ABSTRACT
Gwyn A.Williams is a radical historian of the English working classes and of the Italian marxist thinker and party leader, Antonio Gramsci. As a self-conscious Welshman in the English-dominated British state, he offers an impassioned but strongly historical account of how a minority constructs its sense of national identity within the context of a nation state and in a symbiotic relationship with the majority nation. His reflections can also serve as a salutary reminder that the British state, like the rest of Europe, needs to come to terms with the appeal or threat of the (increasing) number of social groups with national identities that co-habit in its territory, often in relations of unequal power. The frontiers of a Welsh nation have rarely coincided with the frontiers of a Welsh people. A Welsh nation has frequently been a fraction of a Welsh people, often a small one though never of course a vulgar one. Nations have not existed from Time Immemorial as the warp and woof of human experience. Nations are not born; they are made. Nations do not grow like a tree, they are manufactured. Most of the nations of modern Europe were manufactured during the nineteenth century; people manufactured nations as they did cotton shirts. The processes were intimately linked, as peoples called non-historic invented for themselves a usable past to inform an attainable future, under the twin stimuli of democratic and industrial revolutions. In the precociously unified monarchies of Britain and France, they began to manufacture nations earlier; a British nation emerges from the eighteenth century, in the union of England and Scotland around the armature of merchant capitalism, world empire and liberal oligarchy. The ongoing and increasingly revolutionary processes of capitalism are now radically
restructuring and remodelling the nations they conjured into existence, eliminating some, transcending some, fragmenting some. The British nation and the British state are clearly entering a process of dissolution, into Europe or the mid-Atlantic or a post-imperial fog. Britain has begun its long march out of history.
