From 1975, Pocock began advocating the development of a new subject which he called "British History" (also labelled "New British History", a title that Pocock has expressed his wish to shake off). Pocock coined the term
Atlantic archipelago as a replacement for
British Isles: "We should start with what I have called the Atlantic archipelagosince the term "British Isles" is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously". He also pressed his fellow historians to reconsider two issues linked to the future of British history. First, he urged historians of the
British Isles to move away from histories of the Three Kingdoms (Scotland, Ireland, England) as separate entities, and he called for studies implementing a bringing-together or conflation of the national narratives into truly integrated enterprises. It has since become the commonplace preference of historians to treat British history in just that fashion. Second, he prodded policymakers to reconsider the Europeanisation of the UK still underway, via its entry into the
European Union. In its abandonment of a major portion of national sovereignty purely from economic motives, that decision threw into question the entire matter of British sovereignty itself. What, Pocock asks, will (and must) nations look like if the capacity for and exercise of national self-determination is put up for sale to the highest bidder?
Nationalism In brief reflections on
nationalism manifest in the history of Greater Britain and the wider Atlantic World, Pocock frequently distinguished between "national republicanism" and "republican nationalism", tracing shifts within this polarity across Ireland, Scotland, and England. Change through linear time generated what he described as "settler nationalism." For instance, in 2000, Pocock contended that "the history of the Irish response to the [late eighteenth-century] imperial crisis, the American Revolution and later the French, culminates with the United Irishmen's attempt to put together a national republicanism which, after its failure and the imposition of the Union, became the foundation of a republican nationalism." The
Society of United Irishmen closely followed the fate of the U.S. Confederation during the 1780s "critical period." The "Whiggish"
Church of Ireland concurred with these United Irishmen that the
Congress of the Confederation had been "ineffective." In reaction, both sought greater parliamentary autonomy, organizing a "national Protestant militia for the patriot purpose of demanding it; a programme natural to what we are calling settler nationalism." Church ascendancy in Irish political economy, however, both facilitated, and hampered, confederal status. According to Pocock, in the history of Irish Protestant parishes, specters of a previously "hard-core"
Reformed Christianity had either contributed to rebellions or spurred support for the state. Pocock pointed out that "to see this as key to the journey of Northern Protestants from rebellion towards loyalism is to say that they have a history of their own, unshared with others; but it has become the aim of republican nationalism to deny them such autonomy." Following the
Acts of Union 1800, the parliamentary state "confronted, and helped engender by way of reaction against itself, a modern democratic nationalism (and, by way of reaction against the latter, a counter nationalist loyalism in the distinctive history of the North)." He argues that (one strain of)
Enlightenment also – among other effects – “strengthen[ed] existing elites—some of them clerical—in their capacity for civil control.” Especially pre-Enlightenment philosophers were “well aware” and “fully conscious” about the effects of their work, which resulted more in “the protection of sovereign authority and personal security against religious fanaticism and civil war” than “emancipation”. Those scholars, especially in
England and
Scotland, saw “disputes over the sovereign’s authority in matters spiritual” (e.g., in particular, about
transubstantiation) as the cause for the
civil war they had experienced (e.g.
Thomas Hobbes). The uprising
scepticism in the Age of Enlightenment should lead, in their opinions, to “self-limitation of the mind” and submission to authority, specifically in theological questions; directed, in fact, against both sects and the
Roman Papacy. Pocock tied those thoughts to the
American Revolution, seen from the viewpoint of conservative enlightenment “less a revolution than a war of secession”; not citizens of the same people fought – i.e., a civil war – over religious matters, but two (almost) independent states, although it resembled some specificities of wars of religion. In addition, Pocock picked up again the role and matter of
virtue in government, which he had already presented in a
1981 article in the aftermath of a discussion about
Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Individual virtue, for Pocock both the content and aim of a Greek-Athenian humanism, is in the antagonism between the American and British idea of government “remedy for corruption” found so widely in the latter’s parliamentary monarchy. The question “whether the individual’s need for a sense of moral self could be fulfilled by the establishment of a form of government in which he was morally involved” can also be traced back, in history (drafting of the
U.S. Constitution) as well as in Pocock’s own works. ==New Zealand==