British ethnicity refers to the people of the island of Britain and typically also Northern Ireland in the north of Ireland. The ethnic makeup of the British people has been influenced by a wide range of migrations and developments over the millennia. If one goes back over two-thousand years, Britain was inhabited by the Britons, a Celtic people who were dominant in southern England, while various other sub-groups of the Brittonic Celts inhabited other parts of the island such as the Caledonians of Scotland.[1]
Over the centuries this changed. For instance, many Romans settled in England in the first, second and third centuries CE, while the Irish also colonized parts of Scotland during the late antique and early medieval periods. During the fifth and sixth centuries a Germanic element was introduced into British ethnicity with the arrival of the Angles and Saxons as the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Then from the late eighth century onwards various Norse people in the shape of the Vikings and Danes arrived, with the Danes in particular settling in large numbers in northern England and East Anglia. Finally, the Normans, a Norse people-via France, conquered England in the 1060s and colonized the country.[2]
This already complex ethnic situation has been further transformed since the middle of the twentieth century as Britain has welcomed millions of people from all over the world, many of them Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and the African colonies which once made up part of the British Empire. Thus, Britain is a profoundly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society.[3]
British history
Britain is a country which has had an outsized impact on world history for its relatively small size. In ancient times it lay on the periphery of the known world and when the Romans first arrived here in Julius Caesar’s time, they did not consider it worth conquering for some time to come. Eventually, in the mid-first century CE the Roman Emperor Claudius began the conquest of the island, but it was never fully completed. With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Britain became the target of successive waves of invasion by foreign powers over the next seven centuries. First the Angles and Saxons arrived in the fifth and sixth centuries, then the Vikings and Danes came in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries and finally the Normans under William the Conqueror in the eleventh.[4]
Following the Norman Conquest, England began to emerge as one of the most centralized and powerful kingdoms in Europe, challenging the French crown for control of France during the Hundred Years War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while also gradually reducing Wales to English rule. English influence in Ireland and Scotland also expanded, but it would be the seventeenth century before the English monarchs controlled all of Britain and Ireland. By that time English explorers were already fanning out to North America, the Caribbean and India undertaking the first tentative initiative in what would eventually become the British Empire.[5]
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain emerged as the world's foremost superpower. This was based on a number of factors. Firstly, its overseas empire expanded enormously. Although it lost the Thirteen Colonies of North America as a result of the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), it acquired Canada from France in 1763, developed a series of colonies throughout the Caribbean, and began conquering the Indian subcontinent in the late 1750s. At the end of the 1780s the colonization of Australia was undertaken while colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong were acquired in 1819 and 1842 respectively. Finally, a huge swathe of colonies across Africa in places like South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt were acquired in the course of the nineteenth century. In tandem, the Industrial Revolution had started in Britain in the 1770s and by the nineteenth century England was the center of economic and technological development worldwide. It was, for instance, in Britain that Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine and ushered in the beginning of modernity in the eighteenth century.[6]
As with any superpower, this period of ascendancy could not last forever. By the dawn of the twentieth century countries like the United States, Germany and Russia had industrialized and were challenging British hegemony. In the case of Germany, this led to two world wars. By the time these ended, Britain had declined dramatically and passed the torch as an Anglophone economic and military power to the United States. The empire was dismantled in due course between 1945 and the mid-1960s. But, with London’s position within the world economic system, Britain’s role as the head of the Commonwealth of Nations, and its history and culture, Britain retains a status in the world beyond its small size.[7]
British culture
British culture today combines a wide range of diverse traditions. On one hand, the country’s traditional culture is reflected in everything from the National Trust’s many stately homes and castles across the country, to fish and chips, to football, and the monarchy. But the country is also an eclectic conglomeration of other cultures. For instance, one will find mosques in every town and city in the country to reflect its multiculturalism, while curry has become as native to British diets as lamb stew as a result of the country’s long association with India. In terms of its artistic and literary culture, Britain has, as in all things, punched above its weight, with Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Orwell, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, and William Shakespeare known worldwide.[8]
British languages
English is the official language of the United Kingdom and is spoken by the vast majority of the population. Furthermore, Britain has been responsible for exporting the English language around the world as part of its empire between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, English is the lingua franca of so much of the world today is owing to this. There are additional official languages within the United Kingdom. For instance, Welsh or Cymric is an official language of Wales, Gaelic and Scots have official status in Scotland, and Irish is an official language of Northern Ireland, with Ulster Scots, a regional dialect, having minority status as a language in Northern Ireland as well.[9] Manx, another Gaelic language, has official status on the Isle of Mann, while English and French both have official status on the Channel Islands, which are part of the United Kingdom but lie much closer to France than to England.[10] Finally, Cornish, a Brittonic language, has minority status in Cornwall in south-western England.[11]
Research census records on MyHeritage
See also
Explore more about British ethnicity
- England Deaths and Burials, 1538-1991 at MyHeritage
- 1841 England & Wales Census at MyHeritage
- 1901 England & Wales Census at MyHeritage
- Free Webinar Weekends in June: Great Britain Intro at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Your 18th Century Ancestors in England at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Scientists Are Mapping the DNA of Every Living Thing in the British Isles at MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/were-the-britons-celts/
- ↑ https://www.bl.uk/anglo-saxons/articles/the-danish-and-norman-conquests-of-anglo-saxon-england
- ↑ https://history.port.ac.uk/?p=2668
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Invaders/
- ↑ https://thehundredyearswar.co.uk/timeline-hundred-years-war/
- ↑ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Timeline-Of-The-British-Empire/
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/40106136
- ↑ https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/guide-britains-famous-writers-history/
- ↑ https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/most-spoken-languages-in-united-kingdom
- ↑ https://www.gov.im/categories/home-and-neighbourhood/manx-gaelic/
- ↑ https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cornish-granted-minority-status-within-the-uk