The End of a Local Nation

‘One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty’, wrote George Orwell in 1941. For, no matter how extensive, diverse, fragmentary and even maddening the experiences of the country that he persisted in calling ‘England’ might be, ‘it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you’. As so often in writing of this kind, the essence of the patria is exemplified through a detailed and seemingly unbounded inventory: ‘suet puddings’, ‘red pillar-boxes’, ‘mild knobby faces’, ‘the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs’ and innumerable other traces of Englishness are ready to hand. Yet rhetorical appeals to cultural ordinariness beg the most crucial questions: if your country ‘is you’ (the echo of Lord Kitchener is unmistakeable), then how does this identification come about? In what ways does patriotism begin at home?1

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Loyalty · Patriotism · Pillar · Political science · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Engineering · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US

• Montague Burton

  Tony Kushner, Eric M Sigsworth•The Economic History Review•1991

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