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History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanization in Two British Cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

J. G. A. Pocock
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Extract

      When we were a little tiny colony of Britain
      (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
      Our feckless history began to be written
      (And the waves break busily night and day).
      When first we fought in an Empire's cause
      (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
      It wasn't for the loot, nor yet for the applause
      (And the waves break busily night and day).
      Then when we came to Dominion Status
      (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
      Nor slump nor squeeze could alienate us
      (And the waves break busily night and day).

These are lines in which Allen Curnow, New Zealand's most important living poet, responded in his secondary capacity, as Whim Wham, a weekly contributor of comic verse to newspapers, to the decision of Great Britain to seek entry to the European Community. He could see as everyone could that this would mean a dissolution of Britain's role in a global community and, in particular, of a relationship with Britain that had hitherto given meanings good and bad to New Zealand's history, its sense of itself, and the meaning of its existence.

      Sir, have you thought what it's like to be
      (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
      All, all alone on a wide, wide sea?
      (And the waves break busily night and day).
      Much can happen in a very short time
      (With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves).
      A feckless history, a foolish rhyme!
      (And the waves break busily, night and day).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 4: Britishness and Europeanness: Who Are the British Anyway? , October 1992 , pp. 358 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992

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References

1 Curnow, Allen [Wham, Whim], “Take Your Time, History,” in Whim Wham Land (Auckland: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Curnow, Alien, “Landfall in Unknown Seas” (1942), in his Selected Poems, 1940–1989 (London: Viking, 1990), pp. 102–5Google Scholar; lines on p. 103.

4 A close study of this episode is provided by Salmond, Anne, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (1992)Google Scholar.

5 “The Axe” (1948), in Curnow, Allen, Four Plays (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1972), p. 79Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 88.

7 Curnow, Allen, Not in Narrow Seas (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1939)Google Scholar. Some readers may need this explained. “Not in narrow seas” meant that New Zealand was not Britain, that it was in the Pacific Ocean and not the English Channel. But in “The Axe” the Pacific itself has become “shallow and narrow” while remaining “larger than the moon's pulse.”

8 They may at last have found a means of doing so. We must expect to hear from now on that the Holocaust was the fault of the Western Allies for declaring war on Hitler, who could not have effected it otherwise. See Koch, H. W., “The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany: The Early Phase, May-September 1940,” Historical Journal 34, no. 1 (1991): 140 and n. 152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 There began to be New Zealanders who denied that they were “British,” meaning that they rejected further association with the United Kingdom; about the crown they were less clear. The familiar term “Poms,” for inhabitants of the United Kingdom, began to be replaced by the less affectionate “Brits.” Brits: a new and charmless species generated or imagined in the last twenty to thirty years; ill-natured, avaricious and self-despising. Less classless than declasse, the English class system was intolerable at its best, but they seem to have lost much of their raison d'etre without it.

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11 I am much indebted in this paragraph to the participants in a seminar directed by Dr. John Robertson at the Folger Shakespeare Library Washington, D.C., in May-June 1991 for the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, under the title “Union, State and Empire: The Political Identities of Britain, 1688–1750.” The title indicates the stimulating effects of regarding Britain's identity as matter for questions and answers.

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32 In addition to Dr. Robertson's seminar mentioned in n. 11 above, Dr. Roger Mason (University of Saint Andrews) conducted a Folger Center seminar in the spring semester of 1990, Washington, D.C., entitled: “Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603.”

33 Venturi, Franco, Settecento Riformatore, 6 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1969–1982)Google Scholar. There are three volumes of an English translation by Litchfield, R. Burr, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis; The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, I: The Great States of the West; II: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989–1991)Google Scholar. This is a study of enlightenment and revolution as European phenomena, viewed mainly through the eyes of contemporary Italians.

34 Consider John Mortimer's recently televised Summer's Lease, in which the British colony in Tuscany are all boorish, not quite gentlemen, and amateurishly corrupt, while the Italians are all secretive, sinister, and ancestrally corrupt. It is the myth of the unchanging East once more, minus the sahibs.

35 Morrill, J. S., “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 34 (1984): 155–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Venturi, Franco, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulas, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England,” in L'Eta dei Lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, ed. Ajello, R. (Naples: Jovene, 1985), pp. 523–62Google Scholar, and “Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions,” Government and Opposition 34, no. 1 (1989): 81–105Google Scholar.

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39 See n. 11 above.

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43 New Zealand did not enact the statute of Westminster until 1947.

44 Australian troops were withdrawn from the Mediterranean theater to fight in New Guinea; the New Zealand expeditionary force campaigned from Libya to Trieste.

45 Pakeha, a Maori word of uncertain derivation, is accepted by New Zealanders of European descent to distinguish themselves from Maori.

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49 Australian historians seem to turn more readily towards macro history on a speculative scale; e.g., see Trompf, G. W., The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Redner, H. W., In the Beginning Was the Word (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Caton, Hiram, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1988)Google Scholar; Springborg, Patricia, Royal Persons: Patriarchal Monarchy and the Feminine Principle (London: Hyman Unwin, 1990)Google Scholar, and Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

50 Tangata whenua: people of the land or birthplace. In New Zealand typography, Maori and English word s are no longer distinguished by typeface; the former are italicized here to ease the eyes of American readers.

51 Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966)Google Scholar. Sinclair, Keith, ed., Distance Looks Our Way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand, University of Auckland Winter Lectures (1960)Google Scholar.

52 Discussed by Lipp, Carola, “Writing History as Political Culture: Social History versus Alltagsgeschichte: A German Debate,” Storia della storiografia 17 (1990): 67–99Google Scholar. The possibility that this approach may exculpate or legitimize political indifference is mentioned by Bartov, Omer in “Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich,” Journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (1991): 44–60, esp. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Sinclair, Keith, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1957)Google Scholar, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959)Google Scholar. For a full bibliography, see “Essays in Honour of Sir Keith Sinclair,” a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 21, no. 2 (1987)Google Scholar. Beaglehole, J. C., The Journals of Captain James Cook … (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955–1969)Google Scholar; The Life of Captain James Cook (London: A. & C. Black, 1974)Google Scholar. See John Cawte Beaglehole: A Bibliography (Wellington: Victoria University, 1972)Google Scholar.

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55 Kawanatanga: an attempt made in 1840 to provide a Maori equivalent of the English “government.” Rangatiratanga: a more authentically Maori term initially translatable as “chieftainship,” “property,” “self-possession,” but capable of further meanings.

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