Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences.

Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those Welsh, Scottish and Anglo-Irish individuals who became part of the British Establishment in this period did not in the main sell out in the sense of becoming Anglicised look-alikes. Instead, they became British in a new and intensely profitable fashion, while remaining in their own minds and behavior Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish aswell.

It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.

Most Britons still lived and died without encountering anyone whose skin colour was different from their own. Slaves, in short, did not threaten, at least as far as the British at home were concerned. Bestowing freedom upon them seemed therefore purely an act of humanity and will, an achievement that would be to Great Britain's economic detriment, perhaps, but would have few other domestic consequences.

In the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, as in so many later conflicts, British women seem to have been no more markedly pacifist than men. Instead, and exactly like so many of their male countrymen, some women found ways of combining support for the national interest with a measure of self-promotion. By assisting the war effort, women demonstrated that their concerns were by no means confined to the domestic sphere. Under cover of a patriotism that was often genuine and profound, they carved out for themselves a real if precarious place in the public sphere.

In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution.

A British imperium enabled Scots to feel themselves peers of the Ebglish in a way still denied them in an island kingdom. The language bears that out very clearly. The English and the foreign are still all too inclined to refer to the island of Great Britain as 'England'. But at no time have they ever customarily referred to an English empire.