Introduction

Summary

Tradition holds that Britain's interactions with the outside world have been Janus-faced, distinguishing between transoceanic empire and diplomacy on the European continent. Accordingly, historians have tended to downplay evidence of British empire on the continent. The omission is questionable not merely empirically, but also theoretically, for Europe is geographically and culturally continuous with Asia. Europe is, after all, an Asian subcontinent comparable to India, a familiar subject of British imperial historiography. Including Europe in the history of British empire can solve two stubborn problems. First, it can reduce the cognitive distance between metropolis and periphery that historians of British empire have often regretted. And it will qualify the sense of novelty attending British participation in the European Union, which is itself an empire of sorts. Of course this is opposed by many including John Pocock, who debunks European distinctiveness in order to protect its British equivalent from continental federalism. But for François Guizot and others, European and national exceptionalisms went together. A critique of both enables a truly newBritish history which views political integration with the continent in terms of continuity as well as change.

Both historians and journalists ground British Euroskepticism in the English tradition of unitary sovereignty, dating back at least to the sixteenth century. But at least one country with a similar definition of sovereignty, France, has generally supported European integration. If the argument from sovereignty cannot explain British Euroskepticism, neither can the tradition it seeks to replace. The ‘whig interpretation of history’, with its celebration of parliamentary liberty over administrative bureaucracy, seems to explain the present-day distrust of continental dirigisme. Although British parliaments arose at the same time as continental estates, whig historians emphasize the partial disappearance of the latter during the early-modern period – and the comparative continuity of British constitutionalism. They explain that Britain's geographic position on an island and naval eminence protected parliamentary and civil liberties, which supposedly suffered more insults from continental governments upon the pretext of greater military vulnerability. This is not so much comparative history as geographical determinism, which leaves out counterexamples such as Ireland (an island without a navy) and the Dutch Netherlands (a continental naval power with strong estates).