ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that a reading of modernity can greatly enrich the understanding of English culture and politics in the Georgian decades. The debates over 'modernity' that have reverberated in European cultural theory and history since World War II have not unduly troubled most historians of eighteenth-century Britain. Anderson has since been rightly criticized for his unitary notion of the 'nation' and its unproblematic transpositioning to the colonial and postcolonial worlds. The importance of provincial urban life to negotiating the stability of the Hanoverian state at home and abroad has long been underplayed in accounts of the national becoming. The social heterogeneity of subscribers to patriotic societies actually worked to uphold this composite as the primary instrument of the nation's survival and greatness. Benedict Anderson has argued that the nation was imagined as a 'community' because 'regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship'.
