The ‘British Space’: World‐Empire‐Continent‐Nation‐Region‐Locality: A Historiographical Problem

Abstract

What ‘British history’ may be taken to mean is complex. No simple solution to getting it ‘in focus’ exists. On one level, given the global impact of Britain since 1800, culturally and commercially, and the existence of ‘English‐speaking Peoples’, it is an aspect of ‘world history’ and cannot be understood without this wide‐ranging context. That manifested itself most specifically in the expansion of the British Empire, its consolidation and subsequent disintegration. ‘Great Britain’ and ‘Greater Britain’, for some minds, constituted the ‘whole’. Yet, however global the mindset of policy‐makers (and perhaps people) became, the history of the British Isles could not be detached from that of the European continent. ‘Isolation’ could only ever be ‘relative’. On another level, looking inwards, the ‘British Space’ has embraced a multiplicity of overlapping, interlinked, yet distinct nations, regions and localities. Sometimes such identities have been forged or strengthened in opposition to ‘Britishness’, sometimes they have coexisted contentedly with it. At whatever level, the ‘British space’ is inherently a contested one.

Thinking regionally: narrative, the medical humanities and region

“…This more geographical approach often merges the regional and the local, but defining region is more tricky than this as scholars have, probably too easily, slipped between seeing region in geographical, socio-cultural, economic terms or administrative terms 29. While Charles Phythian-Adams has identified seven key characteristics for defining a region—demographic concentration, hierarchical structures, intra-dependence, self-identification, provincial interests, concentration of indigenous families and a sense of belonging—as the historian Keith Robbins reminds us, ‘Whether any given space coheres into a locality, a region or a nation has been… differently perceived by historians who, after all, have themselves to be located somewhere’ 30 31. The result is that many scholars use region both confidently and imprecisely, assuming the existence of some thing or things in the region they are studying that bounded people together.…”

“…While various organisations in the nineteenth and twentieth century employed region as a category, the problem of thinking about region in the past is that they seldom existed in a clearly defined fashion, making them contingent upon time, place and their interactions with local, national and global political and economic units. For many contemporaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, region was essentially a question of the provinces as ‘an aggregate of all that was not London’ 31. In the history of medicine, there has been the same metropolitan whiggism, and even if scholars have come to reject this attitude, recent work continues to refer to ‘studies of provincial medicine’ when discussing medicine beyond London, reflecting a wider sense that Britain had core and peripheral regions 32.…”

“…It, along with the ‘New British History’ with its emphasis on transnationalism, challenged the distortions of ‘anglocentricity’ and drew attention to relations among the peripheries themselves to highlight the complex interactions of different cultures as seen in writing on medicine and the Enlightenment. In this framework, Britain can be viewed as ‘a multiplicity of overlapping, interlinked yet distinct nations, regions and localities’ 37. England and London might have set the tone of medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but thinking of Britain as ‘four nations’ allows differences and commonalities—for example, about the nature of the medical marketplace—between regions to be considered.…”