British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800

This book examines the status and uses of ethnicity in political debate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the era that immediately preceded the onset of modern racialist and nationalist thinking. Ranging widely across the political cultures of England, Scotland, Ireland and revolutionary America, it also considers European influences and comparisons as well as engaging historically with current debates over nationalism and identity.