2007/08/01 by R. M. W. Travers · 65 citations
Social Sciences · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Britishness #Nationalism #Militarism #State (computer science) #Ideology #Empire #Power (physics) #History #Law #Economic history #Ancient history #Political science #Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm016
published in Past & Present 196(1), 83-124 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2007/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
Over the long eighteenth century, the British imperial state emerged as a precocious example of a ‘fiscal-military’ regime, mobilizing people and money on an unprecedented scale to fight its European and global wars.1 The growing power of the British state and empire relied on symbolic and rhetorical capital as well as coercive technologies, and the idea of Britishness itself became an important tool in mobilizing support for the state's militaristic goals.2 Even the dead were not immune to the ideological force field of militant nationalism. Indeed, official notions of Britishness in the eighteenth century were preoccupied as much with dead heroes as with living ones. The deaths of General Wolfe at Quebec or Nelson at Trafalgar were only the most famous among a macabre procession of great death scenes that came to symbolize the sacrificial heroism of the nation, and especially its officer classes. From the Seven Years War to the Napoleonic War, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's were transformed by a forest of elaborate tombs into schools for imperial warrior-statesmen and generals.