ABSTRACT
It would be easy, if fatal, for me to present these concluding reflections in the character of old Simeon in the Temple.1 About twenty years ago, I began calling for the development of a new sub-field or subject, to be named ‘British history’ and designed as a history of the interlocking peoples and cultures inhabiting what I proposed calling ‘the Atlantic Archipelago’.2 Although Richard Tompson of Utah published a book called The Atlantic Archipelago in 1986,3 and Hugh Kearney, then of Pittsburgh, published The British Isles: A History of Four Nations in 1989,4 it was long the fashion to commiserate with me on the poverty of response to my suggestion; indeed, David Cannadine took no account of it at all in his memorable Past and Present essay on ‘British History: past, present-and future?’5 Yet the tide has abruptly turned, as the essays in this volume and the conference from which they derive make strikingly evident; and though this has had little to do with my rather uncertain trumpet before the dawn, and far more to do with the works of Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Linda Colley, Rees Davies and Robin Frame,6 we can now claim ‘British history’ as a field of study well enough established to have both its paradigms and its critics-that the latter are mainly Irish is a reminder of how necessary they are. It would therefore be possible, easy and perhaps not unfitting for me to cry ‘Nunc dimittis, Domine’—‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’—and vanish into my own prophetic past.
