Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 is a history written in 1992 by Linda Colley. Britons charts the emergence of British identity from the Act of Union in 1707 with Scotland and England to the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837. British identity, she argues, was created from four features that both united the Britons and set the nation apart from others:

1. Britain is a Protestant state defined against a largely Catholic Europe;
2. it is an island nation with a strong navy rather than a massive army;
3. it is a metropole;
4. it is a direct rival to France.
5. Colley’s analysis of the source of British identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led her to wonder whether British identity will survive in the future, now that so much of what made the Britons British – religion, Empire, disaffiliation from the Continent – has been lost.