The British Isles: A History of Four Nations by Hugh Kearney
Cambridge University Press, 236 pp., $29.95 This timely book
aims to correct many popular errors of which historians, of the
British Isles at least, are guilty. Professor Kearney has taught
at universities in Ireland, England, Scotland, and the US, so he
is well equipped for his subject. The first error is to speak of
“England” when we mean “Great Britain.” I am ashamed to say that
I have committed this solecism in my time. A second error is to
assume that the territories which we today call “England,”
“Wales,” “Ireland,” “Scotland” always were England, Wales,
Ireland, and Scotland. “Later national boundaries were extended
backwards into a past where they had little or no relevance,”
Kearney writes, “with the consequence that earlier tribal or
pre-national societies were lost to sight.” A consequent error
is to assume that the unity of each of these nations, in the
form that it ultimately took, is good in itself, and that all
history was inevitably