Ideas of Englishness and Britishness over time
The Constructed Nature of British Identity
One of the most important arguments in migration history is that national identity is not fixed or primordial — it is historically constructed. “Englishness” and “Britishness” have meant different things in different centuries, and what has been considered authentically “British” has constantly been redrawn in response to migration, empire, war and political change. Recognising this is essential to understanding why migration has been so contentious — because it always involves questions about who belongs.
Historian Linda Colley argued in her 1992 book Britons that British national identity was “forged” rather than found — created during the eighteenth century through shared Protestantism, war with France, and the experience of building an empire. Before the Act of Union of 1707, “Britain” barely existed as a meaningful identity. English, Scots, Welsh and Irish had distinct identities. The creation of “Britishness” was a deliberate political project, not the expression of a pre-existing ethnic unity.
The Act of Union of 1707 united England and Scotland politically. Scotland retained its own legal and church systems but shared a Parliament at Westminster. The Union was contested in Scotland from the start — there were Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745. But over the eighteenth century, Scottish elites increasingly participated in the British Empire as merchants, soldiers and administrators, and “Britishness” became a meaningful identity alongside Scottish identity. Irish union followed in 1801, though it was always more contested.
Britishness and Empire
The British Empire was central to how “Britishness” was understood from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Empire gave meaning to British identity by defining it against “the other” — the colonised peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The 1948 British Nationality Act’s inclusion of all Commonwealth subjects as British citizens was, in part, a final expression of this imperial identity — the idea that Britons were spread across the globe and were all subjects of the same Crown.
But the arrival of Caribbean and South Asian migrants in the 1950s revealed the contradiction at the heart of imperial Britishness: people who were legally British, who had often served Britain in the Second World War, found that “Britishness” in practice was racialised. The hostility of the 1958 riots, the “No Coloured” signs in lodging houses, and Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech all expressed an idea of Britishness that was ethnically exclusive, despite the legal reality of Commonwealth citizenship.
Diaspora identity became a key concept for understanding the experience of migrant communities in late-twentieth-century Britain. Stuart Hall argued that Black British identity was not simply “Caribbean” transplanted to Britain, nor simply “British” in the traditional sense, but something new — a hybrid, evolving identity shaped by the experience of migration and the encounter with British culture. This challenged both those who argued migrants should “go back” and those who demanded complete assimilation into a homogeneous British culture.
Hall’s ideas influenced how policymakers, educators and cultural institutions thought about diversity. The multicultural model of the 1990s — expressed in the Parekh Report — drew on this intellectual tradition. It argued that a diverse society could be cohesive without requiring everyone to abandon their distinct cultural inheritance.
Devolution and the Fragmentation of Britishness
In 1997, referendums in Scotland and Wales produced majorities in favour of devolved legislatures. The Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales opened in 1999. Devolution fundamentally changed the political geography of Britain: Scotland now had its own parliament with tax-varying powers; Wales had an assembly with secondary legislative powers. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 established a power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland. Together these changes reflected a growing sense that “Britishness” was compatible with multiple national identities — one could be Scottish and British, Welsh and British, or Northern Irish and British (or Northern Irish and Irish).
The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 put this to the test. In a high-turnout vote, 55% voted to remain in the United Kingdom; 45% voted for independence. The result was clear but the question was not settled: the Scottish National Party continued to campaign for independence, particularly after the Brexit vote of 2016 (which Scotland voted against). Whether devolution ultimately strengthened or weakened British identity remains a live question.
The Life in the UK test, created by a 2002 law and first taken in November 2005, attempted to define Britishness through a formal citizenship process. Applicants had to demonstrate knowledge of British history, institutions and civic values. The test represented a move towards a civic model of Britishness — membership defined by knowledge and commitment, not by ethnic origin. Critics noted that many long-term British residents would fail the test, suggesting that it measured a particular version of Britishness rather than the lived reality of belonging.
The tension between assimilation and integration runs through the entire thousand-year sweep of this thematic study. Norman migrants merged with the English only over centuries: French stayed the language of the courts until the Statute of Pleading in 1362, and French and English slowly combined into Middle English. Huguenot refugees anglicised their names and merged into Protestant English society within two generations. But other communities — medieval Jews before 1290, the post-Windrush Caribbean community — maintained distinct identities precisely because they were excluded from full assimilation by the hostility of the host society.
Roy Jenkins’s 1966 definition of integration as “not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” remains the most influential attempt in British political history to define how a diverse society should work. Whether that vision has been achieved — and what obstacles have stood in its way — is the central evaluative question for this thematic study.