The myths of origin that become hegemonic within states can be immensely influential. The most famous foundation story in Western culture is that of the Jewish people, set out in the first five books of the Bible. These are largely remembered in post-Christian cultures for the stories of the creation, the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. All are indeed present, but the repeated theme throughout is the exhortation of Moses to ‘the children of Israel’ that they take by force their God-given land.

These books relate the story of Moses leading his people out of their ‘bondage’ in Egypt; their passage through the Red Sea as the waters parted to allow them to cross; their sufferings in the Sinai desert. Throughout, Moses urged them on to military conquest of the land ‘that floweth with milk and honey’. As to the existing inhabitants, the people of Israel were commanded in some places in the text to drive them out, in others to ‘utterly destroy them’, or to ‘smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword; but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city… shalt thou take unto thyself.’ (Genesis 35.11; Exodus 3.8; Leviticus 14.34, 25.1; Numbers 10.29, 14.8, 15.2, 32.21–2, 33.53; Deuteronomy, 7.2, 20. 13–14, 20.17, 31.2–34.5.) It was a powerful myth of divinely sanctioned conquest.

More recently, myths of origin have been validated by Christian churches rather than by direct and audible divine commands. Vladimir Putin’s 5,000-word essay ‘On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians’, published on 12 July 2021, provided a rationale for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In that essay, Putin contended that Russia and Ukraine occupied ‘essentially the same historical and spiritual space’. ‘History’ revealed the existence ‘over more than a thousand years’ of foreign ‘forces that have always sought to undermine our unity’. Spiritual space was identified by ‘the Orthodox faith’, expressed in Russian Orthodoxy’s ‘unified church government’, clashing with the Catholicism of Lithuania and Poland.

Putin’s essay largely analysed churches as political phenomena, as definitions of identity. But as historical concepts, these churches proved to be powerful explanatory devices. Such an approach was used to show, in a remarkable rejection of Bolshevik internationalism, that ‘modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era’ as the Bolsheviks’ expectations of the demise of the nation-state led to their ‘bestowing territorial gifts’. The break-up of the USSR meant a large reduction in Russia’s rightful population: ‘Our spiritual unity has also been attacked,’ wrote Putin.

But are myths of origin more widely shared? And if they are such dangerous things, how should they be dealt with? Here I shall pose some basic questions, and then examine how these issues operate in the histories of the United Kingdom and the United States.

A much longer chronological perspective may help to explain recent events. At the end of the last ice age in the northern hemisphere, the glaciers retreated and the snowfields melted. They were replaced by woodland and grassland. At that point, tiny bands of people moved in and began to grow grain and keep livestock on the meadows. They were the last innocent generation. But their farming practices created the idea of private property in land, which could hardly develop among hunter-gatherers or herdsmen. Subsequent mass migrations, therefore, had to entail forcible dispossession.

Stable, peaceful societies derived from unstable and violent origins. All polities of which written record survives began in the same way: with enormous episodes of murder and theft. Such sanguinary realities then had to be re-described and turned into ethically justified episodes – initially often divinely sanctioned. The evolution over only a few thousand years of the sophisticated and complex societies of today was never inevitable. In this process, myths of origin played an important part by promoting positive practices, but also by continuing to camouflage negative ones.

If polities typically arise as a result of extreme violence, they do not have ‘founding principles’ (unless murder and theft count as principles). These episodes do not reveal, let alone are they driven by, general principles of government or universal human rights. Instead, they are chaotic. Out of the chaos come individuals claiming to interpret those episodes, to explain what they mean. These meanings are, at the outset, heavily disputed.

Over time, certain interpretations often emerge as hegemonic, but they are never uncontested and never immortal: they change over time. Thus, historically stable values and practices can never be inferred from claimed ‘founding principles’. These have to be expressed in terms too general to be meaningful, like the written constitutions to which they sometimes relate. The US and the UK are often claimed to be ‘democracies’, but their political systems work in different ways. They are often held to pursue ‘liberty’, but liberty to do what? A myth of origin is unlikely to be decisive. To be effective, it has to contain elements of truth. It will also contain elements of falsehood: to make these palatable is the purpose of the myth, which, to become plausible, expresses itself as history – the discipline through which it can best be examined – rather than philosophy.

A comparison between the UK and the US confronts a paradox which historians outside the US have had little success in resolving, as their theories often contradict the country’s hegemonic origin myths. The riddle is the nature and causes of the American Revolution itself. The war of 1776-83 was quite unlike wars of national liberation: the new nation was an outcome of the revolution, not its cause. It was not a war between a Catholic and a Protestant country. It was not between a capitalist and a socialist society, nor between militarists and pacifists. It was not centrally a conflict between people of different skin colours. On the contrary, the two cultures were similar. The myth of origin of the new United States, then, does not explain the American Revolution.

My own contribution has been to suggest that the American Revolution contained some elements of a war of religion. Those involved were not fighting for republicanism or universal human rights. Instead, these ideas made up the subsequent myth of origin; the parts of the narrative that won acceptance in the new republic.

The revolution had major elements of sectarian conflict. The outcome was a polity that Protestant dissenters made. It glorified a notion, or notions, of religious destiny; in biblical imagery, a ‘city on a hill’. The revolution had to be misrepresented if it was to be sanitised. What of the UK? In recent centuries, one influential myth of origin derived from the revolution of 1688. The reality was that it was an armed rebellion, backed by a foreign invasion, intended to destroy a Catholic monarchy and replace it with a Protestant one. This element had to be incorporated into, but misdescribed in, the myth of origin that succeeded 1688. That myth claimed that England, then Britain, then the United Kingdom, was essentially dedicated to liberty. This narrative was resisted by peoples conquered, and their lands held by force, by the English: Ireland and Scotland; then the American colonies; then a global empire.

The meaning of the revolution of 1688 was lastingly contested by Tories and Jacobites in England, and by some Scots and Irish on the English periphery, but these challenges were beaten off. Britain fought the American war of 1776–83 with a firmly entrenched belief that it was consistent with a free constitution for the Westminster Parliament to legislate for the colonies, a principle that survived defeat. The American Revolution did not have decisive consequences in England.

At home, the regime was challenged by a series of revolutionaries. As in the early years of the French Revolution, such rebels often invoked the anti-monarchism of the 1640s; after 1815, sometimes the idea of an Anglo-Saxon free constitution. In the late Middle Ages, before the rise of capitalism, English socialists planned an armed revolution, sometimes invoking an idea of the prosperity of workers. None of these threatened revolutions happened. Instead, English, then British, history has been deeply modified by historians, not by ideologically inspired revolutionaries.

The new myth that historians have lately made is that the UK was built on the values of pluralism and diversity, an illusion claiming to be based on the further myth that universal human rights were a creation of ‘the Enlightenment’, itself a myth of origin that rose to its present hegemony only in the 1960s.

What happened in the new United States? Since its myth of origin was premised on a justified revolution, the notion that a second (socialist) revolution was needed to bring about a just society had no space in which to develop. The hegemonic myth of origin of the US was powerful and long-lasting. Victory for the southern states in the Civil War of 1861–5 would have destroyed it; the victory of the northern states confirmed it. It emerged greatly strengthened from the military victory of 1945.

Its alleged components were argued over by academic historians, who chiefly explored the options of ‘Lockeian liberalism’ and ‘classical republicanism’ (each largely a myth; for example, ‘liberalism’ was the proper name of an ideology coined more than a century after Locke’s lifetime) but this historiographical contest ended in a stalemate that left the familiar myth of origin of the United States, as embodied in popular culture, largely intact.

When myths of origin are contradicted, challenged, modified or discarded, it is mostly because of major military defeat. In the US, the modifier was the lesser military defeat of the Vietnam War.

The US myth of origin was fundamentally changed, not by subjecting it to historical analysis, but by changing its owners, including others within it, notably women and African Americans (Native Americans are a more recent inclusion, for example in the work of Ned Blackhawk). In its new form it is still powerful. The myth of success, the career open to talents, is still hegemonic, despite the fact that social mobility in the US is little different from other similarly advanced societies: inherited wealth is still a powerful determinant of individual fortune in successive generations, and many marginalised groups are trapped in material and cultural poverty.

But the myth has been secularised. The white settlers of the 13 colonies that achieved independence in 1783 expanded by force across the North American continent, their republic growing by the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the military defeat of Mexico in the war of 1846-8. In that decade, ill-defined but evocative ideas of ‘manifest destiny’ were developed. These ideals, assumptions and assertions became secular. Initially contested ideas, they became widely diffused.

John Gast’s famous picture American Progress was painted in 1872. It showed parties of white settlers moving westwards across the continent with Native Americans fleeing before them. But the scene was presided over and urged on, not by God, but by the figure of an airborne female representing Columbia, a personification of America itself. Thanks to the myth of origin, the land empire of the US is not allowed to stand as an instance of imperialism; the US is described as an exception. In 1998, a conference organised in Rome by the United Nations considered a document establishing an International Criminal Court. The United States voted against the notion, and in 2002 a US Federal Act asserted the immunity of the US from the jurisdiction of that court, which was then being constituted.

In 1920, President Woodrow Wilson used the phrase ‘manifest destiny’, but only to designate the drive to extend ‘democracy’. US power is no longer projected with a missionary zeal, as it was by Wilson, the Presbyterian president of a Presbyterian university, Princeton. Instead, a secularised ‘democracy’ is used as the justification for the use of force by the US around the world. The contradiction between these democratic ideals and the actual working of US politics at home is almost never an issue in daily US politics. There, ‘the Constitution’ still has mythic status.

How, finally, should myths of origin be dealt with? First, ‘myths’. These are partial untruths, used to claim authority: something (partly a fiction) happened in the past, therefore it should happen (in reality) in the future. Traditions are different: they are practices, acted out voluntarily by individuals. Myths are ideologies, imposed on individuals by ideologists. Traditions are what people do; myths of origin are what people are told to do. But the choice of to which view of the past such authority is given must inevitably be arbitrary. Germans might prefer the Germany of Goethe and Schiller to the Germany of Hitler and Goebbels; but why not prefer the Germany of Luther to that of Goethe and Schiller? Putin’s myth of ancient and shared Russian and Ukrainian identity was contested by Norman Davies, a British scholar of Polish history. But he argued, in a review of the same thousand years of history, that ‘Ukraine was part of the Polish state for longer than it was inside Russia’: even if so, why this should dictate an outcome in the present was as unclear as it was in the case of Putin’s argument.

Second, ‘origins’. What people choose to call the origin of their state is equally an arbitrary choice. Citizens of the United States look back to 1776 as its Founding (with a capital letter); but each individual colony was much older, sometimes a century and a half older; the founders of each colony, had they survived, might have disagreed profoundly with the rejection of transatlantic unity in 1776. Each colony had been constituted by killing or ejecting the earlier occupants: their myths of origin were deleted. ‘History’ is an infinite regress. There is no ‘it’ – no History with a capital H – to justify current decisions. Traditions, that is to say unideological practices, may be safe guides; myths of origin may be deeply dangerous.