The life of the overseas Dominions in the past generation has been dominated by the related movements of democracy and nationalism. Here my concern is with a general and comparative treatment of the nature of Dominion nationalism and its influence on the relations of the Dominions to the outer world.

In some important and obvious respects nationality within all the Dominions has common features: it is a growth among immigrant peoples not politically severed entirely from the parent state, and not devoid of loyalty to the parent stock; it is mainly rooted in a culture derived from an older land, and draws inspiration from no wells of a past distinctive only to itself; it cannot in the nature of things nurture the sentiment of “we alone,” and it has not attempted to do so; it is expressed principally in a language common to two powerful world states, one of which has had a great literature for many centuries, and hence it has to be content only with such idioms of speech as local environment slowly brings. In all cases this Dominion nationality has a short history with the emotional shallowness of such. Its spirit is not steeped in the legendary glories of country and town. Unlike the small and intense nationalities of Europe, including the Irish, it rests its claims upon present achievements and future hopes rather than on reference to an epic past, or the tale of oppression suffered at the hands of another. In every Dominion it was both inspired by and expressed in the struggle of people for self-government and democracy, and the political institutions arid ideologies to which it is wedded have a common ancestry. It has arisen within Communities which grew big and prosperous quickly, thanks to a conjuncture of highly favourable world circumstances, notably the rapid industrialization which brought speedy benefit to frontier countries with rich natural resources and abundant land, countries linked to the heart of industrialism and world trade in the period, the British Islands. Related intimately to this circumstance was the Pax Britannica, or long era of relative peace secured by British sea power, which controlled the exits and entrances to the strategic seas and enabled the flow of people and capital, the unhampered occupation of wide territories, and the pursuit of the arts of peace to absorb these frontier communities, and thus achieve that sense of community expressed in their nationality.

In a world torn with nationalistic conflicts, men's minds are naturally turning to projects of international government and to hopes for a wider acceptance of international loyalties, language, and civilization. One of the last epochs in which a measure of such international unity can be said to have actually existed was the European Middle Ages. The following study of the conditions underlying medieval unity, therefore, may offer some information on a topic of present interest.

Accounts of the rise of modern nationalism frequently begin with a picture of the spiritual, linguistic, and cultural unity of medieval Christendom. Mr. Carlton Hayes speaks of “the traditional internationalism of civilized Europe” before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; other authors similarly use the Middle Ages as a point of departure. New forces are then pointed out, which in their rise toward the end of the Middle Ages broke up that unity into the present multitude of nations and sovereign states. This useful method of exposition, however, suggests further questions. How did that “traditional internationalism” of medieval Europe come to exist? What were the conditions favouring its spread, and how durable was it likely to be under the law of its own growth? Can the medieval vision of cultural unity again be recreated on similar foundations?

Economic historians are faced with the task of reconsidering modern European history as a whole. No age is more in need of reinterpretation than the hundred years or so which began in England with the outbreak of the Civil War and in France with the accession of the infant Louis xiv. Tawney, his associates, and pupils have revealed the main features of English agrarian, industrial, commercial, and financial development in early modern times. With the copious data provided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Clapham, his associates, and pupils have built recent English economic history into a solid edifice on massive and precise statistical foundations. But Continental and British economic history have still to be brought into appropriate relationship to each other. And even in modern English economic history, an unfilled gap of more than a century remains. The materials that have been thrown into it are inadequate from about 1640 down to 1740, the year in which the war of the Austrian Succession broke out. The task of arranging such materials as are available into a durable pattern has not been seriously faced. So our knowledge of the place of these hundred years in the rise of industrialism both in Great Britain and on the Continent is vague.