ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the land of England underwent a fundamental change. Revisionist/empiricism had contrived an artificial but nonetheless rigid barrier to the perception of change. James Harrington, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, thought that the parliamentary challenge to the crown, with the ensuing Civil War, could be attributed to the change in the balance of economic weight that had taken place in the preceding century. In recent decades, historians of the early modern period have largely discounted the causative force of fundamental economic circumstances or of developing political and national psychologies. Members of parliament and political theorists would be speaking routinely of the state as the unit of collective integrity and security. Some technical aspects of unification are recognized, like the incorporation of Wales into the English state in the 1530s. But there is little acknowledgement of the rise of national sentiment and of the important role this played in the political transitions of the times.
