British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens and diaspora of the United Kingdom, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.Cfr. Interpretation Act 1978, Sched. 1. By the British Nationality Act 1981, s. 50 (1), the United Kingdom includes the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man for the purposes of nationality law.:: "Brit·ish (brĭt'ĭsh) adj. Of or relating to Great Britain or its people, language, or culture. Of or relating to the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth of Nations. Of or relating to the ancient Britons. n. (used with a pl. verb) The people of Great Britain." British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, which can be acquired, for instance, by descent from British nationals. When used in a historical context, "British" or "Britons" can refer to the Ancient Britons, the Celtic-speaking inhabitants of Great Britain during the Iron Age, whose descendants formed the major part of the modern Welsh people, Cornish people, Bretons and considerable proportions of English people. It also refers to those British subjects born in parts of the former British Empire that are now independent countries who settled in the United Kingdom prior to 1973.
Though early assertions of being British date from the Late Middle Ages, the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 triggered a sense of British national identity.. The notion of Britishness and a shared British identity was forged during the 18th century and early 19th century when Britain engaged in several global conflicts with France, and developed further during the Victorian era.. The complex history of the formation of the United Kingdom created a "particular sense of nationhood and belonging" in Great Britain; Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots and Welsh cultures, whose distinctiveness still resists notions of a homogenised British identity.. Because of longstanding ethno-sectarian divisions, British identity in Northern Ireland is controversial, but it is held with strong conviction by Unionists.
Modern Britons are mainly descended from the various ethnic groups who settled in Great Britain before the 11th century AD: the Bell Beakers, the Insular Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norsemen and the Normans. The progressive political unification of the British Isles facilitated migration, cultural and linguistic exchange, and intermarriage between the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales during the late Middle Ages, early modern period and beyond... Since 1922 and earlier, there has been immigration to the United Kingdom by people from what is now the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, mainland Europe and elsewhere; they and their descendants are mostly British citizens, with some assuming a British, dual or hyphenated identity.. This includes the groups Black British and Asian British people, which together constitute around 10% of the British population.
The British are a diverse, multinational,Gordon Brown: We must defend the Union The Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2008DIVERSITY AND CITIZENSHIP CURRICULUM REVIEW www.devon.gov.uk. Retrieved 13 August 2010. multicultural and multilingual people, with "strong regional accents, expressions and identities".. The social structure of the United Kingdom has changed radically since the 19th century, with a decline in religious observance, enlargement of the middle class, and increased ethnic diversity, particularly since the 1950s, when citizens of the British Empire were encouraged to immigrate to Britain to work as part of the recovery from World War II. The population of the UK stands at around 67 million, with around 50 million being White British. This includes 44.4 million in England and Wales as of 2021, and 4.2 million in Scotland as of 2022. 1.8 million identify as White in Northern Ireland, including White British and other White ethnicities, as of 2021. Outside of the UK, the British diaspora totals around 200 million with higher concentrations in the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with smaller concentrations in the Republic of Ireland, Chile, South Africa, and parts of the Caribbean.
History of the term
The earliest known reference to the inhabitants of Great Britain may have come from 4th century BC records of the voyage of Pytheas, a Greek geographer who made a voyage of exploration around the British Isles. Although none of his own writings remain, writers during the time of the Roman Empire made much reference to them. Pytheas called the islands collectively (hai Brettaniai), which has been translated as the Brittanic Isles, and the peoples of what are today England, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man of Prettanike were called the (Prettanoi), Priteni, Pritani or Pretani.
The group included Ireland, which was referred to as Ierne (Insula sacra "sacred island" as the Greeks interpreted it) "inhabited by the different race of Hiberni" (gens hibernorum), and Britain as insula Albionum, "island of the Albions". The term Pritani may have reached Pytheas from the Gauls, who possibly used it as their term for the inhabitants of the islands.
Greek and Roman writers, in the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, name the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland as the Priteni, the origin of the Latin word Britanni. It has been suggested that this name derives from a Gaulish description translated as "people of the forms", referring to the custom of tattooing or painting their bodies with blue woad made from Isatis tinctoria. Parthenius, an Ancient Greek grammarian, and the Etymologicum Genuinum, a 9th-century lexical encyclopaedia, mention a mythical character Bretannus (the Latinised form of the , Brettanós) as the father of Celtine, mother of Celtus, the eponymous ancestor of the Celts.
By 50 BC, Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain, the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, and later Roman-occupied Britain south of Caledonia (modern day Scotland north of the rivers Forth and Clyde), although the people of Caledonia and the north were also the selfsame Britons during the Roman period, the Gaels not arriving until four centuries later.4.20 provides a translation describing Caesar's first invasion, using terms which from IV.XX appear in Latin as arriving tamen in Britanniam, the inhabitants being Britannos, and on p.30 principes Britanniae is translated as "chiefs of Britain". Following the end of Roman rule in Britain, the island of Great Britain was left open to invasion by pagan, seafaring warriors such as Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons and Jutes from Continental Europe, who gained control in areas around the south east, and to Middle Irish-speaking people migrating from the north of Ireland to the north of Great Britain, founding Gaelic kingdoms such as Dál Riata and Alba, which would eventually subsume the native Brittonic and Pictish kingdoms and become Scotland.
In this sub-Roman Britain, as Anglo-Saxon culture spread across southern and eastern Britain and Gaelic through much of the north, the demonym "Briton" became restricted to the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of what would later be called Wales, Cornwall, North West England (Cumbria), and a southern part of ScotlandFoster, Sally M. (2014). Picts, Scots and Gaels — Early Historic Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. . (Strathclyde). In addition, the term was also applied to Brittany in what is today France and Britonia in north west Spain, both regions having been colonised in the 5th century by Britons fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions. However, the term "Britannia" persisted as the Latin name for the island. The Historia 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.
During the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Tudor period, the term "British" was used to refer to the Welsh people and Cornish people. At that time, it was "the long held belief that these were the remaining descendants of the Britons and that they spoke 'the British tongue.. 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. The Historia Regum Britanniae chronicled the lives of legendary kings of the Britons in a narrative spanning 2000 years, beginning with the Trojans founding the ancient British nation and continuing until the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 7th century forced the Britons to the west, i.e. Wales and Cornwall, and north, i.e. Cumbria, Strathclyde and northern Scotland. This legendary Celtic history of Great Britain is known as the Matter of Britain. 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 the people later known as the Welsh.
History
Ancestral roots
The indigenous people of the British Isles have a combination of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman ancestry. Between the 8th and 11th centuries, "three major cultural divisions" emerged in Great Britain: the English, the Scots and the Welsh. The earlier Brittonic Celtic polities in what are today England and Scotland were absorbed into Anglo-Saxon England and Gaelic Scotland by the early 11th century. According to the medieval English historian Bede, "the miserable remainder [of Britons], being taken in the mountains [modern Wales], were butchered in heaps" and "Others, continuing in their own country, led a miserable life among the woods, rocks, and mountains, [modern Wales]".Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Chapter XV Although recent scholarship doubts this part of Bede's narrative, it is widely accepted that a large portion of the native British population fled to modern Wales and Cornwall and formed a new identity.
The English had been unified under a single nation state in 937 by King Athelstan of Wessex after the Battle of Brunanburh. The Scottish state is believed to have been unified earlier during the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin (848–858), after his campaigns to assimilate the Picts into the Dál Riata kingdom. Owain of Gwynedd was the only Welsh sovereign to rule over the entirety of Wales. He used the title King of Wales in the 1160s to claim hegemony over other native British kingdoms.
Before unification, 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. In 934, the unified English kingdom under Athelstan invaded Scotland, achieving only partial success. Concurrently, the British Isles were under attack by raiding Viking bands. Scottish historian Neil Oliver said that the Battle of Brunanburh, which pitted the Anglo-Saxons against the Scots and Vikings, 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".
Medieval Britain