What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of England explores how being English has been understood as belonging to a nation, a people, or a race. Paul Kléber Monod examines the ancient and medieval inventions of a British and ethnic Anglo-Saxon identity, before documenting the violent creation of an English ethnic state within Britain, and the later extension of that imperial power into the wider world. Monod analyses the persistence of a specifically English language of cultural identity after 1707 and the revival of English racial identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting the crucial role of imperial expansion and the recurring myth of “little England” pitted against larger enemies. Turning to the revival of English identity in the twenty-first century, this study raises probing questions about the resurgence and future of a divisive concept.

‘There’ll always be an England, as the famous song says. But what, exactly, does being English mean? As Paul Monod shows in this elegant, beautifully written history, such questions have never been easy to answer - not by the ancient Britons, not by the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors, and certainly not today.’

Eliga Gould - author of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire

‘A fascinating and deeply researched study of what it meant to be English - or British (or not-British) - across two millennia of history. Elegantly written, erudite, and wide-ranging, it explores the changing construction of cultural, national and ethnic identities during times of peace and war and across empires. A must read.’

Tim Harris - Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History, Brown University

‘A sweeping and provocative overview of the historical peculiarities of the English and the English obsession with their own peculiarities, Monod’s sparkling study burnishes his reputation as a daring and original historian of early modern England and Europe.’

Kathleen Wilson - SUNY Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University