Refusing to treat the Royal Family as a jokey left-over from feudalism or a mere tourist attraction, Tom Nairn sees the monarchy as both apex and essence of the British State, and presents an analysis of the specific backwardness that explains this phenomenon. The monarchy has been symbol and guarantor of Great Britain's peculiar entry into modernity: the first-comer unable to break free from its origins, and still bound to these by patrician rituals which no later developer has had to imitate. Instead, the Anglo-British evolved a pseudo- modern national identity around the Crown and its constitutional framework - the parliamentary sovereignty of Westminster.