Almost every historian believes but struggles to prove that knowledge of the past helps us to understand the present. It is so much easier to see how experience of the present helps us to understand the past. It is therefore no surprise that interest in the British past as against the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish pasts has grown exponentially over the past 25 years. In part this recovery of a sense of the integrity of the ‘British’, ‘British and Irish’, ‘archipelagic’ past (the instability of nomenclature is itself revealing of the contended nature both of the process of recovery and of what is recovered) is the result of the debate that is raging about the future shape of the United Kingdom, in the face of devolutionary (and separatist) political and cultural movements in Scotland and Wales (even England), and in the face of uncertainty about the future relationship between the North of Ireland and (a) Britain (b) the Republic of Ireland. In part it is also a result of the soul-searching that has been going on across Britain and Ireland about whether their future destiny lies primarily as part of ‘Europe’ or in relation to the Anglophone diaspora, not only (or not particularly) the British Commonwealth but in a special relationship with the United States. In part it also results from the natural desire of historians to move on from worked-out seams to open up new ones: for example, from theories of historical causation rooted in the dynamics of class dialectic and conflict to ones based on ethnic and cultural conflict (itself connected with the previous points).