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‘The Celts: A Modern History’ by Ian Stewart Review
‘The Celts: A Modern History’ by Ian Stewart review Historians may no longer talk of a single Celtic culture, but in The Celts: A Modern History Ian Stewart crafts a unified history of a changing idea. Around the 1990s, the historical Celts endured something of an identity crisis.
Modern ‘Celts’, in particular, started to gain scare quotes: these identities, it appeared, were recent inventions grafted onto historical abstractions, a collage of disparate symbols from the pre-Roman past, stuck together with imagination, enthusiasm, and academic linguistics. Readers expecting dramatic tales of neo-druids and national struggles will, I hope, not turn away from extended sections on (for example) the significance of the phonological distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic: part of the cleverness of Stewart’s book is that he manages to combine a full account of the weirder and wilder Celtic theories with evidence that, in among the eccentricities, genuine scholarly advances were taking place. A chapter on race and the ‘Irish Question’ surveys a large and contentious body of evidence on the role of anti-Celtic racism in Britain’s treatment of Ireland, concluding that any racialised interpretation must always be balanced with other specific factors.
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