MORNING SERIAL

HOWEVER, the prefix re- matters because Welsh identity was not being conjured out of thin air. It drew on understandings of the past and that put the relationship with England at the heart of what it meant to be Welsh. George Borrow wrote in his 1862 travel book Wild Wales, ‘All conquered people are suspicious of their conquerors. The English have forgotten that they ever conquered the Welsh, but some ages will elapse before the Welsh forget that the English have conquered them.’ This may not have been a daily concern but it did create a sense of insecurity around Welshness and so much of the nineteenth-century re-creation of Wales was based around proving an equality with England.

Whatever their source or meaning, an awareness of how national identities can be made and remade has led historians to think of them as ‘imagined communities’. This phrase was coined by Benedict Anderson and is meant to convey how nations are based on their members feeling a sense of belonging to them and imagining that they have something in common with the other members. This make nations more ideas than facts. It does not mean the common identity is not real but it does focus attention on how the process is selective and on how different nations imagine themselves as nations for different reasons.

Furthermore, the idea of nations as imagined communities highlights how a nation might not hold the same meaning for everyone within it. Just because a group of people think of themselves as a nation does not mean that what individuals imagine is precisely the same. Thus political, economic, social and cultural unity is not a requisite for a nation, as long as there is something to give people some sense of unity.

Such perspectives helped explain why a sense of Welshness survived assimilation into the British state. Since nationality had no fixed rules, it was easy for a people to still imagine themselves a nation, even in the face of political realities that suggested otherwise.

> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com