Inventing Britain? Nicholas Crane's Britannia.

‘Nicholas Crane’s Britannia’ is being broadcast on BBC 2 on Tuesday evenings at the moment. Crane follows in the footsteps of historian and antiquarian, William Camden, whose topographical study of the British Isles presaged the Union of the Crowns and contributed to the geographical treatment of these islands as a single entity.

Crane is a geographer, and historically his portrayal of Camden as a kind of proto-unionist, carefully laying foundations for the United Kingdom, might be viewed as a trifle anachronistic. At one stage in last night’s programme, as he retraces the Elizabethan traveller’s route through Scotland, Crane claims that Camden envisaged the various parts of Britain would be ‘stronger together than they would be apart’.

That assertion, made on behalf of a sixteenth century topographer concerned with describing strange foreign lands, is perhaps more than a little over-egged. ‘Britannia’ is, nevertheless, a compelling tale, and the argument that Camden’s study, through content rather than intention, encouraged the concept of political unity, is an intriguing hypothesis.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more