Does England exist and, if so, in what sense? That may seem like a strange question, given the nation’s ubiquity and age. And yet something is fundamentally problematic about England. It may be the largest country in the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give the state its full Sunday title) with 85 percent of the state’s population, dwarfing its Scottish, Irish, and Welsh neighbors, but one might argue that England is everywhere and yet nowhere. It is the territory that, by and large, dares not speak its name. Often, it was a synonym for the United Kingdom or Britain (probably less so today); it gave its name to the world language of English; and it rarely appears explicitly in national naming conventions (e.g., the National Trust and the Football Association). One wagers that if this journal were published in England it would simply be called The Ethnologist

Does this matter? In large part this APPARENT disinterest in self-reference is a reflection of implicit power. Just as white people are never referred to as an “ethnic minority,” or men never think of themselves as a gender, being English is taken for granted as a powerful given. The Scots, Irish, and Welsh who also inhabit these islands juxtapose their national identities vis-à-vis their powerful neighbor by explicit naming. If they wish to assert their non-Englishness, they have little option.

In the last decade or so, there has been a remarkable change in these conventions. Krishan Kumar’s excellent book is one expression of the problematizing of England and the English. It is now much more common to find debates about “being English,” and in what senses, as well as assertions of Englishness vis-à-vis Britishness. English, rather than British, flags are flown at sporting events. (Many Americans would be hard put to know the difference, making the point about English hegemony hitherto.) In the last few years, a growing industry of books on Englishness and its origins has developed. Kumar dismisses the view that Englishness dates from the 13th century (wars), the 16th century (religion), and locates the “moment of Englishness” at the end of the 19th century, when English cultural expressions (folk songs, literature, and pastoralism) bubbled to the surface. Why then? He argues that, despite seeming to be at the apex of imperial power, celebrations of supremacy were indicators of imminent decline: Hegel’s famous owl of Minerva. To some, this might seem like an odd argument. After all, was it not by then a “British” Empire, rather than an English one, that was entering decline? Indeed it was, but that is Kumar’s key point. England had two empires: first, an internal one to the so-called British Isles, dating from late 12th-century conquests of Wales and Ireland and incorporation of Scotland in the 1707 Treaty of Union; and second, the late 18th-century imperial British one. The implicit and ambiguous nature of “England” was deliberately so, because it reinforced hegemony by understating its power. Kumar observes, “Ruling the roost, they [the English] felt it impolitic to crow” (p. 187). In his view, England had a “missionary,” an imperial, identity to incorporate by means of obfuscation and fuzzy frontiers.

Kumar argues that the beginning of the end for this English strategy came in the late 19th century with the rising challenges to global power, leading to soul-searching for the essence of England (as opposed to Britain), just at the moment when nations were being uncovered or invented throughout Europe. When the empire finally ended, with a whimper, not a bang, in the mid-20th century, he observes, “The British, having acquired the empire, in a fit of absence of mind, seemed to have given it up with equal insouciance (p. 194).”

England now stands at the cusp of the 21st century puzzling out what it is. New political–constitutional changes have taken place. British entry into the European Union in the 1970s and a devolved parliament for Scotland and a national assembly for Wales in the 1990s have seemingly diminished Britain as a powerful state and, with it, English hegemony. This is also the moment, 100 years from the late 19th century one, when talking for England becomes more pressing and urgent. It is to Kumar’s great credit that he has provided exquisite analyses of both.