Rediscovering Difference?: Nations, Peoples and Politics in the British Civil Wars

This article considers some of the ways in which the 'New British History' has influenced the study of the civil wars in Britain and Ireland during the mid-seventeenth century. It examines the genesis and influence of the 'three kingdoms' model for civil war studies and the ways in which this has privileged a statist interpretation of the conflicts, often glossing over the cultural and ethnic subdivisions which influenced and inflected the course of the wars within their British theatres. This article considers the ongoing refinement and complication of the 'British' approach to the 1640s by scholars such as Mark Stoyle who have explored the particularist politics of ethnicity within England and Wales, normally considered as an undifferentiated unitary kingdom in most 'New British History' narratives.