The Invention of
Tradition
Edited by
ERIC HOBSBAWM
and
TERENCE RANGER
gif Ca mbr id g e
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© E. J. Hobsbawm 1983
© Hugh Trevor-Roper 1983
© Prys Morgan 1983
© David Cannadine 1983
© Bernard S. Cohn 1983
©Terence Ranger 1983
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and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1983
First paperback edition 1984
Reprinted 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989
Canto edition 1992
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
The invention of tradition - (Past and present publications)
1. Sociology 2. Folklore - History
I. Hobsbawm, E. J. II. Ranger, Terrence
III. Series
303.372 HM201
ISBN-13 978-0-521-43773-8 paperback
Cover illustration: Carl Haag, Evening at Balmoral.
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Contents
Contributors page vi
1 Introduction: Inventing Traditions
ERIC HOBSBAWM 1
2 The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of
Scotland
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER 15
3 From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past
in the Romantic Period
PRYS MORGAN 43
4 The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The
British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c.
1820-1977
DAVID CANNADINE 101
5 Representing Authority in Victorian India
BERNARD S. COHN 165
6 The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa
TERENCE RANGER 211
7 Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914
ERIC HOBSBAWM 263
Index 309
v
Contributors
d a v i d C A N N A D i N E i s Professor of History at Columbia University.
His books include Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the
Towns, 1774-1967 (1980) and The Decline and Fall ofthe British
Aristocracy (1990).
Be r n a r d s. co h n is Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Chicago. He is the author of many articles on the interactions of
history and anthropology and on the study of Indian society.
e r i c h o b s b a w m is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social
History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a foundermember
of the journal Past & Present. Among his many publications
is Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
(1990).
pr y s Mo r g a n is Reader in History at University College, Swansea.
He has published extensively in Welsh and has contributed chapters to
many books on Welsh history.
Te r e n c e r a n g e r is Rhodes Professor pf Race Relations at the
University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Antony’s College. He is the
author of The Historical Study ofAfrican Religion (1972) and Dance
and Society in Eastern Africa (1975).
h u g h t r e v o r -r o p e r (Lord Dacre of Glanton) was Master of
Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1980 to 1987. He was previously Regius
Professor of History at the University of Oxford, from 1957.
vi
I. Introduction: Inventing
Traditions
ER IC HOBSBAW M
Nothing appears more ancient, and linked to an immemorial past,
than the pageantry which surrounds British monarchy in its public
ceremonial manifestations. Yet, as a chapter in this book establishes,
in its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. ‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are
often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented. Anyone familiar
with the colleges of ancient British universities will be able to think
of the institution of such ‘traditions’ on a local scale, though
some - like the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the
chapel of King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve-m ay
become generalized through the modern mass medium of radio. This
observation formed the starting-point of a conference organized by
the historical journal Past & Present, which in turn forms the basis
of the present book.
The term ‘invented tradition’ is used in a broad, but not imprecise
sense. It includes both ‘traditions’actually invented, constructed and
formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable
manner within a brief and dateable period - a matter of a few years
perhaps - and establishing themselves with great rapidity. The royal
Christmas broadcast in Britain (instituted in 1932) is an example of
the first; the appearance and development of the practices associated
with the Cup Final in British Association Football, of the second.
It is evident that not all of them are equally permanent, but it is their
appearance and establishment rather than their chances of survival
which are our primary concern.
‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally
governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or
symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms
of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity
with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to
establish continuity with a suitable historic past. A striking example
is the deliberate choice of a Gothic style for the nineteenth-century
1
2 ERIC HOBSBAWM
rebuilding of the British parliament, and the equally deliberate
decision after World War II to rebuild the parliamentary chamber
on exactly the same basic plan as before. The historic past into which
the new tradition is inserted need not be lengthy, stretching back into
the assumed mists of time. Revolutions and ‘progressive movements ’
which break with the past, by definition, have their own relevant past,
though it may be cut off at a certain date, such as 1789. However,
insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity
of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely
factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take
the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own
past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast between the
constant change and innovation of the modern world and the
attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as
unchanging and invariant, that makes the4invention of tradition ’so
interesting for historians of the past two centuries.
‘Tradition’ in this sense must be distinguished clearly from
‘custom’ which dominates so-called ‘traditional’ societies. The
object and characteristic o f‘traditions’, including invented ones, is
invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes
fixed (normally formalized) practices, such as repetition. ‘Custom’
in traditional societies has the double function ofmotor and fly-wheel.
It does not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though
evidently the requirement that it must appear compatible or even
identical with precedent imposes substantial limitations on it. What
it does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the
sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed
in history. Students ofpeasant movements know that a village’sclaim
to some common land or right ‘by custom from time immemorial’
often expresses not a historical fact, but the balance of forces in the
constant struggle of village against lords or against other villages.
Students of the British labour movement know that ‘the custom of
the trade’ or of the shop may represent not ancient tradition, but
whatever right the workers have established in practice, however
recently, and which they now attempt to extend or defend by giving
it the sanction of perpetuity. ‘Custom ’cannot afford to be invariant,
because even in ‘traditional’ societies life is not so. Customary or
common law still shows this combination of flexibility in substance
and formal adherence to precedent. The differencebetween4tradition ’
and ‘custom’ in our sense is indeed well illustrated here. ‘Custom’
is what judges do; ‘tradition’ (in this instance invented tradition) is
the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualized practices
surrounding their substantial action. The decline o f‘custom’ inevitably
changes the ‘tradition’ with which it is habitually intertwined.
A second, less important, distinction that must be made is between
‘tradition’ in our sense and convention or routine, which has no
significant ritual or symbolic function as such, though it may acquire
it incidentally. It is evident that any social practice that needs to be
carried out repeatedly will tend, for convenience and efficiency, to
develop a set of such conventions and routines, which may be de facto
or de jure formalized for the purposes of imparting the practice to
new practitioners. This applies to unprecedented practices (such as
the work of an aircraft pilot) as much as to long-familiar ones.
Societies since the industrial revolution have naturally been obliged
to invent, institute or develop new networks of such convention or
routine more frequently than previous ones. Insofar as they function
best when turned into habit, automatic procedure or even reflex
action, they require invariance, which may get in the way of the other
necessary requirement ofpractice, thecapacity to deal with unforeseen
or inhabitual contingencies. This is a well-known weakness of
routinization or bureaucratization, particularly at the subaltern
levels where invariant performance is generally considered the most
efficient.
Such networks of convention and routine are not ‘invented
traditions’since their functions, and therefore theirjustifications, are
technical rather than ideological (in Marxian terms they belong to
‘base’ rather than ‘superstructure’). They are designed to facilitate
readily definable practical operations, and are readily modified or
abandoned to meet changing practical needs, always allowing for the
inertia which any practice acquires with time and the emotional
resistance to any innovation by people who have become attached
to it. The same applies to the recognized ‘rules’ of games or other
patterns of social interaction, where these exist, or to any other
pragmatically based norms. Where these exist in combination with
‘tradition’, the difference is readily observable. Wearing hard hats
when riding makes practical sense, like wearing crash helmets for
motor-cyclists or steel helmets for soldiers; wearing a particular type
of hard hat in combination with hunting pink makes an entirely
different kind of sense. If this were not so, it would be as easy to
change the ‘traditional’ costume of fox-hunters as it is to substitute
Introduction: Inventing Traditions 3
4 ERIC HOBSBAWM
a differently shaped helmet in armies - rather conservative institutions
- ifit can be shown to provide more effectiveprotection. Indeed,
it may be suggested that ‘traditions’ and pragmatic conventions or
routines are inversely related. ‘Tradition’ shows weakness when, as
among liberal Jews, dietary prohibitions are justified pragmatically,
as by arguing that the ancient Hebrews banned pork on grounds of
hygiene. Conversely, objects or practices are liberated for full
symbolic and ritual use when no longer fettered by practical use. The
spurs of Cavalry officers’ dress uniforms are more important for
‘tradition ’when there are no horses, the umbrellas of Guards officers
in civilian dress lose their significance when not carried tightly furled
(that is, useless), the wigs of lawyers could hardly acquire their
modern significance until other people stopped wearing wigs.
Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of
formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the
past, if only by imposing repetition. The actual process of creating
such ritual and symbolic complexes has not been adequately studied
by historians. Much ofit is still rather obscure. It is presumably most
clearly exemplified where a ‘tradition’ is deliberately invented and
constructed by a single initiator, as for the Boy Scouts by BadenPowell.
Perhaps it is almost as easily traced in the case of officially
instituted and planned ceremonials, since they are likely to be well
documented, as in the case of the construction of Nazi symbolism
and the Nuremberg party rallies. It is probably most difficult to trace
where such traditions are partly invented, partly evolved in private
groups (where the process is less likely to be bureaucratically
recorded), or informally over a period of time as, say, in parliament
and the legal profession. The difficulty is not only one of sources but
also of techniques, though there are available both esoteric disciplines
specializing in symbolism and ritual, such as heraldry and the study
of liturgy, as well as Warburgian historic disciplines for the study of
such subjects. Unfortunately neither are usually familiar to historians
of the industrial era.
There is probably no time and place with which historians are
concerned which has not seen the ‘invention’ of tradition in this
sense. However, we should expect it to occur more frequently when
a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social
patterns for which ‘old ’traditions had been designed, producing new
ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions
and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove
sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated: in
short, when there are sufficiently large and rapid changes on the
demand or the supply side. Such changes have been particularly
significant in the past 200years, and itis therefore reasonable to expect
these instant formalizations of new traditions to cluster during this
period. This implies, incidentally, against both nineteenth-century
liberalism and more recent ‘modernization’theory that such formalizations
are not confined to so-called ‘traditional’ societies, but also
have their place, in one form or another, in ‘modern’ ones. Broadly
speaking this is so, but one must beware of making the further
assumptions, firstly that older forms of community and authority
structure, and consequently the traditions associated with them, were
unadaptable and became rapidly unviable, and secondly that ‘new’
traditions simply resulted from the inability to use or adapt old ones.
Adaptation took place for old uses in new conditions and
byusingoldmodels fornewpurposes. Old institutions withestablished
functions, references to the past and ritual idioms and practices might
need to adapt in this way: the Catholic Church faced with new
political and ideological challenges and major changes in the composition
of the faithful (such as the notable feminization both of lay
piety and of clerical personnel);1 professional armies faced with
conscription;ancient institutions such as law-courts now operating in
a changed context and sometimes with changed functions in new
contexts. So were institutions enjoying nominal continuity, but in
fact turning into something very very different, such as universities.
Thus Bahnson2 has analysed the sudden decline, after 1848, of the
traditional practice ofmass student exodus from German universities
(for reasons of conflict or demonstration) in terms of the changed
academic character of universities, the rising age of the student
population, its embourgeoisement which diminished town/gown
tensions and student riotousness, the new institution of free mobility
between universities, the consequent change in student associations
and other factors.3In all such cases novelty is no less novel for being
able to dress up easily as antiquity.
1 See for instance G. Tihon, ‘Les rcligieuses en Belgique du XVlIle au XXe siecle:
Approche Statistique’, Belgisch Tijdschrift v. Niemvste Geschiedenis/Revue Beige
dHistoire Contemporaine, vii (1976), pp. 1-54.
2 Karsten Bahnson, Akademische Ausziige aus deutschen Universitats und Hochschulorten
(Saarbriicken, 1973).
3 Seventeen such exoduses are recorded in the eighteenth century, fifty in 1800-48,
but only six from 1848 to 1973.
Introduction: Inventing Traditions 5
6 ERIC HOBSBAWM
More interesting, from our point of view, is the use of ancient
materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite
novel purposes. A large store of such materials is accumulated in the
past of any society, and an elaborate language of symbolic practice
and communication is always available. Sometimes new traditions
could be readily grafted on old ones, sometimes they could be devised
by borrowing from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual,
symbolism and moral exhortation - religion and princely pomp,
folklore and freemasonry (itself an earlier invented tradition of great
symbolic force). Thus the development of Swiss nationalism,
concomitant with the formation of the modern federal state in the
nineteenth century, has been brilliantly studied by Rudolf Braun,4
who has the advantage of training in a discipline (‘Volkskunde’)
which lends itself to such studies, and in a country where its
modernization has not been set back by association with Nazi abuses.
Existing customary traditional practices - folksong, physical contests,
marksmanship - were modified, ritualized and institutionalized
for the new national purposes. Traditional folksongs were supplemented
by new songs in the same idiom, often composed by schoolmasters,
transferred to a choral repertoire whose content was
patriotic-progressive (‘Nation, Nation, wie voll klingt der Ton’),
though it also embodied ritually powerful elements from religious
hymnology. (The formation of such new song-repertoires, especially
for schools, is well worth study.) The statutes of the Federal Song
Festival-are we not reminded of the eisteddfodau? - declare its
object to be 'the development and improvement of the people’s
singing, the awakening ofmore elevated sentiments for God, Freedom
and Country, union and fraternization of the friends of Art and the
Fatherland’. (The word ‘improvement’introduces the characteristic
note of nineteenth-century progress.)
A powerful ritual complex formed round these occasions: festival
pavilions, structures for the display of flags, temples for offerings,
processions, bell-ringing, tableaux, gun-salutes, government delegations
in honour of the festival, dinners, toasts and oratory. Old
materials were again adapted for this:
The echoes of baroque forms ofcelebration, display and pomp are
unmistakable in this new festival architecture. And as, in the
baroque celebration, state and church merge on a higher plane, so
4 Rudolf Braun, Sozialer undkultureller Wandel in einem landtichen Indusfriegebiet
im i9. und 20. Jahrhundert, ch. 6 (Erlenbach-Ziirich, 1965).
an alloy of religious and patriotic elements emerges from these new
forms of choral, shooting and gymnastic activity/'
How far new traditions can thus use old materials, how far they
may be forced to invent new languages or devices, or extend the old
symbolic vocabulary beyond itsestablished limits, cannot bediscussed
here. It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological
movements and groups - not least in nationalism - were so unprecedented
that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example
by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity,
either by semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vercingetorix, Arminius the
Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech medieval manuscripts).
It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices came into
existence as part of national movements and states, such as the
national anthem (of which the British in 1740 seems to be the
earliest), the national flag (still largely a variation on the French
revolutionary tricolour, evolved 1790-4), or the personification of
4the nation ’in symbol or image, either official, as with Marianne and
Germania, or unofficial, as in the cartoon stereotypes of John Bull,
the lean Yankee Uncle Sam and the ‘German Michel’.
Nor should we overlook the break in continuity which is sometimes
clear even in traditional topoi of genuine antiquity. If we follow
Lloyd,0 English Christmas folk carols ceased to be created in the
seventeenth century, to be replaced by hymn-book carols of the
Watts-Wesley kind, though a demotic modification of these in
largely rural religions like Primitive Methodism may be observed.
Yet carols were the first kind of folksong to be revived by middle-class
collectors to take their place ‘in novel surroundings of church, guild
and women’s institute’ and thence to spread in a new urban popular
setting ‘by street-corner singers or by hoarse boys chanting on
doorsteps in the ancient hope of reward’. In this sense ‘God rest ye
merry, Gentlemen’ is not old but new. Such a break is visible even
in movements deliberately describing themselves as ‘traditionalist’,
and appealing to groups which were, by common consent, regarded
as the repositories of historic continuity and tradition, such as
peasants.7Indeed, the very appearance of movements for the defence
5 Rudolf Braun, op. cit.%pp. 336-7.
6 A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (London, 1969 ed.), pp. 134-8.
7 This is lo be distinguished from the revival of tradition for purposes which
actually demonstrated its decline. 'The farmers* revival (around 1900) of their
old regional dress, folk dances and similar rituals for festive occasions was neither
a bourgeois nor a traditionalistic feature. On the surface it could be viewed as
Introduction: Inventing Traditions 7
8 ERIC HOBSBAWM
or revival of traditions, ‘traditionalist’ or otherwise, indicates such
a break. Such movements, common among intellectuals since the
Romantics, can never develop or even preserve a living past (except
conceivably by setting up human natural sanctuaries for isolated
corners of archaic life), but must become ‘invented tradition’. On
the other hand the strength and adaptability of genuine traditions
is not to be confused with the ‘invention of tradition’. Where the old
ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented.
Yet it may be suggested that where they are invented, it is often
not because old ways are no longer available or viable, but because
they are deliberately not used or adapted. Thus, in consciously
setting itself against tradition and for radical innovation, the
nineteenth-century liberal ideology of social change systematically
failed to provide for the social and authority ties taken for granted
in earlier societies, and created voids which might have to be filled by
invented practices. The success of nineteenth-century Tory factory
masters in Lancashire (as distinct from Liberal ones) in using such old
ties to advantage shows that they were still there to be used - even
in the unprecedented environment of the industrial town.8 The
long-term inadaptability of pre-industrial ways to a society revolutionized
beyond a certain point is not to be denied, but is not to be
confused with the problems arising out of the rejection of old ways
in the short term by those who regarded them as obstacles to progress
or, even worse, as its militant adversaries.
This did not prevent innovators from generating their own
invented traditions - the practices of freemasonry are a case in point.
Nevertheless, a general hostility to irrationalism, superstition and
customary practices reminiscent of the dark past, if not actually
descended from it, made impassioned believers in the verities of the
Enlightenment, such as liberals, socialists, and communists, unreceptive
to traditions old or novel. Socialists, as we shall see below,
found themselvesacquiringan annual May Daywithoutquiteknowing
a nostalgic longing for the old-time culture which was so rapidly disappearing, but
in reality it was a demonstration of class identity by which prosperous farmers
could distance themselves horizontally relative to the townspeople and vertically
from the cottars, craftsmen and labourers.’ Palle Ove Christiansen, ‘Peasant
Adaptation to Bourgeois Culture? Class Formation and Cultural Redefinition
in the Danish Countryside’, Ethnologia Scandinavica (1978), p. 128. Sec also
G. Lewis, ‘The Peasantry, Rural Change and Conservative Agrarianism: Lower
Austria at the Turn of the Century’, Past & Present, no. 81 (1978), pp. 119-43.
8 Patrick Joyce, ‘The Factory Politics of Lancashire in the Later Nineteenth
Century’, Historical Journal, xviii (1965), pp. 525-53.
how; National Socialists exploited such occasions with liturgical
sophistication and zeal and a conscious manipulation of symbols.9
The liberal era in Britain at best tolerated such practices, insofar as
neither ideology nor economic efficiency were at issue, sometimes as
a reluctant concession to the irrationalism of the lower orders. Its
attitude to the sociable and ritual activities of Friendly Societies was
a combination of hostility (‘unnecessary expenses’such as ‘payments
for anniversaries, processions, bands, regalia’were legally forbidden)
and toleration of events such as annual feasts on the grounds that
‘the importance of this attraction, especially as respects the country
population, cannot be denied’.10But a rigorous individualist rationalism
dominated not only as an economic calculus but as a social
ideal. Chapter 7 will investigate what happened in the period when
its limitations became increasingly recognized.
These introductory notes may be concluded with some general
observations about the invented traditions of the period since the
industrial revolution.
They seem to belong to three overlapping types: a) those establishing
or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups,
real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing
institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main
purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems
and conventions of behaviour. While traditions of types b) and c)
were certainly devised (as in those symbolizing submission to
authority in British India), it may be tentatively suggested that type
a) was prevalent, the other functions being regarded as implicit in
or flowing from a sense of identification with a ‘community’ and/or
the institutions representing, expressing or symbolizing it such as a
‘nation’.
One difficulty was that such larger social entities were plainly not
Gemeinschaften or even systems of accepted ranks. Social mobility,
the facts of class conflict and the prevalent ideology made traditions
combining community and marked inequality in formal hierarchies
(as in armies) difficult to apply universally. This did not much affect
traditions of type c) since general socialization inculcated the same
values in every citizen, member of the nation and subject ofthe crown,
9 Helmut Hartwig, "Plaketten zum 1. Mai 1934-39’, Aesthetik und Kommunikation,
vii, no. 26 (1976), pp. 56-9.
10 P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815-1875 (Manchester,
1961), pp. 123, 119.
Introduction: Inventing Traditions 9
10 ERIC HOBSBAWM
and the functionally specific socializations of different social groups
(such as public school pupils as distinct from others) did not usually
get in each others’ way. On the other hand, insofar as invented
traditions reintroduced, as it were, status into a world of contract,
superior and inferior into a world of legal equals, they could not do
so directly. They could be smuggled in by formal symbolic assent to
a social organization which was de facto unequal, as by the restyling
of the British coronation ceremony.11 (See below pp. 282-3.) More
commonly they might foster the corporate sense of superiority of
elites - particularly when these had to be recruited from those who
did not already possess it by birth or ascription - rather than by
inculcating a sense of obedience in inferiors. Some were encouraged
to feel more equal than others. This might be done by assimilating
elites to pre-bourgeois ruling groups or authorities, whether in the
militarist/bureaucratic form characteristic of Germany (as with the
duelling student corps), or the non-militarized ‘moralized gentry’
model of the British public schools. Alternatively, perhaps, the esprit
de corps, self-confidence and leadership of elites could be developed
by more esoteric ‘traditions’ marking the cohesiveness of a senior
official mandarinate (as in France or among whites in the colonies).
Granted that ‘communitarian’ invented traditions were the basic
type, their nature remains to be studied. Anthropology may help to
elucidate the differences, if any, between invented and old traditional
practices. Here we may merely note that while rites of passage are
normally marked in the traditions of particular groups (initiation,
promotion, retirement, death), this was not usually the case in those
designed for all-embracing pseudo-communities (nations, countries),
presumably because these underlined their eternal and unchanging
character-at least since the community’s foundation. However,
both new political regimes and innovatory movements might seek to
find their own equivalents for the traditional rites of passage
associated with religion (civil marriage, funerals).
One marked difference between old and invented practices may be
observed. The former were specific and strongly binding social
practices, the latter tended to be quite unspecific and vague as to the
nature of the values, rights and obligations of the group membership
they inculcate: ‘patriotism’, ‘loyalty’, ‘duty’, ‘playing the game’,
‘the school spirit’and the like. But if the content of British patriotism
11 J. E. C. Bodley, The Coronation o f Edward the Vllth: A Chapter o f European and
Imperial History (London, 1903), pp. 201, 204.
or 4Americanism *was notably ill-defined, though usually specified
in commentaries associated with ritual occasions, the practices
symbolizing it were virtually compulsory - as in standing up for the
singing of the national anthem in Britain, the flag ritual in American
schools. The crucial element seems to have been the invention of
emotionally and symbolically charged signs of club membership
rather than the statutes and objects of the club. Their significance lay
precisely in their undefined universality:
The National Flag, the National Anthem and the National
Emblem are the three symbols through which an independent
country proclaims its identity and sovereignty, and as such they
command instantaneous respect and loyalty. In themselves they
reflect the entire background, thought and culture of a nation.1*
In this sense, as an observer noted in 1880,4soldiers and policemen
wear badges for us now’, though he failed to predict their revival as
adjuncts to individual citizens in the era of mass movements which
was about to begin.13
The second observation is that it seems clear that, in spite of much
invention, new traditions have not filled more than a small part of
the space left by the secular decline of both old tradition and custom;
as might indeed be expected in societies in which the past becomes
increasingly less relevant as a model or precedent for most forms of
human behaviour. In the private lives of most people, and in the
self-contained lives of small sub-cultural groups, even the invented
traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occupied or
occupy a much smaller place than old traditions do in, say, old
agrarian societies.14‘What is done5structures the days, seasons and
life-cycles of twentieth-century western men and women very much
less than it did their ancestors’, and very much less than the external
compulsions of the economy, technology, bureaucratic state
organization, political decision and other forces which neither rely
on nor develop ‘tradition’ in our sense.
However, this generalization does not apply in the field of what
might be called the public life of the citizen (including to some extent
12 Official Indian government commentary, quoted in R. Firth, Symbols, Public and
Private (London, 1973), p. 341.
13 Frederick Marshall, Curiosities of Ceremonials, Titles, Decorations and Forms of
International Vanities (London, 1880), p. 20.
u Not to mention the transformation of long-lasting rituals and signs of uniformity
and cohesion into rapidly changing fashions-in costume, language, social
practice etc., as in the youth cultures of industrialized countries.
Introduction: Inventing Traditions 11
12 ERIC HOBSBAWM
public forms of socialization, such as schools, as distinct from private
ones such as the mass media). There is no real sign of weakening in
the neo-traditional practices associated either with bodies of men in
the public service (armed forces, the law, perhaps even public
servants) or in practices associated with the citizens’ membership of
states. Indeed most of the occasions when people become conscious
ofcitizenship as such remain associated with symbols and semi-ritual
practices (for instance, elections), most ofwhich are historically novel
and largely invented: flags, images, ceremonies and music. Insofar
as the invented traditions of the era since the industrial and French
revolutions have filled a permanent gap - at all events up to the
present - it would seem to be in this field.
Why, it may be asked finally, should historians devote their
attention to such phenomena? The question is in one sense unnecessary,
since a growing number of them plainly do, as the contents
of this volume and the references cited in it bear witness. So it is better
rephrased. What benefit can historians derive from the study of the
invention of tradition?
First and foremost, it may be suggested that they are important
symptoms and therefore indicators of problems which might not
otherwise be recognized, and developments which are otherwise
difficult to identify and to date. They are evidence. The transformation
of German nationalism from its old liberal to its new imperialistexpansionist
pattern is more exactly illuminated by the rapid replacement
of the old black-red-gold colours by the new black-white-red
ones(especiallybythe 1890s)amongtheGermangymnasticmovement,
than by official statements of authorities or spokesmen for organizations.
The history of the British football cup finals tells us something
about the development of an urban working-class culture which
more conventional data and sources do not. By the same token, the
study ofinvented traditions cannot be separated from the wider study
of the history of society, nor can it expect to advance much beyond
the mere discovery ofsuch practices unless it is integrated into a wider
study.
Second, it throws a considerable light on the human relation to
the past, and therefore on the historian’s own subject and craft. For
all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator
of action and cement of group cohesion. Frequently it becomes the
actual symbol of struggle, as in the battles over the monuments to
Walther von der Vogelweide and Dante in South Tyrol in 1889 and
1896.15 Even revolutionary movements backed their innovations by
reference to a ‘people’s past’(Saxons versus Normans, ‘nos ancetres
les Gaulois’ against the Franks, Spartacus), to traditions of revolution
(‘Auch das deutsche Volk hat seine revolutionare Tradition’ as
Engels claimed in the first words of his Peasant War in Germany)16
and to its own heroes and martyrs. James Connolly’s Labour in Irish
History exemplifies this union of themes excellently. The element of
invention is particularly clear here, since the history which became
part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or
movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular
memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized
and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so. Oral
historians have frequently observed how in the actual memories of
the old the General Strike of 1926 plays a more modest and less
dramatic part than interviewers anticipated.17The formation of such
an image of the French Revolution in and by the Third Republic has
been analysed.18Yet all historians, whatever else their objectives, are
engaged in this process inasmuch as they contribute, consciously or
not, to the creation, dismantling and restructuring of images of the
past which belong not only to the world of specialist investigation
but to the public sphere of man as a political being. They might as
well be aware of this dimension of their activities.
In this connection, one specific interest of‘invented traditions’for,
at all events, modern and contemporary historians ought to be
singled out. They are highly relevant to that comparatively recent
historical innovation, the ‘nation’, with its associated phenomena:
nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest.
All these rest on exercises in social engineering which are often
deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty
implies innovation. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism or nations
15 John W, Cole and Eric Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an
Alpine Valley (N.Y. and London, 1974), p. 55.
1C For the popularity of books on this and other militant historical subjects in
German workers’ libraries, see H.-J. Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie.
Zur Ideologic der Partei vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Hanover, 1967),
p p .131-3.
17 There are perfectly sound reasons why participants at the bottom do not usually
see historic events they live through as top people or historians do. One might
call this (after the hero of Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme) the ‘Fabrice
syndrome’.
18 E.g. Alice Gerard, La Revolution Fran^aise: Mythes et Interpretations, 1789-1970
(Paris, 1970).
Introduction: Inventing Traditions ' 13
14 ERIC HOBSBAWM
must be novel, whatever the historic continuities of Jews or Middle
Eastern Muslims, since the very concept of territorial states of the
currently standard type in their region was barely thought ofa century
ago, and hardly became a serious prospect before the end of World
War I. Standard national languages, to be learned in schools and
written, let alone spoken, by more than a smallish elite, are largely
constructs of varying, but often brief, age. As a French historian of
Flemish language observed, quite correctly, the Flemish taught in
Belgium today is not the language which the mothers and grandmothers
of Flanders spoke to their children: in short, it is only
metaphorically but not literally a ‘mother-tongue’. We should not
be misled by a curious, but understandable, paradox:modern nations
and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel,
namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of
constructed, namely human communities so ‘natural’ as to require
no definition other than self-assertion. Whatever the historic or other
continuities embedded in the modern concept o f‘France’ and ‘the
French’-an d which nobody would seek to deny-these very
concepts themselves must include a constructed or ‘invented’ component.
And just because so much of what subjectively makes up the
modern ‘nation’ consists of such constructs and is associated with
appropriate and, in general, fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored
discourse (such as ‘national history’), the national phenomenon
cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the
‘invention of tradition’.
Finally, the study of the invention of tradition is interdisciplinary.
It is a field of study which brings together historians, social anthropologists
and a variety of other workers in the human sciences, and
cannot adequately be pursued without such collaboration. The
present book brings together, in the main, contributions by historians.
It is to be hoped that others will also find it useful.