'The history of England,' Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), 'is not in England but in America and Asia.' Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, 'Greater Britain', but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing. In his opinion, altogether too much attention had been devoted to a Whig narrative of purely domestic constitutional advance, to the story of Parliament, political parties and pieces of statute law, when 'the great fact of modern English history' was in reality the evolution of its Empire overseas.

LRB 19 July 2001 | PDF Download