power of public opinion and the integrity of small capitalists. This article eloquently argues for this revisionist view of Smith and the pessimistic outlook of his later years.