This study considers the origins of some of the puzzling features of national identity in modern Britain. Prominent among these is the failure of almost three centuries of Anglo-Scottish union to generate a comprehensively ‘British’ conception of national identity. Instead, in its political manifestations, ‘Britishness’ is Anglo-British, dependent on a historical allegiance to England's evolving constitution of crown and parliament. Outside Ireland, this ‘whig’ self-image has proved remarkably durable, enthralling even socialists, whose curious lack of hostility to the monarchy the Marxist-nationalist revisionist Tom Nairn has attributed to acquiescence in the English constitutional model of the seventeenth century and the avoidance of a modern nationalistrepublican revolution of the French type.

Anglo-Britishness is almost as pervasive in Scotland as in the English heartland of the United Kingdom. This ready acceptance of English ideals in Scottish political culture is almost certainly connected to an ideological non-occurrence in Scotland's modern history whose causes pose a second historical problem for this study. During the nineteenth century, the Scots, unlike the Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Poles and most of the other historic nations of Europe who, at that stage, lacked full political autonomy, missed out on the development of a full-blown ‘romantic’ nationalism. A retarded nationalist movement did develop in the second half of this century, but remains the party of a minority.

Nairn has investigated this problem via the socioeconomic perspective afforded by the modernisation theories of Ernest Gellner. Gellner interprets nationalism as a modern phenomenon arising out of the impact on traditional cultures of industrialisation and the attendant state-sponsored mobilisation of the infrastructure, including the provision of a basic schooling in numeracy and literacy.