Presidential Address: The People of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, 1.Identities

Abstract

PEOPLES are back on the historian's agenda. Their return to the historical limelight, or at least out of the historical shadows, is doubtless in part a response to the growing awareness of the power of ethnicity in our own contemporary world. So it is with changes of historical fashion at all times. But it also no doubt arises in part from the growing recognition that the centrality that academic historians have so long given to the unitary nation state as the natural, inevitable and indeed desirable unit of human power and political organisation is itself a reflection of the intellectual climate in which modern academic historiography was forged in the nineteenth century. The linear development of the nation state is no longer of necessity the overarching theme and organising principle in the study of the past that it once was. Once our historical gaze could be shifted from the state and its institutions and from the seductive appeal of its prolific archives, other solidarities and collectivities could come more clearly into historical focus. Some of them seemed to have as great, if not occasionally greater, depth and historical resilience than did the nation state. At the very least they deserve to be studied alongside it. Not least in prominence among such collectivities are the peoples of Europe.