ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores some of the consequences, for cultural production and individual and collective self-consciousness, of divergent articulations of Englishness in eighteenth-century domestic and colonial settings, and of the psychic costs that national identity, indeed, perhaps all national identities, extracted from their subjects. Rather, it is to underline the many purposes and divergent agendas that the clarion calls to recognize and preserve a 'nation's heritage' can serve. Ralph's effort to perform the ancient spirit that allowed the English to 'fight, and win, and survive' against unseen but real invaders of the national spirit is not an unfamiliar feature of heritage politics in contemporary Britain. The conditions of possibility for their divergent or collective experiences were firmly rooted in the extended network of communication, Diaspora and culture created by the eighteenth-century British Empire.
