The Making of British Nationality

What makes for a seminal book? It must be excellent enough to excite admiration, original enough to introduce new perspectives, and problematic enough to elicit constructive criticism. It should raise new questions, but provide the kind of provisional, provocative answers that will serve as a stimulus to future work. Linda Colley's Britons has been such a book. When it appeared, in 1992, Modern British social history was in a state of crisis, reeling from a decade of largely negative, deconstructive critiques. Class, which had been its central category of analysis, was being dismissed in a flurry of vehement manifestoes, none of which offered any plausible alternatives.1 In the midst of this dispiriting confusion, Professor Colley boldly offered a new paradigm.