Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 126

Hugh Kearney’s book provides a magisterial account of the complex histories and political geographies of the British Isles over the very long term. Many readers of this journal will be aware of Professor Kearney’s aim in writing this monograph: ‘to examine ... the interaction of the various major cultures of the British Isles from the Roman period onwards’ (p.1). In particular, he seeks to show how our understanding of the histories of the various ‘cultures’ inhabiting the British Isles is augmented if we consider the long-term interactions between them. In this vein, Professor Kearney’s book, when first published in 1989, was in the vanguard of a so-called ‘new British history’, which specifically attempted to view the history of the various peoples of the British Isles as a totality. His book – wide-ranging in its temporal and thematic scope – provided a welcomed corrective to previous studies which had fallen foul of, and indeed reproduced, ways of studying the British past that were grounded in the national historiographies of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The additional insights provided by Professor Kearney’s approach are numerous but one example may serve to illustrate its eminent value. The author’s discussion of the history of the British Isles during the late seventeenth century, for instance, questions English historians’ efforts to denote the revolution of 1688 as a ‘landmark of English liberty’ (p.189), when the future of Protestantism, parliamentary sovereignty, religious toleration and progress was secured within the English state. When viewed in the context of a broader Britain, however, the revolution of 1688 appears as a far more uncertain event. The revolution’s religious and geopolitical aims were not secured in Scotland, for example, until the middle of the eighteenth century, following the battle of Culloden. In Ireland, religious tolerance was not granted until well into the nineteenth century and the character of parliamentary sovereignty within Ireland was also of a dubious character. Even in Wales, religious tolerance was denied to a raft of dissenters. Professor Kearney’s approach is made clear by this brief example. It is only by considering the British Isles as a whole that we may gain a true insight into the political, economic and cultural developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Professor Kearney’s book is all the more impressive for the way in which it succeeds in negotiating a series of potential tensions in a deft way. One of the book’s strengths is that it does not always consider equally each of the territories of the British Isles but rather interrogates a territory’s history only to the extent that it contributes to the main themes being discussed within a particular chapter. For instance, in Chapter Four, which examines the Viking influence on the British Isles during the early medieval period, the discussion of events in Wales is limited, since the sources of evidence pertaining to the Vikings are far more extensive for England and Ireland. Professor Kearney’s approach, therefore, is not borne out of a sense of national pedantry, which argues that equal attention should be directed towards the four territories of the British Isles as a matter of principle. Rather, his approach comprises an effort to understand the complex history of the British Isles through an interrogation of the processes and events taking place in its different territories but only to the extent that they contribute to the grander narrative.

At the same time, Professor Kearney has been wary of underplaying the overarching political, economic and cultural significance of England, and especially the south-east of England, within this historical narrative. By emphasizing the contribution made by processes in Scotland, Ireland and Wales to the politics, economics and culture of the British Isles, there might have been a danger of deflecting attention away from the key impetus provided by England for the emerging histories of the British Isles. In this respect, Professor Kearney successfully illustrates the significance of England (and the south-east in particular) as a motor of social, political and economic change, while at the same time trying to position it within the wider geographical framework provided by the British Isles as a whole. Professor Kearney’s chapters on the early modern period, for instance, show how the south-east of England’s, and especially London’s, economic and subsequent political dominance possessed considerable implications for the economic and agricultural practices of the north of England and the remaining territories of the British Isles. His skill, in this regard, has been to discuss the key innovations that took place in England – in numerous contexts – and to show how these shaped, and were shaped by, equally fundamental developments in other parts of the British Isles. And yet, Professor Kearney’s story is not solely concerned with the interactions between the different cultures contained within the British Isles. Presaging debates concerning the significance of globalization and extra-territorial influences, which have become commonplace within the world of academia since 1989, the author is to be commended for discussing the important connections between Britain and a series of broader political geographies. Attention has already been drawn to the discussion of the Viking influence on British history in Chapter Four. Other chapters, in equal measure, demonstrate the links between developments in different parts of the British Isles and other far-flung places. The connections between Norman political and economic geographies within the British Isles, for instance, is placed within a broader European context in Chapters Five and Six, while the chapters dealing with the early modern period position Britain within the broader context of an English empire that extended into the New World. Taken together, such examples demonstrate Professor Kearney’s remarkable sensitivity to the complex political geographies – both within and outwith the British Isles – that have contributed to British history over the long term.

Finally, I must congratulate Professor Kearney on his ability to present a thoroughly engaging ‘big-picture history’. The danger with such ‘big-picture history’, of course, is that it becomes a superficial and rather anodyne treatment of key events with little time or space to discuss the more specific stories and occurrences that make history interesting. In this respect, Professor Kearney has been able to weave detailed stories about the struggles of a range of different people – from kings down to the more lowly businessman – into a far grander narrative concerning the major political, economic and cultural developments that have affected the British Isles. The British Isles, in this regard, succeeds in promoting highly-peopled versions of the past, which make the grander story that is being recounted all the more compelling.

While the above comments signal the impressive scope and quality of the book, I still have some slight criticisms. First of all, I would have liked to have seen the revisions provided in the second edition – revisions deriving from seventeen years of academic scholarship since the publication of the first edition – incorporated into the text in a more meaningful way. At present, the author reflects on these more recent contributions in discrete postscripts, which are to be found at the end of each chapter. While there is some effort to relate the themes discussed in each chapter to the findings of more recent academic studies, I would have appreciated a more concerted effort on the author’s part to weave these more recent studies into his own narrative. The second criticism revolves around the book’s temporal coverage, which is rather uneven. The chapters discussing the Roman past and the twentieth-century history of the British Isles are brief, especially when compared with the chapters focusing on the medieval and early modern periods. The relative brevity of the earlier chapters, admittedly, may be explained by the paucity of evidence concerning the Celtic and Roman past within the British Isles but the chapters that deal with twentieth-century history are, in my mind, overly brief. There was considerable scope to extend the discussion of this period.

Viewed as a whole, these are minor criticisms. I very much enjoyed reading the book and the second edition is to be welcomed. The success of the first edition is reflected in the way in which it has inspired a large number of other historians to consider the connections between the different cultures contained within the British Isles. I am confident that the publication of the second edition of The British Isles will serve to reinforce the value of such an academic endeavour.