For other uses, see British (disambiguation).
For the ancient Celtic people, see Britons (historical).
The British (also known as Britons, informally Brits, or archaically Britishers) are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants.[22][23][24] British nationality lawgoverns modern British citizenship and nationality, which are acquired, for instance, by birth in the UK or by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, the term British people refers to the ancient Britons, the indigenous inhabitants of Great Britain south of the Forth.[23]
Although early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages,[25] the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain[26] in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.[27] The notion of Britishness was forged during the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and the First French Empire, and developed further during the Victorian era.[27][28] The complex history of the formation of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Britain;[27] Britishness came to be "superimposed on to much older identities", and the English, Scottish and Welsh "remain in many ways distinct peoples in cultural terms", giving rise to resistance to British identity.[29] Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong conviction by unionists.[30]
Contemporary Britons are descended mainly from the varied ethnic stocks that settled in Great Britain before the 11th century. Prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse influences were blended in Britain under the Normans, Scandinavian Vikings from northern France.[31] Conquest and union facilitated migration, cultural and linguistic exchange, and intermarriage between the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales during the Middle Ages, Early Modern period and beyond.[32][33] Since the 19th century, and particularly since the mid-20th century, there has been immigration to the United Kingdom by people from Ireland, the Commonwealth, other parts of Europe and elsewhere; they and their descendants are mostly British citizens with some assuming a British, dual or hyphenated identity.[34]
The British are a diverse, multicultural society, with "strong regional accents, expressions and identities".[35][36] The social structure of Britain has changed radically since the 19th century, with the decline in religious observance, enlargement of the middle class, and increased ethnic diversity. The population of the United Kingdom stands at around 61 million, with a British diaspora concentrated in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.[37]
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[edit]History of the term
Further information: Britain (name)
See also: Alternative names for the British
Greek and Roman writers between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD name the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland as the Priteni,[38] the origin of the Latin word Britannic. Parthenius, a 1st century Ancient Greek grammarian, and the Etymologicum Genuinum, a 9th century lexical encyclopedia, describe Bretannus (the Latinised form of the Ancient Greek Βρεττανός) as the Celtic national forefather of the Britons.[39] It has been suggested that this name derives from a Gaullish description translated as "people of the forms", referring to the custom of tattooing or painting their bodies with blue woad.[40][41]
By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles.[42][43] However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, and later Roman occupied Britainsouth of Caledonia.[44][45] Following the Roman departure from Britain, the island of Great Britain was left open to invasion by pagan, seafaring warriors such as Saxons and Jutes who gained control in areas around the south east.[46]
In this post-Roman period, as the Anglo-Saxons advanced, territory controlled by the Britons became confined to what would later be Wales, Cornwall and North West England.[47] However, the term Britannia persisted as the Latin name for the island. TheHistoria Brittonum claimed legendary origins as a prestigious genealogy for Brittonic kings, followed by the Historia Regum Britanniae which popularised this pseudo-history to support the claims of the Kings of England.[25][48]
[edit]History
[edit]Ancestral roots
Further information: Genetic history of the British Isles and historical immigration to Great Britain
Traditional accounts of the ancestral roots of the British have taught that they are descended from diverse populations: the Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Irish from the Celts,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55] and the English from the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to Great Britain's western and northern fringes;[47][56] each are also thought to have a small portion of Viking heritage.[57] However, geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer suggests that DNA analysis attests that three quarters of Britons share a common ancestry with the hunter-gatherers who settled in Atlantic Europe during the Paleolithic era,[56][57][58] "after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands".[57] Despite the separation of theBritish Isles from continental Europe as a consequence of the last ice age, the genetic record indicates the British broadly share a common ancestry with the Basque people who live in the Basque Country by the Pyrenees.[56][57] Oppenheimer continues that the majority of the people of the British Isles share genetic commonalities with the Basques, ranging from highs of 90% in Wales to lows of 66% in East Anglia. The difference between western Britain and the East of England is thought to have its origins to two divergent prehistoric routes of immigration — one up the Atlantic coast, the other from continental Europe.[57] Major immigrant settlement of the British Isles occurred during the Neolithic period,[57] interpreted by Bryan Sykes—professor of human genetics at theUniversity of Oxford—as the arrival of the Celts from the Iberian Peninsula, and the origin of Britain's and Ireland's Celtic tribes.[59] Oppenheimer found that "by far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales".[60] The National Museum Wales state that "it is possible that future genetic studies of ancient and modern human DNA may help to inform our understanding of the subject" but "early studies have, so far, tended to produce implausible conclusions from very small numbers of people and using outdated assumptions about linguistics and archaeology."[61]
Throughout classical antiquity the Celts formed a series of tribes, cultures and identities, notably the Picts and Gaels in the north and the Britons in the south. The Roman conquest of Britain introduced Romans to Britain, who upon their arrival recorded that in what is now southern England were people from Gallia Belgica,[57] in west Britain were the Ordovices, the Demetae, the Silures and the Deceangli tribes.[62] A Romano-British culture developed in central and southern Britain, until shortly after the Roman departure from Britain, completed in the early-5th century. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain occurred thereafter in the 5th to 6th centuries, when the Angles, Jutes and Saxons established petty kingdoms over much of what was to become England, and parts of southern Scotland, pushing the Celtic languages and culture to the northern and western fringes of Great Britain.[46][47] Archaeological evidence from Heinrich Härke supports that their invasion "added about 250,000 people to a British population of one to two million", an estimate that Oppenheimer "notes is larger than his but considerably less than the substantial replacement of the English population assumed by others".[57]
Between the 8th and 11th centuries, "three major cultural divisions" had emerged in Britain; the English, Scottish and Welsh.[63] The English had unified under a single nation state in 937 by King Athelstan of Wessex after the Battle of Brunanburh.[64][65] Before then, the English (known then in Old English as the Anglecynn) were under the governance of independent Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms which gradually coalesced into a Heptarchy of seven powerful states, the most powerful of which were Mercia and Wessex. Scottish historian and archaeologist Neil Oliver said that the Battle of Brunanburh would "define the shape of Britain into the modern era", it was a "showdown for two very different ethnic identities - a Norse Celtic alliance versus Anglo Saxon. It aimed to settle once and for all whether Britain would be controlled by a single imperial power or remain several separate independent kingdoms, a split in perceptions which is still very much with us today".[66] However, historian Simon Schama suggested that it was King Edward I of England who was solely "responsible for provoking the peoples of Britain into an awareness of their nationhood" in the 13th century.[67] Scottish national identity, "a complex amalgam" of Gael, Pict, Norsemen and Anglo-Norman, was not finally forged until the Wars of Scottish Independence against the Kingdom of England in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.[68][69] After their unification in the 10th century, the English developed as an imperial people driven by their monarchs.[63] The name Welsh is derived from the Germanic word walha meaning "stranger" or "foreigner", and was introduced by the Anglo-Saxons to describe the Celtic Britons.[63]
[edit]In the Middle Ages
Further information: Matter of Britain
During the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Tudor period, the term British was applied to the Welsh people. At this time, it was "the long held belief that the Welsh were descendants of the ancient Britons and that they spoke 'the British tongue'".[48] This notion was supported by texts such as the Historia Regum Britanniae, a pseudohistorical account of ancient British history, written in the mid-12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth.[48] The Historia Regum Britanniae chronicled the lives of legendary kings of the Britons in a narrative spanning a time of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the ancient British nation and continuing until the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the 7th century forced the Celtic Britons to the west coast, namely Wales and Cornwall.[25][48] This legendary Celtic history of Great Britain is known as the Matter of Britain.[25] The Matter of Britain, a national myth, was retold or reinterpreted in works by Gerald of Wales, a Cambro-Norman chronicler who in the 12th and 13th centuries used the term British to refer to what were later known as the Welsh.[70]
Following the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, Wales in the Early Middle Ages was marked by a series of military conflicts with the Anglo-Saxons, and invasion by the English and the Normans. Despite the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 which annexed the legal system of Wales into that of the Kingdom of England, the Welsh people endured as a nation distinct from that of the English people.[71] King Henry VII of England was the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty, a Welsh royal house that ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms from 1485 until 1603. Henry VII was descended paternally from the rulers of the Welsh principality of Deheubarth, and maternally from a legitimised branch of the English royal House of Lancaster. The Matter of Britain was used as propaganda by the Tudor dynasty to assert and reinforce their Deheubarthian lineage with the kings of the Britons to validate their reign over England and Wales.[25][48][72] The English Reformation, which also affected Wales and the Kingdom of Ireland, was given Royal approval by Henry VII's grandson, the Tudor KingEdward VI of England. Edward VI, under the council of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, saw the Scottish Reformation gathering pace, and advocated the Kingdom of Scotland joining England and Wales in a united Protestant Britain.[73] The Duke of Somerset supported the unification of the English, Welsh and Scottish people under the "indifferent old name of Britons" on the basis that their monarchies "both derived from a Pre-Roman British monarchy".[73]
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1603, the throne of England was inherited by the Scottish House of Stuart, which resulted in the Union of the Crowns; the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland were united by a personal union under King James I of England and VI of Scotland.[74] Like the Tudors, King James was an advocate of full political union between England and Scotland,[75] and on 20 October 1604 proclaimed his assumption of the style "King of Great Britain".[25] The proclamation stated that the name Great Britain was not "new-affected" but rather "the true and ancient name which God and time have imposed upon this Isle, extant and received in histories, in all maps and cartes wherein this Isle is described, and in ordinary letters to ourselves from divers foreign princes". It was further proclaimed that the title was "warranted also by authentical charters, exemplifications under seals, and other records of great antiquity giving us precedent for our doing, not borrowed out of foreign nations but from the acts of our progenitors, Kings of this Realm of England, both before and since the conquest".[25] However, although James used the style of "King of Great Britain" until his death, the title was rejected by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland[76][77] and so had no basis in either English law or Scots law.
[edit]Union of the English, Scottish and Welsh
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Despite centuries of military and religious conflict, commercially England, Wales and Scotland had a "long history of interdependence" and had been "drawing increasingly together" since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the Union of the Crowns in 1603.[79] A broadly shared language, island, monarch, religion and Bible (the Authorized King James Version) further contributed to a cultural alliance between the two sovereign realms and their people.[79][80] The Glorious Revolution of 1688 resulted in a pair of Acts of Parliament by the English and Scottish legislatures—the Bill of Rights 1689 and Claim of Right Act 1689 respectively—which ensured that the shared constitutional monarchy of England and Scotland was held only by Protestants. Despite this, although popular with the monarchy and much of the aristocracy, attempts to unite the two states by Acts of Parliament, in 1606, 1667, and 1689 were unsuccessful;[80] increased political management of Scottish affairs from England had led to "criticism", and strained Anglo-Scottish relations.[81][82]
English and Dutch maritime explorations during the Age of Discovery contributed to the European colonialism of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and provided newfound imperial power and wealth for the English and Welsh at the end of the 17th century. In contrast, the Jacobite rising, crop-failure and famine exacerbated a long-standing weak economy for Scotland.[81] In response, the Scottish kingdom, in opposition to King William II of Scotland and III of England, commenced the Darien Scheme, an attempt to establish a Scottish imperial outlet—the colony of New Caledonia—on the isthmus of Panama.[81] However, through a combination of Scottish mismanagement and English sabotage,[81][83] this imperial venture ended in "catastrophic failure" with an estimated "25% of Scotland's total liquid capital" lost.[81]
The events of the Darien Scheme coupled with the English Parliament passing the Act of Settlement 1701 giving them the right to chose the order of succession for English, Scottish and Irish thrones escalated political hostilities between England and Scotland, and neutralised calls for a united British people. The Parliament of Scotland passed the Act of Security 1704, allowing it to appoint a different monarch to succeed to the Scottish crown from that of England, if it so wished.[81] The English political perspective was that the appointment of aJacobite monarchy in Scotland opened up the possibility of a Franco-Scottish military conquest of England during the Second Hundred Years' War and War of the Spanish Succession.[81] The Alien Act 1705 was passed by the Parliament of England which provided that Scottish nationals in England were to be treated as aliens and estates held by Scots would be treated as alien property,[84] whilst also restricting the import of Scottish products into England and its colonies (about half of Scotland's trade).[85] However, the act contained a provision that it would be suspended if the Parliament of Scotland entered into negotiations regarding the creation of a unified Parliament of Great Britain, which in turn would refund Scottish financial losses on the Darien Scheme.[83] Despite opposition from much of the Scottish,[81] and English populations,[86] a Treaty of Union was agreed by their parliaments; England and Scotland passed the Acts of Union 1707 uniting the two states as the Kingdom of Great Britain on 1 May 1707.[87][88][89] This kingdom "began as a hostile merger", but led to a "full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world"; historian Simon Schama stated "it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history."[90]
At this time the notion of British national identity was gathering pace as "a pragmatic creation designed to exploit and develop new economic and militaristic opportunities of expanding trade and industrial and technological and scientific revolution".[91] Although initially resisted—particularly by the English[86]—the peoples of Great Britain had by the 1750s begun to assume a "layered identity", to think of themselves as simultaneously British and also Scottish, English, or Welsh.[86]
[edit]Development of Britishness
Main article: Britishness
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After the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, British national identity was explored and developed. The terms North Briton and South Briton were devised for the Scottish and English, with the former gaining some preference in Scotland, particularly by the economists and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment.[92][93] Indeed, it was the "Scots [who] played key roles in shaping the contours of British identity";[94] "their scepticism about the Union allowed the Scots the space and time in which to dominate the construction of Britishness in its early crucial years",[95] drawing upon the notion of a shared "spirit of liberty common to both Saxon and Celt ... against the usurpation of the Church of Rome".[96] James Thomson was a poet and playwright born to a Church of Scotland minister in the Scottish Lowlands in 1700 who was interested in forging a common British culture and national identity in this way.[96] In collaboration with Thomas Arne, they wrote Alfred, an opera about Alfred the Great's victory against the Vikings performed to Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1740 to commemorate the accession of King George I of Great Britain and the birthday of Princess Augusta.[97] "Rule, Britannia!" was the climatic piece of the opera and quickly became a "jingoistic" British patriotic song celebrating "Britain's supremacy offshore".[98] An island country with a series of victories for the Royal Navy associated empire and naval warfare "inextricably with ideals of Britishness and Britain's place in the world".[99][100]
Britannia, the new national personification of Great Britain, was established in the 1750s as a representation of "nation and empire rather than any single national hero".[101] On Britannia and British identity, historian Peter Borsay wrote:
Up until 1797 Britannia was conventionally depicted holding a spear, but as a consequence of the increasingly prominent role of the Royal Navy in the war against the French, and of several spectacular victories, the spear was replaced by a trident... The navy had come to be seen...as the very bulwark of British liberty and the essence of what it was to be British.[102]
From the Union of 1707 through to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Great Britain was "involved in successive, very dangerous wars with Catholic France",[103] but which "all brought enough military and naval victories ... to flatter British pride".[104] As the Napoleonic Wars with the First French Empire advanced, "the English and Scottish learned to define themselves as similar primarily by virtue of not being French or Catholic".[105] In combination with sea power and empire, the notion of Britishness became more "closely bound up with Protestantism",[106] a cultural commonality through which the English, Scots and Welsh became "fused together, and remain[ed] so, despite their many cultural divergences".[107]
The proliferation of neo-classical monuments at the end of the 18th century and start of the 19th, such as The Kymin at Monmouth, were attempts to meld the concepts of Britishness with the Greco-Roman empires of classical antiquity.[102] The new and expanding British Empire provided "unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility and the accumulations of wealth", and so the "Scottish, Welsh and Irish populations were prepared to suppress nationalist issues on pragmatic grounds".[108] The British Empire was "crucial to the idea of a British identity and to the self-image of Britishness".[109] Indeed, the Scottish welcomed Britishness during the 19th century "for it offered a context within which they could hold on to their own identity whilst participating in, and benefiting from, the expansion of the [British] Empire".[110] Similarly, the "new emphasis of Britishness was broadly welcomed by the Welsh who considered themselves to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Britons - a word that was still used to refer exclusively to the Welsh".[110] For the English however, by theVictorian era their enthusiastic adoption of Britishness meant that for them it "meant the same as 'Englishness'",[111][112] so much so that "Englishness and Britishness" and "'England' and 'Britain' were used interchangably in a variety of contexts".[113] Britishness came to borrow heavily upon English political history because England had "always been the dominant component of the British Isles in terms of size, population and power"; Magna Carta, common law and hostility to continental Europe were English factors that influenced British sensibilities.[72][114]
The political union of the predominantly Catholic Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain in 1800 coupled with outbreak of peace with France in the early 19th century, challenged the previous century's concept of militant Protestant Britishness.[115][116] The new, expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland meant that the state had to re-evaulate its position on the civil rights of Catholics, and extend its definition of Britishness to the Irish people.[116][117] Like terms that had been invented around the of the Acts of Union 1707, West Briton was introduced for the Irish after 1800. In 1832 Daniel O'Connell, an Irish politician who campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, stated in Britain's House of Commons:
The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the [British] Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Briton if made so in benefits and justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again.[118]
Ireland 1801–1922 was marked by a succession of economic and political mismanagement and neglect, which marginalised the Irish,[117] and advanced Irish nationalism. In the forty years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world".[119] Although the vast majority of Unionists in Ireland proclaimed themselves "simultaneously Irish and British", even for them there was a strain upon the adoption of Britishness after the Great Famine.[120]
War continued to be a unifying factor for the people of Great Britain; British jingoism re-emerged during the Boer Wars in southern Africa.[121][122] The experience of military, political and economic power from the rise of the British Empire led to a very specific drive in artistic technique, taste and sensibility for Britishness.[123] In 1887, Frederic Harrison wrote:
Morally, we Britons plant the British flag on every peak and pass; and wherever the Union Jack floats there we place the cardinal British institutions—tea, tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches.[113]
The Catholic Relief Act 1829 reflected a "marked change in attitudes" in Great Britain towards Catholics and Catholicism.[124] A "significant" example of this was the collaboration between Augustus Welby Pugin, an "ardent Roman Catholic" and son of a Frenchman, and Sir Charles Barry, "a confirmed Protestant", in redesigning the Palace of Westminster—"the building that most enshrines ... Britain's national and imperial pre-tensions".[124] Protestantism gave way to imperialism as the leading element of British national identity during the Victorian andEdwardian eras,[122] and as such, a series of Royal, imperial and national celebrations were introduced to the British people to assert imperial British culture and give themselves a sense of uniqueness, superiority and national consciousness.[116][122][125] Empire Day and jubilees of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom were introduced to the British middle class,[122] but quickly "merged into a national 'tradition'".[126]
[edit]Modern period
See also: British nationality law
Further information: Immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922
The First World War "reinforced the sense of Britishness" and patriotism in the early 20th century.[116][121] Through war service (including conscription in Great Britain), "the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish fought as British".[116] The aftermath of the war institutionalised British national commemoration through Remembrance Sunday and the Poppy Appeal.[116] The Second World War had a similar unifying effect upon the British people,[127] however, its outcome was to recondition Britishness on a basis of democratic values and its marked contrast to Europeanism.[127] Notions that the British "constituted an Island race, and that it stood for democracy were reinforced during the war and they were circulated in the country through Winston Churchill's speeches, history books and newspapers".[127]
At its international zenith, "Britishness joined peoples around the world in shared traditions and common loyalities that were strenuously maintained".[128] But following the two world wars, the British Empire experienced rapid decolonisation. The secession of the Irish Free State from the United Kingdom meant that Britishness had lost "its Irish dimension" in 1922,[127] and the shrinking empire supplanted by independence movements dwindled the appeal of British identity in the Commonwealth of Nations during the mid-20th century.[129] Since the mass immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922 from the Commonwealth and elsewhere in the world, and the British Nationality Act 1948, "the expression and experience of cultural life in Britain has become fragmented and reshaped by the influences of gender, ethnicity, class and region".[130] Furthermore, the effect of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Economic Community in 1973 eroded the concept of Britishness as distinct from continental Europe.[131][132] As such, since the 1970s "there has been a sense of crisis about what it has meant to be British",[133] exacerbated by growing demands for greater political autonomy for Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.[134]
The late-20th century saw major changes to the politics of the United Kingdom with the establishment of devolved national administrations for Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales following pre-legislative referendums.[135] Calls for greater autonomy for the four countries of the United Kingdom had existed since their original union with each other, but gathered pace in the 1960s and 1970s.[134] Devolution has led to "increasingly assertive Scottish, Welsh and Irish national identities",[136] resulting in more diverse cultural expressions of Britishness,[137] or else its outright rejection; Gwynfor Evans, a Welsh nationalist politician active in the late-20th century, rebuffed Britishness as "a political synonym for Englishness which extends English culture over the Scots, Welsh and the Irish".[138]
In 2004 Sir Bernard Crick, political theorist and democratic socialist tasked with developing the life in the United Kingdom test said:
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, initiated a debate on British identity in 2006.[141] Brown's speech to the Fabian Society's Britishness Conference proposed that British values demand a new constitutional settlement and symbols to represent a modern patriotism, including a new youth community service scheme and a British Day to celebrate.[141] One of the central issues identified at the Fabian Society conference was how the English identity fits within the framework of a devolved United Kingdom.[141] An expression ofHer Majesty's Government's initiative to promote Britishness was the inaugural Veterans' Day which was first held on 27 June 2006. As well as celebrating the achievements of armed forces veterans, Brown's speech at the first event for the celebration said:
Scots and people from the rest of the UK share the purpose—that Britain has something to say to the rest of the world about the values of freedom, democracy and the dignity of the people that you stand up for. So at a time when people can talk about football and devolution and money, it is important that we also remember the values that we share in common.[142]
[edit]Geographic distribution
Main article: British diaspora
See also: Anglosphere and List of countries by British immigrants
After the Age of Discovery the British were one of the earliest and largest communities to emigrate out of Europe, and the British Empire's expansion during the first half of the 19th century triggered an "extraordinary dispersion of the British people", resulting in particular concentrations "in Australasia and North America".[37]
The British Empire was "built on waves of migration overseas by British people",[144] who left the United Kingdom and "reached across the globe and permanently affected population structures in three continents".[37] As a result of the British colonisation of the Americas, what became the United States was "easily the greatest single destination of emigrant British", but in Australia the British experienced a birth rate higher than "anything seen before" resulting in the displacement of indigenous Australians.[37]
In colonies such as Southern Rhodesia, British East Africa and Cape Colony, permanently resident British communities were established and whilst never more than a numerical minority these Britons "exercised a dominant influence" upon the culture and politics of those lands.[144] In Australia, Canada and New Zealand "people of British origin came to constitute the majority of the population" contributing to these states becoming integral to the Anglosphere.[144]
The United Kingdom Census 1861 estimated the size of the overseas British to be around 2.5 million, but concluded that most of these were "not conventional settlers" but rather "travellers, merchants, professionals, and military personnel".[37] By 1890, there were over 1.5 million further British-born people living in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.[37] A 2006 publication from the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated 5.6 million Britons lived outside of the United Kingdom.
